ABSTRACT
Many teachers in special education have become acutely conscious in recent years of entitlement and empowerment issues for their pupils. Traditionally in the education of pupils with special needs, art has been regarded as good for them. The emergence of art therapy as a discipline in recent years has highlighted the potentially cathartic emotional release through art activity. The overlap between art therapy and art education is significant and should be recognised and acknowledged in practice. Many children with learning difficulties, however, may take a very long time to pass through a stage of development in art. The DES places art in the context of the whole curriculum, and considers links between art and other subjects and implications for cross-curricular work. Imagination is a capacity to explore and experiment with memory, and to combine ideas rationally or irrationally as a form of creative, divergent thinking.
