Critical Thinking and Teaching Art

National Art Education Association

Critical Thinking and Teaching ArtAuthor(s): David E. TempletonSource: Art Education, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 4-9Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191305 .

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BY DAVID E. TEMPLETON. The last five or six years have seen increased systematic, sustained attention being paid to critical inquiry, reflection, and thinking in the visual arts. With an almost perceptible lurch, the steering wheel of art production may be giving way to the troika of art production, art history, and art criticism. The creating of art forms is not being given a back seat. However, with increasing clarity, art history and art criticism are demanding equal time. For example, it has been asserted that ". . . it would be useful for students to know that there are at least three types of statements that they can make about a work of art. They can describe its visual 'facts,' they can interpret their reaction to what they described and they can evaluate the work of art by making some value judgment about it. Description, interpretation, and evaluation differ and it would be useful for students to know when they are doing each." '

Yet, in the rush to achieve new (or refurbished) aesthetic objectives, we must be careful not to stumble over means which are either ill-conceived or little considered. Surely our students must critically observe art forms of the past. Just as surely they should be able to evaluate critically art forms of their own creation, of their contemporaries, and of current adult artists.

However, despite a flurry of slides, kits, reproductions, films, art appreciation institutes, texts, and programs, the following questions must still be asked: What is critical thinking? How do we engage children in critical thought? What effect might the answers to those questions have on the structure of art programs? j

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?

There is a profusion of definitions, ranging from its being a combination of attitude, knowledge, and skill 2 to Guilford's "evaluative abilities." ' An area of study which is virtually com- mitted to critical thinking and which exemplifies the explosion of interest in this field is critical reading. King and Ellinger have reported that from 1960 to 1965 the production of litera- ture in critical reading is seven times that produced in all of the 1940's. My reference to the work in critical reading is by no means casual. Researchers in this area have broken much ground for us in art education.

Admittedly, when one invests critical thought in a visual art form, he is not operating quite the same as when he critically reads; the critical reader is not involved with the same kind of stimulus as the critical viewer of art. Yet, how the perceiver becomes concerned that he should attend to the material, be it visual or verbal, may hold many commonalities. This is the assumption upon which I shall operate.

Of those definitions perused, I find that of Robert Ziller to be the most comfortable to work with, applicable to the visual arts, and perhaps the most provocative. He has broadly asserted that critical thinking is a cognitive style. Cognitive style has only recently emerged as a delineated area of psychological study. Discussing cognitive style, Tyler has pointed out: ". the world might actually look, sound and feel differently to different persons . . . they . . . solve problems and form concepts in quite different ways, and . . . the same stimulating situation [carries] different meaning for them. ... ." 6

For art educators, perhaps the most outstanding exemplifi- cations of cognitive style are Lowenfeld's haptics and visuals. In the art education context, I feel June McFee's Perception- Delineation Theory provides us with some suggestions as to how one might develop a cognitive style.

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But what does all this have to do with critical thinking? First, we must throw off the notion that elementary children completely accept information new to them with the subsequent inability to evaluate it critically. As Ziller has indicated, when the child matures, his sources of information multiply, and the communication among these sources decreases. As such, the child increasingly relies upon himself to reconcile divergent points of view in order to arrest conflict. In gross terms, two variables play important roles in the handling of this conflict. One is the degree of disparity between the sources of information. The other is the stability of the self-concept of the child handling the conflict. "If the stability of the self-concept is the basis of personal adjustment, alterations of the concepts through critical thinking may be presumed to pose a threat to the self-concept, particularly if the self-concept is only tenu- ously held. Thus, critical thinking is a process in which stable personalities may indulge with impunity."'

One must be cautious in his use of the self-concept con- struct, however. While there is a pervasive self-concept which undoubtedly underpins much of the individual's life-style, I am utterly convinced that a person has more than one sub-self- concept. For example, I have dealt with many high school and college students who possessed "academic self-concepts" which appeared to be quite stable. Yet, faced with the prob- lem of creating art forms, these very same students clearly exhibited unstable "artistic self-concepts."

