Learning to Draw || Encountering Student Learning

National Art Education Association

Encountering Student LearningAuthor(s): Mary HafeliSource: Art Education, Vol. 54, No. 6, Learning to Draw (Nov., 2001), pp. 19-24Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193911 .

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Remember that impossibly demanding studio art teacher you had in college?

Encountering Student Learning //COHH4~S / /* A CH~~~~~

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M ine was Professor C. He taught a course based on JosefAlbers's theories, and everyone in my class dreaded his often critical feedback about our attempts to solve the color problems he gave us. Professor C.'s feedback was tough to handle at times, but it was not personally degrading; he didn't make us feel as if we were unworthy of his time.

He just looked at our work through the lens of the discrete skills he was trying to teach, and commented on the degree to which his expectations for persuasive color effects and relationships had, or had not, been reached. Professor C. used these same standards when he assigned grades to our projects. As we interpreted his "critical insights" (Feldman, 1973), we tried to "see" our works as our teacher saw them.

The tradition of the teacher as principal judge of quality more or less continues today, as secondary school art teachers assign grades based on students' achievements and performance in art class. These days, teachers may use rubrics with defined criteria based on lesson objectives and specific qualities expected in the work. They may even ask students to rate themselves according to these criteria or to write in journals about their processes of creating the work. And yet, as in the case of Professor C., it is usually the teacher alone who assigns final grades, and these grades are often based, in large part, on a comparison of the teacher's intended learning and achievement outcomes for the lesson and observable learning and achievement outcomes, as recognized or identified by the teacher.

But there is a problem with assessing student learning by relying only on what can be "seen" in student artwork. There is a problem, too, with focusing judgment about student learning around just the teacher's intended outcomes for a lesson. Looking at what students learn in art through one lens, or set of criteria, limits our view of the full spectrum of learning. It leaves out the "what else" that students may have attempted, learned how to do, grappled with, or understood through works made within a particular lesson.

There's More To Drawing Than Lines...

What is this "what else" that students say they have to know, or learn how to do, as they work on art projects assigned by their teacher? What do students learn in art, beyond or within their teacher's guidelines for the lesson? As a first step in exploring these questions, I visited Norman and his eighth-grade students as they worked on self-portrait drawings in a middle school art class. I spent several weeks in the classes, observing students at work and talking with them as they finished their drawings. I wanted to find out what the students took as the "given" of the assignment, what they were "supposed to do" to make their self-portraits. I also asked them as artists to tell me about the "things you had to know" or "think about," or "learn how to do," as they were starting out, working through, and finishing their drawings.

Cartoon panels from Berlin (1996), by Jason Lutes. Used with permission of the artist.

Norman's lesson was based on the paintings of Chuck Close. Using 81" x 11" photographs of themselves, students were to make enlarged, 18" x 24" pencil drawings based on the photos. They were to both transfer lines from small-grid square to large-grid square and re-create through shading the value contrast seen in the photograph. The emphasis was on transferring information accurately, through the use of grids and rules of proportion for line placement and through the use of shading for achieving value contrast.

When I spoke to students about their works, I found similarities between what Norman had intended for the lesson and what students interpreted as the "given." The students seemed to understand and, at least initially, work towards the photorealist and accuracy outcomes of the lesson. Everyone I spoke to said that looking closely and

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paying attention to the grid was important because, as Jane put it, "one little mistake with a wrong line somewhere will blow the whole picture." The students also cited the use of shading as essential. Shading "really dark where it's supposed to be and lighter where it's supposed to be" made the images look "real," "3-D," and like they were "popping off the paper." But apart from this focus on correct line placement and value contrast, issues that Norman emphasized repeatedly, students spoke about some distinct actions and insights that were necessary for the artist in the process of drawing the self portrait. These actions and insights formed a pool of resources- specific ways of working, perceiving, and judging-that the artist had to develop and call on in order to make decisions and choices as the work evolved. These personal resources also, at times, allowed the artist to go beyond-or choose not to comply with-the photorealist emphasis of the lesson.

