Facilitating Engagement with the Art-Making Process

Investigating Materials and Ideas

“Teachers who orchestrate thoughtful investigations of materials help students develop a repertoire of ideas about materials and expertise in using artistic media and processes.”  Giving students the opportunity to explore, develop, and personalize both 2D and 3D materials and processes is a vital part of meeting the needs of students with different modes of thought and expression.  By supplying students with encounters that challenge students’ use of materials develop creative thinking, problem solving, and more in-depth explorations.  “Greater investment arises out of work that is guided by internal motivations to express personally significant ideas.” 

Structuring for Creative Thinking

“Teachers who structure conditions for creative thinking help students discover and understand more about the nature of creativity in the visual arts and its rewards.”  Several strategies can be implemented in the classroom to create structure for creative thinking such as: introducing “closed” problems to beginning students, adding constraints and limitations, tasks that match the students’ ability, asking essential questions, considering open-ended problems for more advanced students, encouraging brainstorming and play, synthetic thinking, material investigations, guiding intuition, and metaphorical and conceptual thinking, process portfolios, reflections, and assessment. 

Forming Elegant Problems 

“Teachers who structure units around an elegant problem make it possible for learners at different levels of ability to engage with the problem while promoting choice making, originality, elaboration, and the creation of work that has personal meaning and value.”  By incorporating investigation into units, students can learn from big ideas, themes, and metaphors.  Big ideas, or themes, are “broad constructs that accommodate a wide range of ideas’ they are also engaging and interesting for considering similarities and contrasts.”  Metaphors are used to make meaning and sense of an experience through the creation of a coherent structure.  Metaphors allow us to understand “experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”

Designing Problems Based on the Real World of Work

“Teachers who draw problems from the real world of work in the visual arts develop a wired range of valuable kills in their students while exposing their students to future career options.”  In other words, this idea of authentic, problem-based learning is helpful in integrating creative thinking into real world problem solving.  Authentic problems result in real products.  Here, “Visual thinking strategies can be employed in gathering ideas and planning, observing and recording information and making connections, displaying information and reflecting and assessing.”

Facilitation Dialogue and Discourse About Student Work

“Teachers who focus dialogue and discourse on student work and the meanings that can be found in it can make such dialogues constructive and productive.”  Forms of dialogue within the art classroom might include peer sharing, small group discussions, large group conversations, and critiques of artwork.  In class critiques can provide feedback and suggestions and give students opportunities to “read” works back to their peers. 

Article: Understanding the Artmaking Process: Reflective Practice

By Sydney Walker in Art Education 

The problem Walker raises is “Teachers frequently lack sufficient and tangible understandings of the processes that distinguish artmaking activity.”  Having knowledge on the process of artmaking is required in order to plan and give effective artmaking instruction in a classroom. 

Walker gives two essential questions for discussion: What is it that artists do when they create artworks?  How do artists pursue meaning?

Walker was a part of research in which the goal was to “understand conceptual approaches to artmaking and comprehend how specific artistic practices enabled conceptualization.” 

One effective strategy Walker discusses is the importance of exposing students to professional artistic practice in order to develop student understandings about the artmaking process.  He says, “Professional artistic practice can serve as a productive model to instruct students about the artmaking process and its conceptualization.”  Walker references political activist artist, Edgar-Heap-of-Birds Hachivi, “The first step in teaching is one of informing and inspiring the student with various methods of artistic practice concentrating particularly upon the conceptual themes of artists… This examination of artists’ notions is best done through video-taped artist interview.”  Of course, this automatically makes me think of the importance and value of Art 21, giving free access to contemporary artists and their work. 

Walker introduces the use of big ideas within artists’ work and in classroom curriculum.  He characterizes the big idea as “themes, issues, or perhaps questions that captivate the artist for extended time periods, often years.”

Walker found that artmaking is most successful with the artists is conscious of his or her artmaking process.  He references Schön on the idea of the reflective practitioner, “Sometimes we think about what we are doing in the midst of performing an act.  When performance leads to surprise—pleasant or unpleasant—the designer may respond by reflection in action: by thinking about what she is doing while doing it, in such a way as to influence further doing.”

If in artist is conscious of their artmaking process it might also lead to increased confidence as an artist and a new understanding of meaning making within artmaking.  Walker discusses a study in which “students who were judged to be more creative tended not to utilize pre-conceived ideas or principles, but rather let the artmaking solution gradually emerge during the process.”  Many well known practicing artists consistently delay closure in the production of their artworks and some even begin their work without clear end-goals and “engage cycles of problem reformulation throughout the process.”

Walker concludes by saying, “artmaking can be about meaning making that has both personal and larger social consequences.  Additionally, the use of big ideas, personal connections, knowledge, artmaking problems, and boundaries nourishes and enables the employment of meaning in artmaking.”