Learning Through Art

Last updated

Learning Through Art is an educational program of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. LTA pairs practicing artists with participating public elementary school classrooms throughout the five boroughs of New York City. These resident artists spend one day a week for a period of 10 or 20 weeks working with classroom instructors to create and execute an art curriculum for the students that ties in with current Guggenheim exhibitions and supports the core curriculum learning inside of the classroom. Participating classrooms visit the Guggenheim multiple times throughout the duration of their program, and student artwork is shown in a culminating exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in their annual A Year With Children showcase.

Contents

History

In 1970, in response to the cutting of art and music programs in New York City public schools, Natalie K. Lieberman started a program called Learning to Read Through the Arts. Later becoming a Guggenheim trustee, in 1994 the program was merged with the Guggenheim Foundation. In its first 35 years, LTA has worked with hundreds of resident artists to serve approximately 138,500 New York City schoolchildren in dozens of public schools.

Methods

At the core of the LTA philosophy is the belief that artwork can, and, in today's image-saturated culture, should, be taught to be read much like a traditional text. Teaching students to talk about art the way they would talk about text gives them a forum to practice critical-thinking skills and become active participants in a work, be that work visual or text based. Unlike text, however, works of art provide a highly accessible way for students to practice these necessary reading skills without having to worry about stumbling over a difficult word, flip through pages to find a quote, or struggle with decoding written text.

Additionally, it may be easier to find visual artworks open to a wide array of interpretation - thus lending themselves to be contoured more easily towards a specific teaching point (es: mood) while at the same time inviting more varied discussion from students. This is because we as a culture have grown familiar with abstract art, abstract expressionism and surrealism for example, whereas we remain extremely uncomfortable with literature that approaches abstraction.

Critical-thinking skills are developed through open-ended questions and conversations between instructor and student. This practice is called Inquiry. Questions such as: "What do you notice about this painting? What can we guess about this place? Compare this place to your own neighborhood. How is it similar? How is it different?" [1] are similar to the kinds of conversations that would take place around text in the classroom. Students are asked to back up their interpretations of the artwork with explanations of details in the piece that lead them to their conclusion; multiple interpretations of the work are encouraged by discussion facilitators, such as "Does everyone agree? Are there any other ideas?" Through inquiry, students not only develop visual literacy skills that transfer to textual literacies, but an important groundwork is laid in the grammar and value of group discussion.

Literacy skills

In 2006, results of a three-year study confirmed fundamental literacy skills were developed through participation in inquiry with art. The study, Teaching Literacy Through Art, was administered by the LTA program, conducted by Randi Korn & Associates, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The study examined groups of third graders at P.S. 148 in Queens, and P.S. 86 in the Bronx. Along with classroom discussion of texts and visual documents, for the purposes of this study students were asked to discuss the painting The Artist and His Mother by Arshile Gorky (1926), and an excerpt from Cynthia Kabohata's 2004 book Kira-Kira. The study found that the third grade students who participated in the LTA program and had ample practice talking critically about works of art using inquiry, used more words to express themselves and demonstrated higher achievement in six categories of literacy and critical-thinking skills than their peers who had no experience with inquiry and visual documents. Categories of improved literacy skills were: thorough description, extended focus, hypothesizing, evidential reasoning, providing multiple interpretations, and building schema. [2]

See also

Footnotes

Related Research Articles

A teaching method is a set of principles and methods used by teachers to enable student learning. These strategies are determined partly on subject matter to be taught, partly by the relative expertise of the learners, and partly by constraints caused by the learning environment. For a particular teaching method to be appropriate and efficient it has take into account the learner, the nature of the subject matter, and the type of learning it is supposed to bring about.

Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process, some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are physical, life, earth, space, and human sciences.

Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated, and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others. Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to actively construct artifacts. But while social constructivism focuses on cognition, social constructionism focuses on collective meaning-making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic portfolio</span> Collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user

An electronic portfolio is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually but not only on the Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Experiential education</span> Philosophy of education

Experiential education is a philosophy of education that describes the process that occurs between a teacher and student that infuses direct experience with the learning environment and content. This concept is distinct from experiential learning, however experiential learning is a subfield and operates under the methodologies associated with experiential education. The Association for Experiential Education regards experiential education as "a philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people's capacity to contribute to their communities". Experiential education is the term for the philosophy and educational progressivism is the movement which it informed. The Journal of Experiential Education publishes peer-reviewed empirical and theoretical academic research within the field.

