Teaching Art in the Age of Digital Media

VISUAL ARTS: A TEACHING FROM WITHIN

Over the last 70 years, a great deal has been written about creativity.  Take the 1950 presidential address to the A.P.A. (American Psychological Association) by Guilford to the TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson (2006) who questions the role of creativity in schools by asking “do schools kill creativity?”  Robinson believes that creativity is as central to education as Literacy is.  Robinson argued that being creative means that you have to be prepared to be wrong, and the educational system frowns on being wrong, to the point of considering it the worst thing possible.  Nonetheless, students continue to be taught how not to be wrong.  In doing this, education throws away the student’s natural urge to ‘give it a go’, as Robinson (2006) states.  There has also been much written about the elements that can help or hurt people’s ability to be creative.  Some of these factors are issues of personality (qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character), feelings (an emotional state or reaction), emotions (a state of mind obtained from one’s situations, mood, or relationships with others), motivations (a reason or reasons someone has for behaving in a specific way), thinking styles (the characteristic way one processes information) and their environments (the surroundings or conditions in which someone or something operates) ( Baer, Cropley, Kaufman, Reiter-Palmon, & Sinnett, 2013).  Most researchers in the field of creativity have several different main focuses of their research efforts, some researchers focus on the environment (which is the person, the process, the press, or the product), while others look for “systems” models that combine several focuses into one single model (Baer, et al).

This study investigated high school visual arts educators who teach in the age of digital media art curriculum.  What practices do art teachers use to engage their students in their development of art-making?  How do teachers encourage students to take risks in the art making practices?  According to Sternberg (2007), students are able to connect with real problems than ideas that are untenable because they can draw connections from their own experiences.  This study investigates how visual arts teachers are teaching high school students in order to understand how they encourage them to be creative, think outside the box, or use their imagination.  That information will help inform future research on which teaching strategies are more successful than others in teaching high school visual arts students.  This qualitative study approached through a Theory of Multiple Intelligences study lens provides a way to examine how high school visual arts teachers teach students and helps create meanings based on those experiences.  The study was limited to four high schools in Northern California.  Data collection includes open-ended interviews, surveys, and three observations of each participant.  The participants were interviewed over a month period at their individual high schools, Elliot High, Barnet High, Glenn High, and Mitchell High (identified by a pseudonym).  The interview responses were transcribed, analyzed and categorized themes.  Several themes emerge from the data; each of them has important implications for all educators and for future recommendations.  The focus in this section centers on two of the emerging themes and makes a comparison to themes in the literature review and an analysis.  These themes are (a) the teaching of visual arts at the high school level and the interaction with students, and (b) visual arts and the changing curriculum.

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

When thinking back to most of the high school art classes I have taken, the instructor usually asks the students to be creative.  The problem with this is, no one has ever taught us how to be creative or what the meaning of creativity is?  Most high school art curriculum assumes the ability to be creative; seldom is creativity defined, explained, or modeled for teachers who teach creativity to students.  I have been guilty of this.  One day while teaching my advanced painting class some techniques on painting landscapes.  I was explaining several different techniques of applying oil paint to the canvas with a palette knife while building the landscape in my head and adding it to the canvas, I told the students in the class to be creative on building their own landscapes.  I stopped, thought about what I had just said and asked myself if I had ever been taught how to be creative or what does that even mean?  I then asked my students if they have ever been taught how to be creative, all of them said no.  I then asked the class as a whole what does creativity mean?  Most of the students’ answers were to use your imagination or make something.  Ok, but what does that mean I asked the students.  The room was silent, no one had an answer, this leads me to start the journey of questioning what is creativity?  After a time, that changed to what is the role of creativity in the age of integrating digital media into the art curriculum and its influence on students’ resilience and expression.  Which made me wonder if we could incorporate play as a tool to teach creativity?

The purpose of this study is to understand how high school visual arts educators teach visual arts in the age of digital media.  What practices do art teachers use to engage their students in their development of art making?  How do teachers encourage students to take risks in the art making practices?  There are many studies that show the benefit of having visual arts class in the high school curriculum.  Other studies showing the benefit of teaching creativity (Guilford, Renzulli, Torrance, Robinson & Stern, 1997) but there are very few studies on how the teaching of creativity is being done.  This study will touch on the importance of visual arts classes, how the teaching of creativity is done now, and what can be done to help students learn how to be successful in the visual arts classroom.

