POINT OF VIEW

Students exercise their creative dispositions through improvisation routines, demonstrating risk-taking and comfort with ambiguity. 

Jason Blair

How do we prepare our students for a world that changes daily? How do we empower them to challenge the status quo with the aim of creating a more just and sustainable world for everyone? We can utilize the arts to cultivate the types of thinking skills that prepare our students for today and for the future.

Three Dispositions
One way to approach our curriculum is to facilitate experiences where students can think like artists, designers, and agents of change. These three lenses will help students develop the essential thinking skills they need for a rapidly changing and complex world. Each lens equips the student with a framework to approach questions, issues, and challenges that face us every day. Let’s break down each lens.

Thinking like an Artist
Thinking like an artist provides students an opportunity to express ideas and thoughts about issues relevant to themselves, others, and the larger community. A framework that cultivates the dispositions of thinking like an artist includes being comfortable with ambiguity, valuing questions over answers, being flexible, being curious, and viewing play as process. (You can find this framework at the Columbus Museum of Arts’ Making Creativity Visible blog.)

We can utilize the arts to cultivate the types of thinking skills that prepare our students for today and for the future.

Projects that make space for these perspectives build the creative confidence our students need to find joy and success in the world. Maybe at the beginning of each lesson, there is time to play with materials, tools, and concepts before digging into the project. Perhaps the projects are open-ended to cultivate the comfort with ambiguity that is so essential today. Finding ways to encourage the skill of thinking like an artist ensures that students have ownership of their learning while nurturing their innate creativity in the process.

Thinking like a Designer
Thinking like a designer is about becoming a problem finder. It provides an opportunity for students to apply learning in a relevant way through a question or problem of personal or community relevance. A framework to cultivate thinking like a designer includes inspiration, ideation, and implementation. (IDEO provides one model with their Human Centered Design Toolkit; see Resources). The first stage of thinking like a designer involves finding inspiration. This might be a question, problem, or issue that impacts more than one person.

Taking inspiration from the Reggio Emilia Approach of 100 languages, children need a variety of tools to express and communicate their thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

The next stage is ideation. The designer explores possible solutions for the problem identified during the inspiration stage. This is when reflection and iteration are used to refine ideas. This is also the stage where designers test ideas to see how they work. Some ideas may also spark more inspiration; thinking like a designer is a fluid and symbiotic process.

The last stage is implementation—the designer is ready to turn an idea into reality. This stage is about creating a final product that is ready for an audience. At the conclusion of this framework, the designer can reflect on the entire process and explore the strengths and challenges learned along the way.

Thinking like a Change Agent
Thinking like a change agent is about learning to challenge the status quo. It builds on the previous two frameworks and combines elements of both to create a more just and sustainable world. A framework to cultivate the dispositions of thinking like a change agent includes imagination, investigation, influence, and interconnectedness.
As with thinking like a designer, this process begins with a spark in the form of a problem, question, or issue that impacts more than one person. The imagination stage is about identifying a challenging or undesirable reality and imagining it can be otherwise.

The investigation stage is about exploring thoughts, ideas, and questions related to the initial spark. This stage is also about investigating all perspectives that are impacted by the spark. The influence stage is about exploring the social, political, economic, and environmental influence and its relationship to the individual and the larger community as it relates to the spark.

The interconnected stage is about gaining a deeper understanding that each of us operates as both an individual and a member of many different communities and systems, and that all of this impacts one’s approach to action. When thinking like a change agent, working together produces an action that seeks to make the world more fair, beautiful, and sustainable for everyone.

The artist embraces wonder, curiosity, and imagination. The designer embraces perseverance, failure, and iteration. The change agent embraces risk-taking, boldness, and action. What if the art studio were a space for artists, designers, and change agents?

Jason Blair is an elementary art educator at Abraham Depp Elementary School, Dublin, Ohio, and teacher-leader-in-residence at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. blair_jason@dublinschools.net