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.

A language of critique, a language of possibilities

This post discusses the potentials of combining ‘critical’ and ‘possible’ discourse in gallery education. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and Elliot Eisner to consider how the combination of these ‘languages’ can be used to construct new individual and collective relations, boundaries and ways of thinking. 

“There was a language in the world that everyone understood… it was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose as part of a search for something believed in and desired.” Paulo Coelho, ‘The Alchemist.’

A few years ago, I realised that the thing I so desperately wanted to see in the world – a democratic pedagogic approach that could be used by art museums to consider how they were connecting with children, families and wider communities – was not currently in existence. I recognised the gap when first starting my career developing children’s learning programmes and began to understand the effects of it through my continued work and travels in Australia and abroad. This was possibly the major motivation for undertaking my doctorate. I wanted to use the research to begin to construct and theorise such a pedagogic approach. To also do this in a way that could be shared with others and used to develop a network between similarly motivated artists, learning curators and interdisciplinary teams. I don’t think I have all the answers yet, maybe I never will, perhaps a pursuit towards it is enough to keep the wheels turning.

I really respect people who primarily stand by something as opposed to against things. This sounds like a subtle difference but it is also a fundamentally different one.  I agree that the shortcomings of the current political and economic climate are easy to see and are totally valid. However, I am always initially quite hesitant when someone introduces their work and their ideas about the world as a reaction to a deficiency in society. That is not to say that that those deficiencies do not exist or that what they are doing is without purpose. However, to me the real ‘proof of the pudding’ lies in the rigour and strength of what is being constructed, not just in the deconstruction of what is currently in existence.

Critiquing unequal power structures is important but it takes something different: optimism, unbridled enthusiasm and an unquestionable commitment to whatever is being created for an individual, or a group of people, to work towards the construction of positive relationships, processes and strategies that strive for equality. From my experience, this path can be gruelling. At times also deeply problematic, challenging, tedious and full of self-doubt. This is also a path of immense fulfilment gained through a process of continuously realising and reconsidering one’s own philosophies and principles that they live by. Sometimes the only way these philosophies and beliefs become sharper is through being the fish that is swimming upstream. The languages of critique and the language of possibilities are not necessarily separate but ones that have tremendous capabilities when intertwined together.

On Monday, I attended an event organised by the Tate Learning Research Centre on ‘Museums, art institutions and social change in the 21st century.’ Anna Cutler, Director of Learning at Tate, discussed the significance of constructing a language of the future, a language of potential and a language of ‘what if?’ For art museums, some key questions that then arise are: how can institutions challenge current ways of thinking and open new discourse with wider communities? How can learning curators listen, negotiate and respond to what emerges from this?

In The Dialectic of Freedom (1998) Maxine Greene discusses the importance of critiquing current human beliefs and constructions as a necessary starting point for the development of new constructions. For this to occur, she argues that we need to consider reflective discourse as a dialect between the actual and the possible. This is a process that reaches towards a greater human potential, that constructs new boundaries, relations and ways of thinking. Extending upon this, Elliot Eisner’s (1972, p.219-220) conceptualisation of ‘boundary breakers’ can be drawn upon to articulate the intricacy of such a process as:

“the rejection and reversal of accepted assumptions and the making of the ‘given’ problem… In Boundary Breaking the individual sees gaps and limitations in present theories and proceeds to develop new premises which contain their own limits. Two kinds of behaviour characteristically displayed by Boundary Breakers – insight and imagination – may function in the follow ways. Insight may help the Boundary breaker grasp relationships among seemingly discrete events. It may also enable him to recognise incongruities or gaps in accepted explanations or descriptions. As he recognises these gaps, his imagination may come into play and enable him to generate images or ideas useful for closing the gaps. Through the production of these images and ideas, he is able to reorganise or even reject the accepted in order to formulate a more comprehensive view of the relationships among the elements that gave impetus to the initial insight. Insight into gaps in contemporary theory or actions and vision of the possible are probably insufficient to satisfy the Boundary Breaker; he must be able to establish an order and structure between the gaps he has ‘seen’ and the ideas he has generated.’ 

So, this post is dedicated to the boundary breakers and their journeys of tremendous love, doubt, frustration, optimism and possibilities. I have so much respect for you all.

References 

Eisner, E (1972). Educating Artistic Vision. Macmillan, USA.

Greene, M (1998). The Dialectic of Freedom. Teachers College Press, New York.