Necessary "Know-How" For the Self-Portrait Drawing: The Students' Views 1. "You have to be ready to change a lot of things."

For all of the students, ongoing editing was a major part of the process in this lesson. The artist's ability to "go back in," "fix things," and "add more details or take some away" to make the portrait "better," "more like the photograph," "more like how you look" and "more real" was cited as essential to a good drawing. The editing process was a struggle for some students, like Stuart who was "used to being right the first time" in other activities or classes. Adjusting and reworking the portrait took time, concentration, and effort, and the students used these criteria when talking about successful drawings: "You can tell he spent a long time because he changed things, there's more detail, and it's not fast drawn, he worked hard on it." Reworking the drawing also involved some risk for those who were "afraid to change it" because they "didn't want to mess up on it." In revising, there was a chance that the work would end up to be worse, not better, because of the changes. 2. "You have to know that adding something over here makes everything different over there."

The fluid and changing nature of the image was character- ized in other ways, as students talked about how "adding" or "taking away" in one area affects the appearance of the other parts of the drawing. Stacey explains:

You had to shade everything or else one thing would really stick out and then it looked funny, and it was out of proportion. Like it was out of proportion but it really wasn't, it was just how you did the shading. For some students, "balance" was the goal so that there

was a kind of uniformity to the work. For others, adding detail

to certain areas and not others was intentional so that, in Max's words, "your eyes would focus more on those parts and less on the other things that weren't so important." Students recognized that the artist could direct attention to or away from different areas of the drawing by making those areas "stick out from" or "fall into" the rest of the image. 3. "You have to look at it like a camera, zooming in and zooming out."

This orchestration of the "parts" working as the "whole" took a kind of perceptual flexibility; to Shari it was like "mov- ing back and forth" between focusing on the separate areas and "looking at how the whole thing was working, together." Students also talked about a point at which "you could not use the grid and just look at the parts and see if they worked together." For John, areas that "didn't work" were ones that "stick out and don't look right." For Ella, this "sticking out" resulted from too much concentration on developing isolated areas: "It was like I just looked at that part for too long and worked on only that, and then the whole thing sort of got off." Being able to "zoom in" and "zoom out" seemed to resolve this problem for many of the students.

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4. "You have to know when to forget the photo and go with what's on the paper."

All of the students described initial success in drawing from observation to be, in Ella's words, "getting it to be as close as possible to what you're looking at." But many also realized that there was more to think about than staying true to the model. As Josh explains, students had to "decide about what things to include and what to leave out" as they drew:

You figured out on your own how things should look instead of using the photograph. Like with John, his skin is darker but he thought the shading made his face look dirty, so he didn't do it exactly as it was in the photograph. And it ended up better, looking more like him. And then some people, if they didn't like part of their face in the picture they might have changed that part in the drawing a little bit. Or if they didn't think they could draw it right, they might leave it out. So it was doing it accurately, but also deciding how you wanted people to see you. And after a while, we didn't use the pictures at all ... you just had to go with what was happening in the drawing.

According to Josh, the self-portrait resulted from a kind of filtering process that included: (a) how the artist wanted to be seen by others; (b) how successfully he could draw those parts of the photograph that he wanted to include; and (c) "what was happening in the drawing" itself. For Josh and others, these considerations seemed to lessen a strict reliance on the photograph as model. The initial goal of achieving accuracy according to the photograph gradually expanded to include interpretive issues that were related to students' self-image, understanding of artistic options, and aesthetic judgment. 5. "You have to understand that people are going to have different ideas about how your drawing looks and how to make it better."

