Learning through artworks

This post discusses the possibilities of artworks in facilitating learning and alternate ways of imagining the world. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and John Dewey to explore the proposition that children’s learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses, opening up new ways of thinking and being. There is also a resource list for educators and parents interested in incorporating artworks into children’s learning.

Amalia Pica’s ‘A ∩ B ∩ C’ (2013). © Amalia Pica. I found this bad boy on the Guggenheim online archive.

“It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond” Maxine Greene (2000, p. 276).

Artworks can be used in many ways for many different reasons in learning contexts. They offer rich possibilities for experiencing and imagining the world from new and multiple perspectives. Visual art as well as the arts more generally, have the ability to make people aware of different ways of thinking and being in the world, working against reductionist and singular ways of thinking.

Maxine Greene (2000) extends upon the word of John Dewey (1916, 1934, 1954) to argue that imagination and the arts play a critical role in the making of democratic communities. She suggests that school curriculum should aim to prioritise the ‘releasing of the imagination’ through providing rich aesthetic experiences for children. These then provide new modalities for children to sense, experience and learn through the world.

However, the mere presence of artworks in a learning environment does not guarantee that a child is encountering or imagining the world in new ways. Greene argues that if school curriculum is to support imagination through the arts, children’s encounters need to be aesthetically varied, rich and reflective. Through this, learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses and ways of thinking. This may then encourage children to question their understandings and assumptions about the world, to think critically about what is and what could be.

Below is a list of resources for educators and parents who may be interested in incorporating artworks in children’s learning at home or in the classroom.

Resource list 

Many of the major modern and contemporary art museums have online digital archives for their collections. Here are some links to my favorites:

Online art museum collections

• MoMA’s online collection

The Museum of Modern Art has made 77,000 works from 25,000 different artists available online. The search engine is easy to use and you can refine your hits using different classifications and time periods.

• The Tate online collection

Tate also have an extensive online collection featuring artworks, exhibitions, videos and artist journals. The digital archive is well referenced and has many tags that are great for getting lost in amazing artwork worm-holes. The search engine is easy to use and has lots of search filter options. Tate’s most famous artworks feature extensive summaries, a copy of the artwork’s display caption as well as the techniques used to produce the artwork, for example Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ page. 

• The Guggenheim also has an extensive digital archive.

Video Channels

• TateShots  and TateTalks– Tate have also put together two quite an exceptional collection of video and audio recordings. TateTalks features video footage of talks and events held at the art museum. TateShots comprises of artist interviews, performance pieces (I highly recommend watching Earle Brown’s ‘Calder Piece‘), exhibition films and artist studio visits. If I had a dollar for every minute I spent watching TateShots I would be a millionaire. But I work in children’s education and the arts so maybe I shouldn’t put a monetary value on the amount of time I procrastinate.
• The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark has a constantly growing online collection of videos from different fields such as art, architecture, music, literature and design. I love the Louisiana Channel as it features a lot of Scandinavian and European contemporary artists who I have only discovered through watching these clips.
• The art auction houses of Southeby’s and Christie’s both have YouTube channels featuring short video clips of artist interviews, studio visits and world auction records.

Online courses

• MoMA has developed three online courses that explore inquiry-led learning through artworks. Admittedly I have not had a chance to do any of these courses but I think it worth a look. The first, ‘Art & Ideas: Teaching with Themes’ uses theme-based teaching practices to support educators in incorporating modern and contemporary artworks into curriculum. Then there is Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom looks at museum education strategies for inquiry-based teaching and how these can be used in classrooms. Finally, Art & Activity: Interactive Strategies for Engaging with Art builds on content from courses one and two to explore activity-based strategies for using artworks primary and secondary lesson plans.

Article

• Here is a link to Dr. Emily Pringle’s article on ‘The Artist as Educator: Examining Relationships between Art Practice and Pedagogy in the Gallery Context.’ Emily is Head of Learning Practice & Research at Tate & also my awesome co-PhD supervisor.

References

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York, Macmillan.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York, Minton, Balch.

Dewey, J. (1954). The Public and Its Problems. Chicago, IL: Swallow Press.

Greene, M (2000). ‘Imagining futures: the public school and possibility,’ Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol 32(2). P.267-280.

5 great children’s learning spaces in the Bay Area, California

I was fortunate enough to recently spend a month in California, mainly in and around San Francisco. During this time I visited a handful of children’s learning spaces and met with a bunch of lovely, passionate people working in both formal and informal learning contexts. The places listed below are places that I visited or that came highly recommended. I hope you find these equally as inspiring as I did!

A crazy drawing/painting machine/printer that appears to be programmed by a Raspberry Pi on display at The Exploratorium.

