Artistic biography: a didactic device to foster healing for young Yezidis in Iraq through art

Résumé En

The Yezidi community living in Iraq experienced genocide in August 2014 by the Islamic State group. Many people are now traumatized living in IDP camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Non-formal education programs through the conduct of artistic activities are set up fostering the healing of youth. Our current research is part of this educational framework, and aims at transforming the postures and skills of facilitators by designing didactic devices based on artistic biography. It aims at the narration through art, of individual and collective life experiences (focused on culture, identities, spaces) through creative processes. This research, based on the theory of joint action in didactics, strives to achieve a cooperative didactic engineering. Under certain conditions that we will expose, the design and implementation of this didactic device created by the collective could participate in the transformation of ordinary practices of facilitators. In particular, this would respond to the need to inscribe biographical references in order to reconstitute the landscape of what constitutes the culture of young Yezidis. As research in two camps in Iraq is ongoing, this paper presents the design of the artistic biography and the scenario of collaborative didactic engineering by detailing the preliminary results of our study.