Revealing Creative Thinking

One student excels at interpreting the visual world around them.  Their works amaze others with their fidelity to life and high level of craftsmanship.  Another student has journals full of ideas and often fails to complete a piece of art.  Which individual embodies your definition of creativity? 

The high school art department in which I work has been wrestling with our program goals in the area of creativity for some time.  At first, we merely wanted to provide students (and ourselves) with a workable definition of creative thinking.  We expected that once students understood the process, they would be able to model it.  Wrong!  Students continued to pursue photographic realism with little thought about how to take this training of their eyes into more original paths.   Although, we have continued to celebrate the training of the eye and the training of the brain, our students continue to make their own values known.

Now, we are working together to see how we might restructure our classrooms and assignments to capitalize on our findings.   We are clearly wrestling to find a balance between our students’ interest in traditional skills in art and our needs to educate all students to exercise their creative thinking skills.   As John Dewey discussed in Art as Experience, we are trying to set up conditions where art is experienced by our students in both practice and theory.    We want students to understand art as well as know it. 

So, we are reexamining our entry level course, Studio Art.  If the course is going to live up to its name, it needs to be a place for students to study art.  We need to allow students to participate in open ended, intense creative experiences.  And yet, we need to train the eyes (and therefore, thinking skills) of our students.  Although, rewriting this curriculum is one glimpse of how we might wrestle with our values about a successful art program.  We are confident that this change will bring with it many new opportunities and challenges. In the eyes of our community, we will need to provide clarity in our grading that helps enlighten and guide students in their efforts. 

Who is more creative?  Is it the student who excels at observational drawing? Or, is it the student who excels at ideation?  We hope to nurture both.

-Laura Milas