art and the mind || developmental psychology and art education

National Art Education Association

Developmental Psychology and Art EducationAuthor(s): David Henry FeldmanSource: Art Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, Art and the Mind (Mar., 1983), pp. 19-21Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192656 .

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Developmental Psychology

a n d A r t E d u c a t i o n ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~01

It would seem that developmental psychology and art would have much in common. They both deal

with human responses to life and its per- ceptions. They are also inventions or constructions that are supposed to reveal truths exposed through the disciplined use of their various techniques. Perhaps most important is their common ten- dency to search for universal meanings in the common, the ordinary, the shared dimensions of experience.

In this brief essay I will explore the premise that developmental psychology has in fact been less relevant to art- and in particular to art education-because of its preoccupation with universal themes. I will also suggest some modifications of developmental theory that are intended to make it more responsive to non-universal themes and, by virtue of this, of greater relevance to art education. Finally, I will use this framework to comment on a longstand- ing controversy, namely the emphasis on doing versus appreciating in art education.

First a caveat. It must be acknowl- edged that the insights of psychoanalysis-surely universal in intent if not in fact (like much art, I suppose) have pro- foundly enriched our understanding of two questions pertinent to the issues at hand. One is why the artist does what he or she does in the first place; psychoanalysis says it is a matter of channeling otherwise destructive, futile, and unproductive energies into activities tolerated, even sometimes revered, by society at large. Secondly, the many mythic, religious, and cultural themes of the arts are interestingly interpreted within the psychoanalytic framework which emphasizes the family drama, biological drives, and cultural repression and distortion.

Despite these and other worthwhile contributions to art, it is not surprising that psychoanalytic and other psychological theories of growth have had little influence on art education. What, for example, would psychoana-

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lytic thought say should be done to encourage artistic development? Intensify the family drama? Raise the level of cultural distortion and frustration to pi- que artistic necessity? Find drugs and in- cantations to strengthen drives that might lead to artistic sublimation? These and other suggestions have all been tried, but even the most intrepid lover of the arts could hardly, in good cons- cience, endorse their widespread im- plementation. One need merely imagine the matter coming up at school commit- tee meeting in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to appreciate the problem.

The more recent work in developmental psychology has focused on cognition

and left motive and emotional conflict to take care of itself. Here, too, it might be expected that knowledge about how we think, especially how we learn to think, would have a natural application in the arts. Indeed, a few scholars have tried to carry out just this sort of application: Rudolf Arnheim, Howard Gardner, Calvin Nodine, John Ken- nedy, Michael Parsons, and David Perkins prominent among them. As in- teresting as these efforts have been, they all focus on the universal qualities of thought development when-and this is really my main point-art is inherently not a universal activity. In all its forms, encompassing appreciation as well as production, art is by its very nature a matter of acquiring cultural and disciplined knowledge. Indeed, at its frontiers, art is as far removed from the universal as one can imagine, a matter of unique expression under unique conditions.

Fortunately, three of our best (although not best known) cognitive developmental theorists gave serious atten- tion to the arts in their writings. James Mark Baldwin, Heinz Werner, and Lev Vygotsky were all keenly interested in the arts and realized how distinctive the artistic experience must be from other forms of experience.2 Werner was par- ticularly interested in music and saw in it a source of knowledge about some of man's most basic ways of understanding, interpreting, and symbolizing experience. Vygotsky was more taken by all the art forms and labored to provide a sound basis for a psychology of art. Baldwin saw in the study of music perhaps the most direct evidence of the origins of human thinking. Anyone interested in art education would be richly rewarded by reading the relevant works of these remarkable, pioneering psychologists.

In the spirit of Baldwin, Werner, and Vygotsky, I would like to offer a few thoughts about the distinctive qualities of artistic development and its relationship to other aspects of development.

Art Education March 1983 19



Universal to Unique I have recently proposed that the many realms of developmental change be organized with reference to a continuum of possibilities, a continuum I call universal-to-unique.3 The idea of this continuum is to array developmental domains from those which are indeed universal in the usual sense of the word, i.e., that appear in all individuals in all cultures at all times, to those which are unique, i.e., which may be achieved initially by perhaps a single individual. An illustration of the major divisions of the proposed continuum is given below in Figure 1. What makes the continuum a continuum and not just a taxonomy is the fact that all of the domains associated with it share two sets of common qualities. One of these is the assumption that movement from less to more advanced levels of sophistication in the domain in question is achieved through the mastery of an invariant sequence of stages. The second is that there are regular periods of major qualitative transformation brought about through a set of common transition mechanisms.