Background

Gardner, in his Theory of Multiple Intelligence (1983) believed that human cognitive competence is better described in terms of a set of abilities, talent, or mental skills, that he called intelligences.  Gardner named eight abilities or intelligences: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.  Later he proposed that existential and moral intelligence may also be included with the other abilities/intelligences.  All people possess each of these skills to some extent or another but most differ in the degrees of skill and in the nature of the combination.  Thus, some children can be stronger in one certain area or ability than others are; this might be the reason for using the six different areas of abilities (general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative/productive thinking, leadership ability, visual and performing arts, and psychomotor ability) in the Marland report of 1971.

Marland was the U. S. Commissioner of Education under President Richard M. Nixon who oversaw a study (the Marland report of 1971) of gifted and talented educational programs.  The researchers of this study were made up of a voluntary advisory panel of eleven researchers and practitioners of education from throughout the United States who created a new definition for potential high performing learners.  The Marland (1971) definition was:

Gifted and talented children or those identified by professionally qualified persons who by virtue of outstanding abilities are capable of high performance. These children who require differentiated educational programs and services beyond on the normal curriculum provided by the regular school program in order to realize their contribution to self and Society. (p. 8)

The study was delivered to the United States Congress, it was the first national report on gifted education in the United States.  One of the most concerning findings was gifted and talented children can also be deprived and suffer psychological damage without the access to special education services.  The findings showed that gifted and talented children could suffer greater or equal to the similar deprivation of services suffered by any other population with special needs serviced by the Office of Education.

Being a high performing child in one of the areas or abilities could be a sign of potential growth and development in some of the other areas listed.  Although the difference between abilities/intelligences has been published in great detail, Gardner disapproved of labeling students to a specific ability/intelligence.  Gardner said that his theory of multiple intelligences should “empower learners” not restrict them to one type of learning (Gardner, 1999, McKenzie 2005).  According to Gardner, an intelligence is “a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture” (p. 33-34).

According to Guilford (1957), the creative abilities of artists are not the same abilities as others may possess.  Many in the arts believe that creativity is a very complex human performance and occurrence, one of the high accomplishments any people can aspire to develop and maintain.  Many subcomponents of creativity are combined simultaneously and/or successively to approach the almost total human being response (Smith, 2005, p.99).  This may seem to contradict Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligence because according to his theory, all people possess each of the eight different skills to some extent or another.  Although we must take into account the second part of the theory that most people differ in the degrees of skill and in the nature of the combination.  Should we then assume creativity that is possessed by artists differs from creativity possessed by others?

Description of the Research Problem

Over the last 70 years, a great deal has been written about creativity.  Take the 1950 presidential address to the A.P.A. (American Psychological Association) by Guilford to the TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson (2006) who questions the role of creativity in schools by asking “do schools kill creativity?”  Robinson believes that creativity is as central to education as Literacy is.  Robinson argued that being creative means that you have to be prepared to be wrong, and the educational system frowns on being wrong, to the point of considering it the worst thing possible.  Nonetheless, students continue to be taught how not to be wrong.  In doing this, education throws away the student’s natural urge to ‘give it a go’, as Robinson (2006) states.  There has also been much written about the elements that can help or hurt people’s ability to be creative.  Some of these factors are issues of personality (qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character), feelings (an emotional state or reaction), emotions (a state of mind obtained from one’s situations, mood, or relationships with others), motivations (a reason or reasons someone has for behaving in a specific way), thinking styles (the characteristic way one processes information) and their environments (the surroundings or conditions in which someone or something operates) ( Baer, Cropley, Kaufman, Reiter-Palmon, & Sinnett, 2013).  Most researchers in the field of creativity have several different main focuses of their research efforts, some researchers focus on the environment (which is the person, the process, the press, or the product), while others look for “systems” models that combine several focuses into one single model (Baer, et al).

