Learning to Draw || Lowenfeld: An(other) Look

National Art Education Association

Lowenfeld: An(other) LookAuthor(s): Judith M. BurtonSource: Art Education, Vol. 54, No. 6, Learning to Draw (Nov., 2001), pp. 33-42Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193913 .

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Lowenfeld:

Lowenfeld Lecture NAEA Convention

New York City March 2001

An(other) Look t has become commonplace for us to dismiss or diminish the work of our forebears in art education. We either follow them unquestioningly and by canonizing their work, reduce it to a set of static, scripted, regimented, pedagogical norms, or we simply consign it a place in art education

history where it can either languish without offense or become the play- ground of contemporary revisionists. So has it been with the work of Viktor Lowenfeld and much of the developmental theory he cared and wrote about.

"The Lowenfeld Award" was established in 1960 by friends and former students of Viktor

Lowenfeld to honor an individual

[NAEA member] who has made

significant contributions to the field of art education through

the years. The award winner

presents a lecture on a topic of his or her choice to the annual NAEA convention. This year's

awardee/presenter is Judith M. Burton, Director of the

Art Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia

University, New York City.

Viktor Lowenfeld, Black Moshannon Lake, 1953. Photo by Robert Saunders.

What I See... I want to honor the work of Victor

Lowenfeld. I want to claim him as an important forbear to my own thinking. But in a time-honored way, I also want to make a critique of Lowenfeld's work and in so doing suggest that what one might see as omissions or difficulties in his thinking can also be interpreted as important cautions of contemporary relevance. I want to argue that while Lowenfeld's legendary fear of the cultural-contextual contamination of children's art limits the richness and persuasiveness of his developmental theory, it nonetheless remains as a warning signal to those who make deterministic or essentialist assumptions about the effects of culture on the emerging visual voices of children and adolescents.

In like manner, I also want to recognize that while Lowenfeld's work on creative and mental growth was

more aligned to a theory of personality than to artistic-aesthetic development, he nonetheless privileged a respect for materials, the importance of personal experience as content for art, and believed in the continuity of development. He envisioned youngsters' growing capacities to construct visual images of personal meaning in terms of artistic languages and insights with which they could also critique the forms of the culture in which they lived-both popular and traditional.

Finally, I want to build upon Lowenfeld's work and offer a theory of artistic development, of visual voice, which, I will suggest, has important implications for the kind of art we encourage, how we teach art, and how we view the educational viability of the new standards movement. I wish to note that successive re-writings of Lowenfeld have, in my opinion,

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reduced the clarity and potency of his thinking; consequently, most of my remarks relate to the third edition of Creative and Mental Growth (1957) where we find him at his original best. Second, and more personally, it is important to acknowledge those influences that underpin the assumptions that have brought both Lowenfeld and myself to this moment in time.

It is, however, the children and adolescents I have taught and learned to listen to over the years who have focused my thinking most concretely. I brought with me to the United States from the United Kingdom two questions: "Why should I do art?" and "How can I make it look real?" They are questions that are commonly asked by adolescents and that plague me still.

Lowenfeld in Context... From all that we know about

Lowenfeld, it is not difficult to gauge the sources that directed his thinking. He believed himself to be an untutored prodigy in both music and painting, and he gave up music-his first love-only when taught formally in late childhood. From the philosopher Martin Buber whom he met as a young man, he developed his commitment to the notion that experience is formed as a consequence of a dialogic relationship between self and world- from Freud, the importance of early childhood experience on later personality development; from the painter Kokoschka, his belief in the power of materials to give expressive form to experience; and, from his work with the blind, the notion that sensory input-especially that of touch-plays a critical role in artistic thinking. Finally, and as one who grew up in Hitler's Germany, he acquired an antipathy for the totalitarian shaping mechanism of socio-cultural forces that he saw destroying minority group rights and the integrity of individual voice.

