VTS1: Week 7 Blog Assignment.

Why not tell?

After reading these articles, I saw this quote on Facebook.
I thought it fit this discussion very well.

I understand that teachers who are aware of an artist's intent can feel like they are missing a teaching opportunity by not explaining to students the intent, backstory, or historical context of a piece. However in my opinion, this just goes back to the idea of a "Right answer" when looking at art. The correct answer, being what the artist's intentional message was.

And this seems to be a continued debate that I have had throughout fine art and art history courses. This question of, "Did we get it right?"

First, that brings us to the question of who gets to decide what the "correct answer" is. And in my opinion, only the artist can state what their intent was. And so many art historians throughout time have not been able to speak to the artist about their intentions, but instead use their own clues and visual evidence to derive a meaning. And since they are "experts" their own derived meaning is taken as truth and passed on to others to pass onto people sitting in an art history lecture or on a guided museum tour. So my first argument against telling people "the right answer" is that a good portion of the time, some expert somewhere had the skills to VTS a piece themselves, and they just took that answer and shared it as some undeniable truth. But how did they get that "answer" that was spread around as truth? By being equipped with visual thinking skills/strategies.

But back to this idea of the artist's intent. When you create art, sometimes you are judged on if you communicated your idea clearly enough to the viewer. But then, you are praised on if your initial idea, can be a spark for other viewers. This spark ignites multiple possibilities of "answers" from people who see what they want to see in the artwork because of their own personal experiences or knowledge. In my opinion, it is more exciting when what you started with, even if it was a great idea, can become something more to someone else. What you were shooting for could be just fine, but isn't it exciting if you land somewhere else instead? To me, that's what art is about. Awakening anything and everything possible in your viewer for them to connect to. If they get the same message you intended, great. If they didn't, that's ok. Different is not bad, it is just different.

And I also agree, that those "teachable moments" of connecting it to historical context or other world issues, will have been previously taught somewhere else. Students will learn about WWII in social studies, and then recognize it in artwork. I don't think that artwork is the sole means of teaching kids historical context.  So once they have learned it, if the image is developmentally appropriate, they should eventually be able to tease out those connections on their own. And they will remember them better once they are actually connecting them to their own background knowledge, not being told about it for the first time.

Furthermore when speaking towards my teaching philosophy, I have a hard time telling kids to memorize certain facts as truth and try to remember them for as long as possible. I believe in teaching towards self-discovery and creating kids that have tools in their own toolbox to take out into the world and be successful in any scenario. Being equipped to form an opinion with evidence, create connections to your own background knowledge, take in multiple answers, respectfully agree or disagree are more important skills/tools for students to be equipped with than knowing the assumed correct message of one piece of work.