Booklet 1: Theoretical Handbook

Theoretical Handbook

1. Introduction

Why focus on cultural and physical activities to supplement educational and reintegration services? Because those activities move us and make us think and discover new worlds. At the same time, they ensure cohesion between the various groups, encourage meetings, provide solidarity, and make issues or problems visible and debatable. We are used to training our brains and learning skills by using classical schooling and reintegration methods. Arts and Sports are more flexible, have many different training methods and practices, and rely on 21st-century skills. We implement both disciplines not for their recreational or sporting function but for their social and educational role in the broadest sense of the word. Participation in cultural or physical activities contributes to social involvement and personal growth. It has a personal element, affects you emotionally, and increases creativity, self-development, resilience, curiosity, critical thinking, endurance and new ways to see the world.

Art and Sport are brilliant ‘schools’ for 21st-century skills

2. The triangle composed of Organisation, Location and Guidance

The findings distilled from the project MOVE, namely the triangle guidance, location and organisation, the Agora model, and Social Cognition, have prompted us to elaborate on these activities in the project MOVE Beyond as building blocks in developing practical cultural and physical training courses/ workshops to complement existing educational and reintegration training.

Organisation

The organisation is an essential element for successful training. Management cannot simply tell people that the goal is to be innovative without changing the organisation’s structure. It means that leaders must act in ways that promote and support organisational innovation. Charismatic leadership, support, freedom for innovation, alternative paths to achieve specific goals, and sharing the vision are essential.

Location

In the previous project, MOVE, we constantly recognised the influence location has on young people’s behaviour and its effect on learning and training. Therefore, location characteristics are essential to thinking about Education, motivation and tackling early school leaving. In Education, many studies address learning and educational spaces, so it is fundamental to transform and adapt areas around youngsters to encourage learning as much as possible.

Guidance

Concerning guidance, we refer to the handbook The profile of the trainer (see the website of MOVE BEYOND), in which, in addition to the various roles of a trainer, we also describe the essential competencies necessary for building participation and interaction between the trainer and the participants within the objectives of this project. The goal is to translate into practice what we deduce from general indications and to be able to replay the model in specific contexts.

3. The Agora model

The Agora model is a Bildungsmodel. It categorises the buildings in our world, teaching us there are only eight types of buildings. These buildings come back in any place at any time and give us a perfect starting point to develop our young people into all-around, engaged and committed citizens. The eight buildings are called spheres. There are four living spheres (public, private, political, and privatised) and four training spheres (Art, Sport, religion, and philosophy).

The model is an instrument to visualise the connection between the training and life spheres. It makes youngsters aware of the world around them by connecting them with all spheres of society. In this way, they become acquainted with the possible roles they can play in the rapidly changing society, and they can prepare for a life in the four training and life buildings.

4. Social Cognition

Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about others and social situations. It focuses on the role of cognitive processes in our social interactions. How we think about others plays a significant role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us. It involves:

• The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know about the people in the world around us.

• The study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social world.

• The reasons we address certain information about the social world, how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then used to interact with other people.

What we should remember

- Do not assume a priori that people are unwilling to participate or are just playing around. Maybe they cannot do that activity or have different perceptions.

- Ask Open-Ended Questions.

- Layer information.

- Incorporate various kinds of activities (involving other learning styles, like writing, drawing, taking a pose or gesture of a particular figure in an artwork, etc.) to make room for responses you might not get through conversation alone.

- Make connections (between information and ideas, personal experiences).

- Reflect on and synthesise the ideas.

- Realise that there is a difference between unwillingness and ignorance.

- Be aware of cultural differences.

- First, listen carefully and repeat what you hear before judging.

- Do not let your expectations guide your behaviour.

- Watch out for possible deception of first impressions.

