Mind in Art

Cognitive Foundations in Art Education

Charles M. Dorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780805830781
• eBook ISBN: 9781135675165
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is for the reader who believes that thinking about and making art is intelligent behavior and that art as a subject in the K-12 school curriculum should not be used as an alibi for other curricular objectives. It examines and makes explicit those cognitive behaviors normally associated with most higher order thinking and problem solving activity and explains how they function in the act of creative forming. Its goal is ultimately to find ways to use these behaviors in the construction of an intelligent art curriculum for K-12 American schools.

This is perhaps the only text in the field designed to assist teachers in meeting the challenges of teaching in the Goals 2000 curriculum and evaluation reform effort, acquainting them with both the National Art Standards and with the assessment processes needed in order for them to become accountable.

Mind in Art grapples with current and relevant theory, research, and unsolved problems. It is cohesive as it attempts to bring together information that is only partially known, even among those who are college professors. And it takes a critical look at the ideas and points of view that have created divisiveness and shabby thinking in the field. In this book Charles Dorn significantly advances thinking in the field of art education.

1
Introduction

ART AS INTELLECT

Experimental Studies

New Goals in Schooling

Cognition and Art

Cognitive Research

PLAN OF THE BOOK

Asking Questions

Seeking Answers

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

SUMMARY

Whether artistic forming is an act of intelligence is something rarely questioned by either aesthetitions or cognitive scientists. However, when one poses the question of whether the making of art is an act of intellect, both the aesthetition and cognitive scientist express serious doubts—the aesthetition because of the general belief that art cannot be a product of intellect and the cognitive scientist because as of yet, we have failed to make such a case experimentally. With a new century fast approaching, there will be even more stringent demands on school arts programs to show they are a positive force in improving academic performance, school attendance, and graduation rates in our nation’s schools. Therefore, the question we now face is whether both the aesthetition and cognitive scientist are correct, which is to suggest that the arts will never achieve that goal, or whether we may have only failed to ask the right questions by looking to aesthetics and cognition rather than to art itself. This book seeks answers to these important questions.

ART AS INTELLECT

Experimental Studies

Up to this point in time, no nationally significant studies have experimentally confirmed that art study contributes to the overall intellectual development of students in schools. Even when we attempt such studies, they are rarely perfect in their science and, even if flawlessly done, still fail to positively prove anything. However, the studies that fail to make the case also suggest that we need to revisit the claims of those who believe that art study, in itself, can make students better citizens and learners or improve graduation rates and school attendance, as well as what means we are now using to verify such claims. The lack of empirical evidence to support art learning as affecting academic performance should be looked at as a challenge that requires a second look at both the claims and the means used to verify them.

Arts advocates who are critical of experimental studies that fail to support their point of view, claim that such studies are really not proof of anything, and that their failure to show that formal art study is a better way to effect cognitive abilities may really be due to the failure of existing test instruments to measure the behavioral gains achieved through such experiments. Although partially correct, the argument can also be made that the instruments used in these studies do have established national norms and are statistically reliable and valid, especially with regard to measuring general cognitive ability.

The truth of the matter, of course, lies somewhere in between the failure of instruments to measure what some want them to measure and what arts advocates want to prove about the effectiveness of current approaches to art study in improving general cognitive abilities. The problem with such claims begins with the fact, as Efland (1995) noted, that all learning requires strategies where different elements in the knowledge base are assembled to provide new perspectives on the same learning problem. In an ill-structured domain, like art, it requires retaining a network of concepts and principles that accurately represents key phenomena and their interrelationships to be engaged flexibly and, when pertinent, accomplish diverse and somewhat novel objectives. What this implies is that all higher order thinking skills or cognitive abilities are content-specific and, in art, require an in-depth understanding of art that may not be the same as the understandings required for learning math or physics, where concepts are based on laws, axioms, and theorems as applied to a variety of situations with predictability and consistency. Thus, we should be aware that the cognitive abilities needed in art may not be the same as the cognitive abilities needed in other fields; as a consequence, they may fail to transfer except under specific circumstances. The irony in all of this is that we have a pretty good idea about what cognitive abilities are evident in most domains except art. What we now need to know is what higher order thinking skills and abilities best characterize the phenomena of the artistic act and which ones show the most promise of transfer among domains both within and outside the field.

To begin thinking about such matters, we need to identify the skills and knowledges that may be domain specific and nontransferable as well as those that cross over the various domains included in art education instruction, finding out both what is and is not transferable. The main risk to face in pursuing such an investigation is that some of our current thinking may need to be reexamined and some of our current assumptions about art teaching might, as a consequence, be judged as questionable.

New Goals in Schooling

The pursuit of such goals places the discipline in danger of losing the leverage that our current niche provides in the “who gets what, when, and where” struggle to reinvent the nation’s school curriculum. This is painfully evident in the Goals 2000 Educate America Act (1994), where art education, as a field, is already committed as players. Apparently, it is willing to pay the price of undergoing the standard setting and testing of art programs in terms of its success in improving children’s general readiness to learn; high school graduation rates; and competency in such subjects as math, science, and reading; and ensuring safe, drug-free schools. This is in contrast to a few years ago when the arts were not even sure of being Goals 2000 players, much less being glad to be included in the game and anxious to please the other arts disciplines, which, as a political force, seek to shape current federal/state curriculum reforms. At this point in time, we have defined the so-called art standards (National Art Education Association, 1994), which focus on what students should know and be able to do in art in K to 12 educationally reformed schools. Unfortunately, these have not been widely discussed or debated by the rank and file in the field and are seen, at least by some in the field, as simply an effort to dissuade art teachers of the tired old notion that children learn best through making and doing in the arts.