A Personal Context... As I, too, reflect on my own experi-

ences and mentors, I see my thinking shaped initially by an intriguing coinci- dence. For I was an infant born into the latter years and on the other side of that very War that shaped Lowenfeld's thinking. My initial memories are of blackout, loud noises that suddenly stopped, and an understated fear that gripped all the grown-ups in my life. I have very early memories of drawing, of making a world of imagination that was my own and made safe, and where I could retreat, dream, and imagine a world other than it was-without loud and unpredictable noises and fear. While I can remember having art lessons throughout my schooling, and

I can remember doing lots of drawing from memory and observation, I cannot remember ever being taught anything of note. Art was fun and the outcomes admired-I never considered myself a prodigy! When later I studied painting with one of the great art school teachers in the UK, Maurice de Sausmarez, his belief in attending to the expressive voice of the material made absolute sense to me. In the ensuing years, particularly here in the United States, I have had the privilege to study or work with an extraordinary group of scholars: Rudolf Arnheim, Carole Gilligan, George Geothals, Howard Gardner, Philip Jackson, and Maxine Greene, all of whom have shaped important facets of my thinking. It is, however, the children and adolescents I have taught and learned to listen to over the years who have focused my thinking most concretely. I brought with me to the United States from the United Kingdom two questions: '"Why should I do art?" and "How can I make it look real?" They are questions that are commonly asked by adolescents and that plague me still.

Development: The Issue of Culture

It is with the privilege of hindsight, of course, that we identify limitations in Lowenfeld's original text, which subse- quent re-writings did little to modify. I am always struck by a central paradox in Lowenfeld's thinking, namely, that while he claimed a work of art is not a representation of a thing but rather a representation of the experiences we have with that thing, his lack of recognition of the influence on artistic growth of the relationships children build with the various social and cultural worlds in which they live and grow up, is curious. As a reflection of this, in the early editions, Lowenfeld cautions-at some length-against all

I ART EDUCATION / NOVEMBER 2001



forms of copying or imitation, working from models, and influences drawn from adult art. His entire text thereafter limits creative and mental growth to the vantage point of activating children's memories of people, places, and events. While what he calls self-identification with experience is obviously empowered by memory and is critical to artistic growth; yet, he offers no clues about how children actually acquire direct insight about their worlds and how they investigate these worlds through observation, imagination, and reflection, and what they distill from these worlds to enrich their own developing artistic repertoires. For Lowenfeld, the everyday and cultural worlds of popular and traditional arts are envisioned as inhibitors of creativity and growth rather than as stimulants or shapers.

We now know differently and understand cultures more in terms of sets of distinctive practices than enclosing envelopes. There has been growing research, for example, into children's memory and observational drawings-or drawing from the motif. Far from slavishly copying, youngsters at different ages distill and combine a variety of different and distinctive features as they work from human models, natural and human-made forms. Moreover, we are beginning to understand that drawing from memory and observation appears to serve rather different purposes in children's development. Memory drawings allow for the recall of personal and salient experiences with objects and events-often colored by intense feelings-and they situate these memories within the present. Observation drawing invites direct inquiry and investigation and offers new knowledge about self and world for contemplation in the present. Taken together, it seems that both types of drawing interface, establishing

at one level a conceptual richness to graphic repertoires, and at another level facilitating the continuity of experience of self and world. Here, immediate reality finds its roots in the past and can be transported back and forth at will by the action of the imagination.

We also know differently, too, about the influence of cultural models on children's thinking and action with other materials-with paint, clay, stone, etc. We are beginning to understand, for example, that in situations where youngsters' own visual voices have been nurtured through rich and focused experiences with materials, the influence of cultural models will play out differently. For instance, we have found that in situations where children have little faith in, or competence with, materials and whose images are not rooted in personal experience, cultural models will likely determine much of their productivity. Indeed, such youngsters have little recourse but to project their thoughts and feelings into serviceable approximations that act rather like indexes to their ideas. On the other hand, children whose visual voices have been nurtured and who have faith in their action with materials will distill from cultural models and choose those features or effects that best serve their own purposes. In this way, young people enter into a relationship with the culture, for through art they shape their own images and identities. They do not simply index what exists, but rather create symbols that mediate the relationship between themselves and their worlds. Here, if all goes well, the cultural adds richness to the personal without extinguishing it, and, reciprocally, the personal adds richness to children's relationships to their culture(s).

