Exploring works of art is typically the first step in a school art lesson. The art lesson begins with the teacher introducing tidbits of information about an artist, such as Pablo Picasso, before presenting the artist’s most famous works of art. During the presentation, the students describe what they see while the teacher encourages the use of subject-specific vocabulary like colour, line, and texture. Afterward, the students will use crayon pencils, pastels, or paint to produce artwork in the style of or inspired by the artist (Incredibleart, n.d.). To end the lesson, the teacher will ask the students to write a short self-reflection. Within this process, the work of art is simply a stepping-stone to an art-making activity, and the discussion of the art itself is, frankly, quite boring.
Yet within the art museum space, discussing works of art is an exciting experience that promotes curiosity, creativity (Ritchhart & Perkins, 2008), empathy (Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2005, McKay and Monteverde, 2003), and critical thinking (Yenawine, 2013) and encourages students to reflect upon different viewpoints (Greene, Kisida & Brown, 2014). Unlike in the classroom space, the work of art in the art museum space is not simply to be analyzed using a descriptive lens; it is an encounter that draws upon the viewer’s sensibilities to expand their learning. How can discussion of works of art between two different sets of educators be so different?
TALKING ABOUT ART: A BIT OF HISTORY
Firstly, why do we talk about art? It is peculiar that when confronted with a painting, sculpture, installation, or some other form of visual art, we stand silently in front of it to admire it or contemplate its meaning with the hope of learning something new. This practice developed out of the first art museums whose goal was to educate the general public (Brown and Mairesse, 2018), and early twentieth-century North American art museum education programs centred on “instruct(ing) the people as to what constitutes as good taste” (Zeller, 1989, p.32). Traditional methods concentrated on learning the meaning behind the work of art and acquiring subject-specific vocabulary (Ott, 1989). Over time, methods progressed to encouraging individual connections with works of art and recognizing the importance of the viewers’ perspectives (Burnham & Kai-Kee, 2005). With children, museum education programs moved away from the lecture format to a participatory design that included elements of play, storytelling, and hands-on activities along with scaffolding sequences of questions designed to stimulate higher levels of thinking (Sternberg, 1989).
DISCIPLINE-BASED ART EDUCATION
While art museum education has advanced to fostering personal experiences, in schools, less progress has been made. This is likely due to the implementation of Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) in classrooms in the late 1980s. This approach concentrated on students talking about the formal qualities of the work of art, the artist’s artistic choices, and the historical or cultural role of the art object (Dobbs, 1992). At the start of my teaching career, I used DBAE in my art classroom as it is what was taught to me in my preservice university education courses in 1999. While DBAE supported a conversation, it was a very academic and static approach that avoided inviting a reaction from the students. Several contemporary teacher resources have modified DBAE with alterations that invite the student to express their opinion by asking them questions that focus on describing what they are feeling while looking at a work of art (KinderArt). While these are great questions, it is questionable if it draws out a meaningful experience or whether it simply continues to explore the work on a surface level.
VISUAL AND ARTFUL THINKING
Numerous contemporary approaches to discussing works of art are practiced by art museum educators. One such approach is Visual and Artful Thinking. Education researchers Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins (2008) from Harvard University Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero developed Visual Thinking after noticing that effective thinkers express thoughts through several means of communication, including speaking, writing, drawing, etc. Visible Thinking uses works of art to ground the discussion along with various forms of responses. By applying a structured process or routine that applies specific scaffolded questions, teachers encourage students to be creative and develop a sense of curiosity. The teacher takes on the role of a facilitator, allowing the discussions to weave in and out with a bit of uncertainty to challenge the students to consider numerous angles and topics and thus avoid a surface exploration of the work of art. There are over thirty routines developed as a part of Project Zero that focus on developing observation skills and learning to support responses with evidence from the works of art. Students are encouraged to use writing or drawing as a springboard to enter a discussion. Similarly, the Artful Thinking Palette from Project Zero focuses on six thinking dispositions, including exploring points of view, which are used to help students engage with a work of art (Ritchhart & Perkins, 2008).
