Journal Seven
October 14, 2019
#Empathy
Art can contribute to our society in many ways beyond just adding beauty to the world around us. Throughout history, art has been used as a tool to tell stories, share ideas as well as bring awareness to injustices that happen everyday. With it's ability to be displayed in public places, art is a powerful tool for spreading and sharing powerful messages with the intention to bring awareness and change to problems in society. Over the past couple weeks I have learned how using social justice as a basis for teaching art not only fosters learning about art, it also contributes to teaching students awareness of social injustice around them as well as how they can use art to illuminate these issues to an audience. What I experienced through these learning moments in class about social justice is how it can teach students empathy. Empathy is something I have referred to in this art blog as well as in other aspects of my learning as an Art Edu student. I think empathy is important for everyone to learn because it brings us closer to the people around us, helps us understand ourselves and others from a space of kindness and contributes to the goodness of the world and people in it. This connection between my personal experience of seeing the importance of empathy in the classroom and beyond connects to the notion that I need to tell stories of injustice in my art classroom and explore them through art making in order to make a meaningful lesson where students can genuinely grasp empathy and practice it in their daily lives. To visualize this understanding of empathy I chose to create a contour line drawing of two hands holding overlapping hearts. Empathy is all about sharing and understanding the feelings of another person. This image I created not only visualizes the idea of sharing one another's emotions and feelings, contour line drawing echoes a trust between head and hand, a connection that is learned overtime. This connection is similar to empathy in the way it connects our hearts with others when we take the time to observe, understand and learn about them. The hearts are watercolored to show a type of transparency, transparency is crucial in empathy because a transparent heart is open to being vulnerable and experiencing not only it's own feelings, but the feelings of others as well. The space where the hearts meet and blend into one color is representative of the connection one feels when practicing empathy. This experience has helped me understand HOW I can teach empathy to my students outside of just being empathetic myself. They have to make the connection themselves which means providing the opportunity for them to explore issues that require an empathetic approach.