the political imperatives of school reform in America, schools contribute to the restrictions in the lives of children. Homework intrudes into family life. Recess is curtailed to make time to raise standardized test scores or to serve as punishment for children who have misbehaved or failed to turn in their homework. Instruction in the arts is sacrificed to exigencies of budgets. Playtime for children has all but disappeared, and school itself has been documented as a major stressor in their lives.
Yet the research on play tells of its vital benefits. Elise Belknap and Richard Hazler’s article aptly entitled “Empty Playgrounds and Anxious Children” reviews the scientific research documenting the substantial role of play in supporting the development of
• Divergent thinking
• Literacy skills like creating and working with narratives
• Practice with numerical concepts
• Personality characteristics like curiosity, perseverance, self-regulation, optimism, concentration, engagement and motivation
• Prosocial behavior like accommodating and negotiating with others
• Internal locus of control
• Expression of feelings and experiences
• Problem solving, memory, and cognitive flexibility
The relationship between play and learning, in fact, is so strong as to suggest that play is critical to learning. And children can conceive of just about anything, including working with art materials, as an opportunity for play. Through play with material like paints, clay, drawing media, blocks, and cardboard, children begin the work of developing creativity that eventually leads to an ability to produce and modify complex and organized fields.
What is play? Peter Gray in Free to Learn devotes seventeen pages to a definition and gives three general guidelines for explaining play. Play has to do less with an activity itself and more with attitude and motivation. Play can be woven into other activities, bringing a playful attitude to whatever activity in which one is engaged. And “pure” play has five characteristics:
1. It is self-chosen and self-directed.
2. Its means are valued more than the ends.
3. Its structure comes from the minds of those who are playing.
4. It is mentally removed from “real” or “serious” life.
5. It involves an active and non-stressed state of mind.
Doris Bergen developed a taxonomy of play based on the level of self-direction held by the child: Free play is child directed and supports a discovery style of learning; guided play involves an adult contributing support and encouragement. In contrast, directed play and work disguised as play involve an adult as the director and a child as the recipient.
Play also has the potential to create for children positively toned emotions known as “uplifts” that can mitigate both chronic and traumatic stress. Such positive experiences can provide a break from a stressful environment, allow children to experience positive stressors that generate excitement and hope, and promote restorative healing from a stressful event. In school, such a play break can allow a child to return, refreshed, to the classroom better able to engage in academics.
ArtBreak is a choice-based, guided-play experience based on the developmental and restorative possibilities of art making. Our action research documentation for the program tells us that children enjoy and value it, teachers and families appreciate it, and it lowers stress levels for children. It is easy to implement: you can start right away in your classroom or home, at whatever scale suits your space, time, and budget. And no art training is required, only the willingness to embark on a play journey with children. This book is a step-by-step “how to” for creating and facilitating an ArtBreak group for children that meets the needs of your time, space, and budget.
Children flourish when they experience engagement, belonging, and joy. In a working laboratory featuring both freedom and order where their innate curiosity, playfulness, and sociability are guided by their own interests and questions, children are able to find a natural balance. In ArtBreak such a balance is created through a social/emotional framework designed to support community, work, relaxation, problem solving, creativity, and imagination. As schools are working to meet the requirements of new evaluations and assessments, they are asked to also master the delivery of new curricula and encouraged to infuse their classrooms with twenty-first-century skill building: creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, and collaboration. These skills are best learned in an atmosphere that recognizes school as a social-emotional place.
These two worked out how to choose and share a palette to paint one big picture together. Photo by Josh Birnbaum
This book is a practical guide for educators and families who wish to offer children an ArtBreak program grounded in social/emotional learning and based on the restorative possibilities of art making. No art experience or training is needed. You may have picked up this book because the thought of a joyful, productive classroom is compelling. Yet, on the other hand, it sometimes seems impossible. At no time during the last hundred years of public education has so much been expected of schools, teachers, and children. Much of the current American conversation about school reform binds public-education policies to the service of national economic interests, emphasizing children as beings to be shaped to fit an undefined future based on competition. At the same time schools face challenges of every kind—funding, standardized achievement test performance mandates, drop-out rates that approach 50 percent in some demographic groups, political hostility to teachers, achievement gaps, and children deeply affected by environmental stressors such as poverty and trauma and, indeed, the stress imposed by schools themselves.
An ArtBreak program offers children freedom of choice in art making within a community guided by flexibility and individualization, where they are always supported and sometimes guided. In ArtBreak settings children meet weekly for a forty-minute, choice-based art experience throughout the school year. ArtBreak’s organizing framework is the expressive therapies continuum (ETC), a theory from art therapy based on the restorative and creative possibilities of art making. The ETC describes the functions of art materials according to how fluid or resistive they are. Fluid media like watercolor and finger paint support kinesthetic and sensory goals like relaxation and expression of feelings. More resistive media like colored pencils and markers support perceptual and affective goals such as identifying emotions, understanding cause and effect, and creating narratives. Highly resistive media like collage and construction develop problem-solving skills. A creative strand runs through all three levels and can occur at any point along the continuum.
You can conduct an ArtBreak with an entire classroom, with a small group composed of children from different classrooms, or in a home with children of various ages. I have partnered with classroom teachers and worked solo by using a pop-up studio stored in bins, an entire room dedicated to the studio, and a hand-built, sketchbook-based version—in schools as well as in community settings like libraries. Regardless of the setting, ArtBreak groups develop their own personalities yet evolve through common stages. This session, originally published in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, illustrates an ArtBreak group in its ninth session in which children are working independently with different media.
Six children, ages five through eleven years, rush into the school counselor’s room and dive into the apron box for smocks. It is time for ArtBreak. Two students head for the back table where their cardboard robots are
