What is good? Research Booklet

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WHAT IS GOOD?

The arts fuel children’s curiosity and critical capacity. They are every child’s birthright. It is vital that children engage with the arts early in their lives.

The arts contribute to the development and wellbeing of children and young people. They inspire future audiences and the next generation of artists and arts leaders.

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The benefits of art education Art is a means for children who do not otherwise excel in school to have a subject where they can shine. Involvement in the arts has been shown to increase academic performance in all areas, not just art.

Children who are active in art education also demonstrate further interest in school as a whole.

They give more attention to subjects during class time. Involvement in the arts is associated with gains in math, reading, cognitive ability, critical thinking, and verbal skill. Arts learning can also improve motivation, concentration, confidence, and teamwork.

Art classes provide children with opportunities to discuss and help each other to learn how to be better artists. This peer to peer learning is very valuable since it is difficult to have direct instruction with art. Each child’s needs are different because each child’s work of art will be a personal expression of how they see an object or even the world. Students can have social benefits from art by learning to be constructive critics and helping one another to create better art.

The facts & figures Art encourages for self-expression. Therefore, there is not necessarily a completely right or wrong answer. This can encourage students who may have a hard time in other areas where there is only right and wrong. Art can build self-esteem and motivate children to learn. The motivation that is created in the art classroom can be carried over to other subjects. This can help children to stop blaming external, uncontrollable factors in their educational results. They will try harder to understand material and therefore do better.

A comprehensive arts education promotes the attainment of knowledge, understandings, and skills that contribute to the student’s intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development and is also the perfect place to begin increasing children’s awareness of a variety of cultures, and plays a key role in affecting children’s long-term beliefs.

It is observed that children who are engaged in art activities, develop a better understanding of other subjects, right from languages to geography to even science. Studies have shown that students who are exposed to any of the forms of creative expression, be it music, painting, or drama, on an average achieve higher scores in standardized tests. Some other findings suggest that students engaged in an arts program in school are much more unlikely to drop out of school compared to those who are not into any kind of arts.

Children art education is something that is much encouraged for the sake of the child’s creative growth and so that they learn to appreciate art from a very early age itself. This is necessary so that a child can have a broadened sense of appreciation for the arts and along with all the other things that they learn in school they also have a place where they can give vent to all their expressions. According to researchers, a heavy focus on arts activities for young pupils produced more ‘positive emotions such as interest, happiness and pride, and greater growth in emotion regulation across the school year.’

Top 10 skills children learn from the arts 1. Creativity

6. Non-Verbal Communication

2. Confidence

7. Receiving Constructive Feedback

3. Problem Solving

8. Collaboration

4. Perseverance

9. Dedication

5. Focus

10. Accountability

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The negatives of art education

What is being done to counteract the negatives?

What happens in an ideal world is that everyone is catered for.

However, what happens when schools stifle creative work with curriculum is that stigmas are created that can last a lifetime.

“You’re not much good at this”, is a very negative feedback from a teacher to a child.

Curriculum based teaching in academic subjects of course is necessary, though art teachers should be aware that for those children who will not excel to a future in art, there is a necessity to try and cater for them in school by offering choice and letting the child develop as best they can with limited ability.

The problems that face art teachers and schools are that their own horizons are so narrow. They forget that a child’s imagination is a whole playground of new ideals and ideas, waiting to be matured, waiting to develop, and without understanding this, what teaching does is make the child feel their imaginative ideas are of no substance.

Programs in art for after-school are also very important, especially for children in disadvantaged areas. It is common knowledge that the hours immediately following school are often the most critical for children. With parents at work, children have around two hours of often unsupervised time.

For children who are at-risk, it is important to have a place to go in these in between hours. Art programs can provide the safe environment for children to learn and still have fun until their parents come home from work.

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Charities & programmes running art classes

How a selection of these groups are branded

Despite the benefits, there are some down sides to art education clubs for children, such as the overwhelming number of children in the United Kingdom and worldwide who don’t have access to a creative outlet and some children may not find it beneficial for their developmental needs.

However, there is an increasing number of charities and programmes opening up to provide education in the arts to children who could benefit from creative experimentation and play, such as children in developing countries who need a safe place to go after school or who don’t have art lessons offered at school.

There are also charities in the United Kingdom which use art as a way of reaching children in hospital, with disabilities, who are likely to become a part of gang crime, who come from broken homes, and so on.

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Brief & concept For this brief, I want to propose a charity or project that would provide art education for children in Leeds, so there is an extensive range of products I can create.

I would initially start by creating all the branding and identity for the charity, then branch out into making things for the community spirit of the programme, such as t shirts and membership cards on lanyards. I would then look at creating the printed promotional material for the project, such as banners and fliers, along with a promotional web element.

From this, I plan to branch out into creating the products that would be used within the programme, such as packaging for art materials and colouring books.

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Products to create Full set of branding and identity products for the art club

Plastic membership cards on lanyards to promote community spirit

Information booklets for parents, guardians and teachers of children in the art club

Club t shirts for the children and teachers/leaders to promote community spirit

Branding & Identity 13

Products to create Colouring and activity books to be used in the art lessons

Packaging for the art suppolies used in the lessons

Product & Packaging 15

Processes to be used As there is such a wide range of products that I could make for this brief, there is also a wide range of processes I could try, as the different groups of products are likely to require different ways of producing the finished pieces.

For the packaging and promotional materials, I can experiment with different printing methods, possibly using the laser cutter to make some interesting packaging cut outs, and to make stamps that could be used on fliers and letters etc.

For the t shirts, I plan to learn how to screen print as I havent experimented with this yet, and for the plastic membership card and lanyard I would look at how to print them commercially, but also how to replicate this within the studio, possibly again using the laser cutter or printing onto plastic / vinyl stickers.

Vinyl cutting stickers - to be used for stickers for the activity packs and for the membership cards

Laser cutting into packaging - to be used on the art materials packaging

Vinyl cutting stickers - to be used for stickers for the activity packs and for the membership cards

Printing onto plastic / vinyl stickers for the plastic - to be used for the membership cards

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Target Audience & Tone of Voice

Aesthetics

The target audience for this brief comes from the title. I would aim the charity programme at primary school aged children within Leeds as Leeds is said to have one of the highest rates of child poverty in the United Kingdom.

This gives me the chance to work on a brief which would be seen locally and also as a branch out from a charity I am already working with within Leeds.

With further research, I will be able to decide on a specific group of children whom the charity would reach, possibly aiming it towards children in the poorer areas of the city who don’t have acces to an after school activity club.

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OUGD505 What Is Good? Research Booklet Andrea Hannah Cooper