POINT OF VIEW

Elizabeth Van Gelder

In 2008, the National Science Foundation sponsored the workshop Art, Creativity, and Learning, which investigated the connections between learning through art and the transfer of cognitive abilities from art to traditional academic disciplines. These studies explored how experience in the arts could impact students’ abilities for creative problem-solving, flexible thinking, refining critical insights, and embracing a spirit of innovation. When children learn by way of visual art, they depend on perceptual, higher cognitive, and motor functions that share similar brain processes with other disciplines. This study highlighted the potential of cross-cognitive experiences to enhance learning in all subjects. 

The news of an exciting study recently came to me by way of ChildArt, a quarterly magazine published by the International Child Art Foundation. The October–December 2020 issue highlights the research of the National Institutes of Health’s $400 million Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study on the brain and human development. Researchers selected a diverse group of 12,000 nine- and ten-year-olds and will follow each student for ten years to study all aspects of their lives that could influence their brain development. The research includes the use of fMRI, questionnaires, directed play, the collection of biospecimens, and monitoring each student until the age of nineteen or twenty. The ABCD Study is the first of its kind in which data will continue to be collected over many years, and the findings will be released regularly to the public.

Art educators are uniquely positioned to engage in exploration of the complexities of today’s reality with their students.

This particular issue of ChildArt illuminates the ABCD Study’s observations of how merging the arts with other disciplines generates innovation, creativity, and possibilities for social interaction and emotional healing. As a former art teacher, I have a personal interest in the magnitude of this study and what it could reveal about the necessity of art education. I believe that the visual arts are fundamental to a comprehensive, holistic, and academically challenging education.

The study of art enables students to see the world through an aesthetic lens while building lifelong skills that carry over into other disciplines. To understand art as a visual language is to understand a vocabulary of symbols and images that can convey ideas, feelings, beliefs, and values. By making art, students learn how to decode the historical and cultural messages contained in other works of art.

I believe that an ideal art curriculum provides a context where learning encompasses how to analyze, synthesize, reflect, intuit, and imagine alternative possibilities while communicating a personal point of view. This approach encourages students to embrace open-ended interpretations of their own work and the work of others.

Over time, the ABCD Study will provide data to give us insight into new ways to improve education by focusing on how students learn, not just what they learn. STEM programs will likely acknowledge the overlap and potential for connecting the arts with STEM disciplines. We live in a highly visual culture. It is logical that learning how to interpret and evaluate the visual world, to decode images and symbols, should be a sought-after skill—a skill that requires the same intellectual rigor as mastering any body of knowledge. 

Art is the great connector to all disciplines of study. Learning to think creatively begins with recognizing the connections among seemingly disparate subjects. We teach art best when we teach skills that lay the foundation for greater success in other disciplines. The Victorian art critic and philosopher John Ruskin put it simply when he wrote, “The teaching of art is the teaching of all things.” As art educators, we should never stop advocating this philosophy and taking advantage of what neuroscience continues to reveal.

Elizabeth Van Gelder currently serves as an education advisor to the International Child Art Foundation (ICAF).