Art Sparks holistic program engenders a wide-range of benefits, including strengthening social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The program enriches both learners and educators.
“The purpose of education is not just to impart knowledge but to nurture empathy, resilience, and emotional well-being.”
— Linda Lantieri, award-winning educator, author, and SEL champion
By inspiring participants to increase their individual creativity, self-worth, and connection to the Cosmos, Art Sparks helps them learn to:
- Strengthen their social-emotional learning (SEL) and essential life skills
- Use their creativity to solve problems
- Look at life’s bigger pictures, including their connection with the Cosmos
- Lead more satisfying, meaningful, and healthier lives
- Create attitudes and behaviors that engender their future flourishing
Social and emotional learning (SEL) skills supported by Art Sparks include the following. These also align with learning targets for lesson plans in schools:
- Self-awareness: Learn to recognize and express their feelings, ideas, and stories in art. Treating themselves and others with respect, including when making and presenting personal art, increases their self-esteem.
- Self-management: Set and achieve a positive goal by creating something—their personal artwork. It’s particularly exciting that, each session, they create something that didn’t exist before! Participate in distributing and/or cleaning up art supplies. Discover that they have a personal story, and that they can make it more meaningful and satisfying. Presenting their art hones their presentation skills and strengthens their sense of agency.
- Social awareness: Experience trust and self-esteem while participating in the session’s activities, creating art, and having fun with others in a safe environment. Cultivate empathy by viewing the video that shows people with diverse accents and music from around the world from a creative, heart-centered perspective. Experience empathy for others when they share their stories.
- Relationship skills: Build and maintain healthy, mutually supportive, and trusting relationships and camaraderie with classmates by interacting cooperatively when making art, and being empathic of others’ artwork, i.e., showing interest by asking questions and making supportive comments of others presenting their artwork.
- Responsible decision-making: Choose to maintain quiet and respect when viewing the video and listening to the teacher present new ideas. Choose appropriate ways to interact when participating in discussions, engaging in activities, and interacting with classmates who are presenting. Learn to present one’s own artwork and lead the Q&A in an appropriate manner.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EQ)
By strengthening SEL skills, Art Sparks strengthens emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ). EQ is a facet of SEL skills that strengthens one’s ability to understand, use, and manage one’s emotions in positive ways.
By improving students’ EQ, Art Sparks helps students learn that they can:
- Lessen their stress in productive, non-violent ways
- Connect with their feelings
- Improve their effective communication
- Develop empathy for others
- Build more mutually-respectful relationships
- Overcome personal challenges
- Defuse conflict
In boosting EQ and developing SEL skills, Art Sparks helps students create more meaningful, happier, and satisfying lives.
ART THERAPY
The benefits of Art Sparks and individual and group art therapy align. Intentionally creating art to express one’s personal ideas, experiences, and feelings is therapeutic. This is the key to Art Sparks’ success.
Nonverbally expressing one’s feelings, experiences, and fears through visual imagery in a safe space helps participants:
- Overcome trauma
- Acknowledge loss
- Recover from grief and illness
- Develop an identity as someone who possesses personal agency, and is worthy of love and respect
As in art therapy, engaging in this process helps participants grow and heal.
Art Sparks‘ therapeutic techniques include the following:
- Ask open-ended questions
- Communicate active listening
- Affirm students—themselves and their art—without judgement, criticism, or praise
Like psychotherapy, the structure of the curriculum creates a safe space, and sequentially moves to deeper issues through an alternating process of invitations to lesser and greater depths of personal introspection.
As with group art therapy, Art Sparks engenders an empowering benefit for all participants.
The benefits to children participating in Art Sparks in classrooms are similar as those in group art therapy. Both modalities provide a safe space, insightful guidance, and create a sense of shared community. At the same time that each child is focusing on expressing their individual selves in art, they are also experiencing a synergy shared by the group. Knowing that each of their classmates is also taking the risk to intentionally express themselves provides a reassuring sense of cohesive group support.
This synergy of shared group experience, reinforced by presenting artwork to your peers and leading Q&A sessions further increases the therapeutic, SEL, and EQ benefits of Art Sparks.
