#seeking out and engaging with the preexisting content and community
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Grandfather Moros (Chronicles of Darkness)
Few Chthonians care to communicate with ghosts or the Bound, but Grandfather Moros is an exception. No one remembers when the ancient chthonian first appeared, but it is certainly old enough to have been around in ancient Greece. While some bound have associated it with the chthonic deity, old Grandfather cares not for worship, merely content to watch and observed until it chooses to dispense either wisdom or swift oblivion.
Art by me!
Grandfather Moros has the body of a withered old vulture, the head of an angler fish, and a skeleton’s bony arms in place of legs. It prefers to perch at a distance from those it watches, hiding the cracks and crags of the Underworld’s ceiling, staring at them with massive, luminous eyes. Those who approach the creature with the proper gifts may catch its attention, however, prompting the Chthonian to intercede on their behalf.
When Grandfather Moros speaks, it is the sound of an oncoming avalanche, a raging storm, or an erupting volcano. It is surprisingly compassionate and understanding of the ghosts who trail in its wake, feeding off its plasm. Sometimes Grandfather Moros engages in conversation with them, pointing out those it deems interesting to the Bound. Other times it just eats them.
Grandfather is deeply curious about the Bound and is far more willing to engage with them than most Chthonians. Moros lacks any sense of human morality, however, making it equally willing to engage with Sin-Eaters, Elysians, Necromancers, and Eaters of the Dead. Many Bound are also appalled to discover that Moros views Reapers with a similar curiosity and insists they are similar entities. Grandfather is generally bemused by the few Mages who make their way into the Depths it inhabits, especially by those who truck in Death and Fate magic. Prometheans are likewise an amusing curiosity, being so filled with the Elpis opposite of its nature.
Rank: 5
Attributes: Power 15, Finesse 15, Resistance 15
Influence: Doom 5
Corpus: 25
Willpower: 10
Size: 10
Speed: 35
Defense: 15
Initiative: +30
Numina: Awe, Blast, Changing Fates, Drain, Empower Ghost, Engulf, Proxy, Puppeteer, Reap Memories, Seek, Speed
Max Essence: 50
Ban: Must listen to a tale told by those who offer it a mixture of burnt animal, ambrosia, and their own blood or Plasm.
Bane: A knife craved from the bones of an animal sacrificed in a hecatomb, engraved with words for "hope" in nine different languages.
Other Traits: Alien Ephemera, Alien Essence, Ectophagia, Materialization, Plasm Trail, River Dweller
New Numen - Changing Fates: By spending a Willpower and five Essence, Grandfather Moros shapes a being’s fate. This bestows or removes the Destiny merit. It can also alter a preexisting Destiny’s destiny and/or doom.
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NICOLAS BOURRIAUD POSTPRODUCTION CULTURE AS SCREENPLAY: HOW ART REPROGRAMS THE WORLD
This book fucking rocks and affirms many things about my practice. Good to know I am on a good path. Written in 2002, the text could not take into account the level of postproduction that would ensue in the following twenty years. This is the age of the consumer-producer. Everything is consumed and produced multiple times over. Bourriaud thought that artists processing their own consumption would take on liberatory pollitical effects. Unfortunately late capitalism has simply developed such that we no longer need ‘power’ to satiate us with entertainment, we are given the tools to satiate one another.... Below are really haphazard notes, not very well structured but all very important.
p7“Pop Art was born of a conjunction between the phenomenon of mass production and the birth of visual marketing, under the aegis of a new era of consumption” (p2)
“the works of Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, or Rirkrit Tiravanija deeply reexamine notions of creation, authorship, and originality through a problematics of the use of cultural artifacts - which, by the way, is absolutely new.” (p4)
“When artists find material in objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, the work of art takes on a script-like value: "when screenplays become form," in a sense.” (p4)
“Postproduction apprehends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the Net (how to find one's bearings in the cultural chaos and how to extract new modes of production from it).Indeed, it is striking that the tools most often used by artists today in order to produce these relational models are preexisting works or formal structures, as if the world of cultural products and artworks constituted an autonomous strata that could provide tools of connection between individuals; as if the establishment of new forms of sociality and a true critique of contemporary forms of life involved a different attitude in relation to artistic patrimony, through the production of new relationships to culture in general and to the artwork in particular.” (p7) <<So important
It is no longer a matter of starting with a "blank slate" or creating meaning on the basis of virgin material but of finding a means of insertion into the innumerable flows of production. "Things and thoughts," Gilles Deleuze writes, "advance or grow out from the middle, and that's where you have to get to work, that's where everything unfolds."01 The artistic question is no longer: "what can we make that is new?" but "how can we make do with what we have?" In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life? (p8) BINGBINGBING
The activities of DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists imply a similar configuration of knowledge, which is characterized by the invention of paths through culture. Finding a way through, finding bearings, the endless trace through culture...
By using television, books, or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and "ruses" that has to do with enunciation and therefore with language whose figures and codes may be catalogued.
Commerce is above all a form of human relations, indeed, a pretext destined to produce a relationsship. Any transaction may be defined as "a successful encounter of histories, affinities, wishes, constraints, habits, threats, skins, tensions."(p15) << Reminds me of the andy warhol quote, “ Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes. When entire sections of our existence spiral into abstraction as a result of economic globalization, when the basic functions of our daily lives are slowly transformed into products of consumption (including human relations, which are becoming a full-fledged industrial concern), it seems highly logical that artists might seek to rematerialize these functions and processes, to give shape to what is disappearing before our eyes. Not as objects, which would be to fall into the trap of reification, but as mediums of experience: by striving to shatter the logic of the spectacle, art restores the world to us as an experience to be lived.
ARTISTIC DETOURNEMENT (DIVERSION) - DJing
A pollitcal application of duchampian readymade (using a rembrandt as an ironing board or erasing a De Kooning drawing)
The DJ’s work consists both of proposing a personal orbit through a musical universe (a playlist) and in paying attention to their sequence as well as the construction of atmosphere. One can recognize a DJ's style in the ability to inhabit an open network (the history of sound) and in the logic that organizes the links between the samples he or she plays. Deejaying implies a culture of the use of forms, which connects rap, techno, and all their subsequent by-products.
The curatorial process is an artistic one we know that already! But it can be tighter, more specific, weilded masterfully.
"Sometimes," Godard writes, "the class struggle is the struggle of one image against another image and one sound against another sound."
We must stop interpreting the world, stop playing walk-on parts in a script written by power. We must become its actors or co-writers. The same goes for works of art except now, the ‘power’ has given us the tools of creation such that we socially govern one another. The best marketing is user generated. pollitical agendas are spread through memesis. This is not the liberating scenario Bourriaud thought it would be in the early 2000′s
we are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of the community.
We are then very close to the "equivalence of everything, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the insignificant and the distinctive"
to signify that everything was equal because everything could be consumed
Roland Barthes, asserts that culture is an infinite palimpsest. Considering each book to consist of "multiple writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into dialogue, into parody, into protest," Barthes accords the writer the status of scriptor, an intertextual operator: the only place where this multiplicity of sources converges is in the brain of the reader-postproducer.
Boycotts, detournement, and piracy belong to this culture of activity. When Allen Ruppersberg recopied Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray on canvas (1974), he took a literary text and considered himself responsible for it: he rewrote it.
No public image should benefit from impunity, for whatever reason: a logo belongs to public space, since it exists in the streets and appears on the objects we use, A legal battle is underway that places artists at the forefront: no sign must remain inert, no image must remain untouchable. Art represents a counterpower. Not that the task of artists consists in denouncing, mobilizing, or protesting: all art is engaged, whatever its nature and its goals. Today there is a quarrel over representation that sets art and the official image of reality against each other; it is propagated by advertising discourse, relayed by the media, organized by an ultralight ideology of consumption and social competition. In our daily lives, we come across fictions, representations, and forms that sustain this collective imaginary whose contents are dictated by power. BOOM
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How Far Down the QAnon Rabbit Hole Did Your Loved One Fall?
What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon, part 2.
Psychology Today
Joe Pierre M.D. August 21, 2020
“Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me.”
—President Trump, retweeting a QAnon-related meme
This is part 2 of a series on “What to do When Someone You Love Becomes Obsessed with QAnon.”
In the first installment, "The Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds," I discussed the psychological needs that QAnon may fulfill for its followers. Understanding those needs is a vital first step in order to understand why those who have fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole may be loathe to climb out. In this installment, I’ll set the stage to understand how the chances of rescuing our loved ones from the QAnon rabbit hole—and how to go about trying—may depend on just how far they’ve fallen.
Are Conspiracy Theorists “Crazy?”
To begin with, let’s differentiate belief in conspiracy theories like QAnon from the kind of delusional beliefs that are used to define mental illness and psychosis. Generally speaking, delusions are false and unshared beliefs that are often based on subjective “inner” experience and whose content is often “self-referential,” involving the believer. In contrast, conspiracy theories are usually shared beliefs that don’t explicitly involve the believer and are based on external evidence that one finds “out there,” such as on the internet. Unlike delusions, conspiracy theories may or may not turn out to be true. After all, they’re “theories.”
Based on this distinction, people who believe in conspiracy theories, however “crazy” they might sound, are no more delusional than those who believe in literal interpretations of religious texts like the Bible or the Quran. And so QAnon—the increasingly popular “right-wing” belief about the secret nefarious machinations of the Satan-worshipping, child-trafficking “Deep State” and President Trump’s destiny to thwart them—is a classic conspiracy theory, not a delusion. Now, if someone were to believe not only in QAnon dogma, but also in the false and unshared belief that they are Q, that would suggest a delusion. Note that it’s possible to believe in both conspiracy theories and delusions at the same time, with some overlap.