The Brightworks School

Founded by Gever Tulley who also started The Tinkering School, Brightworks is a project-based learning heaven that ‘weaves learning and life experiences together.’ In the every day runnings of the school, children are put into mixed-aged group teams and encouraged to investigate real-world problems collectively. ‘The Arc’ (I interpret this term to mean the pedagogical principles that drive the learning processes at the school) consists of three phases: exploration, expression and exposition. Learners move through these cycles, allowing for the development, integration and contextualisation of skills and knowledge.

Interested in hearing more about this approach to learning? The Brightworks school run a ‘Brightworks Curious Educators Tour’ approximately once a month that you can book into. Details can be found on their website. Gever also has an awesome TED talk on ‘life lessons through tinkering’ that looks at children’s experiences at The Tinkering School.

AltSchool

Max Ventilla, a former Google executive, created Altschool after he could not find an appropriate school to send his daughter to. Altschools are lab schools that utilise an array of new technologies to create personalised learning environments for its students. Fundamentally opposed to the American government’s standardisation curriculum, AltSchooler’s learning is driven by their interests, passions and skills under a ‘Common Core’ curriculum. Nicknamed ‘Montessori 2.0,’ the schools works closely with entrepreneurs and engineers to develop new technologies that allow students and teachers to grade and document learning in diverse ways. The New Yorker published an extensive article, ‘Learn Differently,’ on the startup last year. I also found this talk by Max Ventilla particularly informative.

Unfortunately I was unable to visit AltSchool while in SF. I was/still am really interested in learning more the relationship between assessment and the development of the apps being used and how these influence one another.

SFMOMA

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art re-opened in 2016 after major renovations. An epicenter for contemporary art in the Bay Area, the art museum is also a sensory-rich environment for young audiences. From my understandings the museum does not run specific programmes or have a dedicated area for children but there is an array of artworks that may capture the curiosities and imaginations of children. These include Dan Flavin’s luminous installation on level 5, Richard Serra’s ‘Sequence’ and Morris Lewis’ technicolour ‘Untitled’ painting (pictured below). With such an incredibly diverse and amazing mix of modern and contemporary art, it seems like the museum has great potential to further develop children’s learning programmes in the future. The Gallery has also put together an online museum guide for visiting with the little-ies.

Morris Louis, Untitled. 1959-1960. Magna on canvas. 98 in. x 140 1/2 in. © Estate of Morris Louis

The Children’s Creativity Museum 

Deep in the heart of SOMA’s Yerba Buena Gardens sits the Children’s Creativity Museum. The museum features an array of different ‘labs’ such as an animation studio, a tech lab, a music studio and community lab that aim ‘to nurture creativity and collaboration in all children and families.’ The day I visited, the museum was pumping. It is clearly a popular destination for young families living in San Francisco with lots of activities for children to play and make in. The museum certainly has a slightly commercial feel to it, as I often find in American children’s museums. An additional after thought I had was in relation to the separation of the different labs. I wonder what would happen if the tech lab, music studio and community lab became one big space for making and exploring across disciplines and art forms? Check it out: https://creativity.org

The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium

You might notice I write a lot about the Tinkering Studio on this blog but it is just because I truly believe in inquiry-based learning through play, which is what they do so brilliantly. Housed in The Exploratorium and overlooking the sparkling Bay, the museum’s mission is “to create inquiry-based experiences that transform learning worldwide” through explorations of science, art and human perception. The Tinkering Studio is not just for young children, it is a space for everyone to play, make, construct and deconstruct ideas and understandings about the world.

A pic taken in a light play/Scratch Jnr activity in The Tinkering Studio. 

I really connect with The Tinkering Studio’s emphasis on curiosity as the driver for learning. This manifests itself in numerous ways including visitor’s learning during drop-in activities, teacher’s learning at professional development workshops and also (and maybe most importantly) in relation to the learning of the museum team. As an outsider I see it as a continuous process of learning together and that is inspiring. At the same time, the understanding of learning underpinning the practice seems so much more complex than just giving children agency. The activities on offer such as the marble machines, wind tubes and paper circuits are well-considered ‘problem spaces’ where explorations of interconnecting concepts happens through material experimentation. I saw a great quote on the wall of the museum by the American artist Jasper Johns:

“When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.”

I related to this concept that new experiences and ideas keep our minds and bodies awake. Also that one’s desire to continuously strive for what is yet to come into existence or be discovered is a life force. The Tinkering Studio also has a great blog that the team use to share projects and ideas.

There is an array of other innovative startups/play/learning spaces in and from the Bay Area not mentioned above. To name a few: the Bay Area Discovery Museum, Wonderful Idea Co., the Khan Lab School, GCE Lab School, the Berkeley Adventure Playground and the Museum of Children’s Arts. I also highly recommend the Prelinger library for their ‘how to’ and ‘maker’ sections. The library is also a great place to get some general life inspiration. Can’t wait to visit California again!