As young children, we are naturally curious and do not have any preconceived notions.  Something happens as we grow up, maybe due to schooling, but we become less and less imaginative.  Things we thought of as a child have been cast out of our minds and replaced with fact.  For example, as a child, I drew a green dog just because I had never seen one, that was acceptable when I was in kindergarten or even first grade.  Later in high school, that same green dog was unacceptable because it was not real, or even possible.  I felt the only things that I was allowed to draw, at that age, were ones that were tangible.  The same goes for most of my students now they can only imagine things that they can see, touch, or things found on the internet.  They have become so self-critical of their abilities that most students have become their worst critic, just as I had done so many years ago.

I tell students in my art classes I want them to be creative when they are trying to think of or create an original work of art.  The problem is most of them do not understand what creativity is nor have they been taught how to be creative.  Instead of asking what is meant by being creative and how to do it, the students just continue as if they never the direction.  While there is research on the positives of teaching creativity to students, I found limited research that questions if this teaching is occurring. Additionally, creativity can be developed artificially through the infusion of new technology in some cases but that might only be temporary.  Without the ability to be creative or the lacking of intrinsic motivation, artmaking can eventually become purposeless and in some cases, cease completely (Bryant, 2010).  Eisner (2002) also agreed on the importance of intrinsic motivation, not only for the arts but for schools in general.

It is common to see articles focusing on creativity with a lack of a clear definition of creativity.  Most define creativity as the individual’s use of knowledge, imagination, and judgment within the constraints of an environment and its resources (Slocombie, 2000) in order to solve problems in an innovative, high quality, appropriate manner (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007).  This study has helped me to improve my understanding of what creativity is and the lack of a common definition among high school visual arts teachers.

Sternberg (2007), a renowned creativity researcher, described the issue of creativity in education as a developing habit.  Creativity can be taught and improved, creativity requires ample effort and care so that is roughly encouraged.  Sternberg believed that to encourage creativity, three ingredients are needed: opportunity (students must be given a chance and a safe place to express themselves), encouragement (students should have someone who can encourage them to use divergent thinking and push them), and reward (there has to be some type of incentive for the student to try to be creative).  Sternberg described the twelve keys for developing the creative habit that would help to answer the question of “what should we do?” (Sternberg, 2007, p. 8).  These are as follows:

1) Redefined problems.  Steinberg explains redefined problems as taking the problem and turning it on its head.

2) Question and analyze assumptions.  Everyone has assumptions.  Quite often people do not know that these are assumptions because they are so widely shared by society.

3) Do not assume that creative ideas sell themselves; sell them.  Everyone would like to assume that their creative ideas sell themselves, but as many failed entrepreneurs know, they do not.

4) Encourage idea generation.  The environment for encouraging ideas should be critical, but should not be harshly critical.

5) Recognize that knowledge is a double-edged sword and act accordingly.  Without knowledge, one cannot be creative.  Many students have ideas that are creative to themselves, but not in the field that they are working in because others have had the same idea before.

6) Encourage children to identify and surmount obstacles.  The question is not what obstacles there may be; there will always be obstacles.

7) Encourage sensible risk-taking.  Few students are willing to take risks at school because risk-taking can have some negative effects.

8) Encourage tolerance of ambiguity.  There is a lot of grays in creative work, it is not just black and white.

9) Help children build self-efficacy.  Many people often get to a point where they feel that no one believes in them.

10) Help children find what they love to do.  Teachers must help students to find what excites and motivates them to unleash their student’s best creative performances.

11) Teach children the importance of delayed gratification.  Creative people are able to work on projects or tasks for an extended period of time without immediate or interim rewards.

12) Provide an environment that fosters creativity.  There are many ways teachers can supply an environment that fosters creativity (Sternberg, 2007, p. 8-16).

