Alphabet, Design and Artistic vision

In the first part, Chinmay Joshi wrote about the experience of a boy in a creative workshop for hearing-impaired school children. In this second part, he writes about his experience as an art educator in this workshop. Things came full circle as Chinmay not only overcame his hearing impairment but also experimentally devised novel and fun methods to help these young children learn to write, draw and speak at the same time.

After being diagnosed with a hearing impairment issue, I joined the Vikas Vidyalaya for Deaf Children of Janakibai Education Institute in Dadar, Mumbai. It was the first school where I really started to learn the alphabet, read, write, and speak. After a baby is born, sounds and words fall on the ears from around, which helps the children to learn the language. However, the sound perception of hearing-impaired children starts late as compared to their learning age. Once the child starts using the hearing aid, the teachers and parents of the school start from scratch to prepare the children to read every letter and all the words. It takes a lot of time till children can understand the language. In fact, it takes a long time to fully hear all the alphabets of Devanagari script and Roman script at such a young age. So I thought if those children are involved in some fun games using innovative concepts in literacy, they may understand better and faster. As an attempt to experiment with this idea, an attempt was made to make children learn letters in an artistic way.

Usually after summer exams, parents face a big question of how to entertain their children during the vacations. So, the school organized a creative workshop to use the vacation time well. The school invited me as the Art educator for the workshop. For me, the most difficult part was teaching art to the schoolchildren.

Through a few trial experiments, we found out what exactly the children were interested in. After that, an activity on drawing letters with a calligraphic tool was conducted for children from 5th to 8th grade. Through this, children understood the letter, its structure, width, and thickness, as well as the use of the tool or brush and the hand grip while drawing the letters. Meanwhile, I showed them the titles of Cinema, Plays, and Drama which were printed in various newspapers that featured the headlines with expressive letters. Knowing that imaginary worms don’t move in the minds of these children without understanding something properly, demonstrations were shown with different letters. The children were shown how the same letter can be drawn in different ways through voice modulations and gestures. This way, they could also discover the fun in putting on paper the emotion hidden in the letter.

The introduction of Tenses through Letters

The children seemed conscious after being given plenty of newsprints, colours, and calligraphic tools to practice the letters. I immediately told them candidly that there were plenty of newspapers, they could take the letter that they like and have fun with it. That’s when their imagination took off. They started to draw letters randomly on the paper. Where necessary, some of the letters were carefully removed. They were made to understand the spacing that must be kept when drawing ‘kana, matra and velanti’ (various symbols used for making conjugations of letters in Devnagari script), and the basic rules of drawing letters. (It is to be noted that here, we were ‘Drawing’ letters, not really ‘writing’ them!) Children who were allowed to draw rough letters found a way to improve by seeing them again and draw them better. I challenged them to find the words hidden in these rough, scribbled letters. While one student was drawing the P letter in Devnagari script, the boy next to him saw the cup, and the other student also stopped drawing started followed the letter P. Someone gestured and repeated the words one by one “Kapat (cupboard)”, “Pankha (Fan)”, “palang (Bed)”, “jhopala (Swing)” all of which had a ‘P’ in them.

Diversity in composition of manuscripts drawn by children.

The children also enjoyed the game of recognizing letters from objects placed in the class. They were asked how many letters they could recognize by observing a wooden chair. To my surprise, they recognized at least 10 letters from the shape of the chair. Such activities develop children’s visualization power and observation skills. This also teaches them to look at the outer shapes of things with a different artistic eye. In fact, this ability is inherent in them since birth because of their ear defect. It’s important that all parents and teachers take up the task of promoting such creative skills.    Hearing impaired children enjoying letter writing along with  demo

After the one-day creative workshop was successfully completed, we arranged a modest art exhibition of children’s works from the workshop, in the school itself. Parents and children flocked to see the exhibition. The indescribable joy on the children’s faces, their eagerness to show each other their work, and the excited parents looking at their children’s paintings created a wonderful atmosphere.

Discussion with parents during exhibition about nurturing creativity of children

The parents were also excited about the letter games, word building, and letter recognition. The parents were convinced that we can do all these innovative experiments for children with the help of teachers. After seeing the exhibition, they said, “Dada, Let’s do something differently next year, won’t you come to school again?” I couldn’t help but accept children’s sweet urging with a smile.

Glimpses of conclusion of the Creative Workshop

Through this workshop, I learned a lot as an art educator myself. I understood how to teach the children, and how to make them participate in an activity. I made an honest effort by thinking about whether and how the children develop the right attitude of looking at things artistically.

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Chinmay Kailas Joshi

Author is Visual Designer and Brand Designer

Aural Manuscripts: The Music of Letters!