The very notion of having national art education standards, which would have been an abhorrence to most art educators 10 years ago, is now considered by many as merely a matter of compliance and political correctness in the competition along with the other arts disciplines for a piece of the American public school curriculum pie. These standards are already viewed as relative to workplace know-how and improved SAT scores, without most practitioners being aware that such standards are, in management parlance, the main mechanisms used to measure the effectiveness of those who plan, lead, control, and evaluate systems. For example, the use of such standards in the corporate world is to set the acceptable range of performances or outputs that workers are capable of achieving mostly as a basis for determining whether management is achieving bottom line profitability.

However, corporate standards are also set at reasonable and achievable levels within the scope of what management realistically can hope to achieve, given the skill levels of the workers and the physical environment needed to accomplish the corporation’s objectives. Such standards are not, then, for corporations solely a matter of economic greed nor are they necessarily a mechanism to make workers more productive in the interests of enhanced profitability. The standards imposed on the nation’s art teachers also need to realistically state what art teachers can accomplish given the knowledge and skills they have in the teaching of art and the physical environment they are required to work in, which, in the last analysis, may not be that effective in using art to raise the school’s graduation rate and improve student academic performance in other areas of the school curriculum. Such standards would not even be appropriate to pursue if the behaviors required in art forming are not germane, or are inappropriate to achieving other content-specific educational goals. If the true aim of school reform is genuinely to improve and test higher order thinking skills and cognitive ability, we need to know what these behaviors are in art and how they cohere or could be expected to affect student cognitive performance both within and outside the domain of art.

Cognition and Art

To investigate the relationships that exist among the arts, cognition, and basic skills is really not a new idea: Both Stan Madeja at CEMREL (Madeja, 1977) and David Perkins at Harvard’s Project Zero (Perkins & Leondar, 1977) attempted this in the 1970s. Therefore, it would be difficult and unnecessary to compete and/or do better than the prominent scholars did with the same topic 20 or 30 years ago unless the approach used covers ground not addressed in these efforts and/or in a manner that may not have been possible 30 years ago.

My reservations about the Aspen and Project Zero Conference papers are not with their scholarship, but rather with their philosophy, which I believe was shaped by the goals of the federal art education bureaucracy of the 1960s. This particular philosophy was evident in the first federal conference at New York University (Art as Science; Conant, 1967), continued through the reign of Cathy Bloom over USOE’s Division of Research, Arts, and Humanities Program, and continued later in Central Midwestern Regional Laboratory (CEMREL) and the United States Office of Education (USOE)-sponsored Regional Education Laboratory (Madeja, 1991). The Aspen conference’s philosophy is clearly apparent in the lead paper by Anita Silver, then Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. Silver, a positivist philosopher, noted that, although most consider the arts as being in the noncognitive domain, it can also be argued that art is really in the cognitive domain even where its products are not reiterative (i.e., not seeking to reproduce the same product). This is especially true, she believes, when one uses linguistic or analogic arguments to demonstrate that reiteration occurs in art study through denotation and exemplification. Through such a process, art becomes, in Silver’s view, an effective mode of telling (Silver, 1977). Silver believes that art works provide educational models or exemplars that tell children something like how to make a bed, weed a garden, or learn to iron. Her admonition to arts practitioners is for them to reconsider art works as a mode of exemplification (example) rather than an object of denotation (effect).

Silver also wishes that science skeptics would see art works as conveying prepositional truth rather than being merely accepting of ambiguous responses, which is akin to Henry Higgins (in the play My Fair Lady) wishing that Eliza Doolittle could only be “more like a man.” Such wishful thinking really ignores what things are in order to make the case for things being what some think they should be. This kind of structuralist thinking also reflects a time shaped by the challenges of Sputnik, the new science and new math, and Jerome Bruner’s dictum that to make a child a physicist, requires that you teach him or her as one would teach a physicist (Bruner, 1973). In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the character of the times to ask, “Why couldn’t art be more like science?” (i.e., where laws, axioms, theorems, predictability, and consistency rule). This is an argument that, by the way, accommodates the logical positivist philosopher unwilling to note that no philosophy, including his or her own, can go beyond its assumptions in the search for truth.

However, these efforts by the positivists at Aspen and Project Zero in the 1970s are useful for revealing a point of view regarding art as a science and also what frames of mind have shaped current views of art cognition in the scientific community. These include the rather common notion that art is a representational system and a symbol for the communication of propositional truths through language to be interpreted through a public discourse.

Perkins and Leondar (1977) identified at least four points of view e...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sensation, Vision, Perception, and Human Development
• 3 Cognition and Learning
• 4 Cognition in Art
• 5 Conceptual Behaviors in Art
• 6 The Conceptual Curriculum
• 7 Art Learning and Its Assessment
• 8 Summary and Conclusions
• Author Index
• Subject Index