“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” ― John Dewey
More thinking on the Dewey’s pedagogy of art as experience, it starts make more sense to me. Art plays a non-negligible role of activating a shift “in the one who experiences at the moment of experiencing, with the result that one is made different or becomes other than was prior to participation” (Grosz, 2011; . O’Donoghue, 2012) In Lee Mingwei’s work, the guests, who have been invited to dine with him, were sharing their stories of gratitude, forgiveness, and understanding with him in public setting with the minimalist table design. This simple yet multi-sensorial design of installation alludes to the spatiality and sensuality as an aesthetic faculty and the place where participants and artist to meet to exchange their experience of life and be changed by that.
Such experience reminds me of one of my art teaching with the primary elementary school students. When I was try to deliver a lesson on expressing hope through art in suffering, I met unexpected outcomes. Despite being a similar age, the students could not relate to artwork done by the children from the concentration camps. Learning from this experience, I redesigned the lesson plan. To inspire their experience of art, firstly I needed to enrich their experience of hardships and stimulate their imagination about what oppressed lives would be like. I set up a big tent in the classroom to show poor living conditions and cover all the windows to create a dark and miserable atmosphere. We watched videos about suffering kids in Syria, drank bitter tea, and meditated on the Psalm about suffering and salvation. These activities and experiences gave them deeper understanding about suffering. Afterwords, I asked them to make art on kites which would fly high above all the hardships symbolized as hope in their lives.
This art class was way more successful than the one without experiencing suffering, which had great impact on them from now on. They would remember how art formed their way of looking into the world and themselves through experiences.
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