Art as an endeavour to increase thinking skills towards entrepreneurship and employability

Drawing is the most basic thing you can ever imagine, used only as a vehicle to convey ones thoughts. I found that many offenders, particularly the socially excluded, fail to act on information, advice or guidance delivered in traditional ‘face-to-face’ practice. But show them a basic cartoon or graphic instructions the idea touches something within. We should seek different approaches to engaging and motivating offenders and ultimately to helping to improve entrepreneurial or employability skills. Training people to be creative thinkers as documented in their doodles, captions, cartoon drawings can be developed into more formal  outline of their skills for cv’s and ultimately the development of  business plans.

You don't have to be a skilled drawer to draw a storyboard. The most important function of the storyboard is to show you how to plan and to externalise your steps to success. It could start with a doodle and follow up with a caption. With practice we would improve this but as a start up strategy, you cannot beat story-boarding. The approach is to enhance literacy skills and numeracy skills and ideas. An innovative training project would engage and motivates potential learners, extends their range of social skills and increase their entrepreneurship and employability skills. 

A social environment provides an opportunity to identify customers, products and services and how to reach them. We could use the inner creative artistic skills to develop and to programme doodling into our daily activities and expand plans and ideas targeting offenders of low self esteem; addictions, drug/alcohol misuse and young people at risk. We should encourage their outpourings on paper for this very cathartic experience is the start of their creativity. It is no wonder the young go through the graffiti period of “tagging” as they try to make an identifiable trade mark.

Once you get the hang of it, you'll know which details need to be included in the drawing and which doesn't, the final step is to have fun! The drawing is just a tool for thinking the most basic skills that we all have.

What drawing does 

a)      To initiate self-expression from the participants and

b)      Explore the world of imagery on paper and discuss its impact with the individual.

c)      Mentoring through building positive relationships based on value, integrity and mutual respect.

d)     These relationships provide a safe environment to change individuals and the confidence to take responsibility for their lives.

The strategy used is to provide simple drawing resources followed by discussion and if needed mentoring on project development ideas. A4 drawing books that could act as a journal would be a bonus; furthermore I would supply secondary images of other artists and photo source material from magazines and newspapers, as collages. The curriculum outline for the training process of art, design and life skills towards entrepreneur is constantly being developed.

With ongoing review towards reflective thinking this is fundamental to the development process.

1. The project themes looked at and studied, relate to a business problem
2. How the practice/studies are developing and what do they look like?
3. Professional and cultural contexts that inform their practice/studies
4. Their ability to extend their learning and understanding.

Doodling services and products: from the cycle of a chicken to dinner plate and the process in between from slaughtering to environmental packaging. We have frequent exhibitions of art work to see the development, informed by basic research. Where to establish a niche market the importance of cultural background is considered what do people need. This initial ‘fun’ learning with doodles is generalized into business plan from a sophisticated check list of items. In most programmers this will involve keeping a journal that will act as forms of documenting and recording experiences towards a project.

There are the development of skills specific to the project, such as researching, communication, information technology, numeracy & learning to learn; these are facilitated  with the assistance of a trainer.

I have found the results from my project as described as ‘extremely positive’. Overall, it has been found that: Learners have increased motivation and sustained participation. Such a project builds on entrepreneurial and employability skills. Offenders have greater awareness of their skills and talents and of learning new skills to increase their confidence with plenty to show for it. They can see their thoughts more clearly. The exhibiting of such drawings and talking about them forms the embryonic step towards the business plan executive summary and power point presentation.