Finally, the students talked at length about recognizing "what was working" in the drawing and what wasn't. Lisa noted that mistakes were somewhat ambiguous. She describes a difference between the artist's intention and skill level, and the viewer's interpretation of the work:

In art, it's never really wrong or right cause it's a way of thinking. If you make a mistake you can try to fix it, or sometimes people don't think it's a mistake at all. To them, it might not look like a mistake but something you were trying to do that works. Then you try to look at it differently and see if it really does work for you. Or sometimes someone might tell you that something doesn't look right. Then you might want to change it... if you can. The lines in Lisa's portrait were accurately placed accord-

ing to the grid, but the drawing did not approximate the con- trasting darks and lights found in the photograph. Norman urged her a few times to darken certain areas, but Lisa was unwavering in her refusal to do so. Norman and Lisa agreed that the portrait was "lightly drawn," but Lisa wasn't sure that she could add darker areas "without screwing the whole thing up." Other students similarly described the drawing as being finished when "you knew that going any further would ruin it." The self-portrait drawings told, in part, about both how the students wished to represent themselves and how they were able to represent themselves. The way the works turned out had as much to do with students' intentions for their works as with their assessment of their abilities to "make things better without messing everything up."




...You've Got To Get At The Thing!

The drawing lesson described here is one that seems to be a perennial in our field. Some art teachers may think of it as a "basic" or "technical" exercise to use as a confidence builder for adolescents who are critical of their own representational abilities.' Others may use a lesson like this so that students learn about scale by using a grid to draw an enlarged image. But as Norman's students seem to make clear, even a lesson that teachers may think of as basic or technical can create a number of perceptual, interpretive, and aesthetic considerations. The students I spoke with did not report that they simply transferred information about lines and value contrast from their photos to their drawings. On the contrary, after an initial reliance on the information in the photo, the students incorporated information from other sources, such as their own ideas about how they wanted to be seen in their drawings, apart from the photographs. They also made selections and decisions according to "what was happening in the drawing" and "how the parts were working together," regardless of whether or not photographic accuracy was achieved. And the students described the self-portrait as being done not g necessarily whenit looked like a perfect replica of the j photograph but when it was "the way you wanted it" and : when "you knew going any further would ruin it." What is key here is that in a lesson that some teachers may use to teach basic drawing skills, the students were attempting to "make art." They were making judgments about the needs of their works based on intentions that went beyond matching the image in the photograph. Their actions were based on aesthetic responses to the developing image in the drawing, ideas about how they wanted to portray themselves apart from the photograph, and their assessments of their abilities to make changes successfully, to make the drawings better and to make them complete.

How, then, should the works that come from this lesson be assessed? In considering the self-portraits in relation to Chuck Close's process, Norman might look through the lens of photographic accuracy and assess his students' abilities to correctly match in their drawings the lines and value contrasts found in their photographs. In this context, Norman might give 10 points to those nearly perfect matches, 8 points to those that got most of it right and so on. Maybe "effort" would play into the scoring as well, or "care," or "sensitive use of materials." To some teachers, this may seem to be a clean, fair, and objective way to assess the drawings.

But this method, objective as it may seem, limits our view of what students learned and were able to do in the lesson. As Norman's students point out, even a seemingly "technical"

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drawing activity can provide a "non-technical" space in which students confront interpretive issues and grapple with the kinds of perceptual and aesthetic issues that face artists (beyond the one featured in the lesson) in the studio. For example, as the students began, added to, and made changes in their drawings, they were developing their abilities to, in the words of John Berger, look for lines that " [lose] their original and necessary emphasis, as others [surround] them" (Berger, 1974, p. 170). Like the students' descriptions of their own methods, Berger talks about a "point" at which "one begins to draw according to the demands, the needs of the drawing" itself, instead of relying on a model. Further, the students realized that even when they were working from the photograph they were selecting some details from the image to include and deciding not to bring other details into the drawing. For painter Joan Mitchell, considering what to include and not include at times gives rise to the feeling of not "know[ing] what to do with it" as the work evolves, and of being "afraid of ruining what I have."2 Mitchell's uncertainty is similar to the students' fear of "messing up" and "going too far and ruining" the work. In the self-portrait drawing lesson, beyond learning

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about line placement and shading and photographic accuracy, Norman's students were developing some ways of thinking that artists rely on in the studio, including the ability to make independent decisions and judgments about the direction of their works. How might the students' development of these "invisible" ways of thinking, perceiving, and evaluating play into Norman's assessment of their self-portraits?

