Parallel processes

The acceptance of anything as an art object often constitutes the extension of the schemata of experience to include a new model. Strictly speaking, an entirely new schema is not always the case, in that once a Renoir has been seen others are often recognized. However, the experience of artworks may be similar to learning experiences, and this may facilitate educational processes. I will show parallels within references to support this.

In my first case, in their article SITUATED COGNITION AND THE CULTURE OF LEARNING, Brown et al (1989) lament the separation of knowing and doing. Their critique is of knowledge as seen as a substance, to be distilled and bottled. This would be delivered by the teaspoon, should the student be able.

"The breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories 'know what' and 'know how' may well...assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used...Recent investigations...challenge this separating of what is learned from how it is learned and used."

John Dewey, in ART AS EXPERIENCE(1936), may have debunked the idea that artworks are just substance. He laments the separation between the viewer's understanding of a specific piece and the ritualistic means of production in an artist's studio. The contrast of knowing and doing is again an integral concern.

"The work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting or statue...apart from human experience...the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience...an art product...attains classic status...somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions...A primary task...is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience."

My point is that the divide between knowing and doing, relevant to both sources here, is the bridge to cross in learning. Dewey was creating a model of artwork which could include both impressionist paintings and pottery sherds. His context was to link them. Arrowheads that I have found in the creek here in Delaware County and old master paintings in museums worldwide may have both been created in an atelier. According to Brown, this would be a community of practice, that drew upon implicit and shared understanding.

We argue that the creative process that is the manufacture of artistic objects to affect experience may have congruence to instructional design. The student, in expanding schema to interpret an object as art, may undergo a learning process through experience. Our goal is to impart the ability for the student to transfer this skill, once mastered, to other domains of knowledge.