Symposium and conference papers for art educators
“The visual arts are no longer a domain where knowledge, techniques, or properties can be neatly defined... the educational response to this will need to be seen in activities where meaning is explored and grasped through more than the organising principles of line, shape, colour etc.”
As a teacher educator with an interest in assisting teachers to promote higher order thinking across the curriculum, what I value most in terms of theoretical underpinnings for my teaching may (will) differ to your preferred models. However, I wish to introduce some theories with practical strategies that have assisted me to engage students at all levels in higher-order thinking. They demonstrate that by using the visual arts as the vehicle for thinking and inquiry; historic, technological, scientific, sociological and political dimensions of the curriculum can also be explored.
The new Victorian Essential Learnings (EL) curriculum document has now been released for teacher validation in 2005. Its focus on the student as learner, rather than the subject as information, means that teachers across disciplines will soon be planning integrated curricula and evaluation models (with student involvement where possible). Delivery of discrete subject content – if there ever was such a thing – is not appropriate in this model.
Most teachers will not fear this so-called "new" curriculum approach because it is just the 'official paperwork' catching up with schools' practical responses to the MYRAD (Middle Years Research and Development) findings (Hill & Russell, 1999). Extensive research in the 90s found a lack of engagement in the middle years of schooling. Recommendations that resulted can be grouped around 4 main themes:
Pedagogy |
ensure creative & critical thinking are occurring, |
Curriculum |
encourage the student voice, |
Organisation |
flexible timetabling, |
Teacher's role |
mentor and facilitator of student inquiry, |
As you consider these points, you can put a tick against many already happening in your classroom or school. What is the most difficult to achieve? What is beyond your control? Just worry about what you can change.
We are assured by The Department of Education and Training (DE&T) that discipline content need not alter when we plan around the new curriculum standards. But now, with the existence of the Thinking, Personal, Interpersonal and Communication Domains, teachers will also need to consider whether they are incorporating these standards when planning.
Because of my teaching and research background I am particularly interested in the Thinking Domain in the new EL documents. Here three dimensions have been highlighted:
These thinking skills represent ways we are already engaging students in the visual arts. The new documents require us to be more explicit about how and when. I have included below a brainstormed list (Boyd, 1994) of some of the thinking and process skills developed when making art and discussing visual arts issues.
Art making |
Aesthetic perception |
Evaluative reflection |
discovering |
observing |
reviewing |
producing |
selecting |
criticising |
designing |
visualising |
reflecting |
manipulating |
applying knowledge |
comparing |
experimenting |
[e]valuating |
analysing |
imagining |
hypothesising |
contextualising |
risk-taking |
discriminating |
assessing |
organising |
validating |
appraising |
predicting |
adapting |
|
deliberating |
refining |
|
inventing |
intuiting |
Are other disciplines able to show that they incorporate as many skills? It is time we promoted arts' contribution to an integrated curriculum. But before we do, perhaps we need to reflect on the ways we are developing our students thinking skills.
Contemporary thinking about curriculum requires us to reflect on our role and what best promotes student learning. I would like to think that we:
The visual arts are no longer a domain where knowledge, techniques, or properties can be neatly defined. Today's art requires the making of meaning, and understanding it as integrated with digital technology, sound, graffiti, or performance as often as not. We know that the educational response to this will need to be seen in activities where meaning is explored and grasped through more than the organising principles of line, shape, colour etc.
Efland (2002) had a vision of an integrated theory of cognition that offered a new conceptual structure for the visual arts. It incorporated thinking about postmodernism, deconstruction, digital technology etc (descriptors that can no longer be ignored):
Reality is a construction guided by individual needs and interests alongside social norms.
The mind's potential is reached through the acquisition of cultural tools like language, number and artworks.
Knowledge is constructed around social purposes with emphasis placed on individual's making meaning within a cultural context.
Learning is guided by metacognition facilitated by adults who provide appropriate scaffolding.
Knowledge is organised around the motives and purposes of the learner (includes the disciplines)
Meaning is found when learners integrate knowledge into their "lifeworld".
Art educators are fairly comfortable with these concepts, but what about the teachers not trained in art or conversant with contemporary trends - those who panic when confronted with art beyond Impressionism? With The Arts now being Essential Learnings with standards to be addressed at all levels, these teachers (and we) will need strategies that offer entry points.
Some theories that I believe give them (and us) something to hang our hats on are: philosophical inquiry; thinking dispositions; stage theories of artistic and aesthetic development; and cognitive acceleration. These models offer inroads that help us assist students to explore past and present art as well as their own and other students' work. At the same time, we need to be keeping in mind the EL requirement to be explicit about how we are building our students' personal learning, their communication, interpersonal and thinking skills.