Conspiracy Theory Belief: Particle and Wave
Another way to understand whether beliefs might be considered “pathological” is to model them quantitatively as a continuous phenomenon—in other words, within a kind of scale that measures intensity or severity. For example, a cognitive model of delusional beliefs quantifies them along “dimensions” that include strength of conviction (how strongly one believes a delusion), preoccupation (how much one thinks about the delusion), extension (how much the delusion “bleeds into” or affects one's life), and distress (how much one is upset by the belief). Applying this model to non-delusional beliefs like conspiracy theories can help to understand when a belief is likely to disrupt people’s lives with a negative impact on their jobs, relationships, and mental well-being.1
Moving along a continuum of conspiracy theory belief, dimensions like conviction, preoccupation, extension, and distress would be expected to increase across it, along with mistrust in authoritative and mainstream sources of information.2 As believers go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, more and more time is spent “researching” conspiracy theories and immersing oneself in online discussions with other conspiracy theory believers, with less and less time spent on work, relationships, or other recreational pursuits. As this happens, believers increasingly turn their back on previous friends and family who don’t agree with their beliefs and don’t “inhabit” their new world.
Similar to how physicists understand light as both “particle” and “wave,” it can also be helpful to conceptualize belief intensity as discrete points along a continuum, like colors in the visible light “spectrum.” Conspiracy theory researcher Dr. Bradley Franks and his colleagues have proposed just such a spectrum model, with 5 “types” or stages of conspiracy theory belief.3 Their model goes something like this (with additional comments added by me):
Type/stage 1: People feel like “something isn’t right,” but keep an open mind as they seek answers to questions.
Type/stage 2: People feel as if “there’s more to reality than meets the eye,” are skeptical about official explanations, and start to seek out alternative sources of information.
Type/stage 3: Mistrust of authoritative sources of information increases to the point of definitive belief that some official narratives are untrue. As a result, people continue to seek information and engage with like-minded people from whom they gain a sense of belonging and group membership. They’re also more likely to get involved in “political action.”
Type/stage 4: At this point, nearly all official and mainstream accounts are rejected so that people turn away from the mainstream in favor of affiliation with an “enlightened” community of conspiracy theory believers. Non-believers are dismissed as “sheep” who are “asleep.”
Type/stage 5: In the final stage, authoritative and mainstream accounts are rejected to such an extent as to embrace belief in not only improbable, but frankly supernatural explanations for events (e.g. aliens, lizard people, etc.). At this stage, conspiracy theories and delusions may begin to overlap with self-referential aspects.
Dr. Franks’ proposed spectrum of conspiracy theory believers is a novel framework to help understand just how far down the rabbit hole conspiracy theory believers have gone. But for the purpose of deciding how to intervene within that continuum, it may be more useful to more simply divide conspiracy theory believers into two stages: “fence-sitters” and “true believers.”
Fence-Sitters and True Believers
The mentally healthy way to hold most of our beliefs is with “cognitive flexibility,” acknowledging that we might be wrong and remaining open to other people’s perspectives. It’s likewise a good idea to maintain a healthy level of skepticism about new information that we encounter lest we succumb to our cognitive biases and merely reinforce preexisting beliefs. This is especially true when we’re talking about theories where supporting evidence is modest or preliminary, and in the case of religious or political beliefs, where a lack of objective evidence often leads to many equivocal perspectives, such that faith becomes necessary to sustain belief.
In the early stages of conspiracy theory belief, people are “fence-sitters” who are looking for answers and haven’t yet made up their minds. Cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness may be intact, but skepticism is already closely linked with mistrust of authoritative sources of information. At this stage, conspiracy theories are appealing as expressions of, or even metaphors for, that mistrust—for the idea that both information and informants are unreliable—without necessarily having a significant degree of belief conviction. This preliminary stage explains why some people might endorse Flat Earth conspiracy theories without actually believing the Earth is flat.
Farther down the rabbit hole, conspiracy theories are embraced with greater belief conviction and become entwined with a new group affiliation and personal identity (e.g. within QAnon, adherents identify as “anons,” “bakers,” and “Q-patriots”) that makes it increasingly difficult to maintain previously established social ties. As such “true believers” move away from the mainstream and in turn are estranged because of their fringe beliefs, they often feel increasingly marginalized and under threat.
In order to protect themselves and resolve cognitive dissonance, they often “double down,” ramping up belief conviction further and diving even farther into a new ideological world. Many will increasingly feel the need to take action, whether spending more time posting on social media in order to “spread the word” or at the extreme, through more drastic and potentially dangerous measures like arming themselves in order to “self-investigate” a child pornography ring at a pizza parlor.
When people’s beliefs become so enmeshed with their identities, giving them up can be viewed as an existential threat akin to death. Needless to say, that's a bad prognostic sign.
In Part 3 of this series on “What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon,” we’ll conclude by discussing what kind of interventions might be helpful, depending on just how far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory belief someone has gone.
References
1. Pierre JM. Faith or delusion? At the crossroads of religion and psychosis. Journal of Psychiatric Practice 2001; 7:163-172.
2. Pierre JM. Mistrust and misinformation: a two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories. Journal of Social and Political Psychology 2020 (in press). [Available as a PsyArXic preprint at https://psyarxiv.com/xhw52]
3. Franks B, Bangerter A, Bauer MW, Hall M, Noort MC. Beyond “monologicality”? Exploring conspiracist worldviews. Frontiers in Psychology 2017; 8, 861.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202008/how-far-down-the-qanon-rabbit-hole-did-your-loved-one-fall
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part 1 Psychology Today
The Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds
Joe Pierre M.D. August 12, 2020
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202008/the-psychological-needs-qanon-feeds
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part 3 Psychology Today
What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon
4 Keys to Help Someone Climb Out of the QAnon Rabbit Hole
Joe Pierre M.D. September 1, 2020
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202009/4-keys-help-someone-climb-out-the-qanon-rabbit-hole
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Rolling Stone
It took years for the cracks to emerge for Jadeja, who slowly started to realize that Q drops were laden with logical inconsistencies. A turning point for him was a follower asking Q to get Trump to say the term “tippy top” as proof of Trump’s knowledge of the conspiracy; when Trump did say the phrase during a 2018 Easter egg roll speech, Q believers rejoiced, believing it to be confirmation that Q was real. Jadeja did some research and saw that Trump had said the phrase many times before. “That’s when I realized this was all a very slick con,” he says.
Former QAnon Followers Explain What Drew Them In — And Got Them Out
Like those leaving cults, some people who believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate can break free from their beliefs
by EJ Dickson September 23, 2020 9:00AM ET
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ex-qanon-followers-cult-conspiracy-theory-pizzagate-1064076/
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West Point
The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
July 2020
https://ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-security-threat-in-the-making/
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Why it’s important to see QAnon as a ‘hyper-real’ religion
May 28, 2020
https://religiondispatches.org/in-the-name-of-the-father-son-and-q-why-its-important-to-see-qanon-as-a-hyper-real-religion/
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The Birth of QAmom
Parenting influencers have embraced sex-trafficking conspiracy theories — and it’s taking QAnon from the internet into the streets
by EJ Dickson
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-mom-conspiracy-theory-parents-sex-trafficking-qamom-1048921/
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CNN: Born on the dark fringes of the internet, QAnon is now infiltrating mainstream American life and politics
CNN July 3, 2020
by Paul P. Murphy
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The thin line between conspiracy theories and cult worship is dissolving
An information war is being waged.
bigthink.com May 18, 2020
by Derek Beres
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The Prophecies of Q
American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.
The Atlantic June 2020
The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful
The Atlantic August 18, 2020
I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist
The Atlantic May 13, 2020
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I’m dating a conspiracy theorist. But it feels like I’m the one going crazy.
Washington Post August 16, 2020
By Trent Kay Maverick
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Coronavirus: How do I recognize a conspiracy theory?
DW Deutsche Welle May 19, 2020
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Reddit community QAnon Casualties share stories of conspiracy cult
Herald Sun August 11, 2020
by Jack Gramenz, news.com.au
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Christian Groups That Resist Public-Health Guidelines Are Forgetting a Key Part of the Religion’s History
TIME April 20, 2020
by Matthew Gabriele
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Childcare in the Unification Church of Oakland
Sun Myung Moon’s Sex-based Adam and Eve story is just another conspiracy theory
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Fandom & Fan Activism
Today, to most Internet-users, social networking sites are important tools for them but not all would consider themselves as members of online communities where interactions and connections between members occur almost exclusively online. Media fandoms have become prominent examples of online communities today. Fandoms can be briefly described as community of fans that share interests in books, movies, TV shows, bands, sports teams, celebrities and other types of media.
Fandoms have become a perceptible and prominent subculture where fans depend on social networking sites and fan forums to make connections by finding other fans online thus building networks of engagement. Communications online and its immediacy nature and global access provides fandoms the platform to quickly grow their networks and developing relationships with other fans around the world has never been easier!
However, fandom is not restricted to only online technologies despite it being the main platform of interaction. There are many examples of face-to-face events and activities such as comic conventions or normally referred to as “Comic con”.Comic con draws thousands and thousands of fans to meet and fandom-specific clubs have grown to be more common. One thing that I find interesting about fandoms is that since most of the interactions between fans occurs online, they transcend cultural, linguistic and international borders.
According to Jenkins(1992),the fandom experience is “a community not defined in traditional terms of race, religion, gender, politics, or profession, but rather a community of consumers defined through their common relationship with shared text”
What is Fan Activism?
Fan activism can be defined as a form of civil engagement and political participation which emerges from fandoms and fan cultures’ passion.It can also be defined as efforts that are fan-driven to engage and address social,civic and political issues and these efforts are powerful modes of mobilization in supporting campaigns for human rights or social justice. Fan activism models numerous effective approaches of using social media to mobilize supporters and creating awareness and these approaches are also being adopted now by activist organizations and traditional charities in order to adapt to a networked society.
