Childhood is a period when juveniles carry out various developmental tasks and acquire achievement from those tasks. Having low self-esteem in this period brings children anxiety and depression and makes them less trustful and successful in building h...
Childhood is a period when juveniles carry out various developmental tasks and acquire achievement from those tasks. Having low self-esteem in this period brings children anxiety and depression and makes them less trustful and successful in building human relationships.
This also results in their having less interest and lower achievement in their work, not only at school but also at home and work. Positive self-esteem has a significant influence on smooth human networks and mutual development for children.
In particular, group art activities are closely associated with the emotional development of children. While participating in group art activities and completing them usually leaves children feeling full of accomplishment, children can have a variety of experiences. Group art activities are a means of self expression which offers children social value, recognitive value and creative value. Such values satisfy children's psychological desires and develops their self-esteem.
Based on theoretical grounds and field observations, to test the assumption that group art activities have a significant impact on the development of children's self-esteem, children with lower self-esteem were selected for the case study to find out how group art activities affect the self-esteem of 1st graders in elementary school.
Subjects in this case study are children at an art school in Ilgok Dong, Gwangju City, whom I personally teach. With 65 questionnaires retrieved after conducting an SEI (Self-Esteem Inventory) among 100 children, the 1st graders of the art school, 14 children (20%) with lower self-esteem were chosen for the KHTP (Kinetic House-Tree-People) among HTP (House-Tree-People) and 7 children (3 boys and 4 girls) with lower self-esteem were finally chosen for the final case-study with the approval of their parents.
This study was conducted from March 2008 to July 2008 and the educational activity was done once a week, 16 times in total (60 minutes per each activity).
In this study, SEI (1997) and HTP's KHTP adapted by Shin-cheol from Coopersmith's SEI (1987) were used.
After SEI, data processing of the results is used to produce means with MINITAB-V14 and to verify the difference between the preliminary examination and post examination. HTP's KHTP as an alternative method of SEI is a method to compare and analyze children's psychological states before and after group art activities.
The results show that group art activities have a crucial influence on the development of children's (1st graders') self-esteem, which turned inactive children into active ones. There was also an overall effect of improvement of children's self-esteem and general, home, and academic self-esteem; however, they they did not show such great gains in the improvement of social self-esteem.
In this study it is suggested that group art activities which help improve social self-esteem should be developed and the outcome will be different once group art activities are provided more often, for example, 3 times a week compared to once a week, 16 times in total. Therefore, it is necessary that children should be treated with group art activities more often and longer for better analysis of the effect. It is also recommended that the development of a group art activities program to improve children's self-esteem be included in the art activities of elementary education and that these activities should be utilized as a solution for children's emotional problems.