Art: A Way to Teach Thinking

Kathryn Bell, B.S., M.A.

I had decided to do something different for the junior high tour of the art department. The Art Faculty Exhibition was still hanging, and I had turned the junior high visitors loose in the hall to think up questions to ask about the work. Good questions were coming, but there were some snickers perpetually on the fringes of the group who were obviously not involved in the discussion. Suddenly, I heard it, not exactly out loud, but strong enough to be audible--"I think that's the ugliest painting I've ever seen!" So, it had finally happened--a genuine, personal response had been voiced, neither politely covered over nor privately whispered. It was just the opening I was looking for. We stopped before the offending painting and everybody gawked in awkward silence.

It was a landscape. The details were fuzzy, and textures and colors were subdued and soft; colors were muted and dark. In the sky, a single ray of light shot from heavy clouds, illuminating their close-toned hues. It had the dark, rich tonality of a tragic symphony with all the bass instruments in full voice.

"What is the subject of this painting?" I asked.

"It's a landscape," someone cautiously offered.

"No lie!" said a snicker from the back row.

"How do you know it's a landscape?" I asked

"'Cause you can see lots of trees and a hill and valley." "It looks like it sinks down and then rises on the other side of the valley," someone ventured.

"Where are we in relation to the valley?" I asked. Some thoughtful silence ensued. The snickerers were quiet now.

"I guess we're above it, looking down," someone finally decided.

"What are the temperature and the weather like?" I asked, sounding more like a meteorologist than an art teacher.

"It's raining or maybe it's about to rain; I don't know which." we had some disagreement about the temperature, though. Some thought the picture looked like a warm rain in summer; some thought it was more like winter. The group finally eliminated winter because the trees seemed to have too much foliage.

It had taken almost our entire three-quarters of an hour time period to get started, but we had finally achieved what I had wanted. We were looking at a painting together--not as a teacher telling students what they ought to see and know and like--but as a group of people learning to look at a painting and understand it. I wish I could say that the original prejudice against the picture was dispelled, but I cannot. It really doesn't matter, anyway. The students may or may not like the picture, but they did grow in their understanding of it. They went away that day having learned to look at, think about, analyze, and express opinions about a picture. Each of these is an important thinking skill. Actually, all thinking has as its basis, sensory images. Elliot Eisner says words are merely "symbols of experience" (p. 48). Our understanding of words is based on the stock of sensory experiences we can recall. One day a group of us were discussing the correspondence between sounds and colors. A blind friend at the far end of the table listened to the discussion, then, to our surprise chimed in: "I think I understand most of the colors, but the one that nobody has been able to explain to me is purple." How would you explain purple apart from the sense of sight? And how, without the sensory understanding of purple, could anyone understand "purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain"? Language is understood through sensory images which we have stored as a reference. This is especially true of complex, abstract terms. Take the word "success" for example. Dr. Bob Jones Sr. defined it as "finding God's will and doing it." Look at the advertisements contained in a secular magazine. Most ads are selling their products by associating them with success. But what is their definition of success? Is it the fur coat, the luxury sedan, the bottle of vodka, or the ten-room house? Is it any wonder that exposed to such a visual picture of "success," our young people desire to go into business more than they desire to go into a ministry?

God has blessed man with thinking skills that are beyond our understanding, only a small portion of which are used by most of us. Training in productive thinking allows us to use our skills as He intended. The skill of productive thinking can be divided into three components: (1) abstract thinking, (2) task commitment and (3) creativity. Abstract thinking is the use of spatial, verbal, and numerical reasoning. It involves memory, vocabulary, and recall. It applies knowledge to the solving of problems. Task commitment involves the interest and enthusiasm one brings to a task and the resulting determination to get the task done. Creativity is the ability to be flexible and original in the way one approaches a task: one's openness to new ideas and ability to evaluate them.

Students in art class learn vocabulary, techniques, historical data and other knowledge, but the learning of facts is not the goal of their study. The information they gain is put to use in a very special kind of problem solving--the making of a work of art. Students in a fourth grade class had been reading Pilgrim's Progress for weeks. With each chapter, they added new details to a large, colorful map showing all of Christian's adventures on the way to the Celestial City. The teacher had given them no assigned arrangement for the episodes, nor had she given them pictures to copy--each child was responsible for the inclusion of all relevant material and ways of representing pictorially all the events. The result was a completely unique composition by each child--and also, a much clearer memory of the details of the story. Abstract thinking was used in arranging the space to accommodate them all, and in putting them in chronological order. Task commitment was demonstrated in the enthusiasm students brought to the task and in carrying such a lengthy assignment through to its end. Creativity was demonstrated in the various ways children solved the problem of symbolizing visually the experiences described in the book.

Of course, the preceding project was as much a study of literature as it was of art, but the same thing can be done with an art project. The student who draws a three-dimensional object on two-dimensional paper has to use abstract reasoning to figure out a method of representing depth on his paper. The representation of depth usually begins to concern the child in fourth or fifth grade. In "Herbie," for instance, fifth grader drew one of the teacher's cars in the parking lot. He started at the front carefully noticing and recording details that he observed. The entire front of the car is drawn in profile view. But something interesting occurs at the back of the car. The young artist suddenly realized that he could see through a part of the read window. In a strictly profile view, he shouldn't have been able to see the rear window at all. But he drew what he saw and began the process of maturing his spatial representation. He had recognized a problem and used what he had learned in drawing the rest of the car, to solve that problem.

The same student drew "My First Drawing with Perspective" during the following summer. Spatial thinking and creative problem solving have made a quantum leap here. The problem he set for himself was to draw a highway crossed by an overpass, with one of those spectacular high-speed chases going on. The whole scene is being observed from a helicopter in the air above the overpass. The helicopter is the only object in the picture which is drawn from the child's profile view. All the other vehicles are both foreshortened and shown in three-quarter view. Just the completion of such a complex drawing without class deadlines demonstrates task commitment, as well as abstract thinking and creativity.

Can we teach our students to think? Probably not by talking about it, but we can use the art projects which allow them to learn to think.

References

Eisner, Elliot, W. "The Role of the Arts in Cognition and Curriculum." Phi Delta Kappan, September, 1981, pp. 48 ff.

Herberholz, Donald and Barbara. Artworks for Elementary Teachers. 6 ed. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1990.

Parker, Jeanette Plauche. Instructional Strategies for Teaching the Gifted. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 1989.

Reprinted from Balance, a publication of the School of Education, Bob Jones University. Used with permission of Bob Jones University. Please write BJU Press, for permission to reproduce this article.