Perhaps we now have clearer and more sympathetic insights about Lowenfeld's fear of the engulfing influences of models and motifs and his concern for the relationship of personal voice to an ideologically constructed field of discourse. For he surely responded to what he saw in Germany as the effects of a totalitarian regime on an art education for children that consisted of little more than endless copying from chalk boards and workbooks. In such a setting, he must have seen how adult- defined models conditioned children's artwork almost entirely. In another age, and with more understanding, we now know that if youngsters develop visual voices that draw on their own experiences, both real and imagined, and that are rooted in rich interactions with materials, then the integrity of the personal voice is not so easily dislodged. This, of course, is what Lowenfeld wished to protect, what he believed was indigenous to all young people, and that was the right to construct their own meanings and speak in their own voices. While we may find his own developmental theory weakened by his attitude towards cultural models and motifs, he nonetheless offers us a salutary caution against the forces of determinism and essentialism to which our present culture, and art education, appears yet again to be prone.




Once an artist makes a physical gesture towards a material by looking at it, or acting upon it with the hands, a chisel, or paint brush, the material responds to this action: it moves- fast or slowly; it resists or responds; it assumes weight, becomes rougher or smoother, denser or translucent. Such responses are often fleeting and consist of an interplay between a sensory overture from an individual and a sensory response from the material. While finely honed in mature artists, such experiences have their genesis in infancy and are seen most frequently in play and exploratory activities with paper, paint, crayon, and clay.

Development: Experience and Continuity

And how do we now read Lowenfeld's developmental theory? I think it fair to say that neither he nor Lambert Brittain envisioned a theory of creative and mental growth that offered a view of visual art as truly intrinsic to human development in its own right- in service of the investigation, organization re-presentation, and communication of meaning. While, and importantly, Lowenfeld argued for the role of artistic engagements in the integration of mental and emotional life, and in personal agency, this was framed psychodynamically-in favor of the development of a balanced personality, rather than within a more normative psychological theory of artistic- aesthetic development. To this end, he envisioned development in terms of the acquisition of certain formal, canonical, concepts such as harmony, balance, and rhythm destined to promote desirable personality traits rather than as integral elements of visual representation. Not withstanding this personality orienta- tion, one of the great strengths of Lowenfeld's contribution is to a vision of continuous artistic development originating in infancy and projecting forward into adolescence. However, by casting continuity in the context of rather rigidly established ages and stages, and not recognizing the recursive and iterative punctuations to artistic development, he fails to acknowledge the many modes of thinking and layerings that urge it forward. Similarly he does not fully acknowledge the ability of young people to shift gears and mix symbols systems and integrate feelings, perceptions, insights, and concepts as experience calls them into play.

Again, we now know better, or, at least, we know differently. For a more

contemporary recasting of creative and mental growth as this relates to artistic development would offer a model composed of multiple dimensions of thinking, sensing, and feeling that interweave while following a spiral trajec- tory incorporating periodic regressions and leaps forward. The content for such a model would be human experience as this is shaped by age, imagination, and different kinds of socio-cultural engagements and mediated by embodied acts with materials. The notion of stages that follow each other end-on would be more appropriately conceived of as phases that incorporate larger age groupings than those determined by Lowenfeld and that are envisioned as layered over time, interweaving and permeable. However, Lowenfeld would urge, I am sure, that such as model of development must hold at its core the belief that artistic development is continuous-is indigenous to human potential-and that its nurturance is the absolute prerogative of all young people throughout their schooling. Such a model would also foreground human experience as the content of art; for human experience, as Dewey and others have claimed, is grounded in reciprocal self-world relationships, and art expresses this in the fullest terms. Because artistry is imbedded in our shared humanness, its outcomes are trans-cultural and trans-historical and permit public discourse and conversations across national boundaries and time.

