Submission of Paper for: World Conference on Arts Education Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century

When ‘trouble can be good’… Imms (2004) describes how the arts was used as a vehicle for identity building of a troubled dyslexic boy who eventually built his confidence through weekly art classes and finally gained early admission into doing his Bachelors degree in Fine Arts. How true, I thought. I have always had this funny feeling about a certain type of ‘attention-seeking students ’ that kept on appearing in my art classes ever since I started teaching back in 1986. Conditions such as attention deficit disorder may co-occur with dyslexia (Clark & Uhry, 1995; Spafford & Grosser, 1996). The subjects of my fascination always were students with known behavioral problems or labeled as ‘troublemakers ’ in school. It was during visual art lessons that these students seem to shine and flourish, enjoying the compliments they were deprived elsewhere. It seemed that with visual art activities at hand, they were so absorbed and transfixed that none would have guessed that they were the same ‘troublemaker ’ outside the visual art classroom. Of course, at that point in time in Malaysia, I have never heard of ‘dyslexia’, nor the screening instrument or probably the financial means to screen these unique set of students that kept on appearing in my visual ar