P.S. Thank you Ryan Jenkins for the awesome recommendations!

A visit to the Reggio Australia pedagogical documentation centre

This post features a summary and reflection on the theory, principles and practices of the Reggio Emilia process of pedagogical documentation. The possibilities and challenges of what this reflective methodology holds for children’s gallery education are also discussed in relation to my doctoral research. 

“There is a constant relational reciprocity between those who educate and those who are educated, between those who teach and those who learn. There is participation, passion, compassion and emotion. There is aesthetics. There is change.” Carlina Rinaldi

Last week I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon visiting the Reggio Emilia Australia Information Exchange’s documentation centre at the University of Melbourne. I was interested in taking some time to think and reflect on how other early year’s educators are working with the process of pedagogical documentation within their own education settings. This is particularly pertinent to me after spending the past few months working with the early year’s team at the Whitworth Art Gallery where we constructed our own documentation processes in the Atelier programme.

Pedagogical documentation can be defined as (taken from the Reggio Australia website 2011):

“making the visible records (written notes, photos, videos, audio recordings, children’s work) that enable teachers, parents and children to discuss, interpret and reflect upon what is happening from their various points of view, and to make choices about the best way to proceed, believing that rather than being an unquestionable truth, there are many possibilities.”

Whilst this process is common practice in many progressive education nurseries and kindergartens, its use within museums and galleries is near non-existent.

Reggio Australia’s mission is founded upon the premise of advocating for ‘social justice and democracy in education, giving priority to active, constructive and creative learning by children’ as well as promoting ‘the critical role of research, observation, documentation, and interpretation of children’s processes of action and thought.’ These principles are consistent with the philosophies of the international Reggio Emilia educational approach that was developed in post-World War 2 Italy by philosopher and psychologist Loris Malaguzzi.

The Reggio Emilia approach is built around a framework of social constructivist learning theory. Originally proposed by Vygotsky (1930), social constructivism can be defined as the understanding that human’s intellectual, social and emotional growth is developed through social interactions with others of varying skills and expertise. It is through these interactions that new understandings and knowledge emerges from within the specific social, cultural and historic context that an activity is occurring. This sounds like quite a broad and generalised theory but the way that Reggio apply it within early childhood education settings is quite specific.

Pedagogical documentation plays an integral role in generating these new understandings. Through making children’s and practitioner’s learning visible and open to interpretation, old beliefs and practices may be contested and new understandings co-constructed among groups of people.

Image credit: http://www.smith.edu

Documentation generation is always motivated by a collective intention (usually a question) that is collaboratively decided among the team. Once documentation is collected, it is then collaboratively interpreted and reflected upon through a participatory process of dialogue, negotiation and exchange. From these reflections, new questions and intentions are set for the next learning environment. This iterative process works to build a rigorous and responsive curriculum that is in a continuous state of emergence. Documentation therefore becomes central in constructing a democratic and reflective pedagogy that values subjectivity, multiple interpretations of reality and questioning.

Here are my reflections from the documentation centre:

• Reggio is one of numerous child-centred approaches to education but possibly the most well-known. Whilst my work and research has many shared understandings around how human knowledge is developed, there are also many points of difference. These mainly arise from an art museum not being a school and therefore a different set of rules, divisions of labour and tools exist that mediate how teams of people interact and learn. These differences need to be acknowledged and then considered in relation to what new strategies and tools need to be developed to facilitate the learning of children, parents, artists, education curators and other practitioners in art museums.
• The pedagogista (this is a Reggio term for an educator who specialises in learning theory) I met with at REAIE made an interesting comment about the need for practitioners to deeply understand the theory and principles of the educational approach before embarking on collecting the documentation. Without this, the documentation becomes a series of pretty pictures without a pedagogical process around it. Understanding theory gives integrity, rigor and meaning to the practice.
• The need for adult practitioner’s to be open and reflective in their practice. These are actually personal traits and (I swear I am not a cynic) often rare to find in people. Anyone who has ever worked in an art museum for any length of time would probably have identified the sometimes large amount of egos and competing agendas circulating the building. Being self-reflective and adopting a growth mindset can be a very vulnerable place to operate from within this sort of environment.
• The need to not only describe learning process but also focus on the analysis of learning in the documentation.
• The need to holistically consider the cognitive, social, emotional and aesthetic learning processes of children. To isolate one, for example to only discuss learning in relation to cognition, is to paint an incomplete and bias perspective of human knowledge.
• The need to perceive learning as a dynamic, creative and transformative process that is continuously forming new relations between people, ideas, materials and non-human entities.

I left the documentation centre feeling inspired and optimistic. I love the value Reggio Emilia place on uncertainty, questioning and dialogic exchange but within a rigorous and methodical education process. As an art educator it is simultaneously exciting, thrilling and terrifying to see the world in an unformulated and forever changing way.

