Engaging students through art

I have zero talent in drawing or painting. My students giggle as I sketch something on the whiteboard, be it a cat, house, fork, whatever. I channel my creativity in other ways. In online classes, for example, I add artistic flourishes to my class presentations by using colourful and playful designs and animations. And since my students seem to like it, I thought, why not use more visual art to teach the course content?

As ESL teachers, we are lucky to have students from a diverse range of languages and cultures. Students have immense pride in sharing these cultures with us. Even the shiest of learners will raise their hands when I ask about their favourite musicians, authors, celebrities, and food. Naturally, the same applies to visual art, not just “favourite painters,” but any artistic products that they love from home, whether famous or not. These can include murals, staircases, buildings, a colourfully painted fence, street art, statues, sculptures, graffiti, painted trash cans, restaurant decor, and so on.

By sharing and discussing artistic treasures from their homelands, students enter a new imaginative space, away from boxed-in lessons about sentence structure and parts of speech. According to Farokhi and Hashemi (2011), “Imagination makes empathy possible, because to understand another we must be able to imagine living their life” (p. 924) and “[w]hen combined with reading, writing, speaking and listening, art can open doors for high levels of analysis and also challenge students to explore themselves and their surroundings and thus find avenues for sophisticated comprehension and communication” (p. 1). So simple but true!

We can weave art (of all types) into our lessons in many ways. For example, on a trip to Europe, I noticed a spectacular staircase in colourfully painted stones. Back in class, I googled “beautiful staircases around the world” and showed the images to my students, who excitedly said things like “Hey, I’ve been there!” or “Those stairs are in my country!” I then put them into groups to share more staircases or any other cool outdoor art from their homelands. At the same time, I had them integrate the conversation strategies and sentence types we had been working on.

Here are some other ideas:

• Take students on a virtual field trip to an arts museum anywhere in the world. (Familiarize yourself with the navigational tools beforehand so that you can demonstrate them to the class. I find that video screencasts are good for this.) Then direct students to an exhibit and ask them to take notes on a painting they like. Why do they like it? How does it make them feel? What do they learn about life during the period? You can have them use their discoveries to write a standard paragraph or short essay, or they can do the iconic “compare and contrast” assignment by choosing two artists, two types of art, two paintings, and so on.
• Have the class use digital tools or AI to create a piece of art themselves, and then they can write a “process paragraph” to describe the steps and the result.
• Assign a slide presentation where students showcase the work of an artist from their homeland.
• Get students to take photos of colourful and attention-grabbing graffiti in their neighbourhoods to share with the class or in groups. They can discuss possible meanings and emotions that radiate from the images and write personal reflections.
• Teach a little Canadiana by introducing the students to the Group of 7 and Indigenous artists. Then ask them to describe a piece of art that they like and what it evokes, using specifics that “show” rather than “tell.”
• Ask students to write a persuasive paragraph on learning different cultures or history through art.

The sky’s the limit! Go ahead and take your students to that imaginative space. Who knows? They may not notice that they are meeting course outcomes along the way.  😄

Jennifer Hutchison

I’m Jennifer Hutchison and I teach EAP and communications at George Brown College in Toronto. I have also taught courses in sociolinguistics in the English Foundation Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. In my spare time, I write short stories, read, exercise, and bake (the last two are codependent). Teaching English is my passion. I am curious about the world around me and feel fortunate to have that world brought to me every day in the classroom. Nevertheless, I took a circuitous route to discover this passion. After my undergraduate degree in French and translation, I worked as a translator and then veered off into writing and editing, which I did from home while I raised my children (four of them!). In none of these positions (except, possibly, childrearing) was I helping anybody, so I returned to school, launched my ESL career, and have never looked back. I look forward to working with you and sharing experiences and strategies on the Blog!