Exploring Human Needs Through the Arts

Our plan

After years of volunteering in the public school system in the early 90’s, I began to experience a nagging fantasy about starting an integrated arts alternative school in east Toronto. In March 1995 I held a meeting in my home, and in September 1996 EAST was born, the first parent-initiated Grade 7/8 alternative school in the public board, delivering most of my wish list: an integrated arts education with focuses on family involvement, social justice, the “isms”and most of all an inclusive environment. After five years of commitment to getting this dream school (and occasional nightmare) off the ground, I entered University of Toronto and now have a BA, a postgraduate diploma in Expressive Arts Therapy. I'm currently working on my Masters in Social Change through the Expressive Arts. My long-standing interest in universal human needs was cathected by discovering the work of Manfred Max-Neef in 2003 and inspired me to develop an expressive arts project that could integrate his theory of needs with the expressive arts, and I returned to EAST last year to implement that learning piece. (The Expressive Arts include the written and spoken word, drama, visual arts, movement etc.) Through the arts and discussion I planned to introduce students to concepts: • to support them becoming architects of social change in the face of global paradigm shifts. • to differentiate well being from wealth. • to discover that "their needs" are the same as every other person on the planet, • to learn the satisfiers of needs vary culturally, economically and personally. • to experience that social justice is not an altruistic goal but a finite, universal human need. The teachers and I decided to piggyback my project on a geography unit on global economics and local demographics. EAST does this through The Carlton Streetcar Project, in which the class does a hands-on survey of six diverse neighbourhoods, develops a demographic analysis of each community and presents their findings. Through the arts and referring to the 9 universal human needs of the Max-Neef Table, we would do individual explorations of the students’ needs, and then the needs in the lives of the residents of the study communities. I hoped to engage the students equally in process and product, while working creatively in diverse mediums and create a large art project that mirrored their journey, both academically and personally.

What we did

Initially, we examined human needs in relationship to statistical information, such as the meaning of GDP figures, and did brainstorming about concepts of needs, how needs are met and the variance of satisfiers individually, locally and globally. On large panels, learning about graphs and proportion, the students painted a streetcar -- each section with a large window in which the students painted symbolic representations of their communities. The students developed a “needs” questionnaire included in their research, and queried individuals on whether and how their needs were met in their communities. Using music, dramatizations and visual art to explore their experiences in the project, each student also presented an imaginative “character study” of a member of the public who had resonated with them during the interview process. Finally, each student painted in a graffiti format, on the backside of the panels, their own experience of how their needs had been met or not during the school year.