![]() ![]() ![]() He sees (observe) the results of those efforts and reflects on (envisions) possibilities for meaning (express) – certain marks feel like anger or movement certain colors feel like openness or fear. By doing so, he develops some skilled technique (develop craft). Let me illustrate what I mean.įor example, a youth plays around with paint (stretch & explore) to make marks and colors. That’s because, no matter which studio habits an artist uses at the start of a project, reflecting on them helps students find more possibilities within each habit while the artistic process itself pulls the budding artists to use more studio habits responsively. When teachers show student-artists what youth can do with the eight kinds of artistic thinking represented by the Studio Habits, the fun begins. We need to engage these students not in games with low odds for success, but in genuine thinking that holds their interest and keeps them in learning environments in schools and other organizations. As it happens, many urban youth refuse to play as pawns in that game - and that leads them out of school and into the streets. Many schools never ask them to, and so they just stay at the “rote and ritual” level of memorizing, repeating, and performing on cue, becoming pawns in a game that keeps them below the status and responsibilities of being active, responsible decision-makers. Too many students don’t ever get to work at the “thinking with support” level in their educations. That’s why it’s so helpful to use the Studio Habits if you’re interested in teaching equitably. And by working at this level, learning happens. All students, regardless of ability, can work at this level. I refer to the middle level as “thinking with support.” It interests me, because it is the equity level. So it’s the middle level that interests me most. And if expert artist-teachers stay at that level, it makes artistic practice seem too mysterious to be attainable – a magic act performed by a talented few. ![]() While that’s a wonderful level to aim toward, it’s not generally a possibility for our students - not on a sustained level, anyway. But we also can’t expect of students what we see and hear at the level of the expert artist, where the habits interact so seamlessly that they can seem not even to exist. It’s not a bad place to start, but it’s not a good enough place to end! We want more than just naming from using these categories. The low level is a kind of “rote and ritual” level, where teachers and kids use the habits as labels and/or recipes. I think about what it looks and sounds like when students work with Studio Habits at lower and middle and higher levels. Lately, I’ve been most interested in levels of Studio Habit use as shown in what students make, do, and say, because I want to find ways to guide students toward higher quality uses of their developing artistic minds. Studio Habits bind together artistic practices – that is, the ways serious artists work - and arts education, so that what we teach and what students learn more closely resemble genuine artistic efforts. I’ll talk about each part of the framework separately. They’re accessible, “ordinary language” terms for concepts that can help educators, advocates, and students share with the unconvinced what it is that artistic minds do to create and judge the quality of artworks and how art teachers set up learning experiences that nurture that kind of growth. Both parts of the framework are analytic lenses that teachers and students can turn on their practice to make it more visible and meaningful. Studio Thinking is two parts, as you know: Studio Habits (or the dispositions that teachers want students to learn so that they develop artistic mind) and Studio Structures (or how art teachers put together arts learning experiences). Now that you’ve used Studio Thinking in action yourselves, this should make more sense than it would as lifeless theory. Here are a few thoughts that focus on how the framework works, from my perspective. I realize that you’re at the end of your projects, so I’ve been pondering what it makes sense to tell you about the Studio Thinking Framework at this juncture. I’ve spent big parts of the past three days reading through the ENGAGE site(s), trying to understand what you’ve been doing in the project and what you’ve been learning. ![]()
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