According to Bennett(2008),new forms of political and civic engagement are formed by younger generations which are tied to social networks and their personal interests.In this point of view,this participatory and popular culture unites people and mobilizes them to socialize.
Andrew Slack who is an activist, established the Harry Potter Alliance(HPA) in 2005 and this was inspired by Dumbledore’s Army, a student activist organization in the Harry Potter world and HPA is an example of a fan activist organization.The organization uses parallels between the real and fictional world as a boost for civic action and has mobilized young people who are mostly but not exclusively, Potterheads (this is what we call Harry Potter fans) to work for different causes such as human rights,equality and literacy.
As you all know, Harry Potter is widely read and known and is loved not only by hard-core fans but also by those who are “not part of the fandom” making it a useful resource of bringing core concepts from the fictional and the real world together.
The HPA has organized numerous campaigns to raise money in order to achieve both civic and political goals. Jenkins’s definition of fan activism is clearly met by the organization as it uses the story world and is built heavily on the preexisting community of the Harry Potter fandom as a catalyst for social action.The shared perspectives and experiences of Potterheads are mobilized by the organization by connecting stories from Harry Potter to real issues.
Another example is the Invisible Children(IC) which is described as a movement that was built around a documentary.It focuses particularly on the hardships faced by child soldiers recruited into the Lord’s Resistance Army and efforts to increase public awareness of the human rights violations and genocide conducted by a warlord in Uganda. The documentary was a success and in response to that, the filmmakers established IC to inspire young people to use the power of the media to help end Africa’s longest running war. Recently, the campaigns are focused on raising awareness regarding the war in Uganda. It has also urged the US government to pass the Northern Uganda Recovery Act and the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and in May 2010, this was successfully achieved.Now, the Invisible Children puts focus on Uganda’s long-term development and creating infrastructure in the Congo.
Unlike the HPA, IC requires us to have a greater understanding regarding fan activism. HPA was built on existing fan community and popular culture while IC was created by activists’ goals and has almost inadvertently built a fanlike public around a self-produced documentary. Despite that, the organization itself acknowledges that the members of IC resemble fans in many ways such as having an avid knowledge of its narratives and sharing enthusiasm for the media. The members also share a wide range of practices of collectively consuming and producing around IC media products. These two organizations provide us with different representations of the interrelations of fandom and activism.
“Isolated passive consumers” are what media fans have been stereotypically labelled as but I personally think that their consumption is rarely ever isolated or passive and many fandoms these days have become household names and has brought huge impact to people around the globe such as the Potterheads.They are more than just passive consumers because fans seek out content and integrate the cultural capital that they love into their daily activities and conversations.
The Internet, media and social networking sites have become a huge part of our lives and it is unavoidable that social action would intertwine with them. If one of the primary purposes of the Internet has been the production and sharing of media, then it is an ideal setting for the formation of online communities based on media experiences.
Some fans resists the efforts of bringing politics into their fandom and that their fan activities are merely seen as a way to release pressures of everyday life or preferring the term “charity” over the more political term “activism” as a way to describe their pro-social efforts. However, fandoms are valuable and unique in their own ways.
Before I end my post, I would like to ask an important question
Which fandom(s) do you belong to?
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Things Millennials Are Looking For In Small Groups
This is from Vanderbloemen and was encouraged by what young families are looking for. I'd argue that most people are looking for these aspects of community. I'd consider them crucial to ANY small group....
Here's their findings:
1. Authenticity
MILLENNIALS CRAVE AUTHENTIC COMMUNITY
Churches need to build small groups with authenticity in mind. Often, small groups will start meeting simply out of routine, following a prescribed schedule and script that the church provides. When a group becomes just a routine, the depth of relationships can become shallow. Small talk about daily life overshadows discussions about struggles and doubts that can be truly live-giving.
As you build up your small group ministry, seek authenticity above anything else. Create groups that are founded on honesty, vulnerability, and trust. These are the factors that will keep your millennial congregation engaged.
2. Consistency (and Flexibility)
This might seem contradictory, but millenials need to know that their small group will always show up, even if the timing needs to be rescheduled sometimes. It requires more effort to coordinate each week, but it’s often easier to commit to leaving a one night of the week available after seeing consistent dedication from other participants.
3. Making a Difference
Serving together can bring a new depth to relationships, especially within small groups. Not only are you seeing your group outside of its normal environment, but you can meet in your community while focusing on others’ needs.
4. Connection
Most church leaders know how important it is to look at the demographics within your church when assessing how to best disciple your congregation. The same concept applies to small groups. If half of your church is composed of single millennials, but the only small groups in existence are couples with young children, there won't be growth. It’s important to offer a variety of small group cultures to engage congregants in every stage of life.
5. The Right Environment
Offering various environments is another important factor in small groups. Not everyone is comfortable meeting in someone’s home with a group of strangers. It could be helpful to have some groups meet in a coffee shop or a church space instead. Use these types of environments as launching platforms for new members and people just getting into small groups.
Note: this first requires your church to have a set structure and model in place to replicate groups. After a time, the coffee shop group will have enough core people who are no longer strangers to transition to another meeting location, freeing up the coffee shop space for newcomers.
6. Size
Size is not a factor exclusive to millennials, but is still forgotten about at times. A group that is too small (and not growing) can feel awkward and too vulnerable. However, when a group grows too large, newcomers can feel like outsiders and can find it difficult to share open up and be authentic. A larger group can easily be split into smaller groups (or added to a smaller preexisting group) to allow for more intimate connection and discipleship.
7. Proper Leadership
One thing to watch out for as you consider increasing the number and variety of small groups within your church is the quality of leaders. Leaders for these new groups aren’t just pulled out of a hat or plucked off of a tree. Encourage those within your church that have the potential to lead to step into this leadership role.
Likewise, you should make sure that they have the resources and training necessary to be a good leader. It can be discouraging to attend a small group and find a leader that has zero idea what he or she is doing, or mistakenly believes he or she has all the answers. It can be a difficult balance to find, but it is worth the time and conversation to assess the leadership ability in small groups.
8. Respect Time
There are few things worse than going to a small group at 6pm with the expectation of two hours, but not leaving until 9pm. Some groups may function better by meeting for varying lengths of time, but it’s important to set an expectation well ahead of time and stick to it. This creates consistency and loyalty among small group members.
9. Content
Choosing the right materials or bible study for a group can be difficult. It’s certainly easy to stick with a tried-and-true study that the other groups in your church have been doing for years. While well-known material is helpful to some, most millennials tend to gravitate toward more relevant and current studies. Make sure you leave room for all kinds of people, and include both intellectual and emotional takeaways as you work through the study. Then, when your group becomes more established, together you can decide on the next study according to everyone’s collective interests.
10. Variety
While the routine of gathering in a circle to talk every week can be nice in its consistency, it’s not always the most beneficial to a small group. Just as serving together and making a difference helps build relationships within a group, so can switching up the small group routine a bit. Try just having a meal and fellowship one night and attending a worship night or conference together another night. Being able to experience life together outside of a circle in someone’s living room can have a great impact on the cohesiveness and authenticity of a small group.
While many of these qualities could be beneficial in any small group, these are especially relevant to millennials in churches today. Realistically, it would be near impossible to magically create a small group that encompasses all these qualities right this second, but start with just one or two points and see if your millennial engagement doesn’t go up!
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Teach your child to draw
Dr Helen Jones looks at what art means to children and how to provide quality opportunities for drawing and painting at home
Table of contents:
Introduction
Why paint? The benefits of making art
How do the stages of visual representation develop?
How to support your child with art
Final word
‘Intelligence itself is built upon that which we crudely term ‘children’s art’’.
John Matthews, Drawing and Painting: children and visual representation.
Introduction
As an artist and a teacher of art you might think I have a lot to teach you about children’s art. But I haven’t. In fact, it's our children who can educate us.
Having observed children of all ages over the past 11 years, I’ve been fortunate to gain some fascinating insights, simply by letting them show me how they make sense of the world through art. I’ve watched in wonder as their drawing develops, how it links to higher level thinking, and how they are communicating visually.
So often when it comes to our children’s art, it’s tempting to think that they are just messing around with pens and pencils. Art making in infancy can be hugely underrated and in mainstream school curricula it can even be suppressed. Yet science is showing us the huge, invaluable cognitive benefits of art. Scientific trials have revealed young children quickly abandon ‘dummy pens’ without ink, uncovering their strong desire to make marks… but what good does it bring?
Why paint? The benefits for children of making art
Language foundation:
Drawing is an integral part of the way children learn signs, symbols and representation. According to professor of art John Matthews, in his book Drawing and Painting: Children and visual representation, drawing forms ‘the basis for all thinking… what adults call children’s art has a central role to play in cognitive development.’ Art is a visual language - a universal one, and a key to unlock the door of communication.
Cross-curricular learning:
Children learn about gravity, physics, perspective, maths, anatomy, and myriad other concepts all through drawing. I explore art’s symbiotic relationships in my article on what children's art can teach us. But while art can enrich learning in other areas, it can also be used for so much more.
Joy:
When creating art for art's sake - in a self-motivated mode of personal expression and glee - we can be absorbed in our own inventive worlds. The Spanish painter Joan Miro once said ‘A simple line, painted with a brush can lead to freedom and happiness’. It certainly does for me!
Higher level thinking skills.
Have you ever come across Bloom’s taxonomy? It's a hierarchy of cognitive skills, displayed in the form of a pyramid, with 'creating' at the top. Looking at the illustration below, can you see how drawing and painting might sit at the higher end? They involve ‘rapid and complex decision-making’ (Matthews) all while figuring out how to show information about what is - or isn't - in one’s world and our relationship with it.