According to Sternberg (2007), there still remains a missing component in the teaching of creativity to students or anyone else, a component that must be found.  How do we turn Sternberg’s twelve keys for developing the creative habit into actual hands-on classroom components that teachers can build into their activities and or lessons to teach creativity?  How do teachers create opportunities for students to refine problems in a project?  How do teachers encourage idea generation activities for students?  How do teachers give students opportunities to develop a “tolerance for ambiguity?” (2007, p. 13-14).  Maybe the more important question is how do teachers incorporate all 12 of Sternberg’s keys into a single activity or lesson in a meaningful way to ensure that creativity is encouraged and rewarded?  Thus, we need more research on how creativity is taught and what are the effects on students when and if teacher incorporates Sternberg’s twelve keys.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to understand how high school visual arts educators teach in the age of digital media.  What practices do art teachers use to engage their students in their development of art making?  How do teachers encourage students to take risks in the art making practices?  According to Sternberg (2007), students are able to connect with real problems than ideas that are untenable because they can draw connections from their own life experiences.  This study investigated how visual arts teachers are teaching high school students in order to understand how teachers encourage their students to be creative, to use critical thinking skills, and/or use their imagination.  That information will help inform future research on which teaching strategies are more successful than others in teaching high school visual arts students.

Research Questions

The purpose of this research study is to learn about the experiences of visual arts teachers in teaching creativity at the high school level.  My overarching question is “How do visual arts teachers teach the visual arts at the high school level”?

The following questions are also ones that I will explore:

1. What practices do visual arts teachers use to engage their students in their development of art making?

2. In what ways is creativity taught in high school visual art classes now?

3. How does teaching creativity in visual art classes affect the students’ ability to be creative?

4. How do teachers encourage students to take risks in the art making practices?

5. How do visual arts teachers use teaching strategies in their visual arts classroom?

Significance of the Study

The significance of this study is to understand how visual arts teachers teach creativity to high school art students or students in general.  Much of the research on creativity deals with the importance of students learning creativity and the changing role of creativity in education.  Creativity is seen as crucial to the economy of nations (Burnard, 2006) to increase the employment rate, economy achievement, and to compete with other nations on innovation (Davies, 2002).  There has been a shift in current education to have students develop their ability to be creative, instead of trying to suppress or ignore it (Poole, 1980).  With all of the research on creativity, there is limited research on how the teaching of creativity is occurring, if at all.  There is also limited research on evaluating different approaches to teaching creativity and the effects these have on students.

This study’s importance revolves around the idea of creativity being taught in high school art classes and what are the students learning.  This study will help fill in some of the missing components that exist in the limited amount of research on how the teaching of creativity is occurring, describing different approaches to teaching creativity, and explaining the effects of instruction on students’ creative abilities.  This study will be helpful for anyone who is trying to increase the development of students’ ability to be creative (curriculum developers, administrators, teachers) due to the goal in education for students to learn creativity.  For curriculum developers and administrators this research can be used to help teach creativity in other disciplines and to students who will not be exposed to creativity in a visual arts class.  For teachers or anyone else who would like to improve their ability to teach creativity, this research could be insightful by developing a different approach to teaching creativity.

Theoretical Framework

I will be using Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) as the lens to examine the findings in this study.  Gardner hypothesized that human cognitive competence is better described in terms of a set of abilities, talent, or mental skills, that he called intelligences (p. 6).  Gardner named eight abilities or intelligences: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.  Later, he proposed that existential and moral intelligence may also be included with the other abilities/intelligences.  All people possess each of these skills to some extent or another, but most differ in the degrees of skill and in the nature of the combination.  Some children can be stronger in one certain area or ability than others are (p. 115).  Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (1983) will be used to examine the different strategies each visual arts teacher uses in teaching.  Each teaching strategy will also be examined to gauge the effectiveness on students.  There is a possibility that not all eight intelligences will be present in the students who are in the visual arts classroom.

Description of the Study 

This is a qualitative a/r/tography research study that was guided by Irwin and Springgay (2008).  A/r/tography is an arts and education practice-based research methodology that uses inquiry with the arts and writing.  The name highlights these features by setting art and graphy, and the characteristics of artist, researcher, and teacher (a/r/t), in a close relationship.  Not one of the features is more important than the another as they happen simultaneously in and through time and space.  Irwin and Springgay (2008) stress a type of understanding that is relational, embodied, and active.  A/r/tographic researchers pull from their personal experiences as they work through the arts to consider, question, and theorize new questions and possibilities.  The art-making methods are seen as a type of research and are grounded in writing.