5. 21st Century Skills

Educators, business leaders, academics, and governmental agencies have identified specific skills, abilities, and learning dispositions required for success in 21st-century society and workplaces. As a result, new standards for what students should be able to do are slowly replacing the basic skills and knowledge expectations of the past. To meet this challenge, schools, non-formal and informal Education need to be transformed to enable youngsters to acquire flexible problem solving, collaboration and communication skills, and in general, all those skills that will be used to be successful in work and life. Furthermore, among the main objectives of Education in the 21st century is forming creative, innovative, and effective graduates to allow youngsters to be active in the era of globalisation. With this, in the present century, youngsters are expected to master 21st-century skills, which can be organised into three categories: learning, literacy, and life skills. This project focuses on eight skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking/problem solving, creativity/innovation, flexibility, initiative, social skills, and leadership.

What we should remember

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For success in today’s society and workplaces, 21st century skills have been identified as required. These abilities can be organised into three categories: learning, literacy, and life skills.

- The scientific literature on the subject provides valuable tools for assessing the skills of young adults concerning the three categories identified to encourage them to achieve the objectives necessary in the globalised world of the 21st century.

6. Applied theories for the cultural and physical guidelines

John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have influenced Education and social reform. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about Education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, Art, logic, social theory, and ethics. According to Dewey, learning is a

social process of experience, interaction, and participation. John Dewey is most famous for his role in progressive Education. Progressive Education is a view of Education that emphasises the need to learn by doing. Dewey believed that human beings learn through a ‘hands-on’ approach.

What we should remember

- The media often has a negative contribution to how youngsters value things – they have to determine values and perspectives based on the media’s opinions on how we should live. Therefore, Art Education should help children develop their sense of what a value is and what kind of perspective to live life by instead.

- Children need to pay attention to their judgements towards Art to develop productive communication that keeps individuality. They need to think critically instead of simply agreeing with everything the other says and reconstruct their thoughts to make a meaningful conversation. Be aware of your students’ individuality and accommodate their teaching to the situation.

Arthur Efland

Efland was a leading figure in the field of Art Education. He embraces an integrated theory of cognition, which holds that each individual constructs his view of reality in the light of his personal, social, and cultural context. According to this integrated theory, each of us is guided by our interests and purposes in seeking to understand the world through our experience. Yet, we inevitably employ the cognitive tools provided by the culture in which we live, tools ranging from language to a body of scientific knowledge. He also demonstrates how Art contributes to the overall development of the mind delineating how the development of artistic interests and ability is an essential aspect of cognition and learning. Finally, he shows how Art helps individuals construct cultural meaning, a crucial component of social communication – a foundation for lifelong learning that includes the Arts.

What we should remember

- Teach youngsters about Art through their own experiences (cognitive, affective, and sensorimotor) by looking at Art from the past and present and at the creative processes of others.

- Teach youngsters to think about the role of Art, about what is important (analysis and reflection), or what they can or want to make themselves (problem finding). Viewing works of Art requires some intellectual ability to extract valuable meaning from a piece of Art.

- Help youngsters develop their artistic and creative abilities by doing visual research themselves and by learning through experience how to apply their knowledge flexibly.

- Encourage imagination: the act or ability to form mental images of something that is not present or has not been experienced before. It is also the act or ability to create new ideas or images by combining and reorganising previous experiences.

Lev Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and social constructivist whose sociocultural theory of Cognitive Development emphasises the importance of culture and interaction in developing cognitive abilities. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory views human development as a socially mediated process in which children acquire their cultural values, beliefs, and problemsolving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society. He believed that a person has not only a set of abilities but also a set of potential abilities that can be realised if given the proper guidance from others. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was a crucial construct in Lev Vygotsky’s theory of learning and development. The Zone of Proximal Development is the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with adult guidance

or collaboration with more capable peers. The zone of proximal development consists of two crucial components: the learner’s potential development and the role of interaction with others. Learning occurs in the zone of proximal development after identifying current knowledge. The potential development is simply what the student is capable of learning.

What we should remember

- To develop the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), the trainer should consider/elicit the previous knowledge from the learners.

- Art and physical activity help young people to reach their full potential, their ZPD.

- Assign tasks that students cannot do on their own but which they can do with assistance.

- Provide an environment that enables students to do more complex tasks than would otherwise be possible. Art and Sports settings are good examples of such environments.

