Artmaking as Dialogue

Introduction

The Dialogic Curriculum is predicated on the metaphor of “artmaking is dialogue.” The Curriculum’s structure is modeled on a dialogic exchange, and the areas of focus are derived from entailments of the metaphor, some of which are assisted by theoretical work on dialogue by Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber, and Paulo Freire, as well as work on pedagogy, art, and language by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey. It is a secondary curriculum, with a branching, student-directed structure that will allow it to take a different form for each student, and a reflective, recursive component that will allow students to respond to and reform the curriculum.

Why is a dialogic curriculum relevant to visual arts education? In Article Three of his Pedagogical Creed, John Dewey (1897/2009) asserted that the most effective (and ethical) way to teach the various scholastic disciplines was by relating them directly to the student’s social life and lived experience, rather than by presenting them as abstract and outside of the student’s prior experience. He did not discuss the visual arts as a subject area in this text, but in his discussion of language studies he lamented the treatment of language arts “simply as the expression of thought” (p. 38), and emphasized communication over personal expression. “When treated simply as a…means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive in the end.”

Dewey (1934/1980) did address the visual arts in Art as Experience, where he emphasized communicating experiences rather than the production of art objects. To Dewey, art instruction was more than conveying information, it was “a matter of communication and participation in values of life by means of the imagination, and works of art are the most intimate and energetic means of aiding individuals to share in the arts of living” (p. 336).

Dewey (1934/1980) framed the artistic experience in terms of a dialogic interaction, describing it as “a product, one might almost say a by-product, of continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world. There is no other foundation upon which esthetic theory and criticism can build” (p. 220). He cautioned that arresting this engaged interaction would displace the experience of the work of art, replacing it with irrelevant and uncommunicated “private notions” (p. 220).

This emphasis on art as a process of communicating an experience rather than a container for abstract or personal thoughts maps well onto Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2005) notion of authentic speech, wherein speaking and listening are thinking acts rather than systems simply facilitating the delivery of thoughts. “A thought limited to existing for itself, independently of the constraints of speech and communication, would no sooner appear than it would sink into the unconscious, which means that it would not exist even for itself” (p. 206).

While the arts are eminently capable of expressing thought, it is important to be aware that those artistic thoughts are shaped socially, through dialogue with other artists (peers, instructors, historic figures encountered in texts, etc.), and it is only when socially contextualized that these thoughts have meaning (Dewey 1897/2009). Artmaking itself is “from its origin essentially of the nature of dialogue,” always calling to an eye not the artist’s own (Buber, 1947/2002). An art curriculum that doesn’t thoughtfully engage with notions of audience and addressivity is an incomplete one.

The Dialogic Structure of the Curriculum

In planning the overall structure of the curriculum I experienced some tension between outlining a clear, sequential metaphorically-linked curriculum, and creating something more emergent, student-centered, and polyphonic in the Bakhtinian (1963/1984, p.32) dialogic sense. I realized that a truly dialogic format would interpolate between these two “voices,” similar to the way the will of the teacher and the collective will of the students respond to and shape each other in the classroom. In a dialogic classroom, the teacher is still invariably a teacher, with a teacher’s voice, and with control over the curriculum. A teacher who completely cedes this role and become a sort of “facilitator and not a teacher is renouncing, for reasons unbeknownst to us, the task of teaching and, hence, the task of dialogue” (Freire & Macedo, 1995, p. 378).

This map illustrates the form I decided on, where the teacher’s “voice” structures the linear succession of curricular aims, but the students’ “response” allows them multiple avenues of expression. The branching structure is not unlike the “dialogue trees” present in narrative computer games which simulate conversations, where each response chosen leads the conversation down another fork. Each individual student would make their own response at each juncture, meaning that in a single ‘unit’ different students may be exploring different activities. For the first three years of high school, the students will trace a different path through the dialogue tree each year, with the final unit being either a free selection of another activity from the tree, or the creation of a new project to append to the tree. By their senior year, the students will have built up a strong enough skill and conceptual repertoire that their choice of projects will be largely self-directed, and dialogue will persist primarily in the form of critique and peer evaluation.

The first unit is Voice. For Buber (1947/2002), dialogue necessitated the extending of one’s own concreteness to meet another’s, not simply parroting the other or losing one’s self in them. Consequently, the dialogic curriculum must begin with the fostering/recognition of the student’s own voice. Bakhtin (1975/1981) indicated that the speaker’s voice – the values and perspectives invested in an utterance – give that utterance meaning, moreso than the often-appropriated words that comprise the utterance. “The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes ‘one's own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention” (p. 293). The overall branching design of the curriculum is such that, by the end of the year, each student could have one of 24 very distinct artistic “voices” depending on their “responses” to each unit.

