Last week I didn’t have time to post to aesthesis. I spent the week attending a training seminar on integrating the arts with other subjects in elementary and middle schools. The training is part of the Greenville school system’s arts integration project which, this year, is planning to place an artist in class at two area schools. Each artist will team up with the teachers for four to six weeks. They will teach several units that combine special arts instruction and activities with other core subjects like math, social studies, science, and others.
I found the atmosphere charged with excitement. The teachers were very positive about having an artist in their classroom (not always the case) and the artists ready to use their talents to support the teachers’ educational goals.
Shameless plug to other artists: Greenville artists! Quit complaining about how the current state of education that minimizes the arts. Do something about it! Get involved in this project and use your abilities to help meet the needs of the children in your community. I’m not sure what the bets way to get involved is but I know that if you contact the folks at the Metropolitan Arts Council. They can point you in the right direction.
One concept from the seminar that caught my attention was Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. (There are lots of web site about this but THIS is one of them.)
Vygotsky believed that tasks could be divided into two basic categories (or zones).
The zone of actual development (ZAD) is full of tasks a person could to without help. Students come into the educational environment with the necessary skills to do certain tasks. They don’t need to be taught how to hear or see (thought they may need to be taught how to interpret their sense impressions). There are other tasks, however, that a person cannot accomplish on their own.
Vygotsky’s thinking about this second category is what he is known for. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) contains tasks that students cannot accomplish on their own. I might be able to read all the letters in a Latin epigram. I may even be able to pronounce the phonemes of the same epigram, but I would need the help of someone else to gain an understanding of the epigram. The help might take the form of another person—a master of Latin—who can translate the poem for me. Or I might get help from others through books they have written on Latin. In either case I have to have some outside help to accomplish the task of comprehension.
The concept of ZPD informs many situations other than those found in the classroom. Rugged individualism may be an attractive philosophy but it doesn’t play out well in life. I’ll refrain from using a trite expression about men and islands but it is none the less true that we cannot accomplish anything on our own. This concept is expressed in the New Testament in terms of the body. No single part of the body can accomplish its task alone. The eye cannot see without the cooperation of the muscles that raise the eyelid or the optical nerves that communicate with the brain.
How does art play into the ZPD model? (Why am I talking about it on a blog devoted to aesthetics?) Art is persuasive. Enticement is one of the principle uses of art. Enticement can be negative but it doesn’t have to be. In the case of education art can entice learners to step out of the ZAD into the ZPD. Art can be just the help a person needs to accomplish the task they couldn’t do on their own. Art can tempt us to change. Encourage us to think in a different way. Or it can guide us along a different path.
Vygotsky believed that teachers worked in the student’s ZPD connecting skills and concepts that the child had mastered with new skills and ideas that the student would not be able to master on their own. The artist’s role is similar. Art has to have some element that connects with what the viewer already knows. Only on this common ground can art pull the viewer into the ZPD and help them to an action or way of thinking they would not have come to on their own.
Art exists in the ZPD.
Go Greenville! It's awesome to here about that going on. A good resource to recommend to teachers (who, esp elem, tend to revert drastically to crafts and call it art education)once they're on their own again is "Discovering Great Artists" by MaryAnn F. Kohl and Kim Solga. Check it out. Thanks for sharing. It gives me a grain of hope.
Posted by: lynnp at August 12, 2004 03:13 PMI think that poetry especially can have similar ZPD functions (E. Bopp encouraged artists to read poetry to expand their ways of thinking and perceiving their environment). But poetry expresses thoughts more clearly (or at least more right-brain-edly) than art seems to express. How have you seen art break guide the mind into the ZPD other than discovering new techniques or styles? What forms/styles of art do you think are best suited for didactic purposes?
Posted by: tim f at August 12, 2004 10:26 PMZPD seems to agree with Einstein's observation that you can't solve a problem at the level it was created. However, as an art-maker, I tend to find myself overlapping ZAD and ZPD. A clinical analysis of ZAD/ZPD removes the emotional and spiritual aspects of the ark-making process. For example, I can't explain why the painting I'm creating works because I'm too engaged in the technique/application that explaination/analysis isn't available yet. I am very intrigued by Vygotsky's concept even though I am not an educator.
Posted by: Matt Mulder at September 12, 2004 12:42 AMTo Matt:
I spoke with someone else recently on a similar vein. Not every art maker is conscious of their connection with their audience during the making process. I personally stay fairly conscious of that but I know that others don’t work the same way. The ZAD/ZPD connection is still valid as an art theory even if the artist only applies it in the first stages of cognitive conception.
Whether or not these zones are clinically analyzed or not seems to me to be beside the point. In life drawing, the clinical observation doesn’t have to negate the emotional spiritual aspects of the work. This came up recently in conversation and I believe that the art/science divide is a construct that developed in the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Before that time period art and science were inseparable and daVinci is a wonderful example of how the two were unified.
To Tim:
Sorry for the delay.
I think art has the potential for functioning in the same way that poetry does. Think of some of the surrealists, particularly Magritte and his series about light—there the images function in a very poetic way. I think part of the difficulty is to relinquish depiction as a goal and substitute the goal of signification.
I think about the northern renaissance painters who used everyday objects as symbolic devices. These objects (cups, mousetraps, butterflies…) connect immediately with people because people have experienced them. These objects represent the ZAD. But then, through a poetic connection of these concrete images together as a unit they can pull people from simply looking at the objects as objects into the ZPD of looking at the objects as carriers of a meaning greater than the objects themselves.