Through visual arts pupils learn, relax, and express their emotions, thoughts and feelings. With artistic expression and acquiring knowledge about art concepts and their laws, pupil's emotional, social and aesthetic development is connected. The artistic tasks solved by children in schools, derive from the learning goals that strive towards the child's overall development in an affective, cognitive and psychomotor field. In the first years of art class, the technique often conditioned the choice of an artistic motif, and the artwork derived from it. The starting point for artistic creation in the classroom was therefore the means that pupils and teachers had at their disposal. Therefore, the learning goals and objectives were more than affectively and cognitively related to the psychomotor field of the pupil's personality, and some also had an educational connotation. Children with deficiencies in a particular learning field, are children, who with normal intelligence, reveal disorders in one or more basic mental processes. For most of these children it is typical, that they do not have problems with all teaching subjects, and these problems are not always the same, but they fluctuate. We often think that problems cannot arise in visual arts, but we must not forget about children, who have problems with movement, coordination, organization and orientation, which is also evident in artistic creation.
In the master's thesis, we studied the ways of adjusting for visual arts classes, for children with deficiencies in individual areas of learning.
In the first part, which represents the theoretical starting point, we introduced a law on the guidance of children with special needs, defined children with special needs and the process of placement of children with special needs. We have also embarked on the definition of children with deficiencies in a particular learning field, students with specific learning difficulties and explored the concept of dyspraxia. We focused on adjustments for children with learning difficulties and their connection with arts education classes and curriculum.
For the empirical part we used a questionnaire and aimed at assessing, how much teachers are aware, that children, who have problems in one field of study, may have problems in another field; whether these deficits are also reflected in the arts field and what are the starting points for teachers to adapt their teaching of visual arts for children with deficiencies in a particular field of study.
The results showed that pupils with deficits in a particular learning field, have the most learning problems in mathematics, Slovene language subject and arts education. The biggest problems are lack of attention, difficulties in understanding texts and instructions, problems with coordination and motor skills, problems with memory and logic, problems with self-image and lower intellectual abilities. Teachers adjust their arts classes by giving them simpler tasks, more instructions, and extending the time to complete the artwork. Most problems arise in performing art techniques in the field of painting and sculpture. The most important finding, which was shown by the research of the master's thesis is that pupils, who have problems in one field often have problems in other fields as well.
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