What makes this point so pivotal is that if the self-concept is reasonably stable in one domain of knowledge and not in another, then perhaps it is not the student, but the kinds of information and the means of presenting that information which are causing the instability. In fact, this was one of the speculations upon which the new mathematics was based, and it is one which the visual arts ought to consider.

Another point which must be made exceedingly clear is that self-concept instability is not as negative a situation as it may seem. Indeed, it appears to be a most necessary ingredient in moving one ahead, in bringing one to learn. It is when a

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student has examined and internalized information to the ex- tent that he feels comfortable with it that he ceases to deal with it, and thus ceases learning. The information which is unfamiliar and contradictory and which does not quite fit his cognitive styles causes the stability of his self-concept to be threatened. To make the new information familiar, confirmed, and fit, the student must attend to, examine, and internalize it. The cycle is completed, ready to be run again. Thus, it is the quest for stability which is at the very heart of critical thinking. If the student sees no contradiction-or at least a situation whereby his perception of two points of view (his and some- one else's) poses him no threat-then for him there are no grounds for examination, no reasons for thinking critically.

There has been of late much shaking of art education ortho- doxies. One of these is that the only real art learning takes place when one creates art forms. An implication to be drawn from such an assertion is that to look at and talk about art forms is an artistic undertaking of a lower order. Yet, somehow, children learn to enjoy music without composing it, conducting an orchestra, or playing an instrument. True, to play an instrument will give an individual a deeper and consequently different perception of music. Yet all of us have seen nonperform- ing children and adults become excited, moody, or sentimental when certain kinds of music are played.

The kinds of students about whom I am concerned are not solely those who are nonproducing. Indeed, we art educators should show much more concern for what our producing students think about and not assume that the "doing" suffices. Also, while a child surely thinks about those things which he symbolizes in his art work, he just as surely thinks about things which he does not and cannot symbolize. Thus, there are three contexts in which I am attempting to couch my concern for critical thinking: 1) thinking critically about art forms created by artists in times past; 2) thinking critically about one's en- vironment and one's relationship and reactions to it; and 3) thinking critically about the art forms which one creates.

SELF-CONCEPT AS THE BASIS OF CRITICAL THINKING Let me make one point perfectly clear: My employing self-

concept is done as a means to aesthetic education. While all teachers should be concerned with their students' self-concepts, to view improvement of the self-concept as an objective of the art program is to attend to something which is not unique to the teaching of art. As such, it cannot serve as a justification for having art in the curriculum. Also, Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia have candidly stated that few serious workers now use the term "critical thinking" when stating curriculum objectives.8 Lastly, in his definition of creativity, E. Paul Torrance has stated that one first senses problems or gaps in information.' After a fashion, the following examples have problems and gaps in information built into them. Their structures are such that the students can be brought to a point of clearing up the problems and closing the gaps.

A tactic which employs as well as develops critical thinking in the examination of art forms of the past is that evolved by the art historian, Joshua Taylor. Although I am quite sure that Dr. Taylor has not considered its psychological basis, I submit that it is the effect upon the student's self-concept which gives strength to his learning-to-look strategy.

"The proper place to begin a study of the history of art is with the best document we have, the works themselves. The student must first learn honestly to face up to his own responses and judgments, feeble as they may be at the beginning, and not be given the opportunity or means to substitute somebody else's concepts . . . there are three stages to the initial study in the field; the first is the student's recognition that he can and

does respond to a work of art; the second is characterized by his efforts to describe the nature of the response; the third ... is the attempt to link the particular nature of the response to the physical nature of the work he is studying. This is to move consistently from the experience to the concept, which emerges from the third step, and the concept is based on the student's own experience and framed in his own words. Since it is his formulation, he controls its use; it does not have the force of outside authority and law. In fact, if the teaching progresses fruitfully, he will modify the formulation of his concepts continuously." ,o

I have attempted to utilize Dr. Taylor's approach with a large number of classes of nonart college students (elementary education majors) and elementary school children (as far down in the grades as the second) and have found the strategy to have considerable power. Operationally, the college students iden- tified what they saw when looking at a reproduction; they used their own terms. For a while they felt uneasy; they wanted to know who the artist was, the date of the work's execution, and the school in which the artist had been classified. Once they pushed aside the drive for chronological closure and realized that what was wanted was their personal observations, in their own terminology, the feeling began to build that ". . . this talking about art works isn't so tough after all."

