09.40  Exploring Perceptive Experiences Through Multi-Sensory Learning

This presentation will explore how I learned about my heritage through multi-sensory learning (MSL). Working with my grandmother’s story of survival during the Holocaust, I am investigating MSL as an interactive approach to teaching, creating, and learning by way of my family history. This presentation will focus on my story of visiting key sites in Poland, which added new dimensions to my understanding of my grandmother’s story through MSL. I explore substantial connections between the experience of being in the same geographic locations as my grandmother during the Holocaust and my current efforts to embody historical contexts using storytelling. I explore my embodied experience of living history on this trip, and how I have come to understand my family stories in relation to My Self. Within the context of teaching, MSL is an interactive approach to pedagogy that enables learners to make connections between their own identities and the greater world within the context of stories. Through this work, I am also exploring an ontological approach to studying heritage through multi-sensory learning using creative art practices. I will invite the audience to a preview of the multi-sensory art installation that I created as an effort to further understand my grandmother’s story, and, moreover, to establish a discourse around how art educators can teach the Holocaust in more meaningful and sensory ways that will help translate experiences in the classroom. By attending to Holocaust education with creative art practices, I am focusing on the integral value that stories and creative art practices bring to improve historical knowledge as well as art practice.