“Making Artistic Learning Visible: Theory Building Through A/r/tographical Exploration”

ANNOTATION: Ruopp, Amy, and Kathy Unrath. “Making artistic learning visible: Theory building through a/r/tographical exploration.” Visual Arts Research, vol. 45, no. 2, 2019, pp. 29–48, https://doi.org/10.5406/visuartsrese.45.2.0029.

In this article, authors Ruopp and Unrath present the results of a six-week research project with 15 pre-service art teachers in a project aimed at developing aspiring teacher/artists’ ability to articulate how creative and artistic learning unfolds. In the research, pre-service teachers videorecord, photograph, and write reflections on themselves as they narrate their process while creating an original piece of art. They then reduce the hours of videorecordings into a concise 10-minute video in which they review, analyze, then present their creative process. The intention is to develop in preservice teachers an “(a)rtist/(r)esearcher/(t)eacher (a/r/tographic understanding of the creative process, from which they develop their own theory of artistic creation to use in teaching their future students. The authors conclude that their work inspired deep, self-directed and non-linear learning about process, and led individual teachers to develop personal and unique theories about how the artistic process unfolds through embodied reflection process—that is, by doing, noticing, thinking, and reflecting. They reported that their research indicated that they had effectively engaged the “teacher” self and the “artist” self in decoding a process that is typically nonlinear—the authors refer to it as “rhizomatic,” in that creative concepts are generated from interconnected ideas and exploration across many fronts from many starting points. Finally, they conclude that their approach would be an effective way to improve the teaching to build 21^st century skills and thinking processes.

The project was well-designed in that Ruopp and Unrath found ways to have artists create in a self-reflective way. The ten-minute video that required a/r/tographers (future teachers) to “revisit, review and research their process over and over again” seemed to be highly effective, according to the teachers’ self-reflection papers. In their later self-reflection, the preservice teachers shared revelations and discoveries about that process and considered how they might incorporate what they have learned into their own teaching. The authors employed a clear overview of what read as a sound research process, and they presented comprehensive analysis of their creative and nonlinear approach to processing the data. It would be helpful to see this research repeated with similar subjects but with a much larger sample size over a period of time, and to read follow-up research on how and whether these preservice teachers later applied what they learned to their approaches in the classroom. The project was very effective in modeling process through embodiment (learning by doing) and encouraging self-learning to the preservice teachers. These are the very same skills and approaches that teachers are encouraged to develop in their own students according to 21st century new arts standards that emphasize reflection and creation.

It was encouraging to read about the authors’ philosophy that creativity is a critical part of art instruction, and it is easy to see how explicit instruction in the creative process itself has been overlooked over time—because it is problematic at worst and challenging at best. Creativity is nonlinear and rhizomatic, drawing from many sources, many of which are not always consciously known by the artist. According to the authors, creativity requires the artist to feel comfortable moving into the unknown and to value a feeling focus rather than an intellectual focus in the process—a focus that could at times bump up against a more traditional, straightforward quantitative approach. The project idea itself was particularly exciting to me, in that I have observed from my own role as a public school music teacher that public school teachers who have been trained in traditional teaching methods struggle with the new arts standards, in which they are asked to teach “creativity” but were never explicitly taught to be creative themselves—nor were they taught to reflect upon and discover their own creative process. Further, I have witnessed that teachers do not always view themselves as active artists, nor do they engage actively and professionally in the art that they are teaching, having been taught in an instructivist approach that emphasized repetition of taught skills and a pre-established body of knowledge and technique, rather than venturing into a more open-ended creative and ultimately more innovative path. Encouraging teacher/artists to be more reflective and analytical of their own work would seem to be an effective way to train them to be able to articulate their process, and then teach it. Creativity in learning and learning with creativity is very much at the center of my research interests, and I was truly excited to read this work.