Artistic Development: Materials

But what of artistic-aesthetic development itself? Indeed, Lowenfeld offers us some ingredients but gets side-tracked by his preoccupations with nurturing balanced and harmonious personalities. For example, another of his significant contributions is his focus

i

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on the mediating role of materials in the creation of paintings and drawings and sculptures. While he appears acutely aware that different materials offer distinctive possibilities for the organization and expression of experience, he never sets this within any larger theoretical model of development. He seems unaware, for example, that children form broad-based concepts of the materials they use-they do not simply apply materials to ideas or vice versa. Rather, their conceptions of materials enter the larger meta- cognitive framework of re-presentation where they engage in the process of determining and expressing meaning.

Of course, while we see the play of materials in the work of artists, we find its genesis in the development of children. Cyr (2000) has shown how the sculpture of Noguchi emerges in the process of the various ways in which he dialogues with his stones. He spends months, even years, contemplating groups of stones, engag- ing in intimate dialogue with them, before he chooses the right stone to move the dialogue forward, from which the sculpture will be formed. Noguchi's sculpture is, thus, not so much an embodiment of an existing mental image as it is the product of a conversa- tional journey in which both parties give and take in their unique roles in shaping the expressive outcome. The outcome IS the idea conceived, and constructed in consort with, the stone.

This notion of construing artistic creation as dialogue with inanimate materials sounds strange, even mysti- cal. Indeed, it is an idea that many artists have trouble with sometimes. It is not unusual, for example, for art students, fresh from their under- graduate or even graduate education, to think of their materials as entities upon which they impose ideas, or with

which they shape ideas. The thought that their work is the product of a lengthy give-and-take dialogue in which a material assumes its own shaping power, has its own voice, appears farfetched. Yet, understanding something of the elements that make up this interaction helps us to a richer vision of development and artistry.

There are several interweaving levels out of which this dialogue between maker and material is formed, and the first of these is sensory. All materials familiar to artists, such as paint, paper, clay and stone, consist of qualities and properties by which they are known: hard, soft, smooth, rough, sharp, and so forth. Once an artist makes a physical gesture towards a material by looking at it, or acting upon it with the hands, a chisel, or paint brush, the material responds to this action: it moves-fast or slowly; it resists or responds; it assumes weight, becomes rougher or smoother, denser or translucent. Such responses are often fleeting and consist of an interplay between a sensory overture from an individual and a sensory response from the material. While finely honed in mature artists, such experiences have their genesis in infancy and are seen most frequently in play and exploratory activities with paper, paint, crayon, and clay.

While the "overture" stage of creating an artwork may be fleeting, it is nonetheless powerful for it sets in motion a new level of dialogue in which preliminary aspects of a maker's idea are called into concrete existence and begin to take form. While more debated in the philosophical and psychological literature, this moment of "calling into existence" also carries with it a powerful feeling response. We know from work in early childhood development

that initial sensory-dynamic responses to materials are intimately linked to feelings and that this link persists in later life and is often revisited. Here we have only to think of the holy elongations of El Greco, the dense impasto of Rembrandt, the musical chorus sung by Kandisnky's colors, and the walks and fights undertaken by the lines of Klee and Albers. This linking of the sensory and emotional is non-logical in formal terms, but it is logical in sensory terms and provides the very glue whereby, in Suzanne Langer's (1953) terms "feelings become form." It is also arguable that our capacity to make aesthetic responses, in Maxine Greene's (2001) words to experience "the world as other than it is," has its roots in this moment of what I have termed a "sensory-logic" dialogue between a maker and a material (Burton,1980).

