Art Work Display in the Academic Library to Promote Spirituality or to Support Liberal Arts and the Humanities Among Students/Faculty
Chapter One
Objectives of the study
The primary focus of this study is to examine the contributions of displayed library artworks.specifically, this study:
- Examines the contributions of Artwork to spirituality.
- Examines the place of artwork in Liberal arts.
- Elucidates on the importance of Artwork to humanities.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
DEFINITION & CONCEPTS
Defining Spirituality
There are three dimensions of spirituality that is considered especially relevant to exploring its intersection with artistic expression. First, spirituality can be considered a search for meaning in life. The psychologist Viktor Frankl developed a school of therapy around this profound human need after being in a concentration camp and discovering that those who were able to create a sense of meaningfulness fared much better than those who did not. He described the search for meaning in one’s life as “the primary motivational force” in persons (Frankl, 1963). By cultivating a sense of meaning, spirituality can provide an orientation to our lives, a set of values to live by, a sense of direction, and a basis for hope.
Second, spirituality can help us to cultivate a relationship to mystery. In our search for meaning we discover a hunger for something that is beyond the limits of our capacity to fully describe in language. We come to recognize there is a depth dimension to the world beyond surface appearances. This is the presence that great mystics have described as the God beyond all names. It also is an awareness of the presence of love in the world where there might only have been hate; hope where there might only have been despair; being where there might have been nothing. Spirituality facilitates an encounter with the presence of mystery in our lives and nurtures a relationship with it.
Third, spirituality is about transformation and should challenge us to stretch and grow through commitment to a set of practices. In our search for meaning and relationship to mystery, spiritual traditions have advised particular ways of entering more deeply into this search through a set of practices or disciplines. Practices help us to cultivate a way of being intentional about our spirituality and help us shape our lives around the meaning and mystery we are discovering through this commitment.
Defining Creativity
Creativity is a powerful shaping force in human life. It is an intangible human capacity of a transcendent nature – it moves us beyond ourselves in a similar way to spirituality. The psychologist Rollo May describes creativity as “the process of bringing something new into being,” (May, 1975) something that did not exist before – an idea, a new arrangement, a painting, a story. Ellen Dissanayake, an anthropologist, suggests that the act of creating is actually a biological need that is basic to human nature. She describes creating as “making special.”(Dissanayake, 1995).
Creativity includes the arts, but really encompasses the whole of our lives. Every act in which we “make special” can be a creative one. Carl Jung believed images are expressions of deep human experience and our authentic selves. They are the natural and primary language for the psyche and only secondarily do we move to conceptual thought. Jung saw images as clues to the unlived life that move toward some form of outward expression and urged others to look at the images of their lives in a symbolic way so as to reveal deeper meanings and their fuller, more authentic selves (Welch, 1982). The arts help us to access this storehouse of images within ourselves and create a sense of meaning. 700 years ago the Sufi poet Rumi wrote about two intelligences. The first is called acquired knowledge or book learning. It is the kind of intelligence that helps us to get ahead in the world and is tested to see how well we retain information.
Rumi describes it as “getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.” This is the intelligence of our schooling and striving to succeed. Rumi also describes another kind of tablet or intelligence: “one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox.” This intelligence is not the kind that moves from the outside in, as in traditional learning. “This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.”(Barks, 1997). Creativity is about honoring another kind of intelligence that originates from within us rather than from outside sources.
In our own times, Howard Gardner, a professor of education, says there are not one or even two intelligences, but perhaps eight or more. The American educational system emphasizes linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, rooted in a left-brained, highly verbal and analytical mode. This emphasis is measurable through testing. However, Gardner claims, we also have spatial, kinesthetic, and musical intelligence. Others include interpersonal, intrapersonal, natural, and possibly even existential (Gardner, 2006).
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Introduction
In this chapter, we would describe how the study was carried out.
Research design
The study employs quantitative survey research design to examine displayed artwork in library and how it promotes spirituality, liberal arts and humanities among people.
Research settings
This study was carried out in the University of Ibadan, Oyo state.
The University of Ibadan is a public research university in Ibadan, Nigeria. The university was founded in 1948 as University College Ibadan, one of many colleges within University of London. It became an independent university in 1963 and is the oldest degree awarding institution in Nigeria.
Sources of Data
The data for this study were generated from two main sources; Primary sources and secondary sources. The primary sources include questionnaire, interviews and observation. The secondary sources include journals, bulletins, textbooks and the internet.
Population of the study
A study population is a group of elements or individuals as the case may be, who share similar characteristics. These similar features can include location, gender, age, sex or specific interest. The emphasis on study population is that it constitute of individuals or elements that are homogeneous in description (Prince Udoyen: 2019). The study population constitute of all library staffs of the University, estimated at 60.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Preamble
In this chapter, the focus is to present the data gathered from the library staffs and some random Art students which is consider relevant to this study. A total of 52 copies of the questionnaire was administered to the respondents, however, 48 copies were retrieved in usable form, representing 92% response rate.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
Conclusion
Despite the fact that the highest form of creativity is self-cognition, self-creation of an individual, aesthetic creativity isn’t external to the spirituality and human essence but is rather their constitutive force. Creativity is not a service in relation to metaphysics and ethics, but permeates them, filling them with life. Beauty is as vital to the holistic spiritual human development as truth and virtue: harmony is created by their unity in love. That is why the great Russian writer and thinker Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, repeating Plato’s idea, that “beauty will save the world”.
If faculty in the arts and humanities ground their work in exploring with students the cultural and social dimensions of human life, they can release their disciplines’ potential. With this grounding, they can encourage students to recognize and engage with others’ experiences, and thus to challenge or expand their views of the world. If faculty teach with the goal of helping students understand the human condition, using diverse content with comparative and interdisciplinary components, they can open students’ minds to the possibilities for responsible and ethical participation in democracy, and also to the policy- and decision-making democracy requires.
Suggestions
The arts and humanities can play a significant role in advancing democracy, but three stumbling blocks currently exist to realizing these disciplines’ full potential.
First, in conversations about the potential of the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math), politicians and educators frequently forget the equally important and related role of the arts and humanities. The imagination and creativity that the arts and humanities promote can fuel scientific and technological discoveries. By combining STEM investigations with humanistic inquiry, we can emphasize the value of human life and guard against the isolation and alienation that threaten our culture in this technological age. Politicians and educators should recognize the complementary value of the arts and humanities, and administrators should emphasize this value by, for example, compensating teachers of those subjects as highly as those of science and technology.
Second, the disciplinary work of arts and humanities scholars has become increasingly invested in theory that ignores its subjects’ insights into the complexity of human life, identity, and identification. In Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles, Paula Moya details how experience influences identity, how identity is grounded in social location, and how mediated experience can confer knowledge of the world (2002). By more fully recognizing the arts and humanities’ roles in conferring these messages, theory can help promote understanding of the crucial relationship between democracy and identity.
Third, faculty and practitioners in the arts and humanities sometimes neglect to consider their roles in introducing students to the concept of the common good. These disciplines can help higher education recast the idea of civic engagement to include twenty-first century challenges, such as globalization, diversity, sustainability, water shortages, and the search for humanity in a technologically alienated world. By helping students identify with others in the past and present, and by connecting that identification with applied learning in the arts and humanities, we can help them reach toward common goals for the common good, and thus toward a truly democratic society. When we lose the ability to identify with others, we lose our sense of human experience and our ability to empathize, to see the homeless, to recognize and fight racism, and to advocate for the aged. The arts and humanities can help our students identify human needs and find the motivation to work for the betterment of the human condition.
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