Art education
SANKALP has been organizing art education and art appreciation to promote the study and practice of different art forms as well as use art to foster other disciplines/subjects of education and knowledge.
Art education is often neglected in favour of subjects considered useful, such as science, technology, commerce and social sciences. Art education has always been considered as an option or a part of co-curricular activities, but not as a subject to be considered necessary. However, several factors now plead for integration of art education in school education. SANKALPrecognises the necessity and role of art education in the educational content and process.
The art education and creativity strongly influence the shaping the human personality, bring out the full potentials of the children and adolescents, and maintain their emotional balance-all these factors, which foster harmonious behaviour.
At a time when family and social structure are fast changing as well as the nuclear family system and supportive role of the family elders are constantly eroding, the artistic values and subjects help to bridge up the gap in emotional support needed for the children and adolescents.
Art education is a stimulator rather than a decelerator for the growth of scientific knowledge as it sharpens the sensitivity of the child and makes her or him more receptive to other forms of knowledge. Creative education develops the creative faculty, sharpens the memory and directs the aggressiveness towards symbolic choices.
The traditional and conformist behavioural pattern of the child is not always changing towards a progressive behaviour. The children are adapting to and becoming more vulnerable to anti-social behaviour, violence, drugs, and delinquency. The creative thinking imparted by art education provides a healing effect on children to learn to live together and to give up violence.
The process of globalization has contributed towards dissemination of the dominant aspects of the global culture (mostly, western/westernized culture) through advanced new technologies ( including, the electronic media), wherein the children and adolescents are lacking and becoming insensitive to the appreciation of their own culture, and becoming passive listeners and viewers of the dominant aspects of the global culture, without the necessary knowledge or objectivity to evaluate or make any judgment on the same. Therefore, the school education, particularly the primary education, is expected to bring alive local and popular culture by introducing them into the curriculum in the most appropriate manner.
SANKALP’s activities on art education transmit to the child a concrete and living relationship with cultural diversities and impart an integral education, which departs from the customary restriction of school education in undoing or minimizing the link between knowledge, feelings, sensitivity, long familiarities and experience. Such education attempts to bring abut the cognitive, emotional, intellectual and physiological well-being of a child. While in secondary and senior secondary level, specialized methods and content of art education are imparted wherever the same is taken as a subject, mostly art education in school is promoted on an amateur basis. The art education is supposed to bring out the artist in the child, rather than making artist of the child.
The Organisation has been using the different art forms; Indian Classical Dance, Indian Classical Music, Visual Art, Literary Art, Theatre, and Traditional /Folk/ Indigenous Art to promote art education.
The broad activities for such education encompass workshops, orientations, trainings, dialogues, refresher courses and exchange programmes. The focal groups of these programmes are the school students and teachers.