Once an idea is called into form, it undergoes a journey fashioned from a new level of dialogue in which more formal questions are posed of materials and responded to. It is now that the maker calls into play a repertoire of propositions fashioned from their knowledge of the culture and acquired on the developmental journey from childhood to adult- hood. For instance, many distinctive questions can be asked of lines: that they move in certain directions, take on specific lengths or widths, and assume particular relationships. Lines can be asked to play a structural role in a work: to make particular kinds of shapes, to show the relationship between and among shapes, reveal spatial depth, direction, or volume. The same line can also play a literal role describing the curve of contour or the intensity of texture. Indeed, the same lines can also be requested to carry

NOVEMBER 2001 / ART EDUCATION l



In the construction of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages, materials are dialogued with and new and different ways of encountering the world come into view, are tested and layered, interwoven within unified wholes we call "works of art." It is because they are constructed multi-dimensionally out of different ways of knowing, because in their construction they call upon a spectrum of differentiated habits of mind, and because they integrate knowledge and imagination, the arts offer many tiered conduits to the outside world.

expressive meanings: show fear, strangeness, longing, floating and so forth. A single line, thus, can be conceived of in terms of multiple dimensions of possibility. Furthermore, as the maker asks the line to act in certain ways or combination of ways, rather than in others, the line itself will offer new and unsuspecting possibilities to the attention and reflection of the maker that, if accepted, can open new nuances to the journey of forming the idea. Here, the maker is not drawing upon a pre-existing code of conventions and simply applying them to a pre-existing idea, making an external object analogous to an inner idea. The maker is, in a very real sense, discovering IN the material the depictive nuances that will coalesce to express the idea that is the work.

And So It Is For Children... This kind of multi-layered explo-

ration of relationship also occurs for children who bring their experiences of daily life into the classrooms with them-experiences colored often with strong feelings and fantasy. As they engage in painting or drawing, they learn that their materials have particular properties and qualities that resonate more fully with some aspects of their experiences than others. As children explore and discover ever new possibilities in materials, so this new learning resonates back calling forth particular aspects (thoughts, perceptions, feelings, sensory responses) of their actual lived experience, making these available as possibilities for new exploration and elaboration. It is through this dialectic involving active, hands-on, bodily manipulations of material, that much important learning takes place. For as materials bring responses into focus for the mind, so they simultaneously act as vehicles of reflection provoking new shades of

meaning and enriching the immediate significance of the originating thought, memory, or event. This on-going dialectic between action with a material and reflection on the outcome engages youngsters thinking, feeling, and sensing as it does for adults. Thus, different and distinctive ways of knowing are brought, over time, into new integrative constellations through the exercise of the imagination that, in Greene's (2001) terms, "allows children to ask questions of, and construct narrative about, their lives as ordinarily lived." It is the material that transforms an inner event (an experience appre- hended to the mind) by taking it on a journey outward into a new kind of re-presented reality, and it is the role of the imagination along this journey to at once unify and intensify the outcome, facilitating the emergence over time of complex artistic thought.

We now know, as this on-going dialogue takes place, that a number of specific cognitive abilities come in to being in early artistic development and play increasingly complex roles in the fashioning of the kinds of experiences set forth above. According to recent research we have undertaken at Teachers College (2000), four abilities, in particular, appear to play pervasive roles in artistic development: elaboration, originality, fluency, and resistance to closure. The capacity for elaboration, for example, enables youngsters to be attentive to parts and details of their perceptions and ideas, explore and bring into play further information, and, in general, to entertain different possibilities on an idea, problem, or experience. Originality involves seizing some of these different possibilities and reconceiving them in fresh and new ways; in short, originality undergirds independent thinking about things, about making the familiar




strange, and vice versa. Fluency engages the ability to make ideas flow, to move them forward, to sift out and interweave ideas and responses into new unities. Resistance to closure, of course, implies the ability to keep an open and independent mind, consider possibilities, and move thinking forward into new domains of insight and understanding. Recent research tells us that these abilities are all strongly represented among young people who have been exposed to arts education for considerable periods of their education.