Philosophy for Children, sometimes abbreviated to P4C, is a movement that aims to teach reasoning and argumentative skills to children. There are also related methods sometimes called "Philosophy for Young People" or "Philosophy for Kids". Often the hope is that this will be a key influential move towards a more democratic form of democracy. However, there is also a long tradition within higher education of developing alternative methods for teaching philosophy both in schools and colleges.

"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual arts education</span> Area of arts education based on visuals

Visual arts education is the area of learning that is based upon the kind of art that one can see, visual arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings. Contemporary topics include photography, video, film, design, and computer art. Art education may focus on students creating art, on learning to criticize or appreciate art, or some combination of the two.

Critical literacy is the ability to find embedded discrimination in media. This is done by analyzing the messages promoting prejudiced power relationships found naturally in media and written material that go unnoticed otherwise by reading beyond the author's words and examining the manner in which the author has conveyed their ideas about society's norms to determine whether these ideas contain racial or gender inequality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Composition studies</span>

Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States.

Arts integration differs from traditional education by its inclusion of both the arts discipline and a traditional subject as part of learning The goal of arts integration is to increase knowledge of a general subject area while concurrently fostering a greater understanding and appreciation of the fine and performing arts. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts defines arts integration as "an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. Students engage in a creative process which connects an art form and another subject and meets evolving objectives in both."

Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios. It contrasts with traditional education, which generally relies on the teacher presenting facts and their knowledge about the subject. Inquiry-based learning is often assisted by a facilitator rather than a lecturer. Inquirers will identify and research issues and questions to develop knowledge or solutions. Inquiry-based learning includes problem-based learning, and is generally used in small-scale investigations and projects, as well as research. The inquiry-based instruction is principally very closely related to the development and practice of thinking and problem-solving skills.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socratic questioning</span> Type of question to predict knowledge on topic

Socratic questioning is an educational method named after Socrates that focuses on discovering answers by asking questions of students. According to Plato, Socrates believed that "the disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables the scholar/student to examine ideas and be able to determine the validity of those ideas". Plato explains how, in this method of teaching, the teacher assumes an ignorant mindset in order to compel the student to assume the highest level of knowledge. Thus, a student is expected to develop the ability to acknowledge contradictions, recreate inaccurate or unfinished ideas, and critically determine necessary thought.

Multiliteracy is an approach to literacy theory and pedagogy coined in the mid-1990s by the New London Group. The approach is characterized by two key aspects of literacy – linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of linguistic expressions and representation. It was coined in response to two major changes in the globalized environment. One such change was the growing linguistic and cultural diversity due to increased transnational migration. The second major change was the proliferation of new mediums of communication due to advancement in communication technologies e.g the internet, multimedia, and digital media. As a scholarly approach, multiliteracy focuses on the new "literacy" that is developing in response to the changes in the way people communicate globally due to technological shifts and the interplay between different cultures and languages.

Donna Alvermann is an American educator and researcher in the field of Language and Literacy Education whose work focuses on adolescent literacy in and out of school, inclusive of new media and digital literacies. Her most recent research interest involves developing historical-autobiographical methods for uncovering silences in scholarly writing that mask more than they disclose. She is the Omer Clyde and Elizabeth Parr Aderhold Professor in Education in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia (UGA). She is also a UGA-appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education.

Visual literacy in education develops a student's visual literacy – their ability to comprehend, make meaning of, and communicate through visual means, usually in the form of images or multimedia.

A dialogue journal is an ongoing written interaction between two people to exchange experiences, ideas, knowledge or reflections. It is used most often in education as a means of sustained written interaction between students and teachers at all education levels. It can be used to promote second language learning and learning in all areas.

Feminist pedagogy is a pedagogical framework grounded in feminist theory. It embraces a set of epistemological theories, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships. Feminist pedagogy, along with other kinds of progressive and critical pedagogy, considers knowledge to be socially constructed.

Critical understanding is a term used commonly in education to define a mode of thinking, described as, ‘an essential tool for participating in democratic processes, at whatever level.’ It is a defensible position reached through the examination of ideas, issues or sources. It is achieved through reflecting upon, analysing and evaluating different ideas and positions, and is demonstrated through an ability to express informed responses and independent thought. Critical understanding develops through analytical and independent thought and is considered an increasingly important element of the education process as students progress to higher and further education. However it is not an easy concept to communicate for it is not a passive thing we do; it is about active engagement.

Object literacy is a relatively new term that has grown out of object-based learning (OBL), a fundamental approach to teaching the practice of museum and library work. The increasing availability of digital images and texts makes objects more accessible than ever. There is an increasing interest in the physicality of the object or text, and a growing understanding of the need to understand objects and texts in the fullest, most comprehensive context.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.