Observation:
Drawing trains us in the indispensable, lifelong art of observation. Lots of people tend to think we draw to represent reality but in fact a lot of the time what I see from children is the reverse: they draw and then they start noticing similar shapes in reality. Being able to observe and gather information about the world is a life skill.
Emotional regulation and self-expression:
Art can create a mood, record our thoughts, express a feeling or intensify a preexisting one. Art is the ‘go to’ when we want to say something which cannot be said.
Fine motor skills:
Precision and finger dexterity involved when controlling a paintbrush, crayon, pen or pencil are vital, transferable skills, that aid your child with handwriting, tying shoelaces and all those other necessary, but oh-so-fiddly jobs.
Cause and effect:
As soon as you move the paintbrush or pen, a mark is left. This instant feedback, unique to drawing and painting, makes us aware of our body and the consequences of our movement. Children learn the crucial lesson that their actions have an effect on the world. They can make a difference to it. Matthews says: ‘The most dramatic way the child realises this is when she draws. It is only through drawing that the infant receives a record of her movements.’
Ok, so you’re sold, it’s good right? But how does it begin? What should we look out for?
How drawing and painting develops
It’s easy to assume that children’s mark making is a haphazard collection of uncontrolled scribbles. This is far from the case, says Matthews:
‘Children’s drawing has organisation and meaning all the way from the beginning, when many people consider infants to be scribbling.’
While these apparently ill-controlled movements can appear mindless, they are far from it - they mask lots of thought and sensitivity to the drawing surface. As child psychologist Norman Freeman explains in Strategies of Representation in Young Children: ‘ a continuous contact line teaches coordination, control, cause and effect, and what’s more, the child’s aim is, surprisingly, rather accurate.’
There are some recognisable drawing traits that emerge over time in infants.
Vertical arc, horizontal arc and push – pull.
These are the three basic mark-making movements, which enable further marks and shapes to emerge. These are the foundation of children’s mark making. Horizontal arc; an arcing shape with a horizontal swing of the arm, pushing and pulling movements, and vertical arcs; a swing upright against the page.
Closed shape.
This can close off areas and represent the notion of inside or outside. It can also represent front-on views of objects and, more commonly, faces. The introduction of the closed shape marks a developmental milestone in thinking and increased motor control.
Layering.
Placing one object over another deals with concepts of ‘in front’, behind or hide and seek. Connectivity, going over, going under, going in, going out or going through. These are vital concerns that can often only be rectified through visual play.
Landmarks.
This is when children start to consider the format and layout of their drawing, such as the position of an object, and parts of the body becoming coordinated. A mark becomes a landmark, which all other marks are formed around and in relation to.
Parallel lines.
Through exploring side-by-side lines, kids can grasp the concept of parallelism way before they are even introduced to the term parallel. What a head start!
Right angular connections.
I have seen how fascinated children can be by the beginnings and ends of lines and this often precedes their realisation they can add a new line onto the preexisting one, at a right angle. This forms the basis of many recognisable shapes.
Travelling zigzags.
I often see children create meandering zig zag lines when listening to music - perhaps it is the repetition? Or our endless fascination as a human species with pattern, which we are predisposed to detect.
Continuous rotation.
This often deals with issues of process, movement and repetition. Each encircling of a previous circle adds a new layering of understanding and a subtly different perception.
However, this should all come with a cautious caveat: there is no tick-box approach. I don’t wish to create a stage like illusion, where children go from one form of mark making to another, incrementally, climbing the art ladder: it’s not that simple.
Many children swing between these different types of marks. Some of these actions may then come together to form stick men, and fully developed pictures.
When children change the subject matter they adapt the way they use the shapes and lines to give them different meanings. But there are times when children might seem frustrated because they cannot find a way to represent their new understanding about the world.
In times like these adult encouragement and support is especially vital, if not throughout the entire creative process.
How to support your child
Some might think there’s not much use in supporting your child with drawing - they either have ‘it’ or they don’t, right?
Wrong!
While it is true that there is a certain amount of genetic disposition, in my experience the majority of artistic talent is derived from the support a child receives and the amount of hours and effort they invest.
Pablo Picasso once said: ‘all children are born artists, the problem is how to remain an artist.’
The answer to the problem could lie in nurture.
Matthews says: ‘much of children’s drawing and painting is self-initiated. The contribution made by adults is crucial.’ Children need opportunities and the encouragement to create, and if this is not given, the bright star of creativity can dim.
Children can develop their visual storytelling skills with the right support.
Resources and opportunities.
Providing basic art materials, (non-toxic paints and paper, pads, pencils) and setting these up (whether on an easel, table or messy mat), puts creative experiences in children’s paths. It gives them the option.
Show an interest.
Both in your child’s creative productions and art in general. Children are more likely to engage if they see you enjoying or partaking in art, however it is far more important to be encouraging, supportive and nurturing of creative opportunities, then to be artistic oneself.
Encourage.
I have come to understand that praise is far more potent when used specifically. Rather than saying a drawing is lovely, consider what is lovely about the drawing. And is it really ‘lovely’ or is it ‘exciting’ or ‘expressive’ and what is promising about how they have approached the whole process, as well as the outcome?
See without prejudice.
Ibid argues that the problem for adults is not one of simply learning what to say, but of learning to see – and of seeing with impartiality. So when your child wanders up to you with glee at what they have produced, try not to respond with criticism. As despite first appearances, our child’s art is not full of errors. It’s an interaction of what is unfolding within them and what’s in their mind's eye. Try to understand it, show curiosity and pleasure, while helping them to articulate it. As Matthews suggests: ‘Look for meaning behind all their actions.’
Don’t meddle.
Interfering and dominating your child’s productions can stunt confidence, independence and creativity. Matthews writes: ‘It is grossly insensitive to manipulate and interfere with children’s work, sticking things on it, cutting it up, repainting it and generally communicating to the child that her efforts are inadequate. I got a recent communication from my daughters’ childcare explaining their shift to child led art, without the adults adding finishing touches or attempting to control the process. They advised: ‘while it might not always be ‘picture perfect’ it is as unique as the child who has made it.’ I cherish those pieces so much more knowing that.
Display.
Ever wondered why putting up kids drawings on the fridge, cupboard doors and walls is such an institution? It says, ‘you are appreciated, included and celebrated’. It helps kids to see they are building up a collection and allows them to bear witness to their own progress.
Do nothing.
‘Sometimes, simple permission is all that is needed to promote creative thought. Sometimes, the best thing [we] can do is nothing’ says Ibid. Allow this creative process to happen and try not to interrupt unnecessarily (as if what they are doing doesn’t matter). But how do kids get better if we don’t support them directly? Don’t worry, says Matthews: ‘They do much of the work themselves, as they try to resolve ambiguities in their drawings which they find unsatisfactory.’ Phew! We can take our teacher hats off and become an intellectual companion who appreciates their art instead.
Final word
I hope in reading this you have discovered how beneficial art making can be for children and the multitude of advantages it brings. However as much as endorsing art making is a good thing, it should be engaged in for its own sake; children creating artwork for themselves, to serve their own developmental needs and intentions.
The main takeaway really though is how crucial support, encouragement and the right environment can be to developing artistic talent. As Matthews writes: ‘By supporting children’s paintings and drawing we are empowering them. We are giving them some way of controlling their lives.’
So what are you waiting for? Go, create!
from One Hundred Toys - The Blog https://ift.tt/2PhsSHL
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The Absence of Public, Visible Mourning Has Weakened Our Ability to Fight COVID | Religion Dispatches
In May, when the US hit 90,000 Covid-19 related deaths, the Washington Post, published a piece decrying the lack of public mourning from the President and his administration. When we reached 170,000 Covid-19 related deaths, CNN published a similar call. As Americans, some of us have been touched by death personally during the pandemic, but for many more of us, Covid-19 deaths are abstract and impersonal. This is what made Kristin Urquiza’s voice so powerful during the opening night of the Democratic National Convention as she described her father, a Trump voter, whose “only preexisting condition was voting for Trump.”
Hovering over the pageantry of the convention was the fog of death and a deep anxiety that we, as Americans, may not be able to muster the collective will to tackle this challenge. But it also offered one of the most widespread moments of collective, public mourning, which can serve as a catalyst for taking the pandemic seriously.
In my own life, Covid-19-related death has been absent. It was only recently, when a former student died in a tragic accident, that I realized how removed death has been from my experience. He was the son of friends; his mother is the head of my children’s school. The death of a young person, especially one with exceptional promise, would be a tragedy on any day. Given the grim backdrop of the pandemic it felt especially cruel. Our community is devastated. My wife and I have found ourselves regularly dissolving into tears. The death has unleashed four months of loss.
We learned of his death midday on a Monday and by that afternoon our community was gathered on Zoom—over 250 tiny boxes of grief—many from our synagogue, but many streaming in from around the world. Despite its ability to transcend geographic boundaries, Zoom offers little comfort. We couldn’t embrace or offer each other solace. It’s hard to have a sense of the collective when you have to scroll through pages of faces. My rabbi, a master at building community, asked us all to unmute and listen to each other’s pain. Grief-stricken, we sat as different viewers’ breathing or sobs broke in randomly over others.
Until news of my former student’s death, Covid-19 had been an extreme inconvenience. I was frustrated from having to look after my young children while trying to work throughout the spring. I was disappointed that my son, a rising kindergartener, would miss out on important social and emotional development milestones in the fall. As a Bay Area resident, I’ve been sheltering-in-place since early March. It’s been annoying and depressing, but we’re incredibly fortunate. Death and mortality—even unemployment—have been absent from our Covid-19 experience.
