Compassion Through Art

NEA Today, Oct 2005 by Rajagopalan, Megha

Nicole Gnezda hands her problem children paint brushes instead of detention slips.

GNEZDA, A VISUAL ARTS TEACHER at Worthington Kilbourne High School in Ohio, spent her career developing alternatives to conventional models of discipline. In 29 years of teaching art, she's discovered that troubled students often benefit more from compassion and freedom to create than from punishment. That's what inspired her to begin Creative Mondays, a weekly after-school group that allows students to use art as an outlet for their emotions.

Each week, students choose a social issue and get their hands dirty confronting it with paint, markers, newspaper, and other expressive media.

Gnezda has outlined her methods in a book, Teaching Difficult Students: Blue Jays in the Classroom, which explains how to work with difficult students and help them with their behaviors. Gnezda peppers her philosophies with colorful anecdotes of her experiences with "blue jays," students she likens to the cackling, aggressive birds whose beauty is often difficult to find.

But is Gnezda's altruistic approach successful? Her blue jays' stories speak for themselves. One is of an emotionally troubled boy who drew violent images. Later, he explained that drawing the pictures kept him from acting them out.

"Students show me," says Gnezda, "in their artwork and in our conversations, very poignant examples of what it means to be a student these days." -MEGHA RAJAGOPALAN