| What did the researchers say? |
| Participant 2: It’s unclourpredictable.
Participant 3: My eye was inside my brain basically. Participant 3: It sounded like a movie. Participant 4: I just picked up some colours and I felt like doing them…I don’t know why I did that. |
| What did the researchers make? |
|
Pic 1-4: During the music workshops, students were asked to divide up their page and draw an image linking to each of 4 pieces of music. Some children drew scenes from their imagination, others created abstract and colourful patterns and several associated the music with a film they knew and drew scenes form the film. By using films, students were not necessarily expressing how the music made them feel but what feelings they associated with the film.
Pic 5-6: Students started to experiment with pressure and discussed the relationship between and emotion they felt and the pressure they used to create a drawing or make a mark; students commented that pushing harder on the paper could represent ‘harder’ emotions like anger and frustration.
Pic 7: Emojis were used again, but this time children started to create their own, considering features on the faces. Pic 7 shows ‘anger’ as having a straight mouth consistently, but their are variations in the ‘anger emoji’ created.
Pic 8: The researcher started to write down words or phrases to represent an emotion such as ‘shush’ and ‘idiot’, associating anger with a specific individual and/or behaviour. Pic 9-10: Researchers decided to explore how to help others with negative emotions; they changed their focus from communicating emotions to thinking about how to ‘solve’ or help children to regulate emotions. Two students decided to incorporate a sensory strategy to support others – one used sandpaper and another used sequins, explaining that they thought a wellbeing tool should offer students helpful solutions to calm them down as well as strategies to communicate. |
| Reflection: Key observations and findings |
| 1. Researchers independently decided to develop the research tool to provide some ‘solution’ for children who need to regulate emotions and used sensory materials to achieve this.
2. Researchers made associations between emotions and films, drawing characters they did or did not like, characterising objects and people as good or bad characters, such as villains or popular protagonists (Burkitt & Barrett, 2010). 3. Researchers started to relate an emotion to an experience or person, creating dialogue within a scenario to communicate a response/emotion. 4. Researchers explored pressure and made connections between mark making and emotions, varying line heaviness (Ives, 1984). 5. Researchers began exploring emojis and creating subtle variations of emojis. |