Despite what barriers some people are trying to put in place to create social divisions and fuel supremacist ways of thinking, the reality is that we live in a world that is forever changing, diversifying and becoming increasingly interconnected. And no-one knows what will happen in the future. The timeliness of the need to construct and apply pedagogies built upon democratic exchange, uncertainty and diversity are just as critical now as it was in post-World War II Italy. The contribution such an approach to learning makes is significant to both our education system and in the shaping of an empathetic and moral society.

References

Reggio Australia website (2011). Our Vision and Mission. Viewed January 18, 2017. Available at: https://www.reggioaustralia.org.au/our-vision-and-mission

Rinaldi, C (2004). In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. Oxon: Routledge

Vygotsky, L (1930). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 

The Ipswich Art Gallery, Australia

This post features a case study of the children’s exhibition programme at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia. 

From 2011-2015 I worked as a children’s curator at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia. The Ipswich Art Gallery is a special place for children’s creative learning with a well established and renowned children’s exhibition program. The city of Ipswich is home to a very diverse and predominantly low socio-economic community. The art gallery is currently one of the most visited in regional Australia. In my work and travels across Australia, America, Europe and the United Kingdom I have never come across anything quite like it.

Over the past 15 years the Ipswich Art Gallery has developed and presented over 40 in- house children’s exhibitions. The programme is informed by a set of  guiding principles which include; children’s exhibitions are curated for children not adults and learning begins with creative play. The Children’s Gallery is open daily from 10am-5pm with almost all programs being free of charge. New exhibitions are presented between every 4 – 12 weeks meaning that that there is continuously new creative experiences on offer for young visitors. In many ways the Gallery is more of a children’s art gallery than an ‘adult’ art gallery. At the same time, it is quite distinctly different from the American children’s museum movement. I often thought of the children’s exhibition programme as a combination of a Reggio Emilia atelier, the creativity/art slant of a children’s museum and an art gallery.

During my time at Ipswich, I worked as part of a creative team of curators, designers, artists, educators, academics and arts practitioners on the conceptualisation, development, and delivery of the children’s programme including exhibitions, baby and toddler workshops, school programs and children’s art festivals. A sample of these projects are featured below:

Wild Thing (2012)

Featuring Troy Emery’s colourful taxidermy animals and Nicole Voevodin-Cash‘s giant grassy hill, children created their own crazy costume and turned into a ‘wild things’ for some fun kinesthetic play. The exhibition also featured a dedicated play space for babies and toddlers.

Light Play (2013)

Children (0-8 years) used light as a creative material for  making ephemeral art using overhead projectors, light boxes, shadow sculptures and reflective materials. Light Play! was presented across three different programs: a 75 minute workshops for kindergarten and early primary students, baby and toddler workshops and drop-in sessions for the general public. The exhibition was influenced by the Reggio Emilia philosophy which promotes creative play through experiential and discovery-based learning. Image credit: top left/bottom: Ipswich Art Gallery, top right: peacefulparentsconfidentkids.com

Children (6-14 years) worked with conceptual artist Briony Barr to create collaborative ‘expandable’ drawings out of electrical tape. These sessions were run as 90 minute workshop in which children learnt about rules in art (Sol le Wit, Jim Lambie, Richard Long) and rules in nature (bifurcation, Fibonacci sequence) and how rules can be used to make unpredictable works of art. Children were then introduced to the medium of electrical tape and set a series of challenges to create 2D and 3D drawings that covered the room using rules. A video of a similar project to what was presented at Ipswich can be found here.

Construction Site (2007, 2009, 2013)                                                                                                In Construction Site children unleashed their inner-engineers to design and build cubby houses using foam blocks. The 2013 iteration of the exhibition included a giant ‘Ball Run’ in which visitors used tubes and recycled materials to create tracks for balls to roll down.

Image credits: far left weekendnotes.com.au, far right brisbanekids.com.au

Electronic Art (2015)

Children made squishy play-dough sculptures and wearable art pieces using electrical circuits and flashing LED lights. Throughout a 90 minute workshop children were introduced to the basics of electronics and electronic art including contemporary artists using circuitry in their practice. They were then able to use conductive play dough (5-11 year olds) or textiles  (11-14 year olds) to make a fun artwork to bring home. The program combined interdisciplinary skills from visual art, technology and science in a creative art making workshop.

Further links:                                                              

Piscitelli, B 2011. What’s driving children’s cultural participation in Australia?, National Museum of Australia website, viewed February 2 2016.

Piscitelli, B & Penfold, L 2015. ‘Child‐centered Practice in Museums Experiential Learning through Creative Play at the Ipswich Art Gallery’ Curator: The Museum Journal, 58 (3). P.263-280.