Torrance Journal for Applied Creativity

The Learner-Directed Studio-Classroom
I have already disclosed that I am the wise-guy in the back of the auditorium
who calls out provocative questions and interrupts the speaker’s flow. Now I will
disclose that I am also an art teacher with a specialty in gifted education. I am every
bit as much a learner as I am a teacher. One thing I have learned from my students
is that in order to thrive, they need time and space. These are two things modern
schools rarely offer; scheduling is often so tight that little ones barely have time to
finish their lunch. But for reasons I do not need to delineate here, the art room can
operate a little differently from the rest of the school. So, given a license to be creative,
art educators can experiment a little with how they use both time and space. While
usually still locked into 45-minute periods, an art program can begin to function less
like a school classroom and more like a community art studio. Students can assume
the role of artists and have their time reallocated to preserve as much as possible for
making art. The concept of Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB), or Choice-Based
Art Education, is a grassroots movement supporting learner-directed art education.
What I have learned from my Choice-Based practice can, I believe, inform educators
in all fields to reconsider the use of time and space to better suit the needs of children.
In this construct, the roles of teacher and student shift and a new balance of structure
and support emerges in which the learner’s ideas, needs, and interests are honored
and supported in an authentic, organic manner. Here, the agenda for learning is negotiated
between teacher and learner based on observed need, student interest, possibility,
and what each individual brings to the conversation. Re-imagined use of time and
space provides children with a feast of creative possibilities.
Ela Chintagunta
Rethinking Time: “The Student is the
Artist” (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009, p. 9)
In a Choice-Based art studio,
the teacher, assuming now the role of
mentor, facilitator, artist-in-residence,
and sometimes co-conspirator, provides a
setting and an expectation for students to
find and develop their ideas for art-making.
Children arrive with ideas brimming,
as described by my former student
quoted earlier, who lamented having no
place in school to express the daily paintings
in his head. Or sometimes students
enter the studio without a particular idea
but open to creative play and possibility,
ready and willing to explore and experiment
in order to develop a new concept.
Rather than adhering to a fixed lesson
plan where every minute is planned in
advance, TAB classrooms are specifically
structured to acknowledge students’ ideas
and provide the teacher time to inquire
about them. By listening to and observing
student inquiry, the teacher can
support learning by offering references,
resources, and guided connections to the
art world as well as to other domains.
Where students are afforded the
opportunity to make artwork of their
choosing and at their own pace, time
must be renegotiated and allowances
be made for the range of learning styles
and preferences found in each group.
“It is unlikely that students will become
knowledgeable about their own artistry
unless they have the means to self-direct
their work throughout the year.”
(Douglas & Jaquith, 2009, p. 3) In a
learner-directed program, children are
rarely doing the same thing at the same
time. Assignments and due dates must
be flexible enough to allow for this new
reality or they may be done away with
altogether. Do adult artists create their
work through prescribed assignments
and due dates or is there something else
driving their production? In a Choice-
Based art studio, teacher and student
consider this and other questions
relating to authentic art-making and
respond, in part, by reconsidering and
restructuring students’ time.
How and when time is allotted
to creative work, “a precious commodity”
in today’s schools, holds “tremendous
implications for teaching and learning”
( Jaquith, in Jaquith & Hathaway, 2012,
p. 18). Teachers seeking to nurture creativity
in their students need to monitor
Rethinking Space:
From Classroom to Studio
Margaret Boersma
time closely to be sure that learners’ time
is both maximized and defended.
“Everything I ever wanted to do in art is
here.” – sixth grade boy, describing his
choice-based classroom
I will recount how I transformed
a school art room into a community art
studio and as I do, imagine that you are
the science teacher, the language arts
teacher, the French teacher or the math
teacher. How could this concept inform
your practice? Pay close attention,
because in the two schools where I have
made these changes in the art program
(one a private K-8 school for the gifted
and creative, and one a public middle
school), similar changes began to happen
in other classrooms around the school.
For example, the French teacher in my
current school is experimenting with
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