Stepping up to Complex Picture Composition: How Adolescent Students with Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties Succeed at Picture Making with Movable Layout Technique

Movable Layout Technique (MLT) is a research-based instructional adaptation to teach art in classrooms with adolescent students with emotional and behavioral difficulties (EBD). With MLT these students unexpectedly find themselves in a complex process of designing, experimenting and composing. They are easily and successfully guided into the artistic terrain and encouraged to independently lay out pictures and creative compositions in a fun way. Given the chance to arrange figure elements against a background initially on a trial basis, then to manipulate them in new and different ways, makes perspective and the pictorial space concrete for the student as foreground-background, in front of-behind, etc. and dynamically tangible, comprehensible and adjustable. Photocopies are made of the prepared layout. These copies are then enhanced using various artistic methods, including painting, flat screen printing or computer-based image processing applications. In this way, escape-maintained disruptive student behavior can be circumvented. With MLT students step up to complex picture composition and spatial organization. MLT opens up ways to freer forms of artistic work.