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creativity

Within a Montessoricontext, nurturingcreativity is ofcentral importance.For many outsiders,

however, Dr Montessori’s approach tocreativity is counterintuitive. Like othercore pedagogical concepts – freedom,order, respect, and work – Montessori’stake on nurturing the creative capacityin children was, and still is, groundedin a very specific understanding ofhuman development.

In a Montessori classroom,development (emotional, social,cognitive, physical) is a holisticenterprise. It occurs in stages, or planes,and it can either be supported orobstructed by the environment thatsurrounds a child. Creativity is anatural impulse in all humans,stemming from both a universaltendency to express thoughts andfeelings and a fundamental need toconstruct meaning out of our life andsurroundings.

But how is creativity nurtured? Morespecifically, how do the specificpractices of the Montessori preparedenvironment enable the developmentof creative capacities?

We have been struck by how insightsuncovered by those developing andusing Visual Thinking Strategies, a

more recent approach to developingcreative thinking in classrooms, arecompatible with views of DrMontessori. Exploring the theorybehind Visual Thinking Strategies,along with its affinity to Montessoridevelopmental and pedagogical theory,helps illuminate both the how andwhy of creativity in a Montessorisetting.

Sense training andcreativity: imagination isgrounded in perception

One of the first things new visitorsoften notice about Montessoriclassrooms is their order. Second is thequiet, intense focus of the children.

The youngest children are oftenfocused on the sensorial materials,which are meant to be explored in aparticular way and in a particularsequence.

The Brown Stair, for instance, is notto be used as a pretend train. Rather, itspurpose is to enable the child todevelop the ability to classify three-dimensional objects and to refineperceptual discrimination. In doing so,the child learns to appreciate the formalelements of object and, in the words ofDr Montessori, “train himself toobserve.”

Indeed, all of the sensorial materialsare designed to assist the child inrefining her perceptive capacities. Theyare also supporting her ability to

When this second article onVTS by JacquelineCossentino and KeithWhitescarver first appearedin the last issue, a technicalerror resulted in anabreviated version beingprinted. With apologies tothe authors, we arereprinting it here in full.

Margie Gibbonsfacilitating a VTSdiscussion atLexingtonMontessori School,Lexington,Massachusetts

The theory and practice of aesthetic development

Visual thinking and Montessori

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creativity

30 Montessori International JANUARY - MARCH 2012

concentrate while honoring her needto bring order and structure to herrapidly expanding cognitive skills.Sense training sets the stage for deeperintellectual work. As children enter thesecond plane of development, whereabstraction moves to the fore, sensorialskills serve as cognitive tools, enablingcomplex, creative, and critical thinking.Imagination, in other words, isgrounded in perception – not infantasy or other departures from reality,but in the real stuff of living.

Maria Montessori makes nosignificant distinction betweencreativity and other types of cognitiveactivity. Learning to look (or listen,taste, smell, or touch), in other words,is pretty much the same as learning tothink.

“The senses, being explorers of theworld, open the way to knowledge …Simultaneously, everythingappertaining to the child’s higherenergies becomes a stimulus, setting hiscreative powers to work and extendingthe interests of the exploring mind.”(See The Absorbent Mind, especiallythe chapter, ‘Further ElaborationThrough Culture and Imagination.’)

In this way, Montessori’s theory ofhuman development both overlapswith and foreshadows in profoundways the theory of aestheticdevelopment articulated in VisualThinking Strategies.

Rudolf Arnheim (1902-2007), theGerman Gestalt psychologist, coinedthe term “visual thinking” and arguedthat perception was so central tocognition that there is, functionally, nodifference between looking andthinking. “Perception makes it possibleto structure reality,” he wrote “and thus

Working with the Brown Stair at CrosswayMontessori, Kensington MD

Creativity is a natural impulse in all humans, stemming from both auniversal tendency to express thoughts and feelings and afundamental need to construct meaning out of our life andsurroundings.

Table 1 – The five stages of aesthetic development

Stage Stage characteristics

1. Accountive Storytellers—memories and personal associations and concrete observations are woven into a narrative. Judgment based on the familiar and preference; emotions affect interpretation.

2. Constructive Building a framework, using personal perceptions, knowledge, and values. Judgment is negative if something doesn’t look like it is supposed to (i.e. realistic). Distance themselves emotionally with art object.

3. Classifying Art historian—interest in identifying artist, place, style, time, provenance, etc.; Make sense of the work using a library of facts; with proper categorization, meaning can be rationalized.

