Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Master's Theses Graduate College 4-2019 Integrating Visual Thinking Strategies into Art Education: A Curriculum for the Middle School Level Shelley K. Gibbs Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/masters_theses Part of the Art Education Commons Recommended Citation Gibbs, Shelley K., "Integrating Visual Thinking Strategies into Art Education: A Curriculum for the Middle School Level" (2019).edu/masters_theses/4293 This Masters Thesis-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.
INTEGRATING VISUAL THINKING STRATEGIES INTO ART EDUCATION A CURRICULUM FOR THE MIDDLE SCHOOL LEVEL by Shelley K. Gibbs A thesis submitted to the Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Art Education Western Michigan University April 2019 Thesis Committee: Christina Chin, Ph., Co-chair William Charland, Ph., Co-chair Jeffrey Abshear, M. Gibbs ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to first thank my husband and two sons, my mom, and my stepdad for their continued support during my journey of this program. It has been a very long road with many hours spent focused on my thesis and not always on things at home.
I also would like to thank my very dear friends who have continued to be my full-time cheerleaders. Many times, I’ve wanted to give up, they refused to let me get so close to a dream and quit. Sitting for hours, days, and weeks at a computer when you feel life is passing by you can be difficult when you desire to be out and “doing” something, but they realized this degree was something more significant. I would also like to thank Dr.
Christina Chin for her encouragement as I struggled to write this paper. Not being a traditional on-campus student and having a full personal life with ups and downs was something she seemed to understand. She cheered me through and made me believe I could indeed not only get this thesis done but do it well and have a great accomplishment under my belt when it was complete. I cannot conclude my acknowledgments without thanking Dr.
William Charland as well. He was my first professor at Western Michigan University and continued to instruct me through most of my courses. Professor Charland also became my chair toward the end of my thesis. He was a great inspiration and educator.
I learned so much under his guidance, not only about art education but myself as a teacher and artist as well. Gibbs ii INTEGRATING VISUAL THINKING STRATEGIES INTO ART EDUCATION A CURRICULUM FOR THE MIDDLE SCHOOL LEVEL Shelley K. Western Michigan University, 2019 The purpose of this thesis is to expand and demonstrate how the integration of Visual Thinking Strategies into a middle school classroom curriculum could strengthen and benefit students’ critical thinking and art literacy. There is a growing and overwhelming use of technology and images in our world, to which students are exposed daily.
By integrating a visual literacy strategy in a visual art setting, students may learn to slow down and think more critically about what they see and understand, not only in art but cross-curriculum. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEGMENTS.…ii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………….1 The Philosophy of Visual Thinking Strategies…………………………….1 Visual Thinking Strategies: A Simple Concept…………………….6 How VTS is Facilitated in the Classroom………,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,….9 Wording the Questions and Dialogue of Discussion…………………………….9 VTS Discussion as a Learning Tool: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.13 Concerns That Can Arise During a VTS Session.14 Why Art Is the Answer: Aesthetic Inquiry……………….18 Visual and Critical Thinking…………………………………….20 The Writing of VTS: Another Tool to Increase and Assess Critical Thinking…21 Methodology……………………………………………………………………….21 Routine Implementation of the VTS Curriculum…………………….21 Advantages and Disadvantages of VTS……………………………………………….24 Lack of Interaction with Actual Works of Art………………………………….24 iii Table of Contents—Continued The Requirement of Time……………………………………………………….25 Additional Benefits of Routine VTS Implementation….26 Connections with Students………………………………………………….…62 iv LIST OF FIGURES 1. Embroidered Dia de Los Muertos Sugar Skull……. Egyptian Inspired Gold Scratch Art ………….
Aboriginal Inspired Dot Art…………………. Chirico Perspective Drawing …………. Notan Cut Paper ………………. Notan Cut Paper…………………………….
Georgia O’Keefe Abstract………………….………………61 v Literature Review The Philosophy of Visual Thinking Strategies I first discovered Visual Thinking Strategies by accident. It was entirely an unintentional, yet serendipitous finding. Within three years after my teaching career began, I enrolled at Western Michigan University to start my master’s degree. I am not sure when I first read or saw the term “Visual Thinking Strategies,” but I knew once I learned about it, I started applying it in my everyday life as I explored and immersed myself into my learning.
I was digging through education articles and reading about some new developments in art education and found the Visual Thinking Strategies webpage. Instantaneously, as I read and applied the technique to my own life, I was eager to learn more. Always a supporter and lover of teaching more art history, I needed a proven, concrete way to integrate visual art and critical thinking together. It was also important to me to find tools that applied to my culture of students in order to scaffold and bring art and other subject learning to life for them.
