Community and art: creative education fostering resilience through art

Community and art: creative education fostering resilience through art

Abstract While creativity is discussed as a core competence for talented people around the world in the twenty-first century, its exhibition is determined by one's character. Creativity and character education, therefore, should not be considered as separate matters, but the systematically related matters, and exhibition of creativity, can be carried away by character. The purpose of this study is to apply community-based education through art to elementary school students in an effort to enable the learners to experience the cultural facilities of their community and to cultivate their creativity and personality, thus fostering resilience in the face of the trauma of school violence. This study focuses on the importance of the experience of creating art, which can contribute to the building of a happy and safe school environment and to the cultural development of the community. First, school violence and trauma are initially investigated based on a literature review. Second, I discuss the important role of art projects to promote creativity and foster resilience. Third, community-based art education is developed and applied to elementary school students. Finally, it is concluded that community-based art education can encourage adolescents to cultivate a healthy personality and good creativity, ultimately helping them to become well-rounded. The development of practical community-based convergence education through art can contribute to establishing a happy school culture by promoting creativity and fostering resilience to the trauma of school violence.

Introduction

The objective of this study is to investigate the role and significance of community-based art education for the prevention and reduction in school violence as well as for the healing of both the victims and the perpetrators of school violence. During adolescence, numerous physical, emotional, and mental changes occur and most adolescents are vulnerable to the resulting stress from these changes. In particular, Korean teenagers suffer from many problems as they struggle to establish their independence and resist the value system and restrictions of their society. This can lead to a pressing need to relieve themselves of their emotional and psychological desires as a result of the education system that heavily focuses on college admission. This study especially focuses on adolescence which covers elementary school students, because school violence caused by teenagers can be attributed to the unstable self-identity in this period. Self-identity has not yet been established during adolescence; thus, teenagers can be changed. Additionally, school violence could be caused by misunderstanding of others as well as self-exploring. Community-based art education which increases creativity and self-expression helped teenagers to improve self-esteem. Violence arising from the expression of adolescent aggression is being highlighted as a serious form of social pathology. Thus, art education programs are needed to heal both the adolescent victims and the adolescent aggressors. The acclimation of adolescent aggression may provide important clues to understanding widespread acts of school violence today.

Preventative efforts using diverse approaches are being made as teenage school violence is becoming more and more serious and the number of such cases is increasing recently. Although programs related to school violence have been developed and made available both domestically and internationally, such school violence relief programs experienced many difficulties in real application as time had to be specifically allotted during school and the programs targeted specific students. Additionally, most programs showed severe limitations in reducing school violence because these programs were one-time events or were merely based on presentation.

Comprehensive countermeasures, including legislation and enforcement ordinances regarding school violence prevention and measures, have been in effect since twenty twelve, and the scope and subject of school violence have been defined in detail. All acts of violence against students both inside and outside of school are defined as school violence, and its categories include physical violence, verbal violence, extortion of money and other valuables, coercion, ostracism, sexual violence, and cyber violence. As school violence is defined as all acts of violence where a student is the victim, all forms of violence to students in and out of school are considered school violence. Currently, the government announced various comprehensive countermeasures to fight school violence due to the severity of the issue. A presented solution is the call for character education. This need was emphasized in the twenty twelve survey on the current status of character education conducted by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

Therefore, this study raises questions with regard to how community-based art education can heal both the victims and the aggressors of school violence. Can creative artistic activities contribute to the healing process of the victim of school violence? To seek out the answer to such a question, this study conducted art classes in twenty thirteen where twenty-six students who were victims of school violence took part. The process of recovery and healing for these students through creative activities was observed, and the students were interviewed. The twenty-six students who were enrolled in an elementary school in the Gwanak district in the city of Seoul participated in the recovery and healing process of school violence trauma through art projects and art-making activities during three classes.

This study, as Mastern and Powell maintained, defines resilience as the process of bouncing back to a normal or above-normal state despite exposure to school violence. I explore the specific aspects of creativity that appear most pertinent to the process of emotional resilience. Therefore, I attempt to identify the relationship between creative art making and the healing of school violence trauma that students experienced through interviews with the participating students and observations of the resulting artwork.