4. Interpretative Seeking a personal encounter with the work; lets the meaning slowly unfold. Multiple meanings and interpretations exist; awareness of their process of making meaning.

5. Re-creative Long history of viewing; familiarity—returns to a word over and over again. Understands the complexity of the work (its history, contexts, intricacies); works of art as complex things that should be visited and revisited. Combination of the personal and the universal

to attain knowledge.” Art, he furtherargued, “is a means of perception, ameans of cognition. Art reveals to usthe essence of things, the essence ofour existence. That is its function.”(Arnheim interview, 2001,www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/rudolfarnheim.php)

Looking, in other words, shapesthinking; and art – a universal meansof constructing meaning – not onlyexpresses our deepest thoughts andfeelings, it enables us to organize thosethoughts and feelings in ways thattranscend language.

Planes and StagesVisual Thinking Strategies (VTS) takes

its name from Arnheim’s work, and isbuilt, in part, on his view that (1) art isperception and (2) perception is

thinking. VTS co-founder AbigailHousen grounded her own theory ofaesthetic development in Arnheim’searlier psychological and philosophicalideas, but went further. WhereArnheim was interested in describing aprocess of viewing, Housen wanted tolearn how people make sense of art.More specifically, she wanted to knowwhat people think about when thenlook at art, and what, if anything,causes people to grow as art viewers.

What she learned was that aestheticdevelopment is both intricately linkedto human development in general andsomewhat separate as a process. That is,like general human development,which takes place in phases or planes,aesthetic development also occurs insuccessive stages. Those stages,however, are not linked tochronological age or even educationlevel. Rather they are the result of aviewer’s experience with looking at andthinking about art.

Neither is aesthetic developmentlinked to intelligence. In fact, many ofthe subjects of Housen’s early researchwere college-educated visitors to placeslike the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork and the Museum of Fine Arts, inBoston. And most of those visitors werestage 1 or 2.

As a result, VTS is designed forbeginning viewers. Its aim is not toaccelerate aesthetic growth. Like Dr

ThinkingSemblanceInterpretationSpeculation

LookingPerceptionDescriptionRevision

Figure 1 – The relationshipbetween looking and thinking

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Montessori, Housen regards each stageas necessary and valuable on its ownterms. Rather, the aim is to enableviewers to fully experience each stageand to cultivate the qualities ofaesthetic thinking that allow us tocontemplate and express the deepestmeanings of our existence. To put it inMontessori terms, aestheticdevelopment is central to what lies atthe core of the purpose of alleducation: to appreciate both the orderand the challenges of a vast universe;to live intentionally, equipped toconfront and resolve problems,conflicts and puzzles of all kinds; andto discern one’s cosmic task.

To further make the Montessoriconnection, first plane aestheticdevelopment begins as sense training.As the child moves into the second andthird planes of development, cognitivework of perception matures into criticaland creative thinking.

practice, a larger goal is to createsocially developed children who bothlearn and teach one another. Inpromoting and increasing observationskills, reasoning, and speculativeabilities through use of the senses, VTSaccomplishes this learning goal. Theaffinity with Montessori pedagogymakes it a good fit in a Montessoriclassroom, and, not surprisingly, VTS isfinding its way into Montessori schoolsin both North America and Europe. !

Further Reading:Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 1969Abigail Housen, The Eye of the Beholder, 2001Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, 194Jacqueline Cossentino is the Regional Director for VisualThinking Strategies in Boston and New England. She hasbeen a principal for two Montessori schools, one of whichwas an urban, public school in Hartford, Connecticut.Keith Whitescarver is a historian of education. He is on theArchives Committee and Research Committee of theAmerican Montessori Society, and is the director of Grantify, aresearch, evaluation, and grant writing firm.

A child working with moveable alphabets atCrossway Montessori

Figure 2 – Montessori’s first three planes of development

Maria Montessori was the first toarticulate a staged theory of humandevelopment, and recent research onbrain development supports her viewof the first plane child as a sensorialexplorer. It turns out that braindevelopment starts in the parietal lobe(where vision is located), and that bythe age of six 95% of braindevelopment is completed. During thesecond and third planes ofdevelopment, the frontal lobes (whichare responsible for higher orderthinking) continue to develop, while,at the same time, a pruning processtakes place, which organizes the brain’sconnections based on the stimuli itreceives during this period.

Visual Thinking Strategies aims tocapitalize on this developmentalprocess by stimulating perception aswell as higher order processes such asanalysis, inference, interpretation, andevaluation. Similar to Montessori