Collaborative Art Activities

Happy February 1st!

Today in class, we talked about the strengths of collaborative activities which are activities that involve working together with a group to complete a project. These activities help with socialization, communication, and team work. The activities can be used to teach about dealing with conflict settlements, anger management, and peer support. They can reduce stress, heighten moods, and give the group members a feeling of community during the activity which can lead to a feeling of pride in their accomplishment.

When focusing around a collaborative ART activity, there is a "no wrong way" kind of thinking involved. No matter what population one might be working with, there is always some kind of art that can be utilized for that group. Art is a very expressive activity that increases or allows for a great deal of imagination and self-expression. If working around an unstructured art activity, the process of creating the art is a major part of the whole activity; the activity should not just focus on the end result which is also very important, but on the complete process. Having a group design something either individually and then brought together as a whole or as a collaborative group can increase problem solving abilities and interpersonal skills.
One very important thing to always remember when doing art activities is safety precautions with the equipment, environment, and group members.

Examples:
"Quilting" Activities --> when an individual might work on something by his or herself and then as a group everyone's art work would be gathered into one large piece.
Murals
Graffiti Walls
Creative Writing
Structured Activities
Movement/Drama/Music/Dance
Electrical Tape Designs

Literature about this topic: "Development of an Art Program on a Bone Marrow Transplant Unit" Lane and Graham-Pole (1994)
Websites: http://www.tapeart.com/
http://tapesculpture.org/workshops.html

Class Activity: TAPE SCULPTURES
As a class, we organized into our groups to create tape sculptures as you can see on the above website. Each group was given a population to organize their design and story; then, we gathered our materials and set off to work for about an hour and fifteen minutes.
My group was given the population of Psychotic disorders focusing on Schizophrenia. We decided to make our sculpture from a rocking chair that we found in the building. Since there is always so much focus on activities that are active in Therapeutic Recreation, we wanted to focus on the relaxation aspect. With a population of Schizophrenia, this was a great area to begin with because many times people who have schizophrenia are unable to relax because of feelings of paranoia. We wanted to fix our goal on the observation that it is very important for these people to have a place where they can relax and feel comfortable.
We also talked about how we would utilize this activity with a group of people who had schizophrenia and how they would be able to work together. We thought that tape sculptures would be a project that would benefit this population because it involves communication, trust, and the need to work together for an overall goal. To allow for a more comfortable environment with the group, we thought that if they were to sculpt something familiar to them that it would help relax the situation.

~Sarah