- Discover the ways we make sense of our lives through story, and how this can be a beneficial framework for students.
- Consider the power of the arts and why it should sit at the heart of everything we do in classrooms.
- Learn ways that your school can adopt a new view: that you are not just preparing students for the future, you are also providing young people with the tools to imagine and build a better world.
In this keynote, Aotearoa's own Professor Peter O'Connor talks about the arts as a superpower for learning.
Peter starts by sharing beautiful examples of imagination and play with his granddaughter - how by playing with Lego bricks that were children in her eyes, she was “learning how to care for others.” She, and other children, come to school rich in social imagined play.
“Perhaps [children] understand that imagination sits between the head and the heart. ”
He says that we don’t talk about imagination enough in education.
The world is difficult and to get through it, we need hope. At the heart of all hope is imagination.
He also says that school is not preparation for the future, or preparation for life, but is just life itself. He believes his primary purpose as an educator now during COVID-19 is to help students make sense of the senseless world they live in - and to help them to imagine the world they live in better and differently.
How can students find a way to make sense of a tragedy where even adults can’t? Peter has worked in schools after life changing events - earthquakes, major disasters, and even after the bushfires that raged in Australia in 2019 and 2020. We hope things will go back to normal after a crisis on that scale - but there is no going back to normal. So Peter, as an educator, has turned to the arts.
With their imaginations warm, children can imagine an answer to dark times - they can find a way forward.
“The whole brain lights up - it’s the most gorgeous thing… when you see people engaged in thinking creatively.”
Peter has spent the past 10 years working to develop pedagogical resources for educators for this critical post-disaster time: to help children make sense of the world as it is now.
During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, Peter developed a beautiful resource to help teachers help children return to school: Te Rito Toi. Peter did a webinar tour through the resource with PETAA last year, and it’s free for everyone to view.
The arts has always provided a dialogue for deeply important things. When schools re-open, what books and stories will you use to open that dialogue?
Peter says that “It’s time to have conversations with children about what it means to be brave, and what it means to be brave when you’re scared…. Fiction has always served that purpose. Its superpower is that fictional worlds help us understand real worlds.”
When you make theatre and stories with children, laughing and creating with them, it changes the relationships. It allows for different kinds of talk. If you’re making things with children, there are opportunities for parallel talk and new space for dialogue.
There is power in children returning to school in playing together and in making beautiful things together - a song, a play, a splash of colour on a piece of paper. Art brings us closer to the world because we can see it anew, but it also provides an escape.
“The arts are a superpower for learning, but it is the loving, caring quality teaching that is the real superpower.”