Since 1988, Art for Life https://artforlife.org/ has focused on creating programmes that help kids who are undergoing physical, emotional or mental crisis to use art as a way of helping them work through and with their illness. They empower kids from an early age through their teens to embrace art as a way of expressing how they feel during what is a very scary and difficult time for them. All their programmes focus on different aspects of the healing process. From their award-winning ART WHILE YOU WAIT PROGRAMME in Emergency rooms to Oncology, Cardiology, Pallative Care and children’s Hospice programmes that use art as a way of healing families who have lost a child. Art for life is there. Somewhere every day through their network of programmes nationwide they are helping kids and their families to use art as a form of self-expression and in doing so they find a way of moving through their illness into wellness.
Our students (in Group F) in the second year of High School ‘Batxillerat’ (Catalan A-levels) have been carrying out a large number of activities related to a Learning Situation called ‘Art for life foundation’.
We asked them a question. What do you reckon of their work? What does it imply for our society?
This learning scenario intends to develop SDG 4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Students will need to determine whether this goal can be reached given the current approach of pupils to art throughout the world. To do this they will need to find information on the way art has been taught at schools (since the mid 20th century up to the beginning of the 21st century, particularly in Europe), and develop critical thinking to see if things have changed, remain the same or have worsened, as well as to infer what should be done.
The development of this LS includes two initial activities (a brainstorming and a discussion), two development activities (with listening, speaking and reading comprehension), one consolidation activity (a book club) and two implementation activities (a booktuber video and a
discussion essay), one of which is used for summative assessment. This will also allow them to work on narrative essays, connectors, past tenses and -ed & -ing adjectives.
CHALLENGE: During lockdown (in spring 2020) both art and music took a major role as far as people’s (all ages) entertainment at home was concerned. Nowadays most hospitalised children have access to all kinds of online resources related to artistic development as well. How can we all help to expand art among sick children, as much in hospital as at home?
They have created an online magazine with all the stories they have written about the relationship between art and healing kids’ illnesses, which we are going to display on our school website.