The model first applied to school education by Matthew Lipman offers two major strands – discussion skills developed by being philosophical, and a classroom environment called a 'community of inquiry' that supports this.
Being philosophical means:
The community of inquiry has both dialogical and social elements. Here the teacher, as the facilitator of dialogue, is a co-inquirer with the class. The teacher builds on students' interests and ideas by using their questions as the starting point for discussion. There is emphasis on respect for each individual's ideas and allowing time to reflect (metacognition) and dig deeply into issues such as reality and truth. Developing genuine listening skills, the confidence to express opinions, and self-correction: "Wait a minute I agree with Sim, I was wrong to say he is racist", are each important features.
I have written at length about this model in both Critical and Creative Thinking (1995) and Designing a Thinking Curriculum (2004). Strategies for ensuring that students will develop higher order thinking skills and inquire collaboratively into big issues are described in detail in these texts.
David Perkins and members of Harvard University's Project Zero's "Art Works For Schools" team, named thinking dispositions that they viewed as central to responding to and making art. I think there are obvious similarities between these dispositions and those fostered by philosophical inquiry.
Perkins maintained that in order to develop strategies for thinking and talking about art we need to develop the following dispositions:
For Perkins, it is important to encourage our students to dig deeply into what they already know and reason about what they perceive. We would like them to come to clearly articulated, well-evidenced conclusions about the work and their experiences of it. By looking longer and in more systematic way, they can perhaps see what they at first missed.
Contemporary art often makes using existing categories difficult. There is often little in the work to assist interpretation – is it even art? This means part of the experience is how the work puzzles the viewer.
The community of inquiry model is invaluable here as it provides the mind-set and preparedness to dig deeply. Start with examples of art that "snag" the students' interest, offer them plenty to talk about and about which opinions are not right or wrong – not works that we want to tell them all about. They will come to those later, once we have hooked them in and helped them to be confident about expressing opinions. Gradually work towards the difficult pieces (if there is a "piece" to examine!).
Perkins believed that the visual arts offer a supportive context for reflective thinking for six main reasons:
These six points make a good starting point for incorporating the new EL Domains of Thinking, Communication, and the Personal and Interpersonal Learner.
What Perkins reminds us is that when examining their own and others' works a student's perception can be broadened if they:
Look longer & harder, discovering what is not first seen.
Hear other's perceptions of the same work.
Puzzle over the multiple interpretations of a piece.
Use technical aspects to support points of view.
Use terms that help them explain their lines of reasoning.
Articulate questions and possible resolutions.
We need to ensure that both a suitable classroom environment for discussion and the artworks encountered make the above possible.
Naturally, the stages of a student's development are limited by the extent of their knowledge and understanding of art works, concepts and values. Have you noticed that the development of understandings in the arts was absent in Piaget's theory? Michael Parsons, when attempting to address this absence, and influenced as much by artists and philosophers as by psychologists, focussed on concepts used when individuals talk about art – i.e. a kind of history of ideas within a philosophy of art. A few years later, Housen mapped the progress of inexperienced viewers' responses to works requiring complex observation. Similar to Perkins, she believed that looking carefully and puzzling facilitated cognitive shifts. I have juxtaposed Housen's (2001) and Parson's (1987) stages in the table below.
As with any stage theory, this table acts as a starting point for thinking about whether students are moving through developmental stages. No stage should be aligned with a particular age and so I have avoided adding any ages to this table. But are these stages useful at all today in our individually constructed perceptions of the world? I think so, if we remember that we are trying to move the students from factual, brief encounters (!) to complex, considered exploration. Both theorists had names for their stages, but I felt they cluttered table with detail, so I have removed them for the purposes of this paper.
Stage |
Stage |
Verbal example |
BUT IN 2004? |
Decisions driven by pleasure gained. |
1. Concrete observations. Using emotions to observe. |
I like it because of the colour/dog etc. |
|
Attractive subject matter and realism are objective grounds for judgments |
2. Use own perceptions and a "realism" framework |
Ugh, That's gross!! What sort of animal is that meant to be!? I could do better! |
|
Intensity and interest ensure the experience is genuine. |
3. Adopt a critical and analytic stand – believe meaning and message can be rationalised. |
You can tell the artist felt sorry for the model ... by the way she has dressed him. |
|
Significance associated with social rather than individual achievement. |
4. Critical skills replace emotions as viewers let emotions emerge. Insights and comparisons explored. |
See the tension in the lines on the beggar's face... |
...entirely different to the way Rauschenberg/ O'Keefe/ Haacke etc would have depicted it. What face? |
Questions the critical consensus that may have formed around works or values. |
5. Viewers combine personal contemplation with universal concerns. |
The style is too loose and self-indulgent ... |
But who am I to comment on another culture's way of depicting chaos/love etc. |
The Arts Reasoning and Thinking Skills (A.R.T.S) program is a Cognitive Acceleration model developed in the UK that attempts to intervene with the natural development pattern of thinking by accelerating it. As such, it is an 'intervention' model. In this model the teacher provides interventions, not instructions. Work is pitched ahead of student ability i.e. it must be cognitively demanding and in a 'discomfort zone' (shades of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development).
