Acknowledgements
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence . The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course: […]
Conclusion
This free course provided an introduction to studying the arts and humanities. It took you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner.
5 Studying the arts, expectations and concerns
Now we would like you to develop a little further the work you have done. You have captured some of your own ideas about approaching the arts. You have been ‘trying to trap some of the ideas floating about in your mind’. Exercise We would like you now to write a paragraph of about 250 words on […]
4 Concerns about study
Exercise Let us continue this process of thinking, writing and sifting. As we have suggested, many students approaching study have worries about what lies ahead. Let’s look at some worries that students have expressed to us. We will give you six statements; identify any that apply to you on a list, and add others you […]
3 Hopes and expectations about study
Exercise Record your six reasons, but this time try to place your reasons in rank order, beginning with the reasons that seem most important to you. Discussion We hope that this process has made you think (though probably not for the first time) about why you are beginning to study the arts. You may already […]
2 Reasons for choosing to study the arts
Exercise Why have you chosen this course? Please jot down your reasons for choosing this course, either in your notebook or in the course Forum. We suggest you list six points, but it doesn’t matter if you record less than six reasons or whether you want to write more. Remember, there are no wrong or […]
1.1 Introducing the arts and humanities
This course is an introduction to studying the arts and humanities. It takes you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and improve your confidence as an independent learner. So this introductory course will serve several purposes
1 Studying the arts and humanities
Learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
Introduction
This course is an introduction to studying the arts and humanities. It takes you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and improve your confidence as an independent learner. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 1 study in Arts and Humanities.
Acknowledgements
This free course was written by Dr Zoë Walkington, Professor Sara Haslam, Professor Graham Pike, Dr Edmund King and Dr Siobhan Campbell. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence . The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject […]
References
Appel, M., Gnambs, T., Richter, T., Green, M. C. (2015) ‘The transportation scale- short form (TS-SF)’, Media Psychology, 18(2), pp. 243–266. Bal, M. P., Veltkamp, M. (2013) ‘How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation’, PLoSONE 8(1) e55341. Bartlett, F. C. (1932) Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University […]
Glossary
cognitive perspective – Cognition refers to the mental processes that take place in the brain, so cognitive perspective refers to how someone perceives and thinks about the world.emotional state – Psychologists tend to differentiate between traits (which are long term or enduring tendencies) and states (which are more temporary or fleeting). An ‘emotional state’ is […]
Where next?
If you’ve enjoyed this course you can find more free resources and courses on OpenLearn. You may be particularly interested in these OpenLearn articles: Or you might like to take a look at How stories shape our minds , a collaboration between the BBC and The Open University. New to University study? You may be interested in the […]
Conclusion
While often thought of primarily as a form of entertainment, reading books offers so much more as an engaged activity as well. As you have learned in this course, reading can lead to psychological changes and can have positive impacts on our wellbeing in distressing times. As we write this course in 2021, the potential […]
11 Therapeutic benefits of writing and reading
Creative Writing as a discipline within academia and as a practice (both amateur and professional) outside of that arena, has reading at its core. Undergraduates learn to ‘read as a writer’ in order to develop technique and in community settings, in evening classes and in hobby clubs for all ages, creative practice is accompanied by […]
10 Reading throughout history
‘Take choice of all my Library, and so beguile thy sorrow’ Helen Mary Gaskell, 1918 During the Covid-19 pandemic, you might have noticed how much media attention was being given to the idea of reading offering one important way of responding to a crisis of this kind. Reading, as suggested everywhere from BBC podcasts to […]
9 What did reading do to you?
You have now had a go at reading activities that illustrate two of the psychological processes that can mean you become really, closely involved in a book: identification and transportation. In terms of the psychological research, the story does not end here, however. Psychologists have shown that the processes associated with engaging with narratives can […]
8 Transportation and empathy
So how does transportation relate to empathy (i.e. the first psychological test you did in this course)? To return to the initial questions you answered on the interpersonal reactivity index you might expect that transportation may relate strongly to the fantasy scale (which measured the degree to which you imaginatively inhabit book characters). This has […]
7 How did you relate to the story world?
This activity measured the extent to which you felt like you had travelled into the story world. Psychologists call this transportation. Transportation is the extent to which you feel mentally and emotionally immersed in the story world (Sestir and Green, 2010) and can be likened to the sense that you, as a reader, become engrossed (Oliver, […]