A holistic pedagogy of expressive arts through metacognitive transference of embodied experiences

Abstract

Many people do not associate the arts with “thinking” and are unaware that emotional, physical and cognitive abilities of students are the real driving forces behind expressive art forms. There is a lack of research on the awareness of embodied experiences that could be metacognitively transferred from teacher to learner. A holistic view of education, which entails the integration of all expressive art forms, is that it (education) in itself is an artistic practice with a purpose of holistically educating the soul. Succinctly put, it involves intercessions where body, mind and spirit meet in the Art classroom. The purpose of this research was to understand how metacognitive transference of embodied experiences could foster holistic education through expressive arts. Metacognitive awareness and embodied experiences can be metacognitively transferred from teacher to learner. Yet this is often a neglected topic in South African research on adult students. This process of metacognitive transfer occurs through reflection on both the artwork and the artist and it relates to the viewer’s metacognitive awareness. Educating teachers holistically about the process of metacognition can promote this awareness and motivate them towards a holistic approach to educating the soul in their own teaching practice. This awareness is transformed through the artist’s embodied experience. The artist makes the abstract of our reality (or the thoughts of our reality) tangible by means of art and expresses perceptions through symbols. Expressive arts serve as the embodied expressions of our thoughts, whereas art serves as the situatedness of our thoughts. Therefore, it could be said that art can be distributed across various domains of contexts of reality inside and outside the mind. This personal development should be strong and entrenched in pre-service Art teachers’ outlook on teaching and learning before they graduate.