Collaborative work makes learning enjoyable, and it creates opportunities for building empathy. When working in collaboration with others, students are challenged to look beyond themselves and to see the world through someone else’s perspective. This helps to build a tolerance for situations in which students may disagree, and encourages them to find compromise or to see that there are multiple solutions to problems they may encounter. Students who are open to these experiences will find they come away with a stronger understanding of others, and of the world beyond their purview.
Visual Arts
Collaborative Painting - Paint a collaborative picture. Students can be divided into partners, small groups, or the entire group can work together on one painting. Make sure you have a piece of paper or canvas that is large enough.
Object: Learning to work together, regardless of experience and differences, to create a complete piece of art.
Supplies: Paint, paper or canvas, easel or a way to mount the canvas so everyone can see it and paint on it
Process:
Give students a theme or a prompt. It can be serious or silly.
One student begins painting based on how the prompt makes them feel.
Then the next student takes a turn.
This continues until every student has had a chance to add something to the painting. If your students are working in partners or small groups, provide a time limit in which they continue to take turns until the time is up.
Discussion Questions:
What was this experience like for you? What was challenging for you? What did you find interesting? When you look at your painting, how does it make you feel? Did the way your partner(s) painted affect your choice when it was your turn to paint again?
This can be done using any artistic medium. Create a mosaic from old tiles, decorative stones, mirrors, etc. Build a collage using magazine clippings, construction or scrapbooking paper, etc. Tell a story using only movement and a funny prop, sculpt something out of recycled aluminum cans, wire, plastic or glass bottles, cardboard boxes, etc. Compose a rhythmic phrase using claps, stomps, vocal sounds, etc. The possibilities are endless! Experiences like these build empathy as students must agree to work collaboratively in order to present a finished piece. Through these processes, students share their ideas and listen to the ideas of their peers, finding ways to experience and see things from other perspectives.
Movement
Living Statues - Using a common theme (for example “Hope”) can provide more opportunity for empathy building.
Object: To create deeper connections among classmates by helping students see they are not so different from their peers.
Supplies: Music and enough space for students to move
Process:
Divide students into two groups
Based on the given theme, students decide how to create a statue that conveys the theme to the audience and freeze in those poses while the other group makes verbal observations.
Then the groups switch and the observers become the collective statue, and the former statues become the observers.
Discussion Questions:
What similarities and differences did you notice between the two statue formations? What shapes did you create in your own statue that made you feel hope? What about the formation you observed effectively gave you a sense of hope? Was it their faces? Their poses? Their posture? Etc.
Students who are able to identify movements that are similar among individuals and groups and describe why they think those similarities occur are demonstrating an understanding of the work they observe. Students who see similarities between their own work and another’s may begin to feel like they have an ally in the group. There is someone else who understands how they feel.
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