Visual Perception & the Artistic Response (Oh, Yeah!)

What an awesome chapter! It is about time that someone concretely addressed the struggle that my K-5 students AND my undergraduate regular education majors have faced so often.  When it happens, they hit that brick wall that inhibits the brave stretching that will lead to artistic growth. They are confounded by the challenge of "express[ing] ideas from imagination, memory, and experience....[with]...significant imagery while advancing representational skills, visual perception, and recall as well as reflective and intuitive processes for thinking."  Quoting a phrase (sort of) from my favorite movie of all times, "Field of Dreams:"

                                     "If you build it, ... (they will come.)"

IF we, as educators, build the skills and confidence in our students that let creative risk-taking yield personally meaningful and satisfying creative expressions, they will rise to the occasion and meet us in that Field of Dreams, willing and eager to "play ball."  Carrol drove home the necessity of preparing and structuring that performance space to ensure positive outcomes when stating, "To invite students to work unprepared from the imagination and memory results in regression to a previous level of comfort. No new learning takes place, images are hard to generate, and an opportunity to invest in image making at a meaningful level is wasted."  WOW! Ms. Carroll belted that one right out of the park! It totally explains why many of my college Juniors and Seniors produce drawings  that look like the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students they aspire to one day teach. For many, the last weekly art classes they received were in elementary school. Why would they not return to the earlier practice field in which they felt competent and comfortable? Wow. I need to take the time to "build it" better for these older students.

Carroll's discussion of previsualization guided by questions reminded me of Barry Lane's "Exploding the Moment." Visualizing and imagining, with one's eyes closed, individualizes the common class experience, developing "a full and rich [mental] image;" a creative mental bluepint, if you will, that they can work from.  Only when personal and sensory investment in visualization occurs can students move to the production level.  Afterall, no flower can bloom with out the budding process.  To coin a phrase from today's TED video, "no brainer."

I like Carroll's idea of "relaxed attention." Combining it with Eisner's idea of "slowed down perception" results in a great recipe for success. As a K-5 educator who went from seeing my students for 60 minutes per week to a scant 45 minutes, I'll admit I was frequently a "task master" who rushed students along so that the breadth of curriculum could be covered, forsaking its depth....knowing full well that "covering" content is not the same as teaching (or learning) it.  Fortunately, in my 9 years at Daniel Young Elementary, I cultivated my principal's understanding of slower,  richer art experiences extended over longer periods of time (and even had parents comment to me that they were impressed at what their children were learning in art) but still, I walked a fine line between meeting district expectations and my own standards. At times, I sold out.  I could have done better by standing taller and taking more of Carroll's advice.

I studied English as a Second Language for a year or so in the early 2000s as my Spanish skills became more in demand and became aware of scaffolding in terms of second language acquisition.  I realized in Carroll's discussion of encouraging the use of visual sources materials that she was essentially talking about a visual form of scaffolding.  When I want to draw or paint something realistically, I don't work solely from memory. Asking  students, especially those for whom realism is an increasingly important goal, to work without visual references is  like tying one hand behind their backs.  No wonder they shut down increasingly as they get older!

My favorite section of Carroll's Outcome I was "Tapping the Narrative Impulse."  VTS guru Abigail Housen's research confirms that for Stage I or Beginning Viewers, the narrative impulse is dominant. Why would we not nurture that and use it to motivate personally significant and rich art making?  "Teachers who allow the narrative impulse to fund image making help learners of all ages construct personal meaning while developing a repertoire of representational and expressive skills" (p. 70).  I also found Carroll's citing of Duncum fascinating: "...themes that emerge in child and adolescent art are somewhat stable over time even though actual subject matter may reflect specific cultural experiences."
I"d love to test that theory empirically!

Our Ridgeway boys came to mind when reading the section on "Encouraging Visual Storytelling."  In our work with the Boys' Writing Club, we saw proof of Carroll's contentions that, "the act of drawing inspires a story and the story in turn, gives the child new ideas to draw" (p. 71); that "verbal and visual language often work together" (p. 71) and "that movement among symbol systems develops ideas" (p. 72). These statements combine to support one of the sub-hypotheses of our Ridgeway research; that each of the three components of our treatment (talking, drawing, writing) would scaffold and enhance the others!  It's exciting to find further endoresement for our research.  Yeah!

Finally, I"m sure our dear friend (NOT!), Michelle, would jump to her podium to refute Carroll's assertions regarding the integration of old and new forms of art. Carroll states that "contemporary art and media may require new or qualify old terminology used to describe visual-spacial form" (p. 80) and that "computer technology may serve as a useful model for design theory in traditional art media."  This concept of broadening the discipline rather than disregarding everything outside of painting and sculpture makes too much sense!  Again, a "no brainer."