Project description

What could self-portraits in a museum teach us? Do self-portraits mediate more than knowledge about drawing style and epochal features? In the project "DigiSelbst", we focused on visual arts (especially self-portraits) in Art museum and the use of digital media to design cultural learning opportunities.

In an interdisciplinary cooperation of IWM and the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, three courses for upper secondary schools have been developed. In an experimental setting, we evaluated the effect of different course contents on social skills like empathy and self-perception. We designed (1) an emotion course, which focused on perception and interpretation of own and foreign emotions based on mimical expressions, (2) a self-concept course, which focused on differential access to personal characteristics in context of social roles, and (3) an epochal course, which focused on the conveying of epochal knowledge, e.g. hair accessories or clothing style in the Baroque period. The aim of the study was to evaluate, if there is a supporting effect on social skills especially in the emotion and the self-concept course.
The core element of this course program is the graphical interaction with tablets. Digital drawing offer new ways of dealing with the course contents (e.g. zooming, editing) and increases the motivation of the participants. Furthermore, tablets offer a high self-reference through the creation of selfies and, additionally, enable the recording and detailed scientific examination of the drawing process.
The effects, such as better emotion recognition or differentiated self-perception, varied depending on the course content. In the emotion course, for example, a specific improvement was found for emotions regardless of whether the emotions were addressed in the drawing tasks or not. Overall, it can therefore be concluded from our results that cultural education programs aimed at such social-emotional transfer effects should be designed specifically in order to provide sufficient opportunities to effectively develop the targeted skills in the context of the program.

Cooperations

• LEAD Graduate School & Research Network, Tuebingen (Dr. Aiste Jusyte)
• Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig (Dr. Sven Nommensen, Maren Peters)
• University of Art, Braunschweig