Encountering Learning Beyond "What's Seen"

It seems that as our field has urged art teachers to move towards "scorable" student learning outcomes for studio work, we have in turn limited our scope for assessment to what can be seen in student artworks or observed in students' ways of working. In doing so, we have narrowed and in some cases diminished what we recognize as the nature of artmaking and of student learning in art. For Norman simply to score his students' drawings based on adherence to a few observable teacher-set criteria diminishes the importance of his students' own intentions for their works, and of the artistic thinking and independent judgment they developed and practiced in the process.

To widen his own scope for assessment, Norman has adopted some strategies that get at these less obvious kinds of learning. For example, through informal conversations with students, Norman is able to find out about not only "what's there" in the works, but also "what's not there."

Sometimes, in grading, I'll sit down with the students and talk with them alone. And I'll grade the work on not just what is there but I'll ask them, 'What would you do differently, if you could do it again?' And then we almost imagine together what it may look like if they did do it again. I use that information.

Through dialogue, Norman hears his students' ideas about why their works turned out as they did. He is able to recognize that the students' goals and intentions for their works are responses to his "given" for the lesson,3 and not just duplicates of it. If parts of the work don't seem quite right to him, he can find out whether or not that was intentional, tied to expressive or narrative content. Through these conversations, Norman can see if his students are able to identify ways in which their works might be strengthened, even if they are not able to make the changes necessary for that refinement.

In coming to understand how students think about their works, Norman views his own lesson intentions through the lens of his students' goals and expectations. And, he is able to interpret students' works not just according to what he'd like to see there, but in light of the artistic sensibilities that are developed when students face the problems and uncertainties that are a natural part of inventing and composing in the studio.

Artistic learning, a very small part of which was illustrated here by Norman's students, cannot always be recognized by studying students' artworks and work habits and by entering numbers on a scoring rubric. Nor can the range and depth of thinking and learning in art be captured through writing assignments, as students' writing abilities may limit our understanding about what they have learned. Teachers who have developed their own artistic sensibilities-through grappling with the fluid, sometimes competing, thoughts and responses that prioritize and reprioritize themselves as they work in the studio-are fortunate. They have the means to provide, through purposeful dialogue, a different way to encounter and document the learning of their students. And, these teachers have the power to expand our ideas about what we should look for, and acknowledge, as student learning in art class.

Mary Hafeli is Assistant Professor and Director, Art Education Program, State University of New York at New Paltz. E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES Barkan, M., & Hausman, J. (1956). Two pilot studies with the purpose of

clarifying hypotheses for research into creative behavior. Research in Art Education, NAEA 7th Yearbook, (pp. 126-141). Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Berger, J. (1974). The look of things. New York: Viking Press. Feldman, E. (1973). The teacher as model critic.Journal of Aesthetic

Education, 7(1), 50-57. Getzels, J. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1976). The creative vision: A longitu-

dinal study of problem finding in art. New York: Wiley and Sons. Lutes, J. (1996). Berlin, 2. Montreal, Quebec: Black Eye Productions. Stiles, K., & Selz, P. (Eds.). (1996). Theories and documents of

contemporary art. Berkeley:University of California Press. Walker, S. (1996). Designing studio instruction: Why have students

make artworks? Art Education, 49(5), 11-17.

FOOTNOTES 11 don't mean to imply here that Close's works are merely technical

exercises, or that Norman used them in this way exclusively. Close's method of using grids and transferring "objective" information from photos seems to make the subjects in his works more "real" and "human" than the process might suggest. Norman discussed these issues with his students early in the lesson. Norman instructed the students to use the photos as models and the grids as tools, but he also told the students to put these things aside when they were "no longer needed."

2 Yves Michaud, "Conversations with Joan Mitchell, January 12, 1986," in Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade, 1986). Reprinted in Stiles & Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, 31-34.

3 Barkan and Hausman (1956, p. 138) refer to this as the student's "private task"; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976) and Walker (1996) describe it as "problem finding."