A series of well-constructed Arts lessons have been designed. There is specific art-based vocabulary to be taught or revised each lesson (e.g. representation, criteria, classify). A taxonomy of learning objectives (standards) underpins the program, and the thinking agenda around which the visual and performing arts lessons are based, is carefully constructed.
Each lesson has five stages. I have briefly summarised one lesson below:
1. Concrete preparation – setting the scene
A tranquil scene (e.g. Monet's 'Bridge at Giverny' or a modern equivalent). What feelings are evoked? What techniques has the artist used to achieve this?
2. Construction – building on the known
What music might accompany such a scene? Which instruments would be appropriate?
3. Cognitive conflict – a new, conflicting element is introduced
But wait – it has just been revealed in the newspaper that four bodies have been discovered here. What feelings do you now have? What music might best represent these feelings? Which instruments?
4. Metacognition – thinking about the session and their thinking.
How did you feel when you learned about the bodies? How did your thinking change? Classifying the instruments was helpful/not helpful because...
5. Bridging – making connections to other discipline areas.
Why do we create stereotypes in our minds? When is it useful and when unhelpful? How will this lesson help you improve your art appreciation/your music?
As can be seen if one makes a comparison, although steeped in psychological theory, this model compliments both dispositions and philosophical inquiry approaches.
Based on the important role engagement the visual arts can play in improving thinking, this program assists students to learn explicit strategies to organise the way they think (the teaching of thinking). It offers opportunities for students to reflect on, monitor, evaluate and plan their thinking (metacognition). It also establishes a classroom environment where good thinking and dispositions for thinking are modelled, valued and supported. Students are helped to 'bridge' from both abstract and concrete thinking strategies to other curriculum areas and real life. Peer interaction and opportunities for social construction are essential ingredients.
Given the models outlined above, it is obvious that we need to re-look at our current assessment models. Presenting learning in the visual arts can take any form – e.g. a multi-media project, seminar presentation, production, exhibition etc. – hopefully to a broad audience.
If we want to evaluate the discussion component of our students' work in conjunction with the making, then here is a possible list of skills to assess:
a. Sensory skills – e.g. listening skills.
b. Manipulative skills – uses knowledge in creative ways
c. Personal expressiveness – shows aesthetic awareness
d. Vernacular – meaningful use of language
e. Speculative – e.g. possibility thinking
f. Idiomatic – linking un-related ideas
g. Symbolic – uses knowledge to arrive at original ideas.
This list was composed by Swanick in 1979 but it holds up well when we consider that art today is no longer a domain where knowledge, techniques and properties can necessarily be defined and where there is so much more to consider. We can each add categories we feel are missing or delete others.
The Essential Learnings requirement to make meaning and foster understanding in the visual arts using cognitive and new socio-cultural approaches and digital technologies as well as stylistic organising principles means we have to re-think. Hopefully this brief introduction to the theories that underpin my planning will assist you to reflect on yours and how they influence your curriculum design.
Boyd, J. (1994) Thinking and the Visual Arts: The Human Context. In J. Edwards (ed) Thinking: International Interdisciplinary Perspectives . Melbourne: Hawker Brownlow.
Efland, A. D. (2002) Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum . New York: Teachers College Press
Hill, P. & Russell, J. (1999) Systematic Whole-School Reform of the Middle Years of Schooling. Paper presented at the Middle Years of Schooling Conference.
Housen, A. (2001) Voices of Viewers: Iterative Research, theory and Practice. Arts and Learning Research Journal . 17 (1) 2–12.
Lipman, M. (2003) Thinking in Education (2 nd edition) UK: Cambridge University Press.
Parsons, M. (1987) How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience . New York: Cambridge University Press.
Perkins, D. (1994) The Intelligent Eye . Los Angeles: Getty Foundation
Shayer, M. & Adey, P. Eds. (2002) Learning intelligence: Cognitive Acceleration across the curriculum from 5 to 15 years. Buckingham: Open University Press
Art Works for Schools . Project Zero & Massachusetts Cultural Council. http://pzweb.harvard.edu?Research/ArtWks.htm 9.11.2004
Swanick, K. (1979) A Basis for Music Education. New York: Routledge.
Wilks, S. (2004) Designing a Thinking Curriculum . Melbourne: Australian Academy of the Arts
Perkins suggested that those [teachers and students] with little art knowledge could simply ask the following questions in order to see and understand more: What's going on here? What's surprising here? and What was artist up to?
First designed in the Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education model.