ART MUSEUM PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
I encountered Visual and Artful Thinking through the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s professional development summer institute, Visual Arts as Sources for Teaching (VAST) in 2018 as part of my doctoral research project on professional development for teachers. Although I was familiar with incorporating drawing and writing in my art classes as approaches to respond to a work of art, I was in awe of how the museum educators brought about a deeper exploration. Much to my surprise, one of the most engaging discussions I encountered there emerged from a two-hundred-year-old painting.
In the gallery we were invited to discuss race and class division using William Redmore Bigg’s A Lady and Her Children Relieving a Cottager, painted in 1781. The subject matter of the oil painting was of an “aristocratic lady and her children offering charity to an impoverished cottage-dwelling family” (Philadelphia Museum of Art, n.d.). The museum educator drew upon one of the Artful Thinking routines: Exploring Viewpoints (Artful Thinking, n.d.). For the activity, we selected a character in a neo-classical painting and wrote a short text from their viewpoint. As we shared our texts, we deliberated on class structures and racism, both historical and contemporary, all while using evidence from the oil painting to support our viewpoints.
I noticed that throughout the discussion the museum educator inserted pertinent information about the painting and the artist in response to our statements. The discussion never transformed into a lecture or a critique of the work of art, instead the information complemented and increased our experience with the painting. Over the course of the five-day summer institute, I participated in other forms of responding to works of art using routines from Visual and Artful Thinking, such as drawing and poetry activities. I noticed that the goal of each of the activities was to generate a meaningful and personal experience with the work of art.
BRINGING IT INTO THE CLASSROOM
Since my introduction to Visual and Artful Thinking, I have applied it regularly in my teaching practice. For 17 years, I was a visual art specialist at an enriched high school. In 2018, I transferred to an elementary school to become a generalist teacher. Even though I teach a variety of subjects— English language arts, mathematics, ethics, social studies, and visual arts—I have incorporated various works of art into all of these subjects to bring about my students’ personal connections with the content and develop their critical thinking skills. Educational researcher Susan Barahal (2008) emphasized that the routines from Visual and Artful Thinking can be applied in all subjects to help strengthen students’ critical thinking. For example, a student may be asked to examine a photograph of a bridge in a science class to better understand the engineering behind it. Yet, art educational researcher Brad Irwin (2008) observed that when teachers apply a visual image to a discipline outside of visual arts, they tend to focus on technical observations and connections with historical context and rarely upon the aesthetic qualities of the art. In other words, even though a teacher may incorporate a visual image into a lesson, the students may not end up observing the qualities that make the visual image a work of art.
CHALLENGES
Admittedly, this is exactly what occurred in my teaching practice. It has taken two years to alter this, and the practices I’ve developed are likely still far from perfect. In the beginning, whenever I used a work of art to launch a social studies or ethics lesson, I tended to avoid discussing the aesthetic qualities of the work of art, as though these did not matter. When I observed this, I altered my questions to students accordingly. As an illustration, I had selected Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With, which depicts Ruby Ridges walking to a desegregated school as a starting point for an ethics lesson on empowerment. After the students discussed the content of the painting, I invited them to reflect upon the scale that the artist intentionally applied between Ruby and the police officers, hoping that the students connected their age with Ruby’s. A student observed a smashed tomato in the lower right-hand corner that had left a trail of red on the wall in the background. This observation sparked a question about sounds and a profound awareness occurred within my students that most likely the sounds were not cheers but shouts from an angry group of adults. All of a sudden, the discussion entered a meaningful space that recognized the courage of this young girl, one which only came about by focusing on the aesthetic qualities of the work, bridging it with the historical context, and encouraging students to express their viewpoints.
One thing the museum educators made appear seamlessly easy, I found to be quite difficult. Instead of relying upon pieces of information that I knew about an artist or a work of art, I spent time researching the subject to become more knowledgeable. With the additional information, I was better prepared to shift the discussions in different directions. Moreover, the museum educators rarely repeated the same routine. I became fixated on using the See, Think, Wonder technique from Questioning and Investigating (Artful Thinking, n.d.) because it was easiest to facilitate; however, my students became quite bored. To avoid them becoming disinterested in talking about art, I drew upon other routines and incorporated more drawing and quick writing responses.
