Cultivate Social Imagination with Art-based Instruction

Art-based inquiry studies are an ideal curricular cornerstone for cultivating artistic thinking, social imagination, and democratic values.

Art is typically taught by a specialist. Reading, writing, and social studies are taught by generalists. This results in unintended curricular consequences. For example, artistic thinking’s habits of mind—visual literacy, envisioning, creativity, wondering, and empathy, to name a few—are deemed incidental and the responsibility of another. How can we help all teachers infuse artistic thinking across the K–12 curriculum?  

The remedy need not be another onerous education reform initiative. Rather, this may best be achieved by nudging current practices and tweaking existing curricula. For example, mentor texts have long been used to model writing techniques. Mentor art can likewise be used to inspire, teach, and refine student writing. Mentor art has the added benefit of addressing diverse learning styles and providing visual support to language learners. While teachers are well trained in unpacking literature, unpacking a work of art can be intimidating. What teachers needs is help identifying mentor art and related strategies for integrating it into their curricula.  

To address this need I created a website (www.charlesmcquillen.com) that offers mentor art and lessons for teaching artistic thinking across the curriculum.

Organized around an inquiry-based, expanding-conversation framework, these lessons involve students in exploring real-world issues and envisioning alternative possibilities. Each lesson begins with work of art and the simple question, “What is going on in this picture?” Guiding questions help students develop their close reading skills and unpack the art’s expressive elements. This sets the stage for cross-curricular connections: literature links that connect the painter with like-minded writers, social studies inquiries that help students think through social issues. A Bierstadt painting, for example, sets the stage for an inquiry into the value of wildlife conservation and national parks. A painting by Ben Shahn launches research into housing discrimination and Jim Crow laws. John Steuart Curry’s controversial mural of John Brown encourages students to consider fanaticism and demagoguery. National parks under attack, discrimination, and demagoguery—sound familiar? These cross-curricular links build on carefully curated primary source documents from free online archives.  

This site was inspired by the writings of such educators as John Dewey, Ken Robinson, and Maxine Greene. They argue for the teaching of creative thinking along with traditional analytical thinking. They likewise argue the merits of using the arts to achieve this goal. Greene contends that aesthetic experiences foster habits of mind that awaken the viewer to seeing anew and envisioning possibilities. She explains that by envisioning alternative realities, we are able to see through others’ eyes, and that in turn cultivates empathy and social imagination, “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society.” In this light, an inquiry-based approach to the arts is the ideal curricular cornerstone for promoting artistic thinking, social imagination, and democratic values. I am hoping that through collaboration I can find ways to enhance this platform and make these teaching practices and resources accessible to learning communities with limited access to the arts.

This solution offers innovation in process and access. The responsibility for cultivating artistic thinking’s habits of mind has traditionally been the purview of the art specialist. This solution infuses artistic thinking across the curriculum by providing the art and strategies generalists educators need to fit it into their existing curricula. Museums and libraries have traditionally been the bastions of the privileged. Through its carefully curated collections, this solution helps students who are financially and geographically isolated access these cultural institutions.

This solution relies on the power and democratic reach of the Internet. The lessons build on high-resolution art from museum collections. The student wonderings that grow out of the art analysis are answered through authentic research in online archives of primary source documents. By transcending wealth and geography, this delivery system extends cultural assets to historically overlooked classrooms. The solution’s expanding conversation framework likewise relies on the Internet’s democratic reach. By opening channels of communication and fostering collaboration, the platform creates a forum for the teaching of artistic thinking and social imagination.

My solution’s goals for the next 12 months are to expand the art base by 30%, the interdisciplinary lessons by 40%, and the site traffic by 300%. The real challenge is to grow engagement. Most of the current interaction is one-sided as readers review and collect desired resources. For the site to grow into fullness the expanding conversation framework needs to include other educators as they share their ideas and student work.

In the next few years I have plans to grow the solution’s art and instructional offerings. Analytics will help tailor the offerings to address teacher needs and interests. Since this site has begun to achieve a critical mass of art and lessons the real growth in the near future should be in the community of learners who access, share, and grow the site’s offerings and insights. Educator feedback will be instrumental in adapting the site to encourage collaboration and the seamless integration of art and artistic thinking across the curriculum.

One of the important ways I have brought people to the cause is by making reform sensible and intuitive. While my art-based inquiry units are new, they build on current practices and enhance existing curricula. I try to meet teachers where they are professionally and have had some success networking with like-minded educators through professional organizations and conferences. In addition, I have used the site’s analytics to tailor content development to teacher interests. Bringing more teachers into the fold and engaging in fruitful conversation about needs and interests remains one of the welcome challenges I face moving forward.

During this past school year the web site averaged 1000 visits a month, with the vast majority of those coming from the United States. While the content is adaptable and can enhance K–12+ curricula, the readability levels of supporting texts, the sophistication of the concepts, and the curricular topics make it an ideal match for grades 6 through 12. The site’s ready-to-use lessons with teaching moves and language, mentor art, cross-curricular links to common topics, and drag-and-drop handouts directly support teachers in infusing artistic thinking into their existing curriculum.

During this past school year this web site averaged 1000 visits per month. Next year I will try to grow that to 3000 visits a month. The use of links in online teacher forums, Pinterest, and Twitter have proven to be the three most effective social media platforms for driving engagement. Further experimentation with messaging and timing should enhance their efficacy in growing a community. Organic search engine optimization has also proven to be an especially effective acquisition strategy. The further development of content, the strategic cultivation of ranked Google images, and other SEO strategies should likewise boost engagement.

For 30 years my professional focus has been on K–12 educational publishing as I developed a broad range of literacy and social studies resources. At the same time my personal focus has been on creating socially conscious art. Now I am integrating these experiences to harness the power of art to develop an online professional development resource that uses art analysis, talk, and inquiry studies to nurture artistic thinking and social imagination across the curriculum.

This site has relied on open-source software, fair-use content, and public online libraries. I would like to honor that sentiment by keeping this site as accessible and democratic as possible. However, I also realize that for this site to grow and be sustainable it will likely have to generate revenue. Therefore I may eventually explore a service-oriented subscription business model that allows members to participate via an annual fee or through site contributions.

This project’s art and lessons are achieving a critical mass and I have begun reaching out to teachers for feedback, for support, and to offer up this art-based work. Expanding the conversation and community is key. I am looking to connect and layer in even more voices and experiences of students and teachers. Network building on a social and technical level will be crucial if this solution is to realize its potential. Solve could play an instrumental role in the development of these networks.

While my educational publishing experience and personal art making make me fluent with the content development, my technical expertise, or lack thereof, makes the platform development a more dubious undertaking. I don’t have enough technical fluency to imagine, much less to realize, what could be. Even the features I envision are at times technically elusive. A platform that builds on the site’s expanding conversation framework and cultivates social imagination could prove to be as important as the content. Solve’s technical expertise in guiding the development of such a platform would be instrumental in the solution’s success.