Rethinking Critical Thinking and Its Role in Art Museum Education
Rent from DeepDyve- Rethinking Critical Thinking and Its Role in Art Museum Education
Meaningful interactions with works of art are often absent from education. Across the country, art museums are intent on changing this situation. But to incorporate art viewing1 into an educational milieu that does not value art, art museum educators are constantly forced to justify the educational value of their programs. One common argument to substantiate the worth of art viewing is that it promotes critical thinking. In fact, several museums across the United States assert that the goal of their education programs is precisely to foster critical thinking in students.2
These assertions are aligned with a growing body of research that proves that encounters with works of art can help develop skills associated with critical thinking.3 According to Willingham, critical thinking consists of “seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, [and] deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts.” In sync with this definition,4 the research shows that guided dialogues about art can promote skills, including observation, questioning, association, inference, evidential reasoning, and openness to multiple perspectives.
The link between certain art viewing programs and the development of particular critical thinking skills is thus unquestionable. This said, it is one thing to recognize this link and quite another to say that art viewing matters because it fosters critical thinking skills. In this essay I will critique the notion that the purpose and contribution of art museum education is to develop discrete critical thinking skills in students. I will articulate several problems inherent to this idea and conclude by inviting museum educators to embrace a broader vision of their work. [End Page 15]
Problem 1
The research that links art viewing to critical thinking skills focuses on programs that engage students with artworks through inquiry methods. According to Audet and Jordan, inquiry in education is generally associated with science. The National Science Education Standards echo this, stating that “inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is the central strategy of teaching science.”5
In inquiry learning, students construct and discover knowledge for themselves. To this purpose, teachers invite them to observe their surroundings, detect peculiarities, ask questions, infer meaning, probe for alternative explanations, form conclusions, offer evidence, and continually reflect on their understanding.6 The close relationship of science education and inquiry is to be expected; the belief that knowledge is the result of observation and rigorous evidential reasoning is at the heart of the scientific method. Nonetheless, inquiry is also used in subjects such as social studies, language arts, math, and philosophy, and students are encouraged to think critically across the curriculum.7
In inquiry-based art viewing programs, students spend extendedperiods of time with a particular artwork. A facilitator—usually a school teacher or museum educator—encourages them to observe the work, to make connections, to interpret, to consider alternative readings, and to ground their assertions on what they see.8 Through this process, students naturally practice and hone observation, association, interpretation, and the other skills that the research highlights.
But as mentioned earlier, observation, association, interpretation, and so on are skills germane to the process of inquiry—a process that occurs in science and other subjects when good teaching is in place. So, while it is valid to assert that students develop critical thinking skills through inquiry-based art viewing programs, one can hardly argue that this is the contribution of art viewing: observation, association, and the other skills are practiced whenever a rigorous inquiry into an object (or situation) with visual features is conducted—whether the object is an artwork or not. And if one positions critical thinking as the contribution of art museum education, informed decision makers will realize that critical thinking will happen in a school regardless of whether students engage with art, as long as solid inquiry is conducted in other subjects.9
An alternative advocacy strategy, then, is to focus on the overlap across disciplines and to argue that the purpose of art viewing is to promote skills that are useful in other subjects. As art education scholars such...