The Voice unit, features a different activity to begin each year. First-year students create a reliquary, building a container for a cherished memory linked to a personal possession. Second-year students make an autobiographical artist’s book using collage and drawing. And third-year students create a “self portrait” by creating an image of a space or place where they locate a significant memory. Fourth-year students are self-directed, but can respond to the unit’s injunction to articulate their personal “voice.”

The second unit is Response. In dialogue responsibility is somewhat passive, as it “presupposes one who addresses me” (Buber, 1947/2002, p. 52), rather than actively addressing another. This unit consequently functions as a transition from the individual development of “voice” to the more active dimensions of dialogue. And responsibility is not truly passive, as the attentiveness necessitated by responsibility is something which distinguishes the self-actualized “Single One” from “the crowd” which diffuses responsibility (p. 53).

In authentic speech, the role of the listener is to give received thought meaning (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2005). People necessarily speak to us in language we understand, activating our own thoughts in our own minds, “but these meanings sometimes combine to form new thought which recasts them all, and we are transported to the heart of the matter, we find the source” (p. 207). This results in “a taking up of others’ thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts” (p. 208). Likewise, when responding to an artwork, we bring our own ideas and experiences, which the work may or may not activate. The array of subjective meanings awakened by the work “combine to form new thought which recasts them all,” allowing us to articulate new thoughts in our own voice. In this unit, the student may craft a response to the writing of a historic artist, a response to a prior work, or a response to a peer. In each project, the student must allow themselves to be addressed by another artist and formulate a response in their artistic voice.

Following Response is Addressivity. “An essential marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity. As distinct from the signifying units of a language - words and sentences - that are impersonal, belonging to nobody and addressed to nobody, the utterance has both an author…and an addressee” (Bakhtin, 1976/1986, p. 87). Likewise, for a work of art to be an “utterance” and not an impersonal expression, the artist must be mindful of the work’s reception. Art “indeed lives only in communication when it operates in the experience of others” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 104). This unit moves the artist beyond responding to other works towards actively considering who they are addressing with their work. Each prompt asks that students be mindful of a specific audience or recipient of their work.

Now that the artist has responded to an other, and addressed an other, the curriculum moves to Interaction, encouraging the students to create works in which the addressee can more actively engage in a dialogic give-and-take. Albert Barnes (as cited in Dewey, 1934/1980) described the cultivation of artistic experience in terms of a dialogic interaction with the world, cautioning that

[w]hen the continuously unfolding process of cumulative interaction and its result are neglected…the theory becomes subjective reveries, instead of a growth…the rest of the process is exclusively cerebral – a one-sided affair that acquires momentum only from within. It does not include that stimulation from environment that would displace revery by interaction with the self (p. 220).

Just as when dialogue is monopolized by a single voice, it collapses into finalized, closed, monologue (Bakhtin, 1963/1984), when artmaking eschews any sort of participatory interaction it becomes an “exclusively cerebral…one-sided affair.” Some projects at this tier include interactions with other artists, which result in a dialogic artmaking process. Others encourage the creation of an interactive piece, requiring the artist to anticipate the responses of the addressee to create a compelling experience. This opening of the art object to the participation of the viewer evokes Bakhtin’s (1963/1984) dialogic notion of unfinalizability, where no utterance is decisive and final, “everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (p. 166), and the only way for an utterance to approach completion or hope to attain meaning is to anticipate a dialogic response.

            The next logical extension of dialogue beyond Interaction is Communication, the fifth tier of the curriculum. “Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication” (Dewey 1934/1980, p. 22). Now that the students have engaged in dialogue with artists, their audience, and each other at several levels, they can communicate more complex ideas in their artwork while maintaining responsiveness and addressivity as artists. At this point in the year, the tree has branched out so far that it is possible that every student could be working on a completely unique project.

Paulo Friere contended that meaningful dialogue necessitates “the rigour of reflection, reflection on how attitudes and values are formed and how they might be reformed”(Friere & Macebo, 1999, p. 53). Just as one must acknowledge the subjective voice present in their own utterances and recognize the subjective voice within the utterances that address them (Bakhtin, 1975/1981), the critically-engaged artist must acknowledge and respond to the subjective voices that address them through culture and through the institutional forces (including this curriculum) which shape their artmaking. The sixth and final unit of this curriculum affords the student the chance to dialogue with the curriculum itself, reflecting on their particular traversal of the dialogic tree, and, if they wish, reforming the curriculum.

In the Reflection unit, students have a choice. They may recurse their traversal of the tree, pursue another “branch,” and complete a project they may have missed the first time through. The other option is to develop and pursue a new, independent, final project, which they will also formulate as an assignment, and append to the curriculum. The student will choose the appropriate unit and sequence in which to insert their new branch, which will become a permanent fixture of the curriculum and a new choice for all students the following year. This will allow the curriculum to continually grow and change, shaped through dialogic interaction with the students participating in it.

Assessment

Assessment in this curriculum will likewise be based on dialogue between students. Assessment will include peer evaluation and in-class critique, giving students the chance to, in-class, observe how their work is received, and practice thoughtfully receiving, and responding to, others’ work.

