Professional Development Workshop at Center School
Our elementary art team participated in activities that built sensitivity for blind learners. Darleen Joos (art teacher at Center) designed this excellent workshop for us!
L) The activity on the left shows us sculpting a face with model magic using only our sense of touch. It's not as easy as you might think!
R) The activity on the right shows us using our sense of touch and hearing to explore an unknown object. We could communicate with each other while we explored the object with our hands, but boy were we off the mark! It was a paper mache dragon and we guessed a number of other creatures and even a castle!
There were a few more activities not shown here. We learned so much being out of our comfort zone, because as you can imagine... art teachers lean on their sense of sight more than most. I could see myself teaching any one of the activities with a class, especially one with a blind student. This would go a long way toward building empathy toward that student. Any class of students would benefit from these activities though, just by stretching imaginations beyond their day to day experience while creating.