We next moved to noting in the work variables such as color, texture, perspective, and line. (Two words of caution for the teacher who has his students engage in this kind of discussion: 1) be wary of permitting the group to go on so long that simple, spontaneous identification becomes a grinding ordeal

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of dull, methodical cataloging; and 2) as Dr. Taylor exhorts, one must be very painstaking in selecting the art works to be examined and discussed.) Thus, when the students simply noted subject matter and the elements of the work, I believe two operations were occurring simultaneously. First, the students were building a bank of substantive visual information upon which all could agree. Second, when they realized there was nothing esoterically involved in this form of description, their artistic self-concepts were considerably strengthened.

We next turned to a reproduction of a work with content and form quite similar to the first, but with the first being out of sight. They described the second work, using the same approach as with the first. Feeling rather comfortable by now, the students were then shown the two reproductions side-by- side. We now had a visual contradiction; the students were no longer comfortable. In their quest to alleviate the contradiction (to regain stability), they considered the differences in their responses toward each object. I have had students who were considerably irked and demanded to know ". . . why that second artist painted the Crucifixion so differently from the first painter. Could it be the way people felt about that event at the time he painted? When was that painted, anyway?" Thus, the students felt a great need to consider the period when the work was created, not because its date of execution had se- quential importance, but because it might clear up a situation which was proving personally and emotionally irritatingly contradictory to them. They began to look more closely at the objects, subjects, and the elements in the works. Indeed, trig- gered by their own needs and drives for stability, they came to grips with the works' expressive content which Taylor states is "... the combined effect of subject matter and visual form." (It is interesting to note that the students did not press for the artists' names; it seemed irrelevant to understanding the work itself. The name was eventually supplied, however.)

With the second-graders, the point of departure was considerably different. Operating on the well-known premise that children this age are considerably egocentric, I first involved them in an art project of their own. We first listened to the storm sequence from Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite. Of course, they were not told what the music was about, but were asked to draw pictures of what they thought the music sounded like. As expected, most of the youngsters drew pictures of storms. After each very briefly described what was happening in his picture, the children moved to another location in the room where I then brought out a reproduction of Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream. They were asked to name the things they saw in the work, not only subject matter, but the elements. (The terms "subject matter" and "elements" were not used.) They also looked at and talked about Constable's View at Hamp- stead Heath. The children were asked how each work made them feel: "scared," "frightened," "spooky." Pressing them, I asked, "What did the artists do with their pictures to make you feel that way?"

Pointing to the Homer, one boy noted, "That guy used lots of blacks and dark browns and dark blues and no reds and oranges and yellows. Blacks, blues, and browns are lots more scary than happy." They went on to talk about the waves, tilting trees, and lack of people in the scenes.

Then, taking something of a gamble, I moved the reproductions next to their drawings. Their reactions were more than I had hoped for. "Hey!," one second-grader gasped. "That other artist must have felt the same way I did when I was drawing my picture! Look, he used the same colors and the same swirly way I did!" There was not only a complete lack of concern by the youngsters as to the technical inadequacy of their works in contrast with the adult artists' works, but they compared

color selection, application, and feelings behind choices with the other artists!

It appears that some crucial points regarding critical thought in the early elementary school years might well be drawn from this example. First, as most of us who have taught art in the elementary schools know, the vast majority of youngsters at this age are perhaps the most free to create artistic symbols that they will ever be in their lives. This includes not only lack of concern for adult art standards, but as such, a freedom in looking around and encountering (and unconsciously gathering) information which at a later time will begin to fall into place as logic and concepts begin to form. All of those factors and more pivot around their egocentricism. Thus, with their artistic self-concepts buttressed by their egocentrism at such a high level, youngsters at this age are ripe for engaging in thought about works by artists of the past.

Remarkably, another characteristic of young children, with which we are all familiar, comes into play in a rather extraor- dinary way. The children's lack of comprehending time appears to enable them to view the works as having been done by contemporaries. Hence, the children are not only unawed by the works but delighted to see "... the other artists used the same colors as I did!"

