Thinking Like an Artist

By Director of Visual and Performing Arts Barbara Weinstein
Imagine that your child is in a school where all arts classes train toward habits of mind to help students learn to think like artists beyond art class. Could this transfer of knowledge flow seamlessly from the art classroom to real life situations? In their groundbreaking research, authors Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema and Kimberly M. Sheridan of Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, lay out the case for the effects of visual arts education on student learning across the curriculum.

The Studio Thinking Project, a multi-year project as part of Project Zero, analyzed learning in visual arts and investigates how the arts are taught and what students actually take away. The book poses the question, “Does experience in the arts change students’ minds so that they can approach the world as an artist would?”

The study, which examined visual arts learning in K-12 schools in California and Massachusetts, identified eight “studio habits of mind,”—skills of an artist that may be important across different disciplines.

8 Studio Habits of Mind
  1. Develop Craft: Learning to use tools, materials, artistic conventions; and learning to care for tools, materials and space.
  2. Engage and Persist: Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus conducive to working and persevering at tasks.
  3. Envision: Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed, and imagine possible next steps in making a piece.
  4. Express: Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning.
  5. Observe: Learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary “looking” requires, and thereby to see things that otherwise might not be seen.
  6. Reflect: Learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one’s work or working process, and learning to judge one’s own work and working process and the work of others.
  7. Stretch and Explore: Learning to reach beyond one’s capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan, and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes.
  8. Understand (Arts) Community: Learning to interact as an artist with other artists (i.e., in classrooms, in local arts organizations, and across the art field) and within the broader society. Arts is in parenthesis here as it can easily be switched with other disciplines, like science or history.

The authors of
Studio Thinking state that students should be given opportunities to think like artists, just as they should be given the opportunity to approach the world mathematically, scientifically, historically and linguistically. “The arts are another way of knowing the world—as important as the other disciplines to our societal health.”

Much research has gone into finding causal relationships between studying the arts and excelling in core academic subject areas, yet almost no findings publish those relationships as absolutes. The authors of Studio Thinking make mention that the first lesson in any statistics class is not to confuse correlation with causality. Numerous studies cite the correlations between increased spatial understanding and the study of visual arts and dance, and the benefits of the study of music to support mathematics learning, but there are inconclusive evidence for increased and improved learning in either.

It’s more reasonable then to embrace the arts for the power and passion they can naturally and organically instill in our children whether they go on to be working artists or writers or mathematicians or scientists. The ability to gain deeper meaning and insight as a result of studying in the arts is a byproduct that won’t stay in the studio or on the stage but will help individuals grow and flourish wherever life takes them. The ability to observe and see things differently will lead to deeper appreciation of one’s environment and the ability to problem solve and to approach the world with creative vigor.

An important point to emphasize is that all arts programs are not created equal and that learning doesn’t always transfer from the classroom to beyond. The ability to think like an artist is a gift of quality arts education and one that La Jolla Country Day School is proud to embrace as important in the complete experience of a student’s educational journey.
 
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