In the end, I realized that even when I presented a work of art using an Artful Thinking routine to discuss in an art lesson, my students did not naturally gravitate to discussing the aesthetic qualities. Researchers Julie
Wren and Edith Cowan (2006) observed that middle school students had complex ideas about art but could not express themselves due to limited art vocabulary. It follows then that developing an art vocabulary is important. Now when starting an art lesson, I regularly write three vocabulary words on the chalkboard and encourage my students to apply the words while exploring the work of art. I have noticed that after a few months, the conversations have become richer because the students are more comfortable with the art vocabulary, and they are more familiar with the routines from the Visible and Artful Thinking.
FINAL REMARKS
In short, a work of art in an art lesson can be more than a starting point to making art. By drawing upon Visual and Artful Thinking routines frequently used in the art museum space in my classroom, conversations about works of art were significantly altered. Instead of concentrating on the work of art as a prelude to creating an art project with pencils, paper, and paints, I transformed my lessons to include discussions that supported my students’ sense of curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking. Instead of simply using a work of art to support an art project, it is important for teachers to envision how artworks can transform a lesson and develop into a meaningful experience for students.
References
Artful Thinking (n.d.). Thinking Palette. http://pzartfulthinking.org/?page_id=2
Barahal, S. L. (2008). Thinking about thinking. Phi Delta Kappan, 90(4), 298-302.
Brown, K., & Mairesse, F. (2018). The definition of the museum through its social role. Curator: The Museum Journal, 61(4), 525-539.
Burnham, R., & Kai-Kee, E. (2005). The art of teaching in the museum. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 39(1), 65-76.
Dobbs, S. M. (1992). The DBAE handbook: An overview of discipline-based art education.
Greene, J. P., Kisida, B., & Bowen, D. H. (2014). The educational value of field trips: Taking students to an art museum improves critical thinking skills, and more. Education Next, 14(1), 78-87.
Increadibaleart. (n.d.). Picasso Face Pastels. https://www.incredibleart.org/lessons/elem/Jeanette-picasso.htm
Irwin, B. (2008). Learning about art in the classroom: Can we learn some lessons from art gallery practice. The Arts in Education. Critical Perspectives from Teacher Educators School for Visual and Creative Arts in Education, 40-56.
Kinderart. (n.d.). How To Look At (And Approach) A Work of Art. https://kinderart.com/blog/how-to-look-at-art/
McKay, S. W., & Monteverde, S. R. (2003). Dialogic looking: Beyond the mediated experience. Art Education, 56(1), 40-45.
Ott, R. W. (1989). Teaching criticism in museums. Museum education: History, theory and practice, 172-193.
Philadelphia Museum of Art (n.d.) philamuseum.org/collection/object/50366
Ritchhart, R., & Perkins, D. (2008). Making thinking visible. Educational leadership, 65(5), 57.
Sternberg, S. (1989). The art of participation. Museum education: History, theory, and practice, 154-171.
Wren, J., & Haig, Y. (2006). Children Talking to Understanding Aesthetics in Visual Art. International Journal of Learning, 13(6).
Yenawine, P. (2013). Visual thinking strategies: Using art to deepen learning across school disciplines. Harvard Education Press.
Zeller, T. (1989) The historical and philosophical foundations of art museum education in America. In N. Berry and S. Mayer (eds), Museum Education: History, Theory, and Practice, pp. 10–89. Reston: The National Art Education Association.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Julie Etheridge
Dr. Julie Etheridge is an experienced visual arts specialist, elementary generalist teacher and researcher who has worked in public and post-secondary settings for over 22 years. Her research focuses on professional development for teachers, curriculum design, and arts education. She is currently a Field Supervisor at McGill University.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Spring 2023 issue.
