Thinking Allowed.

This blog typically focuses on technology and learning. This time, I am going to branch out into an area that I know less about…art learning.

Last week, a colleague shared an article by Project Zero Principal Investigators Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland.

The article, titled, “Art for Our Sake: School arts classes matter more than ever – but not for the reasons you think“, was a terrific read. (pdf here)

It certainly got me thinking.

Winner and Hetland ask “Why do we teach the arts in schools?”

They argue that despite popular opinion, they had not found causation between arts learning and academic achievement. They cite a Gallup poll that 80% of Americans believe that learning a musical instrument improves math skills.

Winner and Hetland claim that their research in some schools in Boston show that while corelation exists, causation does not. Following up on this and reading around, this gets disputed places, to which they have responded. I’m going to focus on the points in this article.

Interestingly Winner and Hetland refute the commonly held idea ideal that learning the arts improves the math and science learning that schools often focus on in “a test-driven education system”. Instead, art education is valuable for more important reasons:

There is, however, a very good reason to teach arts in schools, and it’s not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on. In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum.

They go on to add:

In our analysis, we identified eight “studio habits of mind” that arts classes taught, including the development of artistic craft. Each of these stood out from testable skills taught elsewhere in school.

The other 7 habits are persistence, expression, making clear connections between schoolwork and the world, and in their words, “we were particularly struck by the potentially broad value of four other kinds of thinking being taught in the art classes we documented: observing, envisioning, innovating through exploration, and reflective self-evaluation.”

I have written before about the need for a thinking curriculum – one less focused on content knowledge.

But let’s think about those last four skills: observing, envisioning, innovating, and reflection.

These are the powerful skills that we talk about constantly as required in our 21st Century Learners.

Here’s what Winner and Hetland had to say about each:

• Observing - “Seeing clearly by looking past one’s preconceptions is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law. Naturalists must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen observational skills too, as do doctors.“
• Envisioning - art teachers were asking questions “prompting students to imagine what was not there.“
• Innovation - “Teachers in our study told students not to worry about mistakes, but instead to let mistakes lead to unexpected discoveries.“
• Reflective self-evaluation – Students are “asked to step back, analyze, judge, and sometimes reconceive their projects entirely.”

These are the skills – the only skills – that will allow our students to change the world for the better.

I’ve done a lot of quoting this post, so I’ll let Winner and Hetland’s words finish it off:

We don’t need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skills – we already target these in math and language arts. We need the arts because in addition to introducing students to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.

For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking.

Those who have learned the lessons of the arts, however – how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes, and how to envision solutions – are the ones likely to come up with the novel answers needed most for the future.

Image “je dois apprendre aux curieux” by drunkprincess, found at Flickr Creative Commons

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under 21st century learner, Curriculum, Learning, Random thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.