The focus is on the connection between creating art and writing that fosters new ways of understanding the world through experiences.  Three ways of interpreting experience, theoria (knowing), praxis (doing), and poesis (making) are folded together in a/r/tography to create spaces in which meaning is “interrogated and ruptured” (Irwin and Springgay, 2008 p. xx).  A/r/tography was selected for this study as it draws upon the multiple roles of artist/researcher/teacher that as a visual arts educator I often find myself practicing.  Each of the three roles is connected with me, it would be extremely difficult to turn one or two of them off.  I have incorporated my experiences into the art-making process with other art teachers who in turn have explained their difficulty in teaching the visual arts.

A/r/tography was developed to encompass the many roles in arts-based research; artist, researcher, and the teacher.  Practice-based foundation focus on how “theorizing through inquiry seeks understanding by way of an evolution of questions within the living-inquiry processes of the practitioner” (Irwin & Springgay, 2008, p. xxii).  The role of the educators and artists are thought to be methods of research and the “intellectual, imaginative, and insightful work” they made is “grounded in ongoing forms of recursive and reflexive inquiry engaged in theorizing for understanding” (p. xxii).

A/r/tography is an arts and education practice-based research methodology (Sullivan, 2004) that use acts of inquiry through the arts and writing process (Irwin & Springgay, 2008).  The name illustrates the structures of a/r/tography by setting art and graphy, and the identities of artist, researcher, and teacher (a/r/t), in adjacent relations.  None of these structures is more important than the other they occur simultaneously in and through time and space.

One cannot explain a/r/tography without explaining the rhizomatic relationality, which is essential to a/r/tography as a methodology of situations.  Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe rhizomes metaphorically through the idea of crabgrass that “connects any point to any other point” (p. 21) by growing in all directions.  Through this idea, Deleuze and Guattari stress the importance of the ‘middle’ by upsetting the order of beginnings and endings.  According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the concept should express an event instead of an essence and might be understood as a collection of lines on a plane moving in multiple directions, each having their own meaning in time.  A/r/tography uses the idea of the rhizomes by applying it to the material being researched, with each of the identities in a/r/tography.  The inquiry now changes with each identity and each point in time, the questions and answers change with the time and positionality.

Furthermore, the acts of inquiry and the three identities repel modernist categorizations and instead exist as post-structural conceptualizations of practice (Bickel, 2004; de Cosson, 2002, 2003).  By stressing practice, a shift occurs from questioning who an artist, researcher, or educator might be or what art, research or education is, to when is a person an artist, researcher or educator and when is an experienced art, research or education (Kingwell, 2005).

The study was a based on in-depth in-person interviews with four visual arts teachers who are teaching visual arts to high school students.  I have also observed these visual arts teachers while they are teaching, observing the responses of the students.  I developed an observation forms as described by Creswell (2007) to keep track of the data during my observations of the visual arts teachers and students.  After all of the interviews and observations were completed the participants and myself, have each create an original artwork representing our experiences during this study (see figures 2-6).

Chapter summary

The purpose of this study is to understand how high school visual arts educators teach in the age of incorporation digital media into the art curriculum.  According to Sternberg (2007), students are able to connect with real problems than with ideas that are untenable because they can draw connections from their own experiences.  The study focused on understanding how visual arts teachers are teaching high school students, not just asking them to be creative, using divergent thinking, or use their imagination.  That information will help inform future research on which teaching strategies are more successful and less successful in teaching high school visual arts students.  This will be done through a qualitative a/r/tography research study that uses Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences as the lens to examine the findings.  There is much research on the role of creativity in education and the benefits of teaching creativity to students, although there is a limited amount of research on how visual arts teachers are teaching creativity, if at all.  The goal of this study was to add to the research of how visual arts educators teach visual arts to high school students.

The following chapters include some background information on the role of creativity in education, a brief history, how play can be incorporated to teach creativity and how creativity might be taught.  I will also cover what methods will be used in this study, the data collection and analysis, and the description of participants in the methodology section.