Mourning activities offer us access to each other’s pain and lead us to reflect on the need to alleviate suffering more broadly. As we moved into the formal mourning period, the social distance barriers to performing these rituals only served to amplify our distance from one another and minimize their effects.
This was especially challenging for an encumbered, tight knit, Orthodox Jewish community like ours. These rituals are intentionally procedural. In the face of loss, discomfort, and confusion, the ritual act provides a structure to navigate our surroundings. In Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon identify that ritual, in its rote doing, allows for dissonance and contradiction. Ritual, they explain, creates an “as-if” subjunctive of the world that could be. But in ritual’s repetition one becomes comfortable with the gap between the attempts of ritual and the reality of the world.
Of course, during the pandemic, we’re unable to perform these rituals as usual. There’s a lack of dignity to all aspects of this new COVID reality—even the darkest most formal moments of grief. While the Zoom memorial service allowed upwards of 1,000 people to participate from around the globe—including one speaker, a well-known head of an Israeli Yeshiva and another, the deceased’s roommate, an observant Muslim now back home in Karachi—for us, the sanctity was punctured by my children running in to ask for lunch and the sounds of the neighbor mowing his lawn.
The shiva, the seven-day period when mourners sit (in chairs low to the ground) and receive visitors, was limited to family and a select group of friends. Visits were pre-scheduled, 25-minute slots for one or two family units at a time. Shiva is about showing up and being there, more than doing something. The interaction is scripted. One isn’t supposed to offer a greeting to either the mourner or fellow visitors, you should not speak to them until spoken to, just be there as a comforting presence. Upon departing, one bids farewell with a scripted line in Hebrew, “May the Omnipresent comfort you among the rest of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Shiva in this new reality, demands what Seligman et al identify as sincerity, which tries to close that gap of ritual towards some notion of “authenticity.” They write:
Sincerity often grows out of reaction against ritual. It criticizes ritual’s acceptance of social convention as mere action (perhaps even just acting) without intent, as performer without belief… The sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the “mere convention” of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction.
When available, sincerity allows us to express ourselves in meaningful ways. But sincerity requires authentic emotion, something that’s only possible when one really means it. Shiva provides the space for dissonance when one can sit in the company of friends and strangers, and just continue to be, through the lulls of conversation, anguish, and pain. Gathering provides much needed collective quiet and non-verbal interactions. The moments of connection born out of boredom and awkward silence.
When acts of mourning are filtered through Zoom or bounded by a tight schedule, the comforts of ritual wither and we’re rushed to transform the experience into a sincere moment. Shiva and other scripted mourning rituals allow those who aren’t sad, who may not have a direct connection to the deceased, to be drawn into the communal project of mourning as social beings.
Through these experiences, behaviors of social connectivity emerge which strive to alleviate suffering. Around the mourners a network of informal helpers feed people, take care of children and make sure that, even while dealing with death, life can go on. These activities draw the community into the mourning process, reverberating through the layers of connection, helping to ritualize a commitment to human dignity.
Maimonides, the great 12th century legalist and philosopher, understood accompanying the dead and comforting mourners as embodied practices which manifest the Biblical command to love the other as yourself (Mishna Torah, Laws of Mourning 14:1). It’s through these rituals that one communicates dignity and the value of life. It’s through these activities that the community, individually and collectively, engages in catharsis that can lead to societal transformation.
In encountering this lone, accidental death, I realized how protected I’ve been from our national tragedy. Our inability to mourn together isn’t just emotionally challenging but reflects the larger political challenge of this moment. The absence of death in real, visible public ways, with ongoing public mourning is a central cause in the lack of collective commitment to defeat the virus. Our lack of collective mourning reflects a broader disengagement from death throughout the pandemic.
The number of deaths is a rolling tab, a new national debt, scrolling at the bottom of the TV screen. There are no funeral marches, no mass services at cemeteries. The images and sounds of death are absent from our news media. It’s too dangerous for a camera crew to enter an ICU ward. How might the airing of choking, coughing and strained breathing, like war footage, change our national discourse?
Three weeks later, my community is still numb. When I run into a friend on the street, we break into tears; the loss is still palpable. But the pain has only dulled because we’re not able to be in the places where we lived with this young man and his family. It will be quite some time before I get to see his father standing in his normal spot again in our synagogue sanctuary. I’m not able to inhabit a public life that offers regular reminders of his absence. We’re not actually coming to grips with the loss, it’s simply out of sight.
And this is a single reflection of our national existence. There are now over 150,000 families, developing networks of pain and suffering wrought by this national tragedy and this administration’s indifference.
During a presidency defined by border walls, travel bans, and caged children are we surprised that we’ve ended up confined to our homes, disembodied faces in Zoom memorial services? We desperately need mechanisms for public mourning, for our collective grief, so that we may take seriously the deep challenges our country faces.
This content was originally published here.
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Take Home Exam for Prof. Brat
In 2014, Dave Brat, an economics professor for a small liberal arts college in Virginia, pulled off what was previously deemed impossible. He defeated one of the Republican Party’s golden boys, Eric Cantor. In a primary. Cantor at that time was House Majority Leader, maneuvering for his spot in line for the House speakership. However, Cantor’s constituents had grown disconnected from him, feeling as if he paid more attention to a national stage with little leftover for Virginians. The fact that he spent $168,000 at a steakhouse during his campaign did not help. Fertile ground to sow discontent was thus tilled by Brat, a Tea Party backed Republican who promised greater connectivity with and focus on the people of the 7th District.
Now, it seems, Brat wishes his constituents were a little less connected.
An early supporter of Donald Trump, Brat has backed many of the new President’s policies, including the construction of a border wall with Mexico and the Muslim Ban – both of which were done by executive fiat. Brat’s constituents, like many Americans, are angered by the substance and style of Trump’s governance and have mobilized to let their Representative know. However, Brat’s availability seems to be limited to the conservative groups that brought him to office, having more visits with the Heritage Foundation in the past year than town hall meetings with his district. Indeed, Brat has actually complained about the increased engagement by his constituents, especially the women, saying that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go.”
On January 31st, Dave Brat hosted a Facebook Live Town Hall, providing only about 7 hours’ notice to his district. Nevertheless, more than one thousand people logged in, filling the question box seven thousand fold. Brat sat in a nondescript wood-paneled room, with a staffer and her laptop next to him, expressing incredulity at accusations of his lack of accessibility. Throughout the broadcast, viewers were able to click on emoticons to provide real-time reaction to his statements, and the running stream of angry red faces flowed under him for most of the broadcast.
Unfortunately, either due to format or design, the vast majority of the questions were left unasked. And even more unfortunately, the vast majority of the questions asked were left unanswered.
To that end, as Brat explores different methods for increased connectivity, I, as his constituent, propose the 7th District issues him a simple, short-answer, written exam.
I imagine that during his years as a professor, he created many of these as a way to gauge his students’ understanding of the course material and their ability to communicate clearly in a well-reasoned response. In the same vein, that is exactly what his constituents are seeking – a way to gauge his understanding of our concerns, as well as his ability to communicate a clear, well-reasoned response to us.
Questions he could expect on this exam may include the following (all of which were directly asked of him this evening and left unanswered):
1. With your long-standing focus upon reducing the federal deficit and debt, please reconcile your support of the construction of a border wall with Mexico that has been conservatively estimated to cost $15 billion? Compare and contrast your response with your previous opposition to funding for the Flint water crisis in Michigan and efforts to combat Zika in Florida.
2. You expressed your support of the President’s recent executive order on immigrants and refugees, but believed that it should not apply to those with green cards. What is your position on the executive order’s effect upon other special visa holders? You also called for increased vetting of refugees. Given that the current vetting process already takes on average two years, what specific changes would you propose (in addition to the Patriotism Test you described)?
3. If the Republican replacement of the Affordable Care Act only provides catastrophic insurance, which would not cover cancer screenings, vaccinations, etc., how would that not still result in possibly crushing medical debt for the consumer? Furthermore, if such replacement would also not bar preexisting conditions, what is the funding design for this plan if no individual mandate is required?
4. Federal law already prohibits federal funding going toward abortion services. How would defunding Planned Parenthood address your concerns about tax dollars supporting abortions? Furthermore, where Planned Parenthood is the primary care provider for many communities, especially low income women, how would your plan not negatively impact those women?
5. And, finally, please respond why you believe women constituents (e.g., me) are getting up in your grill when we reach out to you on issues that matter to us?
Because his constituents value quality of content over speed of delivery, he would be encouraged to take this exam home for extensive consideration before turning it in. Because his constituents appreciate appropriate citations for all factual representations, this exam would be open book. However, we do caution him that only original source material will be considered valid, as skewed, partisan-based reports are generally rejected as unverifiable.
This exam will be Pass/Fail, with a final grade to be released in November 2018.
#davebrat#VaPolitics#Virginia#ACA#NoBorderNoWall#ReproRights#PlannedParenthood#MuslimBan#Refugees#flint water crisis#zika
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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight
With under two weeks to go until Election Day, the political universe is in full horse-race obsession mode. Who’s up, who’s down? Does fundraising matter? Who’s going to turn out on Nov. 6? What popular narrative that’s snaking its way through Twitter is the right one? WHO’S GONNA WIN???
FiveThirtyEight relies on forecast models to give a sense of where a race stands, and we base those forecasts on polls and what we call fundamentals — historic factors that help us predict the way voters will act. But even with the model, elections can be difficult to get your arms around. The Classic version of our model currently gives Democrats a 1 in 6 chance of winning the Senate1, but events in the last couple of weeks of the campaign and a lack of polling in some places leave our model with a couple of blind spots.
