How does
Experiential Arts
impact Arts Education?
Experiential Arts (EA) puts students at the heart of artmaking experiences through the process of Experiential Learning — a framework for how humans learn, develop, and create meaningful change throughout their lives.
EA generates genuine connection and exchange between arts educators and students.
EA invites students to become authors of their own artmaking by creating original productions and works.
EA calls on arts educators to be highly creative, skilled, and imaginative when designing, facilitating, and producing participatory arts experiences along with their students.
EA adapts to any student’s learning style and requires minimal arts training, knowledge, or skillsets for students to participate.
EA can apply to any medium of art and area of arts education.
EA requires minimal resources or expenses and can reach arts educators and students lacking equitable access to high quality arts experiences due to constraints in time, money, proximity, and more.
How does
Experiential Learning work?
"Experience precedes understanding."
- Jean Piaget
Synthesized by David Kolb from the work of educators including Jean Piaget and John Dewey, Experiential Learning is a framework for how humans learn, develop, and create meaningful change throughout their lives.
Building understanding through a cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting,
each time the cycle goes around, we build upon what we learned in previous cycles to develop and evolve generatively. In short: live and learn.
Experiential Learning builds skills and understanding based on every student’s individual learning style. Applied to arts education, this student-centered approach creates entry points to artmaking for students and arts educators alike and generates renewed interest and engagement in the arts.
How does NO FEAR apply
Experiential Learning?
“You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.”
- John Dewey
Experiential Learning in the arts offers an alternative to traditional arts education and Western methods of theoretical learning and instructional training.
Traditional arts education continues to operate largely on what educator Paulo Freire called a “banking model,” in which information is deposited from teachers to students through a process of transmission.
Experiential Learning alternatively invites arts educators to both share their own artistry and withdraw from the artistic experiences their students already have within. This acts as a process of exchange and interaction rather than transmission or transaction.
NO FEAR invites young artists to become authors of their own artmaking. Following the Experiential Learning cycle we accomplish this by:
1. Experiencing: We design and facilitate student-centered Experiential Learning programs that put students at the heart of the artmaking process and reflect their relevant interests.
2. Reflecting: We invite students to contribute their impressions, questions, and preferences to artmaking experiences, as well as consider new perspectives and possibilities.
3. Thinking: We encourage students to actively imagine, conceive, and manifest new ways of seeing and experiencing the world through their artmaking.
4. Acting: We produce interactive and participatory arts experiences that broaden students’ perspectives through meaningful community outreach and cultural exchange, in order to experience firsthand how artmaking can transform the world in purposeful and powerful ways.