Filtering through these creative- thinking abilities are more general competencies of thought, such as imagination, risk taking, and expressivity. Clearly, if the mind is at work considering and filtering possibilities, making leaps and jumps as part of the forward-backward movement of thought, then this is fueled by the imagination that allows the mind to entertain the not-yet-known and opens up the possibility of taking some risks and entertaining ambiguity. However, it seems that as young people reflect upon the content of their experiences, these capacities do not act as single cognitive units; rather, they interweave forming more broadly based "habits of mind." For example, they interweave informing youngsters' abilities to conceive of or imagine different and divergent vantage points on an idea, event, or problem. They interweave as these vantage points become possibilities to be considered in the fashioning of an idea or question. They interweave as possibilities are layered in thought, creating new unities of meaning. They interweave helping to sustain focused perception over time, and they offer a base in thought from which children can feel competent, a sense of personal agency, in expressing their ideas and

feelings openly and thoughtfully. These habits of mind, activated through the potential of particular materials, allow experience to be reflected upon, possibilities entertained, selections and combinations constructed, and, often, as a work itself comes into being, transformative experiences occur-the world and self are known differently.

Narrative as Mechanisms of Mind

If all goes well in teaching and learning in the arts, paintings and drawings become important organizers of knowledge. For in their making they evolve as narratives, as important mechanisms of mind, in which ideas about the world and children's place within it are constructed. Their virtue is that they are not single isolated factual outcomes; rather, they offer larger schemes of meaning having cultural and human dimensions. In the construction of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages, materials are dialogued with, and new and different ways of encountering the world come into view, are tested and layered, interwoven within unified wholes we call "works of art." It is because they are constructed multi-dimensionally out of different ways of knowing, because in their construction they call upon a spectrum of differentiated habits of mind, and because they integrate knowledge and imagination, the arts offer many tiered conduits to the outside world. They also offer to children, adolescents, and artists very important psychological and emotional rewards and have done so since the dawn of history.

Yet, what is the outcome of all this? The question arises are we nurturing artists or privileging artistic-visual-aesthetic literacy? The answer is all of the above! As far as his thinking went, Lowenfeld

conceived the outcome of development in adolescence in terms of the capacity to create realistic and naturalistic works. I happen to think this is unnec- essarily restrictive on his part and probably incorrect. If education gets it right, within the constructed narratives of art, of visual images, young people can explore new intellectual, emotional, and cultural territory; they can investigate, critique, and test different points of view, different value systems; they can transcend the traditional boundaries of knowledge. Above all, with empowered visual voices, youngsters can place themselves in common cause with voices from the past and voices not yet heard. They can, like the Flemish masters before them, hold up the mirror to a world we adults might just find discomforting. All of this cannot be wrapped up in one style, one mode of visual organization, one end point. I would like to envision that the outcome of development results in the acquisition of repertoires of possibility, of different styles and combinations of styles that act to serve the myriad and distinctive artistic-aesthetic meaning- making needs of all young people.

The Facilitating Environment

Let me return to Lowenfeld because he, quite rightly, would say that the developmental picture I have sketched will not occur in any fullness if the facilitating environment does not intercede in its support. Artistic development will not occur in any richness and depth in situations where it is assumed that simple "exposure to materials" is all that is needed to direct children's efforts. For however much children and adolescents may seem to learn on their own in creating images and in their quests for meaning, they cannot do this unaided. Nor can they do this if we teach them such canons as color wheel




Here, the role of the teacher becomes critical. For as Lowenfeld knew it is the teacher who "reads" development and promotes learning and creates a classroom atmosphere of trust and caring in which exploration and learning can take place. It is, thus, critical that teachers are knowledgeable enough about development and contemporary culture-in all the arts-to help each child in their classes contextualize and situate learning in the context of their own experience. It is critical that teachers provoke imagination and critical reflection and are able to evoke situations and experiences of profound import to the youngsters they teach.

and three-point perspective. For development to occur, experiences in the arts must be provided in schools, and teachers must be encouraged to learn from young people what is in their experience that compels them most and what drives their aesthetic interests.

Here, the role of the teacher becomes critical. For as Lowenfeld knew it is the teacher who "reads" development and promotes learning and creates a classroom atmosphere of trust and caring in which exploration and learning can take place. It is, thus, critical that teachers are knowledgeable enough about development and contemporary culture-in all the arts- to help each child in their classes contextualize and situate learning in the context of their own experience. It is critical that teachers provoke imagination and critical reflection and are able to evoke situations and experiences of profound import to the youngsters they teach. For only if learning is situated in compelling personal contexts will it take hold and be grounded enough to inform the emergence of new ways of knowing, thinking, and representing. Only if learning is grounded in a personal context will it have shared salience.