This lack of certainty in the last few days of campaigns means that partisans work overtime to slick the highest sheen of gloss onto races. They want the Twitter and media narratives to go their way — they want their party’s spin to work magic. With that dynamic in mind, I thought I’d ask a couple partisans to give us their best spin on the Senate map. Republican Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell and who now runs his own political consulting firm, and Democrat Lauren Passalacqua, the communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, obliged.
What follows are their takes on a few key Senate races as the campaigns come down to the wire. Their remarks have been edited and condensed for clarity, and I’ve offered some fact checks and clarifications in the footnotes where appropriate.
Indiana
FiveThirtyEight projection: 2 in 3 chance the Democrat, Sen. Joe Donnelly, beats Mike Braun to win re-election
Holmes (R):
Obviously after what happened in 2016 with Evan Bayh, it’s more of a red state than it used to be, but it’s still very competitive. I think Joe Donnelly has run, up to this point, one of the better Democratic Senate campaigns, but I think he’s got his work cut out for him. I think it’s just a tight race. Who knows. In 2016, it broke very late and decisively toward Republicans.
Passalacqua (D):
There’s early voting already in Indiana. They’re already turning people out in the places we need them to be turning out in great numbers — Indianapolis, Marion County. We’re also seeing enthusiasm on college campuses. But what you’re seeing, too, is Joe Donnelly running just as a middle-of-the-road Hoosier — “I’m going to Washington to get stuff done. All that bickering back and forth, that’s not what I’m a part of, that’s not what Indiana wants to be a part of, so I’m just going to work with whoever I can to do the job that Hoosiers expect.”
Missouri
FiveThirtyEight projection: 4 in 7 chance the Democrat, Sen. Claire McCaskill, beats state Attorney General Josh Hawley to win re-election
Holmes (R):
Claire McCaskill spent the better part of 2018 with the good fortune of an in-state governor scandal that she tried to muddy the water with and tie her opponent to. But once that was in the rearview mirror, there was an awful lot that went with it. In about June, Josh Hawley sort of hit his stride in engaging with McCaskill and started playing a lot of offense. I think that race now is in a very strong position. It’s one of the two that has broken [towards Republicans] most obviously since Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.
Passalacqua (D):
This is another place where we’ve seen the public polling neck and neck, which is what we expected, especially in a state that does trend more conservative. Certainly we’ve seen the attorney general back on his heels a bit with the kind of advertising he’s had to rely on, which fights back on this idea that he won’t protect pre-existing conditions, but obviously that ad is undermined by the lawsuit he’s on [challenging the Affordable Care Act].2 So what we see is a debate unfolding on the issues where Claire does have the upper hand.
North Dakota
FiveThirtyEight projection: 3 in 10 chance the Republican, U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer, beats the incumbent, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.
Holmes (R):
I’ve said since the middle of August I thought North Dakota was done with Heidi Heitkamp. It has become a much more conservative state in recent years, and, interestingly, Trump’s economic message resonates perfectly with the kind of historical prairie populism we’ve seen in places like North Dakota. And she finds herself down double digits pretty durably now, going on a couple months.3 Of the races where Republicans are playing offense, I would say it’s the only one where it’s totally off the board.
Passalacqua (D):
I do think it’s closer than people expect. It was always going to be one of the toughest states for Democrats. That’s historically a state that’s hard to poll. I think everyone remembers that famous photo of her with the newspaper that declared her opponent the winner.4 She has an advantage in spending on advertising5 and we know Republican groups like the Senate Leadership Fund continue to spend there, so that still, in our mind, is a place where we’re monitoring it and Heidi is closing it out.
Florida
FiveThirtyEight projection: 5 in 7 chance the Democrat, Sen. Bill Nelson, beats Gov. Rick Scott to win re-election
Holmes (R):
This race is a little bit of a black box to election observers, because of the hurricane and because it’s such a large and diverse state that you have a little bit of everything in terms of political-environment factors. The governor’s race has an interesting component, we’ll have to see. Democrats will tell you they’re hopeful that demographics that were inaccessible to Bill Nelson become accessible because of gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum [Gillum is black]. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Particularly in southwest Florida, there could be a whole bunch of retirees who are just getting down there who may react to the idea of governance that’s more liberal than they’re comfortable with.
Passalacqua (D):
Florida folks were very bullish on Gov. Scott because he brings a blank check and it’s an expensive state. It’s one of those places where you’ve seen the Scott playbook before: Spend a ton of money, get elected. When you dig a little further, there are a couple problems for Scott. His previous races were in 2010 and 2014, which were really good Republican years for Florida, yet he barely won by a single point both times and he underperformed the Republican ballot. I think the thing that works to Nelson’s advantage is that he’s a workhorse. He is someone who will keep his head down.
Arizona
FiveThirtyEight projection: 5 in 8 chance the Democrat, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, beats U.S. Rep. Martha McSally to win
Holmes (R):
Sinema has taken on an awful lot of water in the last couple of weeks. She was very successful at using a Republican primary to rebrand herself as a moderate. And I think it has taken more effort than maybe Republicans would have thought to dislodge that. She has one of the worst oppo files in the Democratic recruiting class, and I think there were an awful lot of folks who thought that it would speak for itself. [Sinema’s past has been in the news — some reports have cast doubt on her stories of childhood hardship and some have questioned remarks she made as an anti-war activist during President George W. Bush’s administration.] Now, maybe it will, but it’s still a very tight race. Republicans, to a person, feel like we have a superior candidate with better credentials and a better fit ideologically for the state.
Passalacqua (D):
This is also an exciting race because this is the first election cycle where you’re seeing a lot of resources pulled into the state. Democrats closed the registration advantage that Republicans had. I read the reporting like everyone else, and what she said is what her parents said: She grew up in tough circumstances and they have helped shape who she is and how she approaches her work.
Tennessee
FiveThirtyEight projection: 3 in 4 chance the Republican, U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, beats former Gov. Phil Bredesen to win
Holmes (R):
The electorate just isn’t the same as it used to be — it’s not in an elder-statesman mood. It’s in a change, drain-the-swamp, fight, represent-us type mood, and it’s just tough for guys like Bredesen who are in the middle of an electorate where there is no middle.
Passalacqua (D):
This is very much a pure toss-up, it’s incredibly competitive. Gov. Bredesen has run a race that’s solely focused on Tennessee. “Forget the noise, let’s talk about Tennessee.” In every one of his ads, in the events he holds, he’s applying for the job, and that’s really refreshing at a time when you’re overwhelmed by the punditry on television.
Texas
FiveThirtyEight projection: 4 in 5 chance the Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, beats U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke to win re-election
Holmes (R):
I think Beto is a hell of a political celebrity, and if you’re running an underdog race in 2018, he’s laid out a perfect blueprint for how to get attention, how to raise money, how to become a national superstar. But I don’t think he’s given us a blueprint to win a red state. We’re living in an age of political celebrity, and there’s no question he’s become that, but in terms of putting votes in a box, he’s got positions that are far, far outside the mainstream of Texas.
Passalacqua (D):
I don’t know if there’s anyone who’s run up as many miles on a car driving around a state the size of Texas as he has. This comes back to something that we’ve seen is so important in all these states: Who’s showing up, and who’s listening? I think something has been a little shortchanged about Beto: He is putting in the work. I think this is going to be a high-turnout election, and I think that’s good. When more people vote, that’s good.
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The best shot at overcoming vaccination standoffs? Having doctors listen to – not shun – reluctant parents
http://bit.ly/2wm9y0m
A recent study of medical students and residents found they were reluctant to engage with parents who have vaccination fears. But listening to parents is important. Olena Yakobchuck/Shutterstock.com
Vaccines save between two and three million lives per year by protecting individuals from diseases such as measles, mumps, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus and others. Clean water is the only other public intervention to save more lives than vaccines. Despite their life-saving benefits, however, parental resistance toward childhood vaccinations is increasing.
Just a few months ago, news came out about a new measles outbreak in Europe. Seventeen unvaccinated children died as a result of this outbreak. Measles cases have popped up in Australia, the U.S., Canada and other countries worldwide.
Health care professionals and public health advocates struggle to create engaging, effective messages to achieve what is called herd immunity. Vaccination works best at controlling disease if enough people (95 percent of the population) are vaccinated, providing protection to those who are vaccinated as well as those vulnerable individuals who are too young, who have weakened immune systems or who have medical reasons for not receiving vaccines.
With others, I recently conducted a study of clinical trainees’ responses to vaccine-hesitant parents. Results were consistent with national trends suggesting that we need to better support health care professionals and patients through difficult conversations when there are disagreements or concerns about vaccines. As we observe National Immunization Month, now is an especially good time to discuss these important issues.
Parents need to be respected
Health care providers can influence vaccination rates with the right attitudes and message. However, providers do not always have accurate perceptions of parents’ views and concerns about vaccination. Some overestimate parents’ concerns, while others are unsure of how to approach conversations about possible vaccine side effects so that they are not misinterpreted.
Parents might not want to share their concerns out of fear of being labeled “difficult” if they question their providers’ vaccine recommendations. Parents’ fears about expressing vaccine hesitancy may be grounded in reality.
In the recent study we conducted among 132 medical students and pediatric residents, we showed clinicians a scenario in which parents were slightly hesitant to vaccinate by saying “I’m just not sure about vaccines. They make me nervous.” Clinical trainees found these parents difficult, frustrating and felt there was little value in having a conversation about vaccination. Many stated they would like to refer these vaccine-hesitant parents to other providers rather than continue to see them in their own practice.
But it might not be a good approach to dismiss parents before engaging in respectful conversations. Having open conversations about vaccination with a trusted physician can improve vaccine rates.
Although there is strong evidence that vaccines are safe and that vaccine refusal has dire public health consequences, parents may be making decisions based on their natural intuition and feelings about protecting their children. Clinicians should aim to understand parents’ values and engage in genuine, respectful conversations; these processes can help vaccine-hesitant parents feel heard and understood.
