Interlocking Images: The Conceptual Core of a Discipline-Based Art Lesson

Abstract

Discipline-based art education teaches children to understand a language of visual imagery in order to expand their expressive options when they use art materials. Putting imagic literacy at the center of studio art instruction departs from traditional practice, which encourages media manipulation but which discourages systematic image manipulation. Children's tutored images display visual concepts (aesthetic properties) acquired as a result of instruction. A discipline-based art lesson has three components: visual analysis, art production, and critical/historical analysis. Consistency of visual concepts (interlocking images) throughout all three components constitutes systematic studio art instruction that introduces children both to media and to the dimensions of artistic imagery. Discipline-based instruction in the visual arts incorporates concepts and skills from four branches of knowledge: aesthetics, art criticism, art history, and art production (Greer, 1984). Most art educators appear to sanction this broad content foundation of discipline-based art education (DBAE). Yet DBAE, as practiced by the Getty Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts, differs profoundly from the approach taken by most art educators with respect to studio art instruction. When children manipulate art materials in response to discipline-based instruction they parallel the processes used by adult artists, who create images that express to others certain ideas, moods, and dynamic states. The aesthetic value of art rests on the capability of imagery to transmit meaning of human import; imagery is central to thought and culture. Broudy (1972, 1979, in press a,b) presents, in this issue of Studies and elsewhere, an eloquent rationale for the uses of imagery within general education that underlies DBAE. Images express meaning through a particular configuration of aesthetic properties or visual concepts.' Discipline-based art education teaches children to understand a language of visual imagery that is common to many styles of adult art made in a variety of media. Learning to read artistic images, like learning to read stories, expands even young children's expressive options '"A concept exists whenever two or more distinguishable objects or events have been grouped or classified together and set apart from other objects [or events] on the basis of some common feature or property characteristic of each. Consider the class of 'things' called dogs. Not all dogs are alike. We can easily tell our favorite Basset from the neighbor's Great Dane. Still all dogs have certain features in common, and these serve as the basis for a conceptual grouping .... so familiar and so well defined that few of us have any difficulty calling a dog (even an unfamiliar dog) by that name when we encounter one .... But empirical studies clearly demonstrate that even the simplest of groupings are often difficult for the young or naive organism" (Bourne, 1966, pp. 1-2).

A Learning Cycle Approach to Art History in the Classroom

“…Some lessons, driven by studio goals, include art history as information about historical works of art or artists. Often a visual analysis of historical works is performed so that students can see how artists have handled the elements they have been using in the classroom (Rush, 1987(Rush, ,1989. There have been some notable exceptions to this approach which suggest that students can take part in the process of art history (Erickson, 1983), or that entire curriculum units can be designed around an historical style of art (Day, 1987).…”

Coaching by Conceptual Focus: Problems, Solutions, and Tutored Images

“…Aesthetic concepts are lines, colors, shapes, textures, and other separate features that combine by means of balance, rhythm, contrast, emphasis, and so on within an artistic image in a way that conveys certain moods, ideas, or dynamic states through an art medium (cf. Rush, 1987).…”

“…When children study the making of art, their understanding of the studio discipline may therefore be assessed by problem-solving activities that display concept acquisition and generalization (Rush, 1987); the problem solutions are tutored images (artworks that are the result of tuition rather than intuition). The testing of a simple hypothesis will produce conceptual consistencies among all learners.…”

“…Rush, 1987, for a longer description of these components). Visual analysis refers to the introduction, through vocabulary words and images, of the compositional problem to be solved and relevant hypotheses to be tested; art production refers to all image-making activities, including demonstration of media techniques; critical analysis refers to the recognition of aesthetic concepts central to the lesson in tutored images by students and in landmark works by professional artists.…”