Abstract 4

ETEC 557

Title: Constructivism and Technology in Art Education

Author: Michael Prater

Journal: Art Education—The journal of the National Art Education Association, November 2001, Volume 54, No. 6, pgs. 43-48

“When two people experience an event, they both experience the event in different ways. Their perception of the event is largely shaped and affected by their social, cultural and physical environment and the symbol systems that have been learned prior to the event. By interacting with others in relation to that event, learners incorporate different perspectives into their understanding of what they experienced.” (p. 44)

Traditional methods of teaching art have not been easy to incorporate into individualistic learning styles. However, new interactive hypermedia technology tends to support a more connections-driven way of learning about art. A new approach to teaching, called Constructivism, allows art students to use the Internet and CD-ROMS more effectively. Mr. Prater explores the relationship between technology in art education and the Constructivist teaching approach. Traditionally, knowledge is composed of facts that are true and considered constants. Curriculum is the process of creating a sequence of objectives that expose students to the facts of knowledge.

Very different from this, Constructivism refutes the idea of constants. Instead, learners construct knowledge based on their experiences. “New experiences are related to past experiences, resulting in a process in which knowledge and beliefs are constantly modified and seen as interconnected.” (p. 44) According to Brooks and Brooks, 1995 and Greene, 1995, there are three key features of Constructivism. First of all, content is less important than the connections between concepts that the learner discovers. Second of all, constructivist learning reflects the inquiry process of the learner, and content is introduced as it is requested. Third of all, with the instructor’s guidance, learners determine their own objectives and tasks.

Piaget and Vygotsky, two famous cognitive psychologists, developed theories, which became the foundations of Constructivism. Specifically, it relies on Piaget’s theories of knowledge schemata and experience and Vygotsky’s theories about how our social context directly affects our perception of our experiences. Learners acquire knowledge by grouping similar experiences into schema or category. The more experiences that are added to the schema, the more in-depth the understanding of the related concept becomes. These schemata interconnect with each other to form higher-level concepts. According to Piaget, each time learners experience something that contradicts their existing knowledge, the learner creates a new schema and modifies the existing one. Vygotsky claims that perception is never a constant when involved in the process of constructing meaning. The meanings constructed are slowly revised as learners interact with and incorporate the experiences of others into their own learning. As part of the process of constructing knowledge, learners are constantly adding to or revising understanding based on continuing experiences.

In a Contructivist curriculum, the instructor becomes a facilitator of exploration and a provider of experiences that help the students to discover their own meanings of various concepts. One Constructivist approach to teaching is to give the students a list of topics and allow them to find the connections between the topics. Another approach is to allow the students to pursue a final objective or performance relating to a topic. Students discover related ideas within the topic on their own in order to form an understanding that they then use to complete the task.

The constructivist methods of teaching combined with interactive hypermedia resources can relate to visual arts education and instruction in many ways. In art criticism, the process of constructing meaning is involved in the critical analysis of an artwork. Teams of students engage with an artwork while including different critical perspectives or voices. Teams are first familiarized with the critical perspective. Voices come together when the class begins to construct meaning for the artwork by finding connections between each team’s critical observations. Students use hyperlinking software such as HyperCard, HyperStudio, PowerPoint 98, Digital Chisel, or HTML authoring software to document the connections they make and see new one while critiquing the artwork.

In art history, interactive hypermedia resources, such as the Internet and CD-ROMS about artists, support the construction of meaning for works as a part of their historical context better than traditional media or methods. Accessing one idea on the Internet usually leads to another and then to many more. In narrative art, students studying collage can do an Internet search for the following terms: narrative art and collage. They will be able to link to a string of different sites, varying in many types of different styles of art. Moving from link to link, the students connect ideas and develop their own interpretation of the cultural, social and artistic contexts of narrative art.

The teaching of aesthetics is naturally constructivist, because students’ personal aesthetics represent their beliefs in relation to ideas such as beauty, artistic value, ethics and morality in artworks. “At the core of a learner’s belief systems are memories of experiences that reinforce what they believe.” (Abelson, 1979) The incorporation of interactive hypermedia into the art classroom provides students with greater access to imagery, content and experiences that can form those beliefs. In studio production students must come to their own understanding of what a medium is and how it relates to their personal expression. The process of developing one’s artistic style has always been essentially a process of constructing meaning. The Internet and CD-ROM resources offer answers about studio techniques and the use of specific media in artists’ works. “Creative cognition requires production of useful but unique solutions to tasks in the form of divergent associations between ideas. This holds implications for the use of interactive hypermedia resources for brainstorming during which the learner searches for “inspiration” in the myriad of possibilities they consider.” (p. 47)