Learning Through Art

In the introduction to his article, "Negotiating with Art Media to Deepen Learning," in the Beginnings Workshop book, Curriculum: Art, Music, Movement, Drama, George Forman observes...

"Art is an interpretation of experience, not a high-fidelity copy.  Art causes us to look at how we look at something.  Art calls attention to itself.  Therefore, at a minimum, an appropriate art activity even for young children encourages children to look at how they look, to treat their art as an expression of their current understanding rather than a representation of an object.  This perspective makes art a rather paradoxical enterprise, a planned journey into the unknown, a negotiation with the tools for making meaning.  And art media are just that — tools to help children make their ideas visible, their thoughts, theories, and perspectives, and in the process traverse the terrain of their own bias in order to construct a new understanding of the subject.

"Children learn a great deal when they use several media to express the same idea.  They begin to understand that each type of representation captures different aspects of their concept.  When children routinely cycle a single concept by rendering it with different media, they begin to understand that each rendering is just that, a first draft of their idea, a perspective that they take when working in a particular medium, to be rethought when the concept is rendered in the next medium."

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