Page 14 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
2020 was a pioneering year for a new art therapy qualification at the University of Johannesburg. It was also the first of its kind on the African continent.
Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic lockdown was devasting for most people, but
it also offered extraordinary opportunities for students to learn and act
in new ways, adapt their expectations and gain insights that were both enriching and transformative. Higher education institutions have a unique opportunity to capitalise on the innovations that emerged. It has forced
us to teach in new ways and activate our imagination as we needed to continue to innovate and find creative ways to deal with uncertainty and fear; hopefully we will not revert to old and familiar ways of teaching and learning in the future.
This short essay aims to share some of the lessons from two lockdown projects that impacted students and communities in a profound way during the closure of universities and community-engagement spaces. These community-engaged projects involved the visual art and art therapy honours students in introducing visual arts activities in three partner centres, as well as a Photovoice project in designing a ‘homeless-home’. The students overcame their feelings of paralysis and fear and found that by exercising their agency in practical ways they felt empowered. The benefits that the students derived from the experience were as great, if not greater, than those derived from the beneficiaries of the various projects.
2020 was a pioneering year for a new art therapy qualification at the University of Johannesburg. It was also the first of its kind on the African continent. Art therapy is a discipline that, among other things, offers theoretical and professional training to help people heal and manage the impacts of trauma and crisis. The arts and arts therapies provide valuable lessons in how to help people process the world around them. It can embrace uncertainty, contradiction and complexities. The arts and arts therapies provide ways to
tell stories in symbolic ways. It has become increasingly evident that engaging creativity stimulates people’s emotional, social, spiritual, physical and cognitive capacities.
It benefits not only individuals but communities as a whole. The pandemic catalysed unprecedented anxiety, despair, hardship and trauma. It prompted the need to find new ways to relate to each other, to stay present and move towards what is broken and requires repair in our communities.
This article presents two examples of innovative projects supported by the University of Johannesburg Teaching and Innovation Fund (TIF) in 2020 and 2021. The fund was used
to enhance students’ learning experience and support them to complete their community engagement module. The funding further enabled the publication of their collaboration outcomes – this can benefit future students as well as provide sustainable resources to the engaged communities.1
The lessons shared make a strong argument for the inclusion of arts-based methods for research, as well as learning and teaching. I would argue that the approach taken could offer a model for university faculties to enrich community-engaged learning. The experience of students involved in these projects has tangible and potentially transformative impacts on the communities they serve. We should not be advocating for a return to ‘normality’, but rather we should move forward imagining that another post-Covid world is possible, taking forward the lessons of how to care for the environment and society at large.
1 Sample of skills book 1 and Sample of skills book 2