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Reflections on VTS Part II

Posted on by Kelsey Longpine

This post is part two of three written by the Director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Linda Duke, as a follow up to her director’s message featured in the Winter/Spring 2015 inSIGHT newsletter available at www.beach.ksu.edu.

Together Housen and Yenawine created an art image curriculum and teaching protocols for schools, testing and adjusting them in an action research process. They taught teachers to become skilled facilitators of their students’ discussions of the curriculum images or of actual works of art when they visited a museum. Over time, with funding from various sources, they set up curriculum and teacher training test sites around the U.S. and in other countries.

Early on, their studies indicated the importance of peer learning. Over the next few years it demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach in narrowing gaps between disadvantaged, struggling students and those who were academically successful. Teachers soon reported that their students spontaneously applied skills and habits developed in VTS discussions to other tasks and subject matter. They could brainstorm over a science specimen or a photo in a history textbook. They were even overheard using evidence-based reasoning in playground disputes.

I could never have imagined all this as I sat in the audience at the National Gallery and heard Philip Yenawine talk that first time. But I vowed then to learn more and become involved. And through my own work with VTS over the years, I came to understand the power of art, the richness and value of its ambiguities. I came to understand that liking or not liking an image is a separate matter from understanding it and evaluating the worth of its meaning. I came to know art in new ways and to value it more than ever before. And I saw, first hand, how it opened students to new discoveries.

-Linda Duke, Director

Reflections on VTS Part I

Posted on by Kelsey Longpine

This post is part one of three written by the Director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Linda Duke, as a follow up to her director’s message featured in the Winter/Spring 2015 inSIGHT newsletter available at www.beach.ksu.edu.

At the beginning of my career in art museums I had a lot of unresolved questions about art. I had degrees in studio art and art history – a master’s degree in the latter – as well as some experience teaching both art history and drawing. So I knew that fascinating perspectives on human history and culture can be discovered through visual art, and a bit about the discipline, pleasure, and difficulty of art making, especially drawing. I understood, for example, that drawing can take courage and that the very act of putting pencil to paper slams one’s consciousness up against basic existential matters of being and nothingness (really). I think it was the Ming dynasty artist Shi Tao – and maybe Dong Qichang, too – who wrote that as soon as brush touches paper, concave and convex forms appear.

But I didn’t really know how to look at works of art on my own. I knew how to read about art and how to listen to what other people said about it. But standing in front of an unfamiliar work of art on my own, I had no resources – or thought I had no resources – to consider it. This secret problem caused me to wonder if working in an art museum was really for me. I felt like a sham.

As luck would have it, I encountered something that changed all of this. While attending a conference in the early 1990s at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. on art museums and schools, I heard the director of education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philip Yenawine, speak about a research project his team was conducting. It was based on a fascinating, eye-popping body of research and theory created by cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen. Eventually, this project developed into something called Visual Thinking Strategies or VTS. It became an image curriculum and a discussion facilitation technique, both designed to foster growth in critical thinking and other skills. Yenawine and Housen collaborated in its creation.

As I listened to Yenawine describe the team’s discoveries to date, it all made sense; and yet it was contrary to most of the assumptions that had been part of my own education in art and art history. He explained that Housen studied the ways people find meaning in art. What kinds of thinking do people do when they encounter an unfamiliar work of art? Do their ways of thinking change as they gain more experience looking at art and wondering about it? Instead of focusing on whether or not they knew names, dates, or the terms used in discussing art, Housen was focused on thinking itself and how meaning is constructed. She wondered what was important to viewers at various stages of their experience with art, not how many facts they remembered. This focus in itself was revelatory to me. It raised the idea of capability-building as an important, or even the most important, aim of education.

-Linda Duke, Director