What is an Aesthetic Learning Process?

Really: What is it? Since I attended a course "Aesthetic Learning Process in Kindergarten and School" last year at the University of Gothenburg, I’ve frequently been using the concept in conversations with my colleagues. But when a deeper discussion takes place, it seems lake we all have different understanding of what it means: What does the “learning” refer to? Is this about a learning process that has aesthetic qualities? And what does “aesthetic” actually mean?

I understand now that my choice to use the concept “aesthetic learning process” in the project Sculpturing Words will require many questions and answers. I’ll be short here though – just to reflect a bit after the PhD-seminars at AHO on the 21-rst and 24-th of April: I believe in merging between learning within fields traditionally called aesthetic (visual arts, dance, music, or drama), and learning through them. I know that for some art-teachers “education through arts” sounds like “misuse of arts” in intention to achieve some “more important” educational goals within other school subjects. These art-teachers are ready to fight for the importance of art education. But let us not fight or beat anyone, let us rather “join them”. (Don’t tell anyone, but my project Sculpturing Words is actually a kind of silent struggle to show that learning can take place during practical, creative activities where students are allowed to play, use their imagination and even have fun!)

The image shows a group of pre-school teacher students, performing a theatre play for their young audience. The students are showing a result of their aesthetic learning process where the product itself was the main motivation, but the learning was mostly related to the process within the group work, to the choices they had to take, to practicing the craft of performing, and of course to thir reflections.

I see similarities between “aesthetic learning process” and the concept “research by design” In both cases some kind of knowledge production is a part of the process. In both cases one has to take a lot of decisions and choices, experiment and explore, learn from own mistakes and from the reflections about the practice. In both cases one has to, in some way, be able to make the knowledge “compatible” for the others, either in order to be evaluated, or in other to present the knowledge so that others can learn in a more traditional way (by reading what has been written). But in the case of writing, we'll have to make one excuse: When children in kindergarten deal with “research by design” – someone else will have to write about the produced knowledge! ...I guess it will have to be me…

Re-sculpturing My Dog

Reading “Classroom Research in the Visual Arts (Colbert and Taunton 2002)” I found an interesting review of a research (May 1987) where students’ media-preferences in art education were studied. One of the conclusions was that “three-dimensional materials were more highly regarded than two-dimensional ones (Colbert and Taunton, 2002)”. The 164 third-grade students were asked about reasons for their choice of the materials. Their preferences were related to the qualities of the medium/materials, to “how the material was manipulated or what sensory qualities are stimulated, the generic pleasure derived from the material, the product outcomes form using of the material (Colbert and Taunton 2002) ”. “The flexibility of ideas or expressive potential of the material (Colbert and Taunton 2002)” was also important for the students’ choices, which I believe, means that the young students wished to express creatively since they appreciated materials with expressive potentials.

I believe that possibility to practice, and develop, creativity is very important in childhood (and in the life in general). In order to establish a creative way of dealing with the world around us, it is also important to get familiar with a variety of crafts, materials, tools and methods of making.

Creative work with different three-dimensional materials, requires different tools, techniques and methods. For instance, there are large differences between modelling (where you can both attach and take away parts of the material), construction (where you deal with assembly of different parts) and carving (where you take away what you don’t need). These different ways of making, also require different types of thinking. In carving, you really have to imagine the form hidden inside because the material that goes through you hands, through your tools like hammer and chisel (or a pair of scissors - ?) can’t be put back again - the point of your start, is “the point of no return”!

Every time I stand in front of my dog and prepare to give him a haircut, I think about sculpturing. Cutting a dog’s hair could be a creative act (if I didn’t aim for a dog show), but usually there are limitations that make this type of “sculpturing” different form carving in a block of stone: While a stone doesn’t have “inner limits”, beneath the fur, there is a living body of my best friend. The three-dimensional form I aim to find, hides between my Kerry Blue Terrier’s skin and bones, and the shape of his new-washed and new-brushed, typical silky-soft, blue fur.

