Resourcefulness 2007

According to Mary Renck Jalongo (2003:218), art educators can enhance the intellectual abilities of learners through developing creative thought processes. The installation artwork, Resourcefulness, represents creativity as an essential resource needed for intellectual development.

Children experience reading difficulties because they are not able to describe the pictures in their mind as they read. These children struggle with decoding the text because they often come from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example they have little, if any background knowledge on the subject being discussed, insufficient vocabulary in the language used for instruction, and lack of understanding of relationships found within the text. In short learners that experience reading disability do not visualize text as they read.

Resourcefulness, was a reading workshop held at Rabana Primary School, and Opang Diatla Primary School during July 2006. These workshops aimed at helping children with reading disability to visualize text through performance. The choice of performance was, because these schools and other similar schools have little, if any resource materials at hand. The idea was to open the minds of teachers and learners to alternative methods of decoding literary text. In other words, that the imagination can be used as a resource to better understand what is happening in the text. Instead of having to draw pictures on paper, which they do not have, children were instructed to draw the text on an imaginary paper, with imaginary paint, thus enforcing the creation of mental images as they read.

In order to enter the room, a digital print of a television must be pushed out of the way. This image of the television represents an imaginary television, because the television used in this installation is imaginary to the children who participated in the workshops. The emptiness of the room enforces the lack of resource materials and can also be interpreted as representing the open, uncluttered space of imagination.