#artfulthinking

Submitted by: Elisabeth Orengo, Program Intern, DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative

May 28, 2019

This page is the second publication of a series based on Artful Thinking: Stronger Thinking and Learning Through the Power of Art, the Artful Thinking project report, led by Principal Investigator Shari Tishman and research team members Patricia Palmer and Jessica Ross, and published in 2006. This section is dedicated to the process of art integration into curriculum. It provides an overview of a set of natural thinking dispositions that help consider the tie between art education and curriculum skills, as well as specific routines designed to enhance those inclinations.

According to the authors, who drew on the distinction between dispositions and cognitive capacities, established by Jonathan Baron in Rationality and Intelligence (1985), school curriculum traditionally values students’ “capacities factors like short term memory”, that “determine what in principle a person can do.” Moreover, students are regularly exposed to already established knowledge, and don’t experiment with the many opportunities to explore “the pattern of thinking that lead to these finished products” of thought. To offset these trends, the Artful Thinking Palette gives emphasis on the “dispositional factors (that) determine what a person does do within capacity limits.” The approach consists in encouraging students to identify the skills they use - whether during artwork exploration or other complex topics in the curriculum - and to ultimately transfer them from one context to another (p.7). Further, some routines leave students with questions, rather than answers, which is a powerful shift in understanding. As defined in Chapter 2: Artful Thinking Approach, this synergetic set of thinking dispositions is divided as follows: Questioning & Investigating, Observing & Describing, Reasoning, Exploring Viewpoints, Comparing & Connecting, Finding Complexity.

More than just strategies, thinking routines are the core of the Artful Thinking model, and an integral “part of the fabric of a classroom’s culture” that helps “students go about the process of learning.” To achieve this purpose, each routine is meant to (p. 14):

- Be oriented toward specific types of thinking

- Get used over and over again

- Consist of only a few steps

- Be easy to learn, teach, and to support when students are engaged in the routine

- Be usable across a variety of contexts, as well as by the group or by the individual

Routines are categorized by the specific thinking dispositions they individually support. A technical sheet corresponding to each item is available on the indicated pages.