Page 18 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Conclusion
These projects have been innovative and transformative for both students and the communities they have engaged with. They represent an integration of teaching and learning in the current BA Art Therapy and Visual Arts honours programmes. Through this dialogical and reciprocal relationship, people have felt empowered to act in ways that contribute to society in positive ways.
Wahbie Long is a clinical psychologist and author of Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind (2021). Long challenges South Africans to rethink the way we see ourselves. He speaks about hope as residing in the individual and between people, which is shaped by the notion of ubuntu (human interdependence). Long (2021: 155) explores the relationship between social deprivation and psychological distress:
[I]n a country where one-third of the population lives on the equivalent of less
than R30 per day, there can be no question of setting life’s goals in keeping with an understanding of the good. This is because the unskilled worker sitting on the kerb has to deal with what can only be called the stuff of nightmares... He lives only for today: there is no point in thinking about the future, which, as anyone with a dream will know, is where hope resides.”
Long (2021: 155) presents another perspective: ‘Hope does not complicate desire: it signifies instead a self that is searching for a fresh start.’ He points to the link between hope and self- actualisation in his statement that ‘showing up is not about fearlessness. It’s about courage and pushing through despite the fear’ (Long 2021: 155).
Interconnectedness and empathy are fundamental lesson for educators in the South. When educators listen to students and guide them in their learning and analysis, the students will start to actualise their ambitions in ways that make them feel empowered and empathic. They will become creative agents in their own lives, as well as people who contribute positively to their communities and society at large.
Our higher education institutions can create safe spaces that will help to dispel and displace the anxiety and fear that has been so widespread during the pandemic, and help students to cope with constant uncertainty. The arts, in particular, are now recognised as having a positive effect on mental health and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
These interventions I contend that the use of art is a vehicle for solidarity and collective action which can lead to empowerment and agency in addressing the challenges faced in times of trauma. The students feel empowered to act in ways that enhance society and by the time they graduate will have greater agency to contribute to a better world.