At first glance, then, it might appear that adult standards are being imposed upon the youngsters. Not so. It has been my experience with first- and second-graders that, for the most part, they do not perceive adult artists' work as better than their own; it is either like their work or different from it. Indeed, I would suggest that the notion that it is an imposition on early elementary school children to confront them with adult art may be mostly a figment of adult imagination. More important, what is being proposed is not simply developing a habit of looking at and talking about works of art. With the emotional distance between the child and artists of the past being perhaps as short as it will ever be, the art works and the men who created them will become old friends . . . much like fairy tales and nursery rhymes. And, much as the child continues to read and find deeper, more expanded meanings in his readings as his intel- lectual equipment develops, so it will be in his encounters with artists and their art. We simply cannot overlook the re- ality of children catching implied meanings, morals, and other nuances in stories well before they can create stories of their own which contain comparable subtleties.

I would also hasten to caution that employing Taylor's strategy of contrasting works in the early elementary years may create more of a state of confusion than lively discussion. This caution is raised not so much from a therapeutic stance, but rather from the position that what may be contradictory to adults may not be so to youngsters. Piaget suggests that early elementary children (perhaps up to the age of seven) often do not perceive differences or "contradictions," the latter being, in fact, a phenomenon of adult logic. The children more often than not account for and blur the differences.12

Next, I would like to report an example of using self-concept as a basis of critical thinking in art production. With slight modification this has been used at all grade levels up to the sixth and has been found to be highly successful. For this particular project in question, the objectives were to make the youngsters more aware of texture and three dimensional form. Three very common, everyday items (e.g., a ball of string, a pine cone, an eraser) were each put into a separate paper bag while the youngsters were not present. When the class was gathered, they were told that a bag would be brought around and they were to feel inside but not to look, and then, on the basis of what they felt, they were to guess what the bag con- tained. No one could say what he thought until everyone had

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had a chance to feel the object. Squirming with eagerness and confidence, the children reported what they thought it was. The matter was not settled that easily, however. They were pressed as to why they thought the object was what they thought it was.

"Well," one youngster started rather indignantly, "Well, the string went around and around and it felt . . . stringy!" And so it went with the pine cone and the eraser. Then a fourth bag was brought out. In it I had put a photograph of a dog. That bag, too, was passed around, and by now the second-graders were virtually swaggering in their reaction to feeling what was inside the bag. Not unexpectedly, they all shouted, "A piece of paper!"

Frowning, I haltingly ventured, "Mmmm . . yes ... you're partly right, but what does the paper have on it?"

Somewhat surprised that they had not met with another complete conquest as they had with the other bags, the youngsters first looked at each other. Finally, almost heatedly, one of them turned to me and asked, "But how can we tell what was on the paper? We can't see it!"

I pulled the picture out of the bag, held it up, and countered, trying to sound a little amazed, "You mean to say you can't tell me what this is?"

"A dog," came the subdued response. "Of course, a dog; but why couldn't you tell me what it was

a moment ago?" "Because we couldn't see it!" They were beginning to whine

a little now. "But you couldn't see the ball of string, or the pine cone,

or the eraser, but you still told me what they were." This threw them into a quandary; they began whispering

among themselves. I could hear some agreeing with what I had said; others were still a little miffed that I had expected them to know what was on a piece of paper they were not allowed to see. Suddenly, one youngster's hand shot up.

"We couldn't put our hands around the dog the way we did with the other stuff!"

"Yes," the rest of the class breathed,>'That was it! And our fingers could feel the string and the pine cone bumps and the rubbery rubber eraser."

We considered these two points for a few moments more, and then they were ready to work with their clay. It is note- worthy that some of the youngsters were seen closing their eyes and cupping their hands around their projects.

It would appear then that these youngsters thought they knew all there was to know about texture: it was something to be touched. Confident that that was indeed the case, when their knowledge (their stability) was in jeopardy, they had to push themselves to a new level of comprehension: apprehen- sion of the distinction between and the meshing of two kinds of texture; seeing and feeling.

Returning to the research in critical reading, Wolf and El- linger 13 studied pairs of classrooms of children, grades one through six. One group of first through sixth graders had teachers who established with them concrete and substantive information about the stories they had just read. That is, they clarified and verified only the material which had been read. On the other hand, the second group of first through sixth graders did not establish substantive information; they were immediately asked divergent questions.14 It was observed that the children of the teachers who had developed concrete information first produced more critical responses than those children who were moved immediately into divergent questioning.