The proportion of the human popula- tion that achieves the more advanced states of a domain determines where on the continuum it will be located. For example, learning to recognize object in- variance even when the object has been rotated in space is virtually universal. Learning to read and write is less universal but substantially achieved in certain cultures (a cultural domain); medicine is a discipline common to most societies but practiced by only a few (a disciplined domain); speech therapy is practiced in only certain cultures and by a tiny number of individuals (an idiosyncratic domain); while the invention of a device to keep track of the number of surgical tools used in an operation, which I recently read about, represents a unique developmental transformation. Not all unique transformations meet the test of

utility as this one apparently has, but the critical feature of a developmental ad- vance is that it reorganizes a domain for at least the person initially achieving it. Even crackpot, silly, or whimsical ideas can thus be thought of as development, if only in a relative, modest sense.

Glancing again at the continuum, it should be clear that all artistic activity falls somewhere to the right of the region of cultural domains. Certainly the arts can be thought of as disciplines, and several such as poetry and music are found in virtually all human cultures. More typically, though, we might guess that the bulk of artistic activity is idiosyncratic, representing as it does an individual's interpretation of a medium of expression. The more esoteric the medium, the more idiosyncratic the domain is likely to be in its expression. In- dividuals, too, may vary in how idiosyn- cratically they approach the demands of a domain. John Cage is a poet/musician practicing a common set of disciplines, but his works are nothing if not idiosyncratic; and since a premium is placed on creativity in all art forms, it is reasonable to expect in the arts frequent incursions into the realm of the unique. Most such incursions are merely novel, of course, but unique nonetheless.

Art education. This quality of aspir- ing to uniqueness in the arts-perhaps their single most distinctive feature- leads us to consider how the universal to unique continuum may be interpreted to shed light on some issues in art education (see also Larry Gross' paper in this volume). In most areas of the school curriculum, things are taught not with the idea of producing historians, physicists, or whatever, but with the idea of exposing children to the traditions of skill and knowledge deemed critical by the community. While the same in prin- ciple could be done for the arts, in practice they are usually perceived as peripheral, optional, or worse, "frills."

It is true that the arts are frills only in the sense that survival does not directly depend on them, which is to say they are more like history than arithmetic. In terms of the great traditions of civilized humanity, however, few would question the centrality of artistic expression. In- deed it is likely that music and drawing preceded spoken (and certainly written) language. Hard to be more venerable than that! In order to relegate the arts to a secondary place in the curriculum, they must be categorized as a set of domains where production of unique works is the primary purpose of learning about them. Since this is generally not one of the goals of public education, it is possible to see the arts as activities that should be pursued outside of school.

A case can be made, however, for the arts to be seen as culturally valued traditions to which all citizens should be pro- perly exposed. The aim here is not to detect the one child in a hundred or a thousand who should become an artist, but to prepare every child to reap some of the benefits of thousands of years of work in the arts. This way of looking at the arts places them squarely in the cultural realm of the universal to unique continuum. It would imply that every member of society, in order to fully par- ticipate in culture, would have to master one or more of the artistic domains to a specified level. Mastery does not necessarily mean performance; appreciation could be specified as the goal of exposure just as well.

It remains true that the primary purposes of the arts, as practiced by artists, is to express universal themes through their own unique application of craft and discipline. These purposes are, of course, reflected in the disciplined and idiosyncratic realms of the continuum. It is not expected by society that many individuals will take up the brush as a life's work, and most of those who do

FIGURE 1. Developmental regions from universal to unique.

I I I I I Universal Cultural Discipline- Idiosyncratic Unique

Based

Art Education March 1983 20



will not produce works of great significance to the wider community. Nor would a responsible society want to encourage any but its most talented students to pursue the arts. The same, however, could be said for most other fields; we probably have too many mediocre lawyers, too. The arts seem to suffer especially, though, because of the expectation that unique and creative works will be produced by artists, and while this is reasonable enough for disciplined and idiosyncratic domains, it has detracted from achievement of the broader aims of art education.

