How can Experiential Arts
empower students and educators?
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 breaks down barriers that separate arts educators and students including roles of teacher as expert and students as subjects to learning.
EA invites students and educators alike to become authors of their own artmaking by creating original productions and works.
EA calls on arts educators to be highly creative and skilled when producing and facilitating arts experiences with their students.
EA is highly adaptable to student’s different learning styles 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 students and arts educators lacking equitable access to high quality arts experiences due to constraints in time, money, proximity, and more.
How can Experiential Learning
transform arts education?
"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. In short: we live and learn by experiencing and reflecting on those experiences.
“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 training and instruction.
Traditional arts education in the West continues to largely operate on what educator Paulo Freire called a “banking model,” in which information is deposited from teachers to students through a process of transmission.
Alternatively, Experiential Learning invites arts educators to share their own artistry while withdrawing from the art already within their students. This acts as an interaction and process of exchange rather than transaction.
NO FEAR invites young artists to become authors of their own artmaking through the Experiential Learning cycle. This includes:
1. Experiencing: We design and facilitate student-centered Experiential Learning programs that put students at the heart of artmaking experiences which reflect their relevant interests.
2. Reflecting: We invite students to contribute their impressions, questions, and preferences following arts experiences, as well as consider new perspectives and possibilities for artmaking.
3. Thinking: We encourage and guide students to actively imagine and manifest new ways of seeing and experiencing the world through their artmaking.
4. Acting: We produce participatory arts experiences that broaden students’ perspectives through community outreach and cultural exchange, in order for students to experience how artmaking can transform the world in purposeful and powerful ways.