A very very long time ago I borrowed a list that I saw in another high school art educator's studio classroom. Andy Dufford of Chevo Studios created this list that soon became ubiquitous in my teaching, assessment and curriculum.
It reads:
What artists do.
Artists...
Look at art
Talk about art
Read about art
Write about art
Make art
I appropriated this list into my studio classroom practice because it speaks directly to the making, the artistic process, the necessity for understanding and thinking about art work that is about being an artist and being an art educator.
What artists do --- after such a very long --Think about/Talk about/ Read about/ Make art--- still holds meaning. Artful Thinking a program that was developed by Traverse City Area Public Schools and Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education is a means of questioning and looking toward the questions to open up discussion of the art work and I would add art making process. As artists and art educators, we require ways to discuss and question art that is essentially an unknowable and individual. What is unknowable is the making.
The list of 'What Artists Do' could read something like community/community/ community / individual. Artful Thinking protocol allows the art student and the art educator a means to gather around the artwork in community. To discuss, to look, to reflect.
Questioning is at the center of fostering a discussion about art and really about any learning. In the article ' Teaching Students to ask their own questions ' Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana peer into the workings of classrooms and how questioning leads to ownership and as one student puts it '... it feels like its my job to answer the question... since I came up with it.' Talk about art / Read about art = Community and individual.
We are working alongside our students. We are facilitating their thinking as well as our own. Community and individual. We are reaching into our own unknowable knowing about art making. Individual. So as to reach into and facilitate the unknowable knowing of our students. Individual.
Questioning, looking , talking ,reading about art making then becomes both community and individual in the practice.