Art and creativity are often outlets for our developing students, as they navigate through the awkward phases of childhood and start to become cognizant of their beliefs and values. Art adds value to student’s development, but it also provides opportunity for students to learn about others through deeper emotional connection. Art prepares these students to be functioning citizens in a collaborative society and also to be more understanding of others and have more advanced emotional awareness.

 

Negative emotional connection can also have an impact on learning. Due to a buildup of fear stemming from lack of knowledge about their own creative abilities, teachers are often hesitant to approach art in their own lessons. As a result, this fear removes the opportunity for students to make personal connections in cross disciplinary learning environments. Incorporating emotional learning through art practice leads to a break in the cycle of schools limiting or suppressing creativity and divergent thinking.

 

Implementing social emotional learning into art practice not only increases the student’s engagement in lessons and projects but also encourages them to think deeper about themselves and about what matters to them. It is crucial that educational systems incorporate emotional learning as to not continue this cycle of hesitance and reluctance in future lessons.

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In an art program it is most beneficial to create lessons about very broad ideas relating to social emotional development, that have depth. A topic with possibility and limited restrictions allows students to form their own meaning and develop it into an artwork that is beneficial and correlates to them and their interests and encourages social emotional connection. The inclusion of interest and deeper level topics in art with feeling and emotion makes learning more engaging.

 

Creating a relationship between the self and curriculum through personal connection and emotion is very effective, as it ensures that learning benefits the student and also increases retention. The brain is more likely to store information that it can connect to past experiences over other information that it might be perceiving. In other words, we tend to remember the things we care about over irrelevancies

 

Understanding how students process information and learning about their preferences allows us to better connect with them and touches on the essential question of thinking deeper and creating thought provoking art while also learning about our students' learning habits.