Many fears and biases affect parents’ decisions on whether to vaccinate, but one thing is known to ease their concerns: respectful discussions. Evgeny Atamanenko/Shutterstock.com
Recognizing the cognitive biases that parents may have can also help providers better connect with their patients. For example, a bias called the omission bias may lead parents to blame themselves more if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect (even something like a temporary fever) than they would blame themselves if their child develops a vaccine-preventable disease.
Another bias, called anticipated regret, may lead some parents to expect to feel remorseful if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect, however rare. Confirmation bias might lead people to believe information that already supports their preexisting beliefs about vaccines, and motivated reasoning might lead them to seek out this supportive information, ignoring information that counters their beliefs.
Many concerned parents are open to hearing about evidence
Parents might start with different levels of readiness to vaccinate. One literature review found that between 30 to 40 percent of parents accepted vaccines without question; 25-25 percent of parents accepted vaccines, but were slightly anxious about some side effects; 20 to 30 percent were hesitant and wanted to know more about vaccine safety; 2 to 27 percent preferred to delay or alter the vaccine schedule and only 2 percent or less refused vaccines all together.
Engaging parents in discussions about vaccination can make a difference. In particular, clinicians can match messages to parents’ feelings and concerns while addressing both risks and benefits for those who want to hear more about evidence. One study found this can lead one-third to one-half of initially hesitant parents to vaccinate.
If clinicians can connect to parents by identifying a shared goal, parents might be more willing to listen to vaccine recommendations. For example, both parents and clinicians want to keep the child healthy and safe. Starting with statements reflecting that goal can make both people more receptive to listening to each other’s concerns.
Stories and anecdotes that help parents understand the importance of vaccination may also be remembered more than data or statistics. Strategies that focus on clarifying patients’ values and reasons for vaccine hesitancy can help clinicians and patients partner together when making decisions about vaccination.
Parents have a role: Critically examining articles they find about vaccines
Parents should be savvy about sources of information about vaccines, eschewing unsourced material. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the other hand, has a wealth of information about vaccines that can be trusted. panuwat phimpha/Shutterstock.com
Communication about health decisions is a two-way street. Parents can prepare themselves with online resources to help them appraise news stories. It is often difficult when looking for information online to tease apart what information is valid and what might be sensationalized. Even some academic journal articles that look like they have been peer-reviewed may skew evidence. These articles are often published in what is called “predatory journals,” which require substantial fees to publish and are often not reviewing papers closely for content or data legitimacy.
Parents can also use resources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ parent information guide and online evidence summaries. Some newspapers also report on common myths debunked and information researched by the vaccine safety commission. This information can help open the door for conversation with providers if parents still have remaining questions about vaccines. Asking questions about side effects and the diseases that vaccines prevent are all questions that providers should be able to answer to help allay fears.
It is clear from our study of clinical trainees and national trends that we need to better support health care professionals and patients through difficult conversations when there are disagreements or concerns about vaccine evidence. Both providers and patients can play a role in supporting these conversations.
Mary Politi has consulted for Merck in 2015-2016 and currently receives research funding from Merck, both on topics unrelated to the content of this article.
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Video game distributors prepare for digital future
The digital wave is growing by the day and companies that don't want to get shipwrecked need to be prepared. Leading video game retailers are feeling the impact already; following E3 both GAME and GameStop saw their respective stocks plummet because investors are realizing that consumers are buying fewer games, and downloading them more when they do (digital accounts for 74% of the US market). New York-based video game distributor Alliance Media Holdings sees the writing on the wall and is taking a bold step in the digital direction.
Alliance, which has direct buying relationships with most of the major game companies, has rebranded its Alliance Digital Media division to reflect the digital revolution. The division will now offer indies funding in the range of $50,000 to $500,000 per title, along with Alliance's core suite of publishing services.
This should not come as a major surprise. In Alliance's most recent quarter ended March 31, the company announced that it lost almost three-quarters of a million dollars as revenues fell 41% and CEO Jay Gelman acknowledged, "We are convinced that the industry as a whole is moving towards digital and streaming alternatives, and that this change will impact our financial performance sooner rather than later... Ultimately, the future of our company will depend on the success of our digital and content initiative, and our ability to fund its growth and further development."
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Gelman stressed that retail distribution remains important for Alliance, especially since digital still has some hurdles to clear. He cited the lack of reliable high-speed internet connectivity throughout the market, along with the consoles' limited digital storage space and ISP bandwidth restrictions. That said, the impact of DLC especially has been undeniable. "DLC continues to grow at a rate that has outperformed all expectations... It does not have the same obstacles facing a fully downloadable game version, and the consumer, by all measures, prefers accessing this content digitally," he noted.
While retail remains viable for now, Gelman is making sure his company is ready for the inevitable. "We believe that, eventually, consumers will access all video game software digitally, and we've been planning for this eventuality for over nine years," he said. "Over that period, we transitioned our business from exclusively distributing games to also publishing our own titles for SCEA, Microsoft and Nintendo. We further evolved to develop our own software for publication, initially for the mobile space, but more recently with our acquisition of Zachtronics, adding digital and platform development to our publishing offerings.
"Our latest plans to seek out games within the indie space is a culmination of our efforts to remain a relevant part of the business we have grown up in. I think our shareholders have come to appreciate the industry's challenges, past and present, and understand we have continually worked to position ourselves to them accordingly."
Perhaps an apt comparison to what Alliance is doing would be Koch Media, which in Europe handles all the boxed releases for Sega and Square Enix but has significantly invested in digital through the Deep Silver label. Similar to Koch, Alliance believes that its long-standing preexisting relationships across the industry will give it an edge in the digital publishing space while facilitating the occasional retail release for devs who still want a physical presence.
"We've been in the video game space since the old Atari days," Gelman said. "We've experienced all the ups and downs of the business from every vantage point. And I think that allows us to provide expert advice to our potential dev partners with regard to what to avoid and what to leverage in their work to get their creations to market.
"From there, we can open all the possible doors that are out there to drive revenue, leveraging our present business in distribution and all of the relationships we have cultivated over 30 years in the industry. With our connections to retail, we can, when appropriate, seamlessly take a digital offering and put it on shelves at major retailers as a box product. We did this with Zachtronics' Infinifactory, taking what had been a strictly digital offering and making it available as a physical PS4 offering at retail."
Gelman said that Alliance will begin by digitally publishing 7 to 12 games per year, "but we're targeting the digital initiative to eventually merge completely with our wholesale business and become our biggest revenue generator over time."
While $500,000 was announced as the maximum allocated per title, Gelman said it's not necessarily set in stone. Alliance can be flexible on budgets and business deals formed with devs. "We established the funding range based on the overall feedback from the dev community on the financial requirements necessary to complete their work. We are open to discussing larger potential budgets if the opportunity presents itself," he noted. "I wouldn't say we have specific criteria for who can and should apply, but what excites us most is innovation and creativity. Granted, our team has to agree it has the potential to be a good game - but we offer an open mind to any project we feel has the right idea and talent.
"The games that excite us most are created by developers who have a clear vision, but lack the financing and support they need to get their projects finished and delivered," he continued. "With that in mind, we always prioritize creative control for the developers we work with. We then step in to provide financing, QA, marketing, promotion, timeline management, etc. with the aim of helping them complete their games and bring them to market. There's no single way things like revenue share or IP are determined - a lot of it is up to each individual situation. We're very interested in establishing a relationship that functions as a true partnership."
One of the big trends in gaming since 2016 has been virtual reality, and while VR has yet to fully mature as a market and offer substantial profits, Alliance is open to funding VR/AR projects in the long-term and not just traditional titles. "We believe both VR and AR offer major potential to the game space. We have experience selling the current offerings of VR through our distribution business. I think we have to keep an active, long-term view as it relates to VR, but in the short-term, our concentration will be on more lucrative platforms," Gelman explained.
One of the biggest challenges for any indie releasing a game onto digital storefronts is discoverability, and no one has completely solved that complex issue yet. That said, Alliance believes that it's industry experience and relationships once again can help it to tackle the discoverability challenge head-on.
"There's no question it's harder for indies in this space, especially as they compete not just against bigger titles, but against each other, as well," Gelman remarked. "Our experience as developers, publishers and distributors is unusual compared to our competition. We have our own in-house marketing team with vast consumer promotion experience, and we're one of the few partners of our kind with the knowledge and reach to make an impact in the ad market to get the word out on a game outside of social media. We have an expansive view on marketing, which we craft depending on the game, considering spot TV, key market newspaper exposure and retail store promotion as part of our unique menu for marketing a game."
He added, "We have longstanding relationships with the first-party owners of gaming's most relevant platforms, which gives us a lead when it comes to getting the games we publish noticed."
As Alliance looks to increase its digital output, the company has wisely expanded into other areas, such as e-tailer fulfillment. "We have been an important distribution partner for every major studio in the video game space, and we've evolved our business with them to stay impactful as the retail landscape changed. For example, we recently launched a fulfillment operation to ship product directly to consumers on behalf of retailers like Walmart, JET, Target and Toys "R" Us," Gelman said.
Coming off E3 2017 - a show that historically has been critical for retail - video game retailers may have felt dismayed by shareholders' reactions, but Gelman remains enthusiastic about being part of the games business, even if retail is in decline. "E3 was extremely exciting," he said. "I loved the electricity of the Switch in Nintendo's booth; Microsoft and SCEA also showed the world gamers are still engaged with compelling new system discussions. Many of the larger publishers, such as Warner, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Capcom, Atlus/Sega, and EA, all showed great future IP.
"The main thing I came away with, based on the public's participation at the show this year, is that great games still put video games at the forefront of the entertainment industry."
