It is apparent that children today live in the rapidly changing era than ever in the past. Among these changes, the educational circles attempt to make lots of changes in education for improving a quality of education to intensify various education ac...
It is apparent that children today live in the rapidly changing era than ever in the past. Among these changes, the educational circles attempt to make lots of changes in education for improving a quality of education to intensify various education according to the globalization.
In the process of adjusting to these various changes of environment or stimulus, some children are severly isolated or shrunk with strain or conflict, showing various maladjusted behaviors found in life, such as being impulsive, distracted, offensive, and maladjusted to school life.
Particularly, for the maladjusted phenomenon that is easily found in children, various types appear as the negative learning attitude like a lack of confidence, negative human relationship, accumulated learning loss, and perception gap for the score with experiences of negative prejudice. These maladjusted children to school have a lack of expression ability to control their desire and emotion, showing unbalanced behavior style due to a 1negative self-concept. These styles can be entered into the integration with reality through art therapy by using art media to digest the experiences of emotion that cannot be expressed with words, expressing with art of non-verbal types and symbolizing events of inner part in children's spirit.
This study is one case study of art therapy, and the individual art therapy was conducted for 50 minutes, 2 times a week, total 32 sessions from July 2010 to November 2010 over 5 months. The study subject A was a boy of 8 years old who entered the international elementary school, showing personality of being very dependent isolated from other peers in a semester with teachers, and made passive or shrunk behaviors in the cooperative activities. Also, A was neglected by his behaviors unsuitable to situation in school life, showing underachievement due to the improper attitude and depression for learning. For this, as the art therapy was asked by school teachers and parent, the researcher of this study gave A an opportunity to express his inner feeling for himself to relieve the problems of adjusting to school. With that, the therapy aimed to help him to voluntarily participate in school life by emotional stability and accepting his problem to overcome through improving self-perception and self-esteem.
As a result of investigating the effects of art therapy on children who are maladjusted to school, the art therapy applied by art media turned out to have positive changes in relieving their problems of adjusting to school.
This can be discussed as follows.
First, children expressed their inner side through the art expression and the process of relaxing their emotion was revealed in the art expression. Second, the shrunk aspects turned out to change and develop by voluntary work and active attitude in absorption of art work. Third, children objectified their problem getting interested and full of drive for the art expression to be active and positive in attitude, which was based on a sense of intimacy formed through interaction with the researcher in the art therapy activity.
Reviewing this finding, it was found that the art therapy helped to solve the adjustment problems, and through this study, the basis of art therapy will be further suggested in helping children who have a difficulty in school adjustment by the environment of school life.