Artistic expression: the caring concept assignment

Two files, one deadline, and the paper is the graded object. The artistic expression is real work — a drawing, sculpture, collage, poem, short story or dance — but the five content criteria all belong to the one-to-two page paper, and only one of the five is about the artwork itself. That ratio should drive your planning. Decide what you want to say about caring first, then choose the form that can carry it: a poem can hold ambivalence and a collage can hold multiplicity, where a single drawing tends to say one thing. Choosing the medium before the idea is why so many of these submissions end up with a competent picture and a paper that cannot explain why it looks like that. It also helps to sketch the paper's five paragraphs before making anything, because the paper will expose whether the idea was ever there.

The second criterion — *a personal definition of caring; include principles of holistic care* — is two requirements in one line and the second half is routinely dropped. A personal definition should be a definition, not a sentiment: a sentence of the form "caring is X, expressed as Y, and distinguished from Z", where Z is the thing it is most often confused with. Holistic care then has to appear as principles, which means naming the dimensions — physical, psychological, social, spiritual — and saying what attending to all of them requires that attending to one does not. If your definition would still be true with the word "holistic" deleted from the brief, the second half has not been answered and a marker checking criteria line by line will notice. The most useful contrast is usually caring against competence: both are required, they are not the same thing, and saying how they differ makes a definition testable.

Criteria two and three pull in different directions on purpose. Your personal definition is yours; the third criterion asks for *definitions of caring found in nursing literature that support your perspective*, which requires published theory. That is a well-populated field — Watson's theory of human caring with its transpersonal relationship and caritas processes, Leininger on culture care, Swanson's caring processes, Roach's attributes — and the instruction is that the literature supports your view, not that you adopt someone else's. The strongest papers name where their own definition departs from the theorist they cite, because a personal definition that turns out to be a paraphrase of Watson is not personal, and saying so honestly is more sophisticated than pretending otherwise. Disagreement is permitted and often welcome, provided it is argued from your own practice rather than asserted against a theorist you have summarised in one line.

The fourth criterion is the bridge and it is the one the whole submission depends on: *an explanation of the artistic expression you chose and how it represents caring*. Two things there — why this form, and how this particular piece embodies the definition you gave in criterion two. Be specific about the work's own features. If it is a collage, say what the juxtapositions do; if it is a poem, say what the repetition or the line breaks enact; if it is a dance, say what the movement quality communicates that words would not. Then close the loop by tying at least one feature to one element of your definition. A paper that describes the artwork without connecting it to the definition has produced two unrelated halves. The clearest structure is one sentence per feature: what the feature is, what it does to a viewer, and which part of your definition it carries.

Practical constraints are specified precisely and worth checking against your plan before you start making anything: videos one to three minutes, poems and short stories no more than one page double-spaced, drawings and collages formatted on an 8 x 10 document, sculptures submitted as a jpg, both files uploaded together. The paper is one to two pages, which is short for five criteria — roughly a paragraph each, with the reflection on your own practice folded into the first. Start the paper with the reflection the brief opens on, because a definition that emerges from something you have actually done in practice reads very differently from one assembled out of the literature. Check the submission format for your chosen medium before you finish making it, since a sculpture photographed badly or a poem that runs to two pages fails a requirement that had nothing to do with the idea.