For the first two units (Voice and Response), students will complete a peer evaluation as homework, writing one page on a single peer’s work. The evaluation will include one paragraph of personal response/interpretation, one paragraph of strengths, and one paragraph of constructive suggestions (these paragraphs needn’t all be the same length). The evaluation will be returned to the artist who will themselves write a three-paragraph response – “I agree with…” “I disagree with…” and “Something I hadn’t thought about before reading the evaluation.” Students will be assessed on the consideration of their peer’s work, their consideration of their peer’s ideas of their work, and the work itself’s fulfillment of the cognitive objective defined for each unit. The rubrics for assessing peer evaluations, evaluation responses, and the unit objectives, can be found here.

Questions for scaffolding students’ formation of personal responses/interpretations of of the work will be adapted from Terry Barrett’s (1997) three questions for interpreting student artwork in critique: “What do I see? What is the artwork about [to me]? How do I know?” (p. 48, additions in brackets). Questions for scaffolding positive judgments will likewise be derived from Barrett: “What is the most effective part or aspect of this work of art? How or why are the artist’s choices good ones? What famous artists throughtout history might most appreciate this artwork?” (p. 90), as well as the questions “[W]hy do you think someone else might think that it is good? Can you think of reasons why someone might value this work of art?” (p. 34), which encourage place-taking to help students make positive judgments about work they may not personally like. The rubrics also clearly outline the requirements for constructive recommendations and criticism, relegating flatly negative statements to the “Needs Work” column. The emphasis on interpretation, affirmation, and constructive suggestion intends to preserve the atmosphere of “unreserve” necessary to allow for open and free dialogue (Buber, 1947/2002, p. 24).

The four remaining units (Addressivity, Interaction, Communication, and Reflection) will each dedicate class time to in-class critiques. After crit, each artist will write a response similar to their response to the peer evaluation, detailing what observations they agreed/disagreed with, and an observation made about their work that they hadn’t considered before the critique.

The Addressivity unit will feature a traditional critique, where the class will address the work and the artist, who will wait until the end to respond. While not every student will need to speak on every piece (for time’s sake), each student will be made aware before critique that during the class period they each must make two expressions of appreciation and an expression of constructive criticism at some point during the crit.

The Interaction unit will use a form of critique adapted from a model by Terry Barrett (1997) wherein the artist determines beforehand the questions s/he would like asked of the class. To encourage the reciprocal give-and-take of dialogic interaction, this critique will take the form of an interview. For homework before crit, each student will prepare 3 questions about their own work that they want to ask the audience (these could be about impression of the work, technical feedback, or something else). The students will be paired, and each will ask the other their questions and record the responses. The students will interview several peers about their subjective responses to their work, and afterward write their response to what they learned in the interview.

The critique format in the communication unit is also derived from a model by Barrett (1997).  Barrett proposed a form of critique that mixed grade levels to foster inter-grade dialogue. Because of the focus on the work of art communicating, and because of secondary school scheduling concerns, rather than having two class levels meet in one period, in this critique, one class/level will critique the work of another class level during their class time. This means that the audience will have to dialogue directly with the word and determine what it communicates to them in the absence of the artist. They will also have to determine the most effective way to communicate their interpretation and evaluation of the piece back to the artist. The students will be divided into small groups of four-to-five, and the pieces from the other class divided between them. These small groups will each critique their piece, and organize their thoughts into a document for the artist, who will then write their response to this.

Through ongoing engagement in critical dialogue, by responding to the work of other artists past and present, and by being mindful of who their artwork is addressing, students will participate in an art practice that mirrors the sharing of experiences and ideas afforded by dialogue. Perhaps, by mapping this mentality onto artmaking, they may even supersede the dialogic potential of speech. It could be that, “[i]n the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 105).

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by Mikhail Bakhtin (pp. 259-422). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1975).

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. (C. Emerson, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1963).

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). From speech genres and other late essays (H. lswolsky, Trans.). In P. Morris (Ed.), The Bakhtin reader (pp. 81-87). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1976).

Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man. (R.G. Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1947).

Barrett, T. (1997). Talking about student art. Worchester, MA: Davis Publications, Inc.

Dewey, J. (1980). Art as experience. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. (Original work published 1934).

Dewey, J. (2009). My pedagogic creed. In D. J. Flinders and S. J. Thornton (Eds.), The curriculum studies reader (pp. 34-41). New York, NY: Routledge. (Reprinted from School journal, January, 1897, 54, 1, 77-80).

Freire, P, and Macedo, D. P. (1995). A dialogue: Culture, language, and race. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), 377-403.

Freire, P, and Macedo, D. P. (1999). Pedagogy, culture, language, and race: A Dialogue. In J. Leach and B. Moon (Eds.), Learners and Pedagogy (pp. 46-88). Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2005). Phenomenology of perception. (C. Smith, Trans.) New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1945).