“Dispositions…arguably are the key to helping learners mobilize their mental powers. Art assists in a natural way. Looking at art invites, rewards, and encourages a thoughtful disposition, because works of art demand thoughtful attention to discover what they have to show and say.”
– Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Professor Emerita of Art Education, Penn State University
foreword, The Intelligent Eye
When you’re looking for ways to encourage more thoughtful engagement with reading and key concepts in your class, you might not expect looking at art to be a relevant activity, but this is exactly what happens in Undergraduate Core classes reading difficult texts by authors like Durkheim, Marx, Wollstonecraft, and more. Jennifer Spruill, co-chair of the Power, Identity, and Resistance sequence in the Undergraduate Core, brings her students to the Smart Museum of Art on campus to look at carefully- selected works and build scholarly skills or “habits of mind,” such as:
- closer reading
- thoughtful analysis before critical response
- a focus on seeking direct evidence for assertions
- openness to novel ideas
As with the strategies of concept mapping and commonplacing described in previous posts in the “Habits of Mind” blog series, Spruill shared her experience with art engagement in an interview with ATS. In this third entry, we’ll explore why and how you can bring the power of art engagement to support your students’ thinking, whether it’s in the art museum, in the classroom, or even in online activities.
Slow Looking for Careful Reading
Often collaborating with the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum, Spruill uses carefully selected art objects both as a focus of study and as a way into analysis for novice learners. One of the first benefits of art engagement she describes is that it can help quell readers’ natural impulse to quick responses of simple agreement or disagreement, which can be a hindrance to fuller understanding and deeper analysis of the text.
“The first thing we want to do in the Core, as you can see with the commonplace books and similar approaches, is to encourage close and careful reading,” Spruill explains. “So this is step one in these Core classes. And when encountering an object, the first step is close looking, which can support close reading and really slow deliberation. People are less likely to approach an object and think immediately, you know, ‘I should just jump into criticism.’ When you encounter an object, you want to think about it. You want to assess it first and take in the information, take in what you’re experiencing.”
An excellent example of this phenomenon in action is when Spruill brought her class to the Neubauer Collegium to view Democratic Sculpture 7 by Gelitin, a piece that aroused some immediate skepticism and initial curiosity from students regarding the apparent discrepancy between the title and its appearance. Upon first viewing, it is impossible to escape the fact that Democratic Sculpture 7 is a slice of pizza made of various pieces of fabric that fills most of a room. The requirement to look beyond direct representation in the art piece, slow down, and gather reactions helps to model the habits Spruill wants her students to practice when reading complex texts.
Gelitin: Democratic Sculpture 7, 2023. Photo by Robert Heishman
(Shared on Neubauer Collegium website.)
Because of the potential impulse to stop at the first assessment, Spruill uses a practice called “slow looking.” Slow looking, as its proponents describe it, is a way of “giving thinking time.” By taking a longer time to interact with a piece of art than we’re generally used to (which one study reports as 15-30 seconds on average), checking in periodically to note how our observations change, and even using reflective questions or categories to collect observations, we can think more deeply about art–and as a result, texts as well.
“When we did the pizza, they were skeptical,” Spruill notes about the visit to Neubauer. “And honestly, when I first saw the pizza I was like…’it’s a giant piece of pizza. Okay, I need to think about this.’”
Spruill used a slow looking exercise that required students to interact with and consider the piece for five minutes at a time, notice their observations changing at these intervals, and discuss a question about the piece. After their initial skepticism, Spruill found that her students became highly engaged with this slower approach to analysis.
“That one was fun, because I could ask a really simple question: “Why does the title of this sculpture include ‘democracy’?” Spruill recounts. “How does this have anything to do with democracy? There’s an immediate tendency that we want to interrupt, that they’re less able to do when they are sitting in front of an object that they need to think about.”
A Range of Roles Art Can Play in Teaching
In Spruill’s teaching, this approach of seeking a meaning beyond what’s initially visible in a piece of art transfers to the challenging texts that she teaches in the social science core. She describes the process of reading a text with her students as being very similar:
“That process really translates into this idea of close reading, that process of slowing down, and really considering what’s in front of you. I often do that with Capital. We just read the first sentence, and it takes fifteen minutes to read. We just move slowly through it, because there’s just so much in it. And then they’re oriented. They realize, ‘Oh, wow! This is how I have to read Marx,’ because they read it the night before, they thought they understood that sentence, and they didn’t. And it’s that kind of dynamic that you get with art.”