In his seminal text, Creative and Mental Growth (1957), Lowenfeld offers a number of conversations, or dialogues, designed to help teachers challenge and nurture children's artistic development. It was, of course, Plato in the guise of Socrates who argued that dialogue is both the rationale path to knowledge of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and the highest form of teaching. Reframed around a broader conception of knowledge than either Plato or Lowenfeld might recognize, dialogue has come to mean an open- ended communication, investigation, or

inquiry between teachers and learners, and among learners. Instead of conveying knowledge as static, the sole possession of the teacher, something to be passed on and acquired by the learner, teaching through dialogue presupposes a free and continuous interchange of ideas that is actively directed towards reflection, discovery, and new understanding. Teaching through dialogue also presupposes that children and adolescents are acknowl- edged as thinkers, able to marshal their ideas and imaginations in the service of developing their own visual symbolic capacities. In short, teaching through dialogue not only opens children to new ways of thinking, it empowers their understanding, their sense of agency, and gives them insights into how knowledge emerges and is constructed and expressed in and through visual images.

The virtues and values of teaching through dialogue in the arts are many. In the first place, it inhibits the kind of dreary uniformity of outcome in making and appraising that is the consequence of "telling" and "demon- stration." It also does not presume that children's minds are blank slates or empty buckets waiting to be filled. A good dialogue will allow an interweaving of personal sensory, affective, and cognitive responses as youngsters reflect on their experiences and, through imaginative reconstruction, give them voice in and though visual materials. A provocative dialogue will also promote self-reflection, recognition and tolerance for diversity, and an ability to listen to and learn from the ideas and thoughts of others. In addition to this, a thoughtful dialogue will offer youngsters insights into how ideas are made and are related to each other in sequence and will build in complexity to larger ideas or concepts.




A challenging dialogue is just that. It gives meaning in terms of individuals' personal development by opening them to the powers of scrutiny, investigation, inquiry, and questioning. By the same token, the teacher must be able to offer through dialogue forms of insights and understanding about materials, techniques, and visual ideas that meet learners where they are in the process of their own personal meaning making.

The Danger of Expressive Voice

There are many threads that form the tapestry of artistic development as it flows from infancy to adolescence and perhaps beyond. In essence, I have tried to bring into the present elements of Lowenfeld's thinking that have relevance for us today. I have tried to present a picture of youngsters' minds as they engage in the creation of art that centers them within their own experiences of self-world and relationship. As I have tried to argue, youngsters' minds consist of inextricable mixtures of personal and cultural dimensions; engagement in the arts offers them the means to construct the kinds of narratives they need in order to make a complex world meaningful. It is in their aesthetic presence, and the demands they make upon the imagination, that visual images become compelling and open the mind to new comers of reality. While this vision of mind and of art places children at the heart of their own experiences, it acknowledges that these experiences are themselves culturally formed and involve the actions and perceptions of others. If learning is to occur, and visual symbolizing capacities are to do their work, then focused experiences with materials must be paced to interests and capacities. Similarly, personal studio experiences must offer bridges towards understanding of the narra-

tives of others, equally as they are enriched by new insights provided by those others.

We sometimes forget that we are not born knowing how to get ideas into materials, or how materials can be manipulated to shape ideas and create meaning; these are constructs of the human senses and mind, and this needs to be nurtured in a thoughtful and disciplined way. We sometimes forget, in our anxiety to initiate children and adolescents into the norms and conventions of the culture, that it is only through the personal expressive endeavors of individuals going beyond cultural norms that we have a culture at all. We sometimes forget that it is through acting on materials to trans- form them that ideas become form, that imagination is engaged to this end, and that form assumes particular aesthetic presence. We sometimes forget that through using materials children are simultaneously carving a niche for themselves in time and space and human culture, often learning to contest the status quo, becoming participants in an ancient ritual. To my mind, we forget too much.