I wanted to learn more about this technique or “tool,” research this concept of Visual Thinking Strategies, and how to integrate it into my classroom. When the administration at the public school at which I taught asked me what my plan was to incorporate writing into art, I already had begun, unknown to me, with some modest ideas related to VTS. In my high school classroom, I used a paragraph length artist statement as part of the project rubric and an assessment grade at the end of each lesson. I would also attempt once a week to show artwork and have the students write a paragraph concerning what they thought the artwork was trying to convey to them.
Looking back at those first years, I was so excited about talking about art with my students, the process of art and the ideas seemed as though it was 1 somewhat unstructured. Nevertheless, my administration was thrilled because I had created integrated art assignments that could be measured and assessed. I was the first fine arts educator to incorporate writing and the visual art discussion into class in that district. The students appeared to love it, as demonstrated by their conversation and overhearing them talk about the art for days afterward.
They seemed to have retained a great deal of the art and knowledge, but unfortunately, I was doing most of the talking. Visual Thinking Strategies is the opposite of the educator talking for days and is quite straightforward, yet complex in its application. It is a brilliant way for students to use critical thinking and for the students to lead the learning, which promotes autonomy and self-efficacy. In a VTS session, the questions are presented by the teacher and must be worded correctly, as outlined by the creators, Abigail Housen, a cognitive psychologist and Philip Yenawine, a veteran museum educator (Landorf, 2006).
Every word has a direct purpose and if changed or misworded, could affect the way students potentially answer or view the art itself. There is no correction of the students from the educator; there are no right or wrong answers, but instead, a chance for students to explore and create more in-depth critical thinking. The result is more visually literate students with more open and straightforward discussions. Visual Thinking Strategies is not limited to visual art education classes and can be used across the curriculum, from algebra to science, with slight modifications to the way questions are read.
Visual Thinking Strategies can be used in every subject, and at every age level. For example, while art is a visual and seems to be the most logical way VTS could be applied in a visual learning situation, poetry, introducing mathematical equations or even vocabulary can be included in ways VTS is accessible to all subjects (Yenawine, 2014, p. In reviewing the variety of ways VTS is utilized, educators could have their students look at a complicated math problem, a story problem, or graph to use the same questions VTS 2 uses in the art room. Offering an algebraic equation, the math teacher may ask; “What do you see looking at this problem? What makes you say that? What more could the students find? The idea is to get the students to slow down their thinking, no matter what the subject or visual presented, and use independent thinking.
Yenawine states in his book about Visual Thinking Strategies and applying it cross curriculum as “trying to engage all student in the active processes required to understand something, particularly to take on unfamiliar material and to dig into it with depth and authentic insight. Because VTS is a collective student-led process prompted by a series of simple questions, the students come up with the answers, and with a variety of solutions, they learn there is more than one way to find a solution. Visual Thinking Strategies are consistent, and the questions never change, nor does the overall structure of the student-led discussion change. With practice and knowledge by the educator, VTS can be integrated into any classroom.
It is no longer just the beliefs of art educators or an underground secret that the visual arts are important at every level of development from kindergarten through secondary education. The days of defending art education are becoming slightly less as the visual arts become recognized as a necessary part of the school curriculum. Many schools have removed art education from the curriculum, only to bring it back after a short absence. Art education has come and gone with such movements as the industrial age and the space age.
Changes in industry and scientific significance have always pushed art to the back of the line behind math, reading, and science. I believe that art will come into its own again, not behind the core subjects, but alongside them in importance and relevance of education. The question I often hear as an art educator is how do we integrate and use art across the curriculum and into the core subjects while preserving the importance and foundations of art education? I hear inquiries from the administration and fellow teachers during professional 3 development that are thrown into a group with me. They realize what I teach is important, but that projects and artist statements are not enough to prove the importance of art education.
Needed are substantial ways to show critical and deeper thinking in action. One of the ways that I, as an art educator, can promote art across the curriculum and outside of my classroom is by using and sharing my knowledge of Visual Thinking Strategies. Visual Thinking Strategies and the instructional method for implementing them was developed over twenty years ago by former MOMA education director Philip Yenawine and cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and has been used by museums and art educators everywhere to teach how to “read” and understand artwork. The philosophies behind Visual Thinking Strategies are overwhelmingly beneficial, yet inexplicably simple to utilize in a classroom, at any grade level, and in any class.
Yenawine and Housen realized something when studying Visual Thinking Strategies. When engaged with them, there were measurable changes in the way students viewed art. Abigail Housen started the research with the ideas of building viewing skills and see if a measurable change in the way students think about art. Within her studies of students, something bigger was recognized, the expansive power of the mind and eye connection and discussing art as a new way to start the cognitive process (Yenawine, 2014, p.
In a world where visuals are ever present with technology and the internet, seeing and genuinely understanding an image is a critical ability that can and must be taught. In today’s visual culture, the need for more visual intelligence and literacy is greater than ever.