Thus, an implication for thinking critically about one's own art forms, especially at the elementary level, might be that

many teachers of art may move too abruptly to questioning the students divergently after viewing stimulus materials. For example, "How can our clay show rough texture like the bark of the trees outside?" Rather, the research in critical reading indicates that what is needed is a substantial amount of concrete information-that is, clarification of what was seen or heard-before divergent, speculative discussion can be carried on.

The intent of my remarks was to underscore two concerns. First, the handwriting on the wall is fast becoming the handwriting in the curriculum. Art education is now seriously at- tending to three modes of learning about art: production, history, and criticism. In the past, the latter two have tended to be the icing on the art production cake. At their best, they were under the purview of an enrichment program. My concern here is that we do not suddenly find lists of "key" art vocabulary terms and crushing numbers of reproductions of art works whose names, creators, and dates must be memorized in numb- ing chronological order. To operate art history and art criticism in this fashion could completely subvert the central intent of all three artistic approaches, that being the understanding of the internal qualities of man through symbol by humans who learn best through their personal involvement. At the same time, we must continually consider and reconsider what is meant by "personal involvement" in the creating of art forms, and what relationship the teacher has in this.

The second concern is contingent on the first. As some workers in critical reading have indicated, critical thinking is a highly personal enterprise. Yet, it is not so highly personal that it cannot be probed, examined, and utilized effectively. Not to reap the harvest of findings in this area could seriously im- pair attaining our objective through new and exciting routes. Indeed, we would do well to think critically about critical thinking.

David E. Templeton is assistant professor, The College of the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus.

REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES

1. Elliott W. Eisner. "Curriculum Ideas in Times of Crisis," Art Education, 18: 7-12, October, 1965.

2. E. M. Glaser. "An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking," Teachers College Contributions to Education, No. 843, 1941.

3. J. P. Guilford. "Three Faces of the Intellect," American Psychologist, 14: 469- 479, 1965.

4. Martha L. King and Bernice D. Ellinger. Annotated Bibliography of Critical Reading Articles, compiled under the auspices of the U. S. Office of Education Project No. 2612, W. Wolf, C. Huck, M. King, directors, The Ohio State Uni- versity, 1966.

5. Robert Ziller. "The Origins of Critical Thinking," Dimensions of Critical Read- ing, Vol. XI, ed. Russell G. Stanffer, University of Delaware Press, 1964.

6. Leona E. Tyler. The Psychology of Individual Differences, New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1965, third edition, p. 211. Dr. Tyler's Chapter 9, "Individual Differences in Cognitive Style," is an excellent compilation and survey of the area of cognitive style.

7. Ziller, op. cit., pp. 17-18. 8. David Krathwohl, Benjamin Bloom, and Bertram Masia. Taxonomy of Educa-

tional Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain, New York, David McKay Co., Inc., 1964, p. 21.

9. E. Paul Torrance. 'Creativity," What Research Says to the Teacher, No. 28, De- partment of Classroom Teachers, American Educational Research Association of the N.E.A., April, 1963, p. 4.

10. Joshua C. Taylor. "The History of Art in Education," in A Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development, Edward Mattil, Project Director, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1966, Cooperative Research Project V-002, p. 51.

11. Ibid. 12. Jean Piaget. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1951. According to Piaget, the young child utilizes syncretism and juxtaposition. Syncretism is a tendency on the part of the child to perceive things spontaneously in sweeping, comprehensive acts rather than by detail. Juxtaposition is the taking of discrete subject matter or propositions and con- necting them: the mode of connection is syncretism. This enables the child, who is not yet able to structure logical justifications, to give reasons for almost anything and everything he wishes.

13. W. Wolf and B. Ellinger. A pilot study for the project, "Critical Reading Ability of Elementary School Children," U. S. Office of Education grant. Other investi- gators include Charlotte Huck and Martha King.

14. Defined by the authors as: "If a question were asked which did not require a single correct answer it was labeled as divergent."

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Critical Thinking and Teaching Art