Ref: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-07-03-video-game-distributors-prepare-for-digital-future
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Your child is an artist
Dr Helen Jones looks at what art means to children and how to provide quality opportunities for drawing and painting at home
Table of contents:
Introduction
Why paint? The benefits of making art
How do the stages of visual representation develop?
How to support your child with art
Final word
‘Intelligence itself is built upon that which we crudely term ‘children’s art’’.
John Matthews, Drawing and Painting: children and visual representation.
Introduction
As an artist and a teacher of art you might think I have a lot to teach you about children’s art. But I haven’t. In fact, it's our children who can educate us.
Having observed children of all ages over the past 11 years, I’ve been fortunate to gain some fascinating insights, simply by letting them show me how they make sense of the world through art. I’ve watched in wonder as their drawing develops, how it links to higher level thinking, and how they are communicating visually.
So often when it comes to our children’s art, it’s tempting to think that they are just messing around with pens and pencils. Art making in infancy can be hugely underrated and in mainstream school curricula it can even be suppressed. Yet science is showing us the huge, invaluable cognitive benefits of art. Scientific trials have revealed young children quickly abandon ‘dummy pens’ without ink, uncovering their strong desire to make marks… but what good does it bring?
Why paint? The benefits for children of making art
Language foundation:
Drawing is an integral part of the way children learn signs, symbols and representation. According to professor of art John Matthews, in his book Drawing and Painting: Children and visual representation, drawing forms ‘the basis for all thinking… what adults call children’s art has a central role to play in cognitive development.’ In my lessons, I often refer to art as a visual language - a universal one, and a key to unlock the door of communication.
Cross-curricular learning:
Children learn about gravity, physics, perspective, maths, anatomy, and myriad other concepts all through drawing. I explore art’s symbiotic relationships in my article on what children's art can teach us. But while art can enrich learning in other areas, it can also be used for so much more.
Joy:
When creating art for art's sake - in a self-motivated mode of personal expression and glee - we can be absorbed in our own inventive worlds. The Spanish painter Joan Miro once said ‘A simple line, painted with a brush can lead to freedom and happiness’. It certainly does for me!
Higher level thinking skills.
Remember that old chestnut ‘Bloom’s taxonomy’ with ‘create’ being placed at the top of the psychological skills triangle?According to Matthews, drawing and painting involves ‘rapid and complex decision-making’ all while figuring out how to show information about what is (or isn’t) in one’s world and our relationship with it.
Seeing is believing:
Drawing trains us in the indispensable, lifelong art of observation. Lots of people tend to think we draw to represent reality but in fact a lot of the time what I see from children is the reverse, they draw and then they start noticing similar shapes in reality. Being able to observe and gather information about the world is a life skill.
Emotional regulation and self-expression:
Art can create a mood, record our thoughts, express a feeling or intensify a preexisting one. Art is the ‘go to’ when we want to say something which cannot be said.
Fine motor skills:
Precision and finger dexterity involved when controlling a paintbrush, crayon, pen or pencil are vital, transferable skills, that aid your child with handwriting, tying shoelaces and all those other necessary, but oh-so-fiddly jobs.
Cause and effect:
As soon as you move the paintbrush or pen, a mark is left. This instant feedback, unique to drawing and painting, makes us aware of our body and the consequences of our movement. Children learn the crucial lesson that their actions have an effect on the world. They can make a difference to it. Matthews says: ‘The most dramatic way the child realises this is when she draws. It is only through drawing that the infant receives a record of her movements.’
Ok, so you’re sold, it’s good right? But how does it begin? What should we look out for?
How drawing and painting develops
It’s easy to assume that children’s mark making is a haphazard collection of uncontrolled scribbles. This is far from the case, says Matthews:
‘Children’s drawing has organisation and meaning all the way from the beginning, when many people consider infants to be scribbling.’
While these apparently ill-controlled movements can appear mindless, they are far from it - they mask lots of thought and sensitivity to the drawing surface. As child psychologist Norman Freeman explains in Strategies of Representation in Young Children: ‘ a continuous contact line teaches coordination, control, cause and effect, and what’s more, the child’s aim is, surprisingly, rather accurate.’
There are some recognisable drawing traits that emerge over time in infants.
Vertical arc, horizontal arc and push – pull.
These are the three basic mark-making movements, which enable further marks and shapes to emerge. These are the foundation of children’s mark making. Horizontal arc; an arcing shape with a horizontal swing of the arm, pushing and pulling movements, and vertical arcs; a swing upright against the page.
Closed shape.
This can close off areas and represent the notion of inside or outside. It can also represent front-on views of objects and, more commonly, faces. The introduction of the closed shape marks a developmental milestone in thinking and increased motor control.
Layering.
Placing one object over another deals with concepts of ‘in front’, behind or hide and seek. Connectivity, going over, going under, going in, going out or going through. These are vital concerns that can often only be rectified through visual play.
Landmarks.
This is when children start to consider the format and layout of their drawing, such as the position of an object, and parts of the body becoming coordinated. A mark becomes a landmark, which all other marks are formed around and in relation to.
Parallel lines.
Through exploring side-by-side lines, kids can grasp the concept of parallelism way before they are even introduced to the term parallel. What a head start!
Right angular connections.
I have seen how fascinated children can be by the beginnings and ends of lines and this often precedes their realisation they can add a new line onto the preexisting one, at a right angle. This forms the basis of many recognisable shapes.
Travelling zigzags.
I often see children create meandering zig zag lines when listening to music - perhaps it is the repetition? Or our endless fascination as a human species with pattern, which we are predisposed to detect.
Continuous rotation.
This often deals with issues of process, movement and repetition. Each encircling of a previous circle adds a new layering of understanding and a subtly different perception.
However, this should all come with a cautious caveat: there is no tick-box approach. I don’t wish to create a stage like illusion, where children go from one form of mark making to another, incrementally, climbing the art ladder: it’s not that simple.
Many children swing between these different types of marks. Some of these actions may then come together to form stick men, and fully developed pictures.
When children change the subject matter they adapt the way they use the shapes and lines to give them different meanings. But there are times when children might seem frustrated because they cannot find a way to represent their new understanding about the world.
In times like these adult encouragement and support is especially vital, if not throughout the entire creative process.
How to support your child
Some might think there’s not much use in supporting your child with drawing - they either have ‘it’ or they don’t, right?
Wrong!
While it is true that there is a certain amount of genetic disposition, in my experience the majority of artistic talent is derived from the support a child receives and the amount of hours and effort they invest.
Pablo Picasso once said: ‘all children are born artists, the problem is how to remain an artist.’
The answer to the problem could lie in nurture.
Ibid says: ‘much of children’s drawing and painting is self-initiated. The contribution made by adults is crucial.’ Children need opportunities and the encouragement to create, and if this is not given, the bright star of creativity can dim.
Children can develop their visual storytelling skills with the right support.
Resources and opportunities.
Providing basic art materials, (non-toxic paints and paper, pads, pencils) and setting these up (whether on an easel, table or messy mat), puts creative experiences in children’s paths. It gives them the option.
Show an interest.
Both in your child’s creative productions and art in general. Children are more likely to engage if they see you enjoying or partaking in art, however it is far more important to be encouraging, supportive and nurturing of creative opportunities, then to be artistic oneself.
Encourage.
I have come to understand that praise is far more potent when used specifically. Rather than saying a drawing is lovely, consider what is lovely about the drawing. And is it really ‘lovely’ or is it ‘exciting’ or ‘expressive’ and what is promising about how they have approached the whole process, as well as the outcome?
See without prejudice.
Ibid argues that the problem for adults is not one of simply learning what to say, but of learning to see – and of seeing with impartiality. So when your child wanders up to you with glee at what they have produced, try not to respond with criticism. As despite first appearances, our child’s art is not full of errors {LINK]. It’s an interaction of what is unfolding within them and what’s in their mind's eye. Try to understand it, show curiosity and pleasure, while helping them to articulate it. As Ibid suggests: ‘Look for meaning behind all their actions.’
Don’t meddle.
Interfering and dominating your child’s productions can stunt confidence, independence and creativity. Matthews writes: ‘It is grossly insensitive to manipulate and interfere with children’s work, sticking things on it, cutting it up, repainting it and generally communicating to the child that her efforts are inadequate. I got a recent communication from my daughters’ childcare explaining their shift to child led art, without the adults adding finishing touches or attempting to control the process. They advised: ‘while it might not always be ‘picture perfect’ it is as unique as the child who has made it.’ I cherish those pieces so much more knowing that.
Display.
Ever wondered why putting up kids drawings on the fridge, cupboard doors and walls is such an institution? It says, ‘you are appreciated, included and celebrated’. It helps kids to see they are building up a collection and allows them to bear witness to their own progress.
Do nothing.
‘Sometimes, simple permission is all that is needed to promote creative thought. Sometimes, the best thing [we] can do is nothing’ says Ibid. Allow this creative process to happen and try not to interrupt unnecessarily (as if what they are doing doesn’t matter). But how do kids get better if we don’t support them directly? Don’t worry, says Matthews: ‘They do much of the work themselves, as they try to resolve ambiguities in their drawings which they find unsatisfactory.’ Phew! We can take our teacher hats off and become an intellectual companion who appreciates their art instead.
Final word
I hope in reading this you have discovered how beneficial art making can be for children and the multitude of advantages it brings. However as much as endorsing art making is a good thing, it should be engaged in for its own sake; children creating artwork for themselves, to serve their own developmental needs and intentions.
The main takeaway really though is how crucial support, encouragement and the right environment can be to developing artistic talent. As Matthews writes: ‘By supporting children’s paintings and drawing we are empowering them. We are giving them some way of controlling their lives.’
So what are you waiting for? Go, create!
from One Hundred Toys - The Blog https://ift.tt/3ctXgr7
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