Some other limitations to my creativity are given by international standards for the dog breed. When exhibiting a dog, it is, of course, the dog’s natural body that is the subject of the evaluation, but the way the dog is presented plays also an important role. A good haircut can make an equipage be an aesthetic experience. A haircut made by trained hands and eyes can emphasize just the write details and lines on the dog’s body. Through contrasts, one can for example make the neck appear longer, or the beck shorter, but the ability to make just the write choices with the scissors is a question of craft, aesthetic competence and practice.

As a not-professional dog groomer, I tried reading the standards for the breed in ordet to understand what I should do, but this required a curtain pre-understanding. What does “good proportions” and “well-balanced” actually mean ? During the last 12 years, I sometimes had opportunity to stand beside a master of Kerry grooming during the 4-5 hours that a Kerry haircut takes, observing and asking questions. Then at home I've been training and training ... and I am still an amateur. But the “zone of my proximal development” keeps challenging me, calling me to keep trying, training my eyes and hands, learning from my mistaking... the way a craft has to be learned…

Reference:
Cynthia Colbert and Martha Taunton (2002): Classroom Research in the Visual Arts, in
Handbook of research on teaching. V. Richardson. Washington, DC, American Educational Research Association

Experience Lost in Words - ?

On Friday the 3-rd of April, I had a day-long meeting with my colleague Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse from Oslo University College, Faculty of Education. In our projects we both deal with young children (0-5 years old) and argue for the importance of children’s experience with the three dimensional world around them: I focus on children’s play with materials, and Ann-Hege on their experience with sculptures. Beside discussing different challenges in choice of research methods, genres of writing etc., our conversation touched on something I kept thinking about: What characterizes a child’s pre-linguistic experience? Are there significant differences in human experience before we are able to verbalize the experience, and after?

Kieran Egan speaks of humans as “creatures whose understanding of the world is profoundly shaped by our particular kind of bodies and senses” (Egan 2001). In the same article “The Cognitive Tools of Children’s Imagination” he writes that: ”…literacy has psychological costs as well as the more obvious benefits” (Egan 2001). I suggest that one such cost is that we, during the process of naming objects and qualities around us, somehow stop giving attention to our senses. Can our “mature” ability to name objects and categorize them in taxonomies hinder us in exploring details and qualities the way small children do when they experience an object for the first time? (See for example “Sharing a nacho”, published 14.02 on this blog page.)

Egan explains that young children first learn words that are opposites, and later fill the gap between the opposites. “Once they have formed an opposition, they can learn other terms along the continuum between such opposites.” I believe that learning the other terms is possible only if the environment offers a spectre of qualities, and if the people (pedagogues) in the child’s environment acknowledge the importance of such learning. As Elliot Eisner wrote ”… the ability to experience qualities requires more than their presence. Experience is a form of human achievement, and as such it depends upon an act of mind; qualitative experience depends on qualitative forms of inquiry” (Eisner, 1991)

Ann-Hege and I watched a video from the pedagogical context where two children explored different types of clay to value the best for their sculpturing. They had never played with any type of clay before. The materials in front of them had different (and surprising) visual and tactical qualities (some of the clay had been dried, some put in water, some shaped in geometric forms etc.) To begin with, the girl and the boy had problems with explaining their experiences, but they commonly used metaphors, songs and imaginative stories to describe the clays’ qualities. After the hour of exploring, the simple word “clay” they knew before the activity, would never again be enough to capture the diversity of qualities they had experienced.

Unfortunately, there are probably people who would turn up their nose at a lump of clay, call it “dirty clay” and leave it untouched…. if they one day found it on their office table…

References:
Egan, Kieran (2001): The Cognitive Tools of Children’s Imagination, paper presented at the Annual European Conference on Quality in Early Childhood Education, Netherlands
Eisner, Elliot (1991): The Enlightened Eye, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company