Dear Fiona, Jinan, and list,
Chuck you write (to Jinan):
>> “…Children say what they are drawing, but at certain ages their drawings show how they envision a tree, castle, or dinosaur, not what it looks like. It is quite different when they try to draw what they actually see. If this is what your students are doing, can you explain how they construct the image and what their thoughts are as they do it?” >>
I find I am rather puzzled by your comment about the difference between children’s “envisioning” and “what they actually see”. I had interpreted Jinan’s post as bringing our attention to the opportunities and challenges of exactly this, and the way that education affects it. You ask Jinan about how the children >>“construct the image and what their thoughts are as they do it?” >> Aren’t thoughts exactly what a drawing is? An expression of the workings of an individual human mind?
So Q 1: Please can you explain what more you think we can gain from further exploring the mental world of his students as they draw – and indicate the kind of techniques that are available and appropriate to his educational goals. I would find that very useful to know more about.
Fiona, Perhaps you are not used to working with very young children who cross a threshold around seven: before that they are directed more by what they imagine than what they see. (You can test this by trying to get them to draw an actual object in their field of view. Generally speaking, they draw what they actually see when they are developmentally ready to do it. As they do so, they become quite critical of their skills and can become discouraged. They are also acquiring more sophisticated language, and social skills at the time and this probably plays in to their thoughts. It is a challenging transition time for them. I wanted to know the ages of Jinan’s students to better understand their stage of development.
One reason it is important to know how the brain manages different kinds of information during thought, is that it can provide better ways to “see" the interplay of language, vision, and motor skills; to look deeper into how our educational efforts might register in different minds at different levels of development, and in different cultures. We might begin to understand why some people love to draw and others find it challenging. We might even begin to understand if drawing could be effected by syndromes like verbal dyslexia (which neuroscience has helped to locate and define).
We might even have some human centered basis for the techniques we find useful. Art education has had to suffer from its inability to convince those who control educational budgets of the profound benefits it offers to every mind. We need a deeper scientifically grounded rationale to go along with the pleasures
and benefits we know from experience.
There is a new book from Oxford University Press, "The Aesthetic Brain", by Anjan Chatterjee, that has taken on the issues of beauty, pleasure and art from the perspective of neuroscience. He has written an excellent introduction to the application of scientific thought to such questions as what is art, is there an instinct for art, and how can we be pleased by such radically different expressions. You will be surprised at how well he approaches such questions (and how well he answers them.) His book sits alongside "The Age of Insight", by Eric Kandel as an early bridge to the future of art and design education.
Or, so I believe,
Chuck
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