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THE PROPOSAL FOR AN ART SPACE

The Art Space is a classroom where a structured Creativity Module can take place after school days, but also a place to be frequented by youth for group activities, socializing, art-creation and other recreational purposes. The goal of the creativity module is not the art itself, or the aesthetic product, but rather the student who grows creatively, sensitively and uses their experience in the module as an opportunity for character development.

Advances creativity and children’s development

Learning through the arts and art education has been promoted by research as being beneficial in terms of advancing creativity and children’s development when applied in congruence with other academic fields of studies (Eisner 2002; Gardner, 1983; Dewey, 1934).

Focusing on creativity

In the Albanian curriculum, there is more emphasis on certain disciplines of study, through an art space, we can provide a bigger focus on creative learning and the arts, where the teacher and the environment must revolve around the student’s social, emotional and cognitive development. An art space with a structured creativity module offers an opportunity to better integrate the arts and creative thinking in the lives of Albanian students who aren’t familiar with co-curriculars or alternative methods of learning.

Lack of after-school activities in the local setting

Students can take courses in international schools, or pay fees for private classes, but the national curriculum hasn’t integrated after-school activities yet. As a big majority of students may not have the funding or resources to attend private after-school courses, this creative module will be a space that will provide them with a range of activities to attend or even just a place to socialize and be.

Introducing Alternative Approaches to Learning

Through the implementation of Art Spaces, the classroom turns into a space where art becomes the way to approach knowledge and such an approach is constantly negotiated between students and adults, abandoning the old method of teaching and embracing a more power-balanced education. 

In such creative learning environments, the focus is on learning through dialogue, inquiry, ‘learning by making,’ collaboration, and practice, and much less on learning by acquisition. The space needs to enable opportunities to take risks without penalty and learning by practice and through feedback opportunities. In truly creative learning spaces, learners and teachers conceive of creativity as an evolution in which new ideas emerge through the reconsideration of existing ideas.  Creativity can exist in the introduction of brand new ideas but it can also come from re-application, where pre-existing ideas are reviewed and seen in a new light (Smith C, Nerantzi C, and Middleton A).

Contrary to the current education where the teacher holds the dominant role, the Creativity Module introduces a new form of student-focused teaching in Tirana. 

Through the implementation of a holistic approach to education, we challenge a teaching practice that focuses less on the traditional milestones of academic development, and more on the complete physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing of a student (UNESCO, 2002). According to UNESCO, the four pillars of holistic education are: learning to live together; learning to know; learning to do; and learning to be. Overall, we can describe holistic education as containing the following broad characteristics: 1) it nurtures the development of the whole person; 2) it revolves around relationships (egalitarian, open, and democratic relationships); 3) it is concerned with life experiences; 4) it “recognizes that cultures are created by people and can be changed by people” (instead of conforming and replicating a established culture); and 5) it is founded upon a “deep reverence for life and for the unknown (and never fully knowable) source of life (Mahmoudi S, Jafari E, Nasrabadi H, Liaghatdar M). 

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