Talented Young Artists: Understanding Their Abilities and Needs

Abstract

Recommended Extra-School Activities:Continue to attend arts related events such as art exhibits, museum openings, festivals, plays, musicals, and operas.Recommended Activity in School: Find like-minded peers at Arts Conservatory Center with whom to attend such events.

Soul Behind the Skill, Heart Behind the Technique

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While a number of research studies have been devoted to identifying creative and artistically talented students (Baum, Owen, & Oreck, 2004;Clark & Zimmerman, 2004;Sternberg, 2000), understanding the nature of artistic talents (Evans, Bickel, & Pendarvis, 2004), programming and intervention provided for teenagers talented in the arts (Clark & Zimmerman, 2002;Hunter & Milne, 2005), and even mentoring for creativity (Subotnik, Edmiston, Cook, & Ross, 2010), there remains a paucity of descriptive information about arts students' abilities and characteristics (Cukierkorn, 2008); artistically talented youth are an "underrecognized and understudied population" (Cukierkorn, 2008, p. 26). Apart from the landmark longitudinal study done by Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen (1996) on experiences of flow and expressed passion in talent domains among talented teenagers, little documentation exists of the flow experience among talented artists-in-training despite the fact that the earlier study indicates that artists' quality of experience is linked to eventual commitment to their art forms.There has been a recent upsurge of interest in creativity and the arts in the Singapore context (Keun & Hunt, 2006;Tan, Ho, & Yong, 2007).

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Linking the Nature of Secondary School Students who are Highly Artistic with Curriculum Needs and Instructional Practice

“…The data clearly illustrated that all participants exhibited the personal attributes of perseverance and problem-solving ability. Cukierkorn (2008) named these two attributes as definitive characteristics of students who are artistically talented.…”

“…To meet the educational needs of students who are highly artistic, an understanding of their personality characteristics is important for both the design and delivery of the visual arts curriculum. Cukierkorn (2008) believed that by knowing their persona, opportunities for student growth can be informed.…”

“…A lack of consensus in identifying learners who are gifted in art (Cukierkorn, 2008) has resulted in neglect for the programming needs of students who are highly artistic (Salome, 1974;Zimmerman, 1985). Treffinger (2004) emphasized that students who are talented are often left behind in school programs and believed that these students require instruction paced beyond that of the regular classroom.…”

A case study of artists from the Kansas City Schools Experiment

“…Gifted artists tend to approach problems in a self-directed and complex way. In the process of creating, artists visualize and set goals to find and define a problem, choose techniques to collect data, reflect on their work consider alternative points of view, evaluate and revise the problem solution, try out changes, and begin the cycle of revision again (Cukierkorn, 2008).…”