The Creative Teacher

5. Powerful Learning through the Arts

People learn in proportion to how fully they use their senses. You learn through your senses-by seeing things, hearing them, and feeling things, you even learn by smelling and tasting. One of the most useful ways to engage the senses and teach learners how to think is through the arts.

First of all art requires thinking. Art must be thought through. Secondly, thoughtful looking at art has instrumental value. It provides an excellent setting for the development of better thinking. We can learn to use our minds better through looking at art. Art assists us in a natural way. Looking at art invites, rewards and encourages a thoughtful tendency, enthusiasm, and commitment. This is because works of art connect to the personal and social dimensions of life with strong affective overtones. So, better than most other situations, looking at art can build some very basic thinking dispositions.

Here are some important features of art, which make it a strong creative learning context:

• It has instant access. Any point of discussion can be instantly checked through asking questions like, "What do you see in the picture which supports what you are saying" or simply by asking the group to look closer.

• Art is made to draw and hold attention. This means that you can encourage a prolonged reflection.

• Although we tend to think of art as visual, looking at art recruits many kinds of cognition - visual processing, analytical thinking, posing questions, testing hypotheses, verbal reasoning and many more.

• Multi -connectedness. Art typically allows and encourages rich connection making with social themes, features or formal structure, personal anxieties and insights. This belief list reveals something of why art is so special and all of these are skills vitally needed in the world today. It is not often the case that we can learn so much in the presence of something as compelling as art. Art is an opportunity. Let's not miss it.