Howard Gardner

The psychologist Howard Gardner introduced the theory of Multiple Intelligences in 1996 in his book Frames of Mind. His theory assumes that the ability to learn can take place in diverse ways. Gardner asserts that you should present learning materials in multiple ways, regardless of which subject you teach (arts, sciences, history, or math). Gardner points out that anything you are deeply familiar with can be described and conveyed in several ways. It is not about how intelligent you are, but how you are intelligent. Based on several criteria, Gardner distinguishes, in any case, the following intelligences:

1. Verbal-linguistic intelligence (well-developed verbal skills and sensitivity to the sounds, meanings, and rhythms of words)

2. Logical-mathematical intelligence (ability to think conceptually and abstractly, and capacity to discern logical and numerical patterns)

3. Spatial-visual intelligence (capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualise accurately and abstractly)

4. Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence (ability to control one’s body movements and to manage objects skilfully)

5. Musical intelligence (ability to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch, and timber)

6. Interpersonal intelligence (capacity to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, motivations, and desires of others)

7. Intrapersonal (capacity to be self-aware and in tune with feelings, values, beliefs and thinking processes)

8. Naturalist intelligence (ability to recognise and categorise plants, animals, and other objects in nature)

9. Existential intelligence (sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence such as ‘What is the meaning of life?’, ‘Why do we die?’, and ‘How did we get here?’)

What we should remember

- As a trainer, you must know that there are different types of information and diverse ways of processing information.

- Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, but they can also evolve.

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Not only do we all learn in a certain way (one by reading, the other by doing, a third by schematising, and so on), but we also express ourselves in different ways: through words, images, schedules, movement, etc.

Of course, in a multidisciplinary activity, you will get some choice in this domain, but it is also good to have an eye for this in other situations.

David Kolb

David Kolb is a learning and organisational psychologist best known for researching the diverse ways people learn from their experiences. His best-known work is Experiential Learning. Experience as The Source of Learning and Development from 1984. He based himself on the work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget. But Kolb was also inspired by Carl Jung, Paulo Freire, Jerome Bruner, L. S. Vygotsky, and William James. As the name reveals, the Experiential Learning Theory involves learning from experience. In his book Experiential Learning, Kolb clarifies that experiential learning can be defined as a learning process where knowledge results from grasping and transforming an experience. Furthermore, Kolb suggested that learning requires abstract concepts that one may apply flexibly in various situations.

What we should remember

- The learner is in control of the learning process, and it is the process that is essential, not so much the result.

- There are four elementary paths of learning, in which most of us have one or more preferences, and the learning becomes complete as there are more ways of learning.

- There is a division in how you get a grip on the world (concrete experience and abstract concepts) and how you process information (reflective observation and active experimentation).

- Ensure that you are alert to vary in the way you offer information, in types of information, and how information can be processed.

George Hein

Alongside an academic and research career, George Hein’s work in Education began as part of the Educational Development Centre in the Elementary Science Program, growing to programme evaluation and valuation of cultural institutions. He theorises a constructivist education with a specific combination of Knowledge theory and Learning theory to be put into practice through pedagogy, called Education Theory. Hein classifies educational approaches based on three components: a theory of knowledge (epistemology), a theory of learning, and, deriving from the first two, a theory of teaching (pedagogy). He places theories of knowledge on a continuum ranging from the realist position, that the real world and knowledge of it exist independent of the mind, to the idealist position, that is to say, that knowledge exists only as constructed by the individual mind.

What we should remember

- If you assume (to the extent possible) that people (young and older) actively learn, and that they have control over their learning process, then, a careful balance must be sought between openness and direction.

- The intention is not to achieve a precise result (or to make a standard) but that everyone learns in the broad sense of the word and develops their knowledge, attitude, and skills.

- The essential is to motivate and stimulate people to enter (and stay) in that learning process and to create a safe and challenging learning environment.

- Starting points, offering a complete learning process, adapting the activity to the needs of learners, and confirming individual results are keywords and require extensive and substantial preparation.

NOTES

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

english language revision by: Rita Brito – escritabrito@gmail.com illustrations by: Federica De Leonardo graphic design and print: tipografialapiazza.it last update: september 2022