The Art of Not Fixing: Re-imagining pedagogy of wellbeing through art

In this talk, I will share my work around wellbeing and art. Concerned with student mental stress and educator burnout, scholars have positioned wellbeing as central to education. Basic needs like feeling safe have to be met before learning can happen (Maslow, 1943; Peppler, 2010). Social-emotional Learning (SEL) has been the most ambitious response (Elias et al., 1997). Yet critical scholars argue that some SEL programs promote "hegemonic positivity" (Stearns, 2017), expecting students and teachers to stay calm, happy, and in control. This reduces emotional experience to cognitive skill and behavior management (Hoffman, 2009), and can promote conformity over authentic self-expression (Zembylas, 2007; Gillies, 2011). Meanwhile, scholars in psychology and counselling are starting to reject the idea that positive emotions are good and negative emotions are bad (Wong, 2011; Lomas & Ivtzan, 2016). Instead, all emotions function as messengers carrying information about our bodies, selves, and needs (Greenberg, 2002). Met with attention, they pass. Suppressed, they return with more force. If emotions are messengers, a pedagogy of wellbeing might look different. Following the Learning Sciences tradition of studying experts in the wild (Hutchins, 1995), I did ethnographic work with a community-based art and wellness nonprofit founded by three art therapists in 1991. Adult participants there made process-based art, dialogued with their artwork, and shared insights under a "no-comment" rule. I found that they experienced joy. They processed grief and anger. They surfaced parts of themselves they had not known were there. They developed compassion for themselves and for others. This work offers Learning Sciences a different way to think about wellbeing: emotions can be expressed and welcomed, instead of evaluated; different parts of selves can be seen and accepted, instead of judged; facilitators can be co-learners, instead of all-knowing managers. This matters because learning, at its best, is the work of becoming more fully who we are.