Using visual art to motivate at-risk children

Teaching Pre K-8, Mar 1996 by Cho, Mika M

For too many inner city children, the words "I can't" and "No" rule the day. This is particularly true of a number of school-aged males, who live in a world where they are expected to fail.

Recently, I shared some exciting experiences in visual art with a group of at-risk youths. The goal of the project was to use visual art activities to provide at-risk children with an opportunity to experience success and thereby raise their self-esteem.

San Pedro Academy, the Los Angeles school chosen for the project, is an all-male, alternative school for students with behavioral and/or learning disabilities. The entire student body, from elementary school-aged children to high school-aged teens, is at-risk.

Weekly sessions. No art classes were offered at San Pedro; however, school officials agreed to set up a special art project. The art activities were offered in four weekly three-hour sessions -- three hours each Monday morning.

Twenty students, ranging in age from 8 to 15, were selected to participate, and because of attention-span difficulties, as well as the potential for behavioral problems, the adult-child ratio was kept deliberately high; two teachers from the school and two counselors joined the art instructor in the classroom.

Selecting the activities for each workshop involved several criteria: Will the students be interested? Is the project something that can be completed during the session? And, most important, is the activity something at which the students can succeed?

Three activities were chosen for the project: self-portraits with pastels, using the contour drawing technique; collages depicting career and life ambitions; and plaster-gauze mask-making reflecting the cultural background of each student. Each session consisted of discussion, instruction and demonstration, followed by hands-on experience.

Week 1. The first session began with a discussion that revealed that the students were completely unfamiliar with contour drawing and self-portraits. After a brief explanation of the concept and vocabulary of contour drawing, a 15-minute video on the process was shown.

Paper, pastels and a mirror were then handed out to each student. The instructions were simple: Look only at the mirror while drawing the contour of your face. Don't worry about what it looks like.

Since "respect" is an important part of the students' culture, they were particularly sensitive to anything that could be construed as disrespectful or that could make them feel "inferior." Typical responses were "Why do we have to do this?" "I can't draw." "This is dumb."

It was clear right from the beginning that we'd have to make the activities meaning and interesting, and present them in such a way as to emphasize the students' dignity.

Resistance to the contour drawing project initially appeared in varying degrees. Some students were easily persuaded to try -- and were excited by the results. Some students gave up and no amount of persuasion could change their minds. Others had someone else draw for them, and they then colored in the outline. Still others waited for a teacher to help them get started. It should be noted that those students who received considerable help were also proud of their accomplishment.

Week 2. For their next project, the students worked on collages depicting their career and life ambitions. The other teachers and I had rounded up a collection of magazines in an attempt to come up with as wide a variety of pictures as possible. That way, the children would be able to create collages reflecting many different career opportunities.

After describing the variety of collages that could be made, I asked the students to write down what they wanted to be in the future. This caused problems for many students. Some had difficulty with spelling, for example. The difficult task for me, however was that of assisting students who did not have the remotest idea of how they saw themselves in the future. Eventually, by brainstorming, I managed to get all students to come up with something.

Each week, I learned that for each activity, there'd be a new set of problems. Not only did I have to keep the students interested long enough to get the project completed, I also had to adapt the activities many different skill levels so that all of the children would have a chance to succeed.

The career choices depicted on the collages ranged from sports star to brain surgeon. Some of the collages were symmetrical, some were free-form, but all showed positive images for the children to focus on.

Week 3. I started the plaster-gauze mask-making project with a slide presentation of colorful masks from different cultures all over the world. Since the students at San Pedro are predominantly African-American and Latino, the inclusion of masks from their cultural backgrounds was particularly fascinating. Doors were opened for conversation about ethnicity, the high level of accomplishment of artisans from various cultures and the importance of art to all people.

Next, students were taken by twos into an adjoining room. There, they were asked to cover their faces with Vaseline" in preparation for my applying plaster-gauze to their faces. Some students eagerly anticipated their turn; others wanted to see how the first masks turned out before they let their faces be covered with Vaseline; still others refused to participate for any number of reasons. We allowed these students to draw and color a mask on paper. The students' eagerness to see how the molds would turn out was almost universal.