arts & business council

MetLife Foundation National Arts Forums Series

Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund
Atlanta, Georgia

Building a Vibrant Workforce Through the Arts in Education
03/13/2007

Moderator: Lynne Sowder, Principal, Burns Sowder Art Advisory

Presentation by Philip Yenawine, Executive Director, Visual Understanding in Education (VUE)

Philip Yenawine began by stating the questions posed to him for this forum: “What is the role of arts education in creating the workforce of tomorrow? And “how does the study of the arts affect cognitive and emotional growth?” His question in response was, “Imagine these questions being asked of science or math. The importance of these fields is assumed; the importance of the arts is not, and has not ever been assumed in this country.”

Yenawine said that the exploration of the role of the arts in education is a field has been largely the province of small arts organizations who have taken this on in addition to their primary role of providing art to the public. They’ve done this without much help from the academic community, with some public funding, some private foundation funding, but mostly with support from individual “venture philanthropists.” The business community, arguably the group most affected by this, is not funding this work.

 “We are in crisis in education,” Yenawine said. Politicians rarely talk about it, yet one-third of kids who enter high school don’t graduate or finish in four years and the majority of these students are people of color or Hispanic kids who struggle with language. Yenawine said that these students have found school to be irrelevant and he does not believe that we are reaching them with current teaching methods fostered by No Child Left Behind. He cited statistics from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that reports that 75 percent of kids are not proficient in reading or math. He cited another study that showed that 42 percent of people cannot read a train timetable.

Yenawine has developed a visual arts program, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), for elementary school students and teachers that uses art to teach thinking, communication skills, and visual literacy. Growth is stimulated by three things: looking at art of increasing complexity, responding to developmentally-based questions, and participating in group discussions that are carefully facilitated by teachers.

Using his VTS method, Yenawine led the audience in a discussion about a series of slides of works of art.  He asked the audience for open-ended reactions, listening and paraphrasing their response back to them and the rest of the audience. From VTS materials: “Students are first asked to look at an image without talking. Then the teacher/facilitator asks certain non-directive questions. ('What’s going on in this picture?' 'What more can we find?') These questions encourage students to examine what they see. Later more specific, probing and directed questions are added. From the beginning, students are also asked to back up interpretations with evidence; whenever they state an opinion, teachers ask them, 'What do you see that makes you say that?' The teacher ensures that every response is heard and acknowledged, by pointing to what is mentioned as students talk, and then paraphrasing what is said. As the discussion evolves, teachers link various related answers, helping to make students aware of their converging and diverging views, and of their developing skills at constructing shared, yet varied meanings.”

The benefit of this method, Yenawine said, is how well it engages and develops thinking and communication skills in the students. In addition to asking students to practice talking about what they see and supporting it with evidence, VTS exposes them to the varied opinions of their peers in a setting where there can be more that one right answer. This is supported by the teacher’s use of conditional language when paraphrasing, “It could be this” or “what you are suggesting is.” As each student’s opinion is validated by the teacher, they can begin to think about speculative frameworks. Yenawine suggested that this type of thinking is easier with art, a medium that deals with fewer absolutes, but that with practice students could apply this thinking more widely.

Yenawine and VUE have had found great success when they’ve evaluated the changes in students after completing the VTS program. Classes have reported a 12 percent increase in language skills and a 14 percent increase in math scores after VTS. VUE found that writing scores improved and credit this to an increased ability to picture things when reading about other times and places. The students have a larger base of images to apply to unseen situations. Many students, without VTS or a resource that supplies images, are resource poor, they are not given the opportunity to see things. Yenawine added that “TV is not seeing.”

Yenawine draws a direct connection from these skills of observation, elaboration, drawing conclusions, evidence-based arguments, and speculative thinking to the workplace of today and tomorrow. Their people will be required to develop hypotheses, question presumptions, consider ranges of possibilities and alternatives, and be able to change course. He sees a direct application of these skills used in government, medicine, science, technology, finance, and law being learned by seven- and eight-year-olds.

An audience member asked about how VTS could be implemented with an adult format and what its applications for a workforce of today could be. Yenawine said they were working with the New York Police Department’s detective branch to improve their skills of observation. At the Harvard Medical School, they were using it to teach doctors and nurses in listening, considering options, and analyzing the detailed visuals, charts, and graphs they produced. He said that Harvard Law School worked with VTS to improve skills of analyzing evidence, making observations and then arguing using the evidence. The difference in the program for adults is not in delivery. It’s handled the same way, but they use different pictures and more advanced vocabulary.
 
As asked by the audience, Yenawine ended the evening with his definition of art: “Artists make things, human-made things that give us the opportunity to think and feel at the same time that often supply us with information we didn’t have, that will often require us to think differently about the info we have, that will probably take us to a place we haven’t been.”