What language is most useful, considering Learning in Art and Design
- Luke Kandiah
- Sep 18, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 22, 2023
[ITAP 2 - How to plan for and articulate learning
Aims to support STs in identifying and articulating learning goals.
1 - Recording task - Insight through planning a short learning encounter for one of your peers.
2 - Language of Learning lecture - In what ways can learning in art and design be described
3 - Planning for Learning workshop
4 - Visit to Wren School
5 - Planning session
6 - Wren workshop day ]
Language of cognitive science dominates education.
Buzzwords within cognitive science based education:
(research limited as none completed in reference specifically to Art and Design education.
Spaced Learning - spacing learning over time with gaps in-between. -can be a challenge within art and design.
Interleaving - Alternating/mixing between knowledge/skills to be learnt.
Retrieval Practice - Practice of recalling knowledge without prompt.
Strategies to manage cognitive load - any strategy aimed to reduce amount of information (including sensory).
Dual coding - providing information/ instructions in two forms
Key finding s of applying cognitive learning to the classroom:
- Can have a significant impact on rates of learning in the classroom.
- Evidence is largely focussed on individual learning process and how they remember information.
Art opens us up to reconnect with the world.
O Sullivan suggests that art has the potential to change our perspective by switching our spatio-temporal register. - Describing digital practices such as time lapse and slow motion photography.
Neuroaesthetics - attempts to make sense of what occurs within the brain when one interacts with artworks.
Learning in art is not just about being swept up by the process, but how we deal with failure, hurdles and hitting brick walls.
The organisational structure underpinning the individual creative project - requires complex, entangled, embodied and evaluative learning.
Bruner
The learning of the culturalist is only communicable through story.
Neuroaesthetics - Five things that happen concurrently during learning
1 - -Perceptual analysis - perception network of realationships
2 - animating dynamics - processing of sensory objects is rapid and intrinsically active
3 - Interactive significance - How a viewer engages with an artwork
4 - Symbolic and personal meaning - artworks, like the viewer convey states of mind which must be decoded in spectatorship
5 - generation of an integrated response - individual personal engagement with and appreciation of the meaning of an artwork. The individual’s final cognitive and affective response to the artwork will depend on integrated neural activity across the artistic brain connectome.
Art is a vehicle for children to develop responses to their states of mind.
limitations of reviews on neuroaesthetics
- Studies on aesthetic perception tend to use little to no art works and novice participants
- Does not compare to 'initiated' minds
- can only speculate that the findings within a narrow context would apply to a wider context.
- This applies equally to 'art making' studies, with novice participants and narrow contexts
- Essentially everything is speculative.
Often Inset training is adapted for art and design class-settings by less informed researchers (teachers who have read a blog on the subject). This leads to teachers 'making up' on the spot how it could apply to art lessons.
[DO IT NOW task - retrieve information from the previous lesson. - example of application]
Demonstrate deeper learning through wider art projects.
Threshold concepts:
Giving them experiences that change their perception somehow. - For example, a lesson about layering might reshape the way that the student sees the world.
We all have schemas as a means and understanding of encountering the world.
When something comes to challenge our schema, Piaget suggests that there are three responses to this challenge:
Assimilation, rejection and accommodation.
As teachers, we need to open the students to the ambiguity and to connect new knowledge by allowing them to accommodate, overcome challenges and mistakes and most importantly grow and demonstrate development.
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