This process of deliberation aided by art engagement is one of multiple ways that art can enhance learning, even in fields that may not bear an immediately obvious connection to art. Museum curator Liliana Milkova describes five roles that art often plays in teaching:
- Visual Literacy: Looking actively and learning to “observe, describe, analyze, and interpret”
- Art as a Cultural Context: “a visual aid to understanding course material” like a historical period or event
- Art as a Conceptual Framework: “to illustrate, expand upon, reinforce, or test the understanding of ideas and conceptual frameworks encountered in class.”
- Art as a Primary Text: “art as cultural document”
- Art as a Creative Focal Point: “inspiration for class assignments”
In addition to modeling the kind of careful analysis that dense reading requires (visual literacy), Spruill’s students also interact with art in the other contexts listed above. For example, she also uses it as a conceptual framework to help students connect multiple readings and ways of looking at the world.
“It’s also valuable for me as a social scientist,” Spruill explains. “What I’m looking for is the capacity for critique in art. I often ask students to use a piece of art to talk about a relationship between two texts, to think about the relationship between a more classically liberal text and a critique of Liberalism. I also give students choices. The possibilities are just really endless.”
Ready to get started?
Spruill’s examples and Milkova’s five models for art in teaching can serve as a good foundation as you consider how art might complement your own course. However, you can also consider a few other excellent resources:
- The Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum of Art, which offers teaching resources, class gallery visits, and consultations to consider your needs
- Liliana Milkova’s five models for art in teaching, complete with examples
- Project Zero’s library of thinking routines, which features many activity structures that help students consider objects to improve their thinking in various disciplinary contexts
But wait, what does this have to do with technology?
While there is no way to perfectly replicate the in-person art experience, it is possible to have significant learning experiences with slow looking and other art-based practices online.
In his presentation “Teaching Close Looking with the Virtual Museum” at the 2021 ATS Symposium for Teaching with Technology, Gary Kafer describes several unique affordances for close looking with objects that virtual activities offer. These include:
- encountering objects at different scales (like looking close up at a section to see greater detail, perhaps closer than you can get in person)
- reorganizing traditional working methods (like looking exclusively at one section at a time, appreciating how parts of the work contribute to the whole)
- new temporalities of communication (creating conditions to look at and consider a work of art for longer than we tend to in a gallery, discussing at length or even in stages)
What’s more, familiar UChicago-supported tools like Ed Discussion, Zoom Whiteboards, and Canvas can be used to support these kinds of discussions about objects and art in several ways:
- Marking on or around an object or artwork with annotation to share thoughts”
- Both Ed Discussion and Zoom allow users to mark up images with their own emphasis and commentary
- In Ed Discussion, students can share their own annotated images to compare their reactions with classmates, which is useful for asynchronous discussion.
- In Zoom meetings, instructors can share their screens to display a work of art and allow students to make annotations for all to see.
- In Zoom Whiteboards, which can be shared both synchronously or asynchronously, students can annotate using pen tips or comment using sticky notes.
- Both Ed Discussion and Zoom allow users to mark up images with their own emphasis and commentary
- Reflection in stages using discussion tools:
- Using whiteboards, you can create separate sections for various types of observation (color, line, symbols, observations, questions and more), and people to share thoughts in only one section at a time.
- Using threaded discussion in Ed Discussion, you can also compartmentalize types of comments using tags.
- Creative constraints for viewing and discussion, like limiting students’ view of a piece to one specific section to discuss in depth at a time:
- In a live Zoom meeting, you can use the screenshare feature and zooming in on one section.
- In an asynchronous whiteboard (available in Zoom) or discussion forum (like in Canvas or Ed Discussion), you can crop an art image to encourage focused engagement on sections of a piece.
In this example, a Zoom whiteboard has been set up using a thinking routine called “Observe, Question, Research, Learn.” Using sticky notes and these categories, students can reflect in stages on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, an art object Jennifer Spruill uses with her class. (For a better experience, feel free to check out the board directly using your UChicago Zoom login.)
In Closing
The focus of this post introduces this big pedagogical idea, and the next post will elaborate on the teaching practices, the relevant technology previewed above, and accessibility in art engagement. We Please keep watching our blog for that next post based on our discussion with Jennifer Spruill. If you’re a UChicago instructor interested in sharing your innovative pedagogical approaches using technology, we’re interested in hearing about it! Email michaelhernandez@uchicago.edu.
For individual assistance, you can visit our office hours, book a consultation with an instructional designer, or email academictech@uchicago.edu. For a list of our upcoming ATS workshops, please visit our workshop schedule for events that fit your schedule.
