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One instructor’s challenge to get students to think about how their use of digital technology might be impacting their mental wellbeing has resulted in a unique art project featuring work by students of the U of A English Language School (ELS).

The brings together the drawings and reflections of ELS students based on prompts about their favourite places on campus and comfort foods, their hobbies and cultural traditions, and their experiences as international students in Canada.

ELS instructor Dan Ripley says the project grew out of a presentation he gave early this year at the Student Engagement Centre on the sixth floor of Education North.

“It’s a place where students can hang out and get extra help and they have daily activities and workshops and field trips,” Ripley says. “So it helps them with language and acculturating to Canada, it helps them get connected to campus, and helps them learn things that will help them outside the classroom. I volunteered to do some guest talks outside of teaching.”

Ripley says he noticed that some students spent their spare time glued to their phones, while some spent their breaks from class doodling and sketching. The latter awakened his own dormant love of drawing, which he saw an opportunity to share.

“I developed a presentation to try to show students some of the evidence of what happens to your mental health when you spend a lot of time living in a digital world and not much time in the real world. So I delivered that presentation as part of this guest speaker series and at the end of that I presented students with a challenge to spend a minimum half an hour a week drawing something related to one of the Student Engagement Centre themes.”

“You see their experience through their eyes”

The challenge was promoted in the weekly video posted to the and soon the centre’s art board was filling up with drawings depicting ELS students’ preferred snacks, pastimes and campus hangouts, as well as memories of home and some of the frustrations of learning a new language and a new culture. 

At the end of the challenge, Ripley says he wanted to memorialize that creativity in a publication, so he invited students to pick their favourite works and share a few thoughts about them. The artwork and reflections were printed in a booklet and given to the students whose work was featured.

“It’s powerful to see some of the things they write. You see their experience through their eyes,” he says. “It ranges from funny to really profound — some of the difficult things they’re going through in Edmonton, what are they seeing, what’s making them nervous… It’s such a range of styles and abilities, but you can express something with just a few lines.”

Ripley’s efforts to promote student wellbeing earned him a U of A Wellness Champion Award, but he says he couldn’t have done it without the extracurricular learning opportunities facilitated by Zuzana Buchanan and Kevin DeSoete, who managed the Student Engagement Centre during the winter term. He adds that he’d like to make the Art Challenge a regular activity for ELS students.

“I’d like to do this once a year. I think winter is a great time to do this,” he says. “One of the things that’s hard for them is getting used to winter in Edmonton, so giving them something to do besides playing video games or being on their phone, getting them to do something productive can help.”