Emotions Behind Shadows and Lights: Exploring Emotions, Shadows and Light through Biology, Physics and Art (SOI-GR-611)
Author: Margarita Dakoronia, Chrysoula Georgakopoulou
School/Organisation: 32nd Primary School of Piraeus, Greece
Below is a summary of the activities, but you can download the full Story of Reuse and its annexes here in Word and PDF.
This Story of Reuse describes an interdisciplinary educational project entitled “Emotions Between Shadows and Light”, carried out with 22 primary school students. The project aimed to connect science and art through the exploration of emotions, light and shadows. It was based on the idea that art can create and communicate feelings, while science helps us understand how light works as a natural phenomenon and how human beings perceive and emotionally respond to visual stimuli.
Starting point: Why emotions, light and shadows?
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 2 hours
The central pedagogical question of the project was: How do light and shadows influence what we feel, what we see and how we understand a work of art?
This question gave students the opportunity to work both as young scientists and as young artists. They observed, experimented, interpreted and created.
Introduction through art observation
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 2 hours
We started with the presentation of selected artworks from the Europeana repository (Annex 3). We intentionally chose paintings in which light and shadows play an important role in shaping the atmosphere and the scene, guiding attention and expressing emotional tension, calmness, mystery or hope.
Connecting art with the science of emotions – Biology
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 1 hour
In the next stage, we discussed emotions from a scientific perspective. In a way appropriate for primary school students, we talked about how emotions are responses to internal and external stimuli, and how the brain helps us interpret what we see and connect it with memories, experiences and feelings (Annex 5).
Physics exploration: light and shadow as natural phenomena
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 3 hours
After the emotions and artistic introduction, students moved to the scientific investigation of light and shadows. This stage was directly connected to their grade’s Physics curriculum (Annex 6).
Using torches, classroom materials and simple objects, students carried out experiments to explore:
- how light travels,
- how shadows are formed,
- how transparent, translucent and opaque materials behave,
- how the size and shape of a shadow change depending on the position of the light source,
- how distance influences shadow length and clarity.
During this step we did the Eratosthenes experiment (Annex 7) for measuring the perimeter of the Earth calculating the shadow of a stick in our schoolyard on the spring equinox (22nd of March).
Inquiry with Europeana resources
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 1 hour
Once students had built both emotional and scientific background knowledge, they returned to the Europeana artworks for a deeper inquiry phase. They observed the same pictures as before (Annex 3), but this time they used a simple observation worksheet prepared for the activity (Annex 8).
Creative production
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 1 hour
In the final creative phase, students designed their own works inspired by both scientific concepts and artistic expression. Some created shadow compositions with objects and torches, others made drawings or mixed-media artworks showing emotions through contrasts of light and darkness, and others wrote short texts or titles to accompany their visual creations (some are shown in Annex 9 together with pictures from the whole project).
Digital comic creation through ICT and AI-supported storytelling
Preparation of materials: 1 hour – Teaching time: 4 hours
At this stage, the project was extended through an ICT-based creative process in which students transformed their ideas, emotions and scientific understanding into digital comics. This phase functioned as a natural continuation of the creative production stage, allowing students to move from visual experimentation with light and shadow to multimodal digital storytelling. Through comic creation, students combined image, dialogue, setting, character design and narrative structure in order to communicate emotional and scientific meaning in an original way.
Presentation and reflection
Teaching time: 1 hour
At the end of the project, students presented their creations to their classmates. They explained both the artistic and the scientific side of their work. This was one of the richest moments of the implementation because students used vocabulary from physics, art and emotional literacy in the same presentation.
For example, students spoke about where the light source was placed, why the shadow had a certain size, and what emotion they wanted the viewer to feel. They also reflected on how an artwork can communicate without words, and how scientific knowledge can improve artistic choices.
Public Domain : the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Nationalmuseum Sweden