Art is one of the most powerful and dangerous things that humans make. To paraphrase an old Greek philosopher, art is dangerous because it often does not ask your permission while entering your soul.
Nowadays, people mostly use art for recreational purposes, to unwind after a day spent at a boring desk job. However, if used properly, arts and crafts will effectively boost students’ interest and engagement levels. This statement is true for both older college students, and younger K-12 kids.
Let’s explore how art in the classroom may be the way of the future and why the interest in traditional art, such as paintings or sculpting, has plummeted.
Arts and crafts can aid retention.
Art is a memory aid
Arts and crafts cannot be defined by purely biological terms. If you have ever been moved deeply by art, you know that there is something transcendent there. It’s not like smelling a good piece of food or satisfying a physical need. It is a spiritual experience.
However, let’s put the spiritual aspects aside for a moment, and look at the pragmatic benefits of arts integration.
Did you ever wonder why you memorize song lyrics easily but struggle to remember formulas, historical dates, or definitions? How is a 3-hour movie enjoyable, yet a 30-minute lecture feels unbearably long?
The answer is hardwired in our biology. Basically, our brains do not store all our memories in the same way. We do not remember every second of every day that we’ve been on this Earth.
The way this works is that memories have emotions associated with them. The stronger the emotion, the stronger and longer lasting the memory will be. This is why we tend to selectively remember the highs and the lows while forgetting the boring, day-to-day stuff.
Taking this fact into account, it becomes obvious that making things more interesting is of vital importance. Good art is remarkably interesting, and strong emotional responses from the viewer will cause him to store longer-lasting memories.
Crafts and engagement
Very few students enjoy school. This is true from the 1st grade up until they finish college. One of the main reasons is that learning is mostly a passive activity.
Most of the time, you are sitting down and listening to someone who is delivering a lecture. Or you are sitting down are reading something that someone else wrote. On a personal note, my engagement levels with my chosen subject were so low, that I used to pay someone to write my research papers.
Our bodies were not made for sitting immobile for dozens of hours per week. In fact, the nervous system’s primary function is not to give you a big brain that knows chess but actually to move you around.
Even if you tried your hardest, there is only so much you can remember or store while being passive.
There were studies done on college students where they were asked to first listen to a lecture while doing nothing, and the second time, they were asked to listen to that lecture while also writing down notes.
The group that just listened remembered about 40% of what was said, while the group that wrote down notes remembered around 75%. Listening and acting activate totally different areas of your brain.
There is this bad tendency in modern culture to differentiate between those who use their bodies and those who use their minds. We’ve all seen it in movies: blue collar vs white collar, or jocks vs nerds, and so on.
In truth, you can never be just a brain on a stick or just all muscles, no brains like an ox. Students, and people in general, will only feel the complete human experience if they pursue both.
As a result, crafts integration in the classroom stands to stimulate students much more, while also boosting memory and engagement. The emotional involvement of actually using your hands is incredible.
Even for more intellectually heavy fields of study, such as those in STEM, some subject-related crafts have to be found.
Some of the best crafts that you can do in school will involve sculpting and molding materials. In fact, for biology students, weaving protein strands and representing organs can be very useful.
What to avoid: “Modern” Art
So, why are so few students interested if art is so powerful and influential? Sure, music and, arguably, movies are widespread, but aside from that, traditional forms of art such as paintings and sculpture have been cast aside.
This is important to know if you want to apply arts and crafts to your curricula.
The answer is as simple as it is profound: modern art is objectively worse. Modern art often rejects the notion that there are objective standards for beauty. A trash can or a smear of paint is as beautiful as Michelangelo’s David or the Pieta.
Even in painting, you used to be able to tell what the painting was showing you. Abstract and post-modern paintings are just randomized blobs of color, and that is not attractive to a vast majority of people. It would be advisable not to waste a semester’s budget on the demonstrably unpopular “modern” art style.
Pinterest art, graffiti, and even Japanese Manga are vastly more popular forms of art because they still maintain an intelligible art style.
Rules vs no Rules
Another thing that modern art can get wrong is limitation. Postmodernism states that there are no objective narratives. It is an attempt to remove any type of limitation, and this is why it does not resonate with students.
Something as random as 3 sticks, a piece of gum, and a stamp from 1990 can be a “work of art”. You can blend, mix, match, not make sense, and it’s all ok. Dadaism used to take random words out of newspapers and present them as art. It wasn’t even a sentence, only words, one after the other.
Meanwhile, real life has hard and fast rules. Symmetry, proportion, harmony, and practicality are all things that must be taken into consideration by nature itself if an object is to exist in our world. Art should hold up a mirror to life, and life by its nature is filled with limitations.
From a classroom standard, working around limitations will greatly increase the student’s problem-solving skills. Also, it will encourage them to look at things from multiple angles.
Conclusion
There is nothing as good as good art, and there’s nothing worse than bad art. At its best, arts and crafts can boost engagement, interest and aid in memory retention.