For over human history, the arts have been used both to promote and inhibit freedom of thought and action; they have revealed tyrants, confronted prejudice and power, while they have also celebrated beauty, the wonders of nature, the comforts of family and spiritual life. None of us can remain unmoved by the spectacle of human inhumanity that Goya confronts us with in his series of etchings called 'The Destructions of War" or by the same token to have our spiritual selves enriched by the works of Fra Angelico, or our social selves provoked by the revelations of the Mexican muralists. It is through their own efforts with

Perhaps this enlarged vision of what it means to be literate in today's world is too challenging, too risky, for (those) who would have children map rule-based codes and conventions-in art and in language-onto a world disengaged and made predictable and tidy, a world that can be defined in terms of separate disciplinary units and sound-bites of knowledge. I can think only that Lowenfeld would be appalled. Standards are not written to test how youngsters interweave myriad facts in the construction of important narratives, nor how they manipulate materials in the integration of knowledge and imagination and mediate the world of self and relationship, or how they go beyond the familiar and test new possibilities.

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materials that young people's minds become informed such that they can actively engage with the myriad works of others, and at the many levels and ways in which they present themselves to us. It is through finding their own visual voices that youngsters can acquire the kind of knowledge they will need to interpret the intentions of others, to speak, challenge, critique, and give form and existence to new possibilities of being in the world. This, I am suggesting, is what it means to be literate in the arts. I hope Lowenfeld would agree.

Perhaps this enlarged vision of what it means to be literate in today's world is too challenging, too risky, for the setters of national and state standards who would have children map rule-based codes and conventions-in art and in language- onto a world disengaged and made predictable and tidy, a world that can be defined in terms of separate disciplinary units and sound-bites of knowledge. I can think only that Lowenfeld would be appalled. Standards are not written to test how youngsters interweave myriad facts in the construction of important narratives, nor how they manipulate materials in the integration of knowledge and imagination and mediate the world of self and relationship, or how they go beyond the familiar and test new possibilities. I think we have always known, from the times of classical Greece onwards, that the literate mind informed by the arts is not tidy and predictable, cannot be prepped for, cannot be trapped within preordained codes, for the literate mind fuels the sense of knowing, and knowing things differently, and having the courage to go there and say so. Recognizing the

complexity, multi-dimensionality, and variability that actually constitutes artistic learning and that resides at the heart of knowledge appears beyond the setters of standards and the writers of tests. As Jerome Bruner (1996) states in his important work The Culture of Education, "a failure to equip minds with the skills for understanding and feeling and acting in the cultural world is not simply scoring a pedagogical zero. It risks creating alienation, defiance, and practical incompetence. And all of these undermine the viability of a culture" (p.42). It seems to me that by freezing in place the worst aspects of traditional education, it is our setters of standards and those who rush to meet them who may really be dumbing down potential of young American minds! How can we standardize, for example, Lowenfeld's sense that for our children "art should become their friend to whom they turn with their joys and sorrows, their fears and frustrations" (p. 11), such that artistic expression becomes an integral part of their whole stream of living? We cannot standardize this, and, moreover, attempt to do so at our peril.

Judith M. Burton is professor and director of the Art and Art Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. This presentation was given in receipt of the Lowenfeld Award, and delivered at the NAEA Convention in New York City on March 15, 2001. The author can be contacted at Teachers College, Columbia University, West 120th Street, NYC, NY 10027. E-mail: JMB62@Columbia. edu

REFERENCES Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Burton, J.M.(1980). Developing minds: The first visual symbols. School Arts, October, pp. 60-65.

Burton, J.M., Horowitz, R., & Abeles, H. (2000). Learning in and through the arts: The question of transfer. Studies in Art Education, (43) 3, 228-257.

Cyr, L.P. (2000).Conversation with a stone. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Teachers College, Columbia University.

Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar. New York: Teachers College Press.

Langer, S. Feeling and form, (1953). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Lowenfeld, V. (1957). Creative and mental growth., New York: Macmillan Co.




Documents

Learning to Draw || Lowenfeld: An(other) Look