Art educators have themselves seem- ed to reflect this lack of clarity of purpose by arguing about whether education should emphasize doing or appreciating art. The question to ask is not which to emphasize, but rather what are the experiences that will best contribute to an appreciation of and sense of par- ticipation in artistic traditions? This in turn requires analyzing domains in the arts, finding their levels of mastery if they exist, and determining under what conditions children of specified ages may enhance their capabilities to appreciate these traditions. More than likely it will require a judicious and well tim- ed sequence of activities that includes both learning "how to" and "learning about," to use Jerome Bruner's phrase.4 If the educative purpose of what is done'is clear, the argument for doing versus learning about should quickly disappear.

Even given agreement on a sense of purpose, it is no small matter to con- struct a curriculum that engages students in the appreciation of artistic traditions at appropriate levels of challenge. But this, it seems to me, is exactly what art education should be all about. It should, in other words, make a clear distinction between the two purposes of art education: career preparation versus appreciation as a member of society. It should then analyze each realm in terms of its various domains and their stages or levels of mastery, recognizing the likelihood that skill development and appreciation will contribute to both sets of goals.

Art education, then, seems to have two sets of responsibilities. One set, cor- responding to the part of the universal- to-unique continuum having to do with culturally required domains of knowledge, aims to introduce children to the artistic traditions that help give

meaning and expression to shared experience. Included in the "cultural transmission" function of art education is expressivity, or the experience of art through doing. Its role, however, is not to lead the student to adult artistry so much as it is to deepen the student's appreciation for what is involved in the artistic process through direct experience with the tools, techniques, and technologies the artist uses. The second, more specialized purpose is to prepare gifted individuals for careers as profes- sional artists. This function corresponds to the disciplined and idiosyncratic regions of the universal-to-unique continuum.

Although related, the two goals of art education are nonetheless conceptually quite distinct. In developmental terms, it is no doubt true that some level of sophistication in the broader purposes of art education is a prerequisite to artistry. This is also true of other disciplines; one must, for example, have some appreciation for exchange systems and trade before one can become an economist or entrepreneur.

Conclusion. The meanings which art tries to express are without question universal and transcendent. This is a noble aim to be sure, but it has obstructed attempts to clarify the purposes of art education. Developmental psychology has been preoccupied with a different sort of universal, the sort which represents common psychological changes and in- tellectual achievements that occtir in all children with time. This, too, is a noble aim, but one which has tended to obscure the relationship between human development and art education. The concept of non-universal developmental domains attempts to relate the two fields in ways that are mutually enriching.

What we have learned from this in- itial effort is that while it is true that the quintessential aim of artistic work is to express universal meanings, the practice of art is largely an idiosyncratic matter. Furthermore, the practice of art represents a conceptually distinct enter- prise from the more general cultural aim of imparting some of the fruits of cen- turies of artistic endeavor to the next generation of citizens. No doubt both aims of art education are served by some combination of didactic exposure and direct experience at making art, but this should not confuse the fact that there

are distinct differences between know- ing about versus practicing or doing. Some level of appreciation of the contributions of art to life should be ac- quired by all children in our culture. Very few of these children should aspire to adult artistry.

Both art appreciation and the production of art are developmental phenomena. They have in common that they are achieved through sequences of stages or levels, catalyzed by sets of specialized cultural conditions, and draw upon the same cultural traditions. They are different from each other in reflecting different kinds of developmental domains, with art appreciation representing a broad cultural body of knowledge and art production a relatively idiosyncratic, uncommon region of the continuum of developmental achievements. Surely it is possible to embrace them both without at the same time confusing them. U

David Henry Feldman is professor of Psychology in the Eliot-Pierson Depart- ment of Child Study, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts.

References

'Preparation of this paper was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to Sylvia Feinburg for commen- ting on an earlier draft, and to Jeanne Bamberger, Howard Gardner, and Nan- cy Smith for discussing with me some of the issues addressed in this one.

2See the following works: J.M. Baldwin, Thought and Things, Vol. 3, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1911; L.S. Vygot- sky, The Psychology of Art, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971; H. Werner, Com- parative Psychology of Mental Develop- ment, New York: International Univer- sities Press, 1957.

3See David Henry Feldman, Beyond Universals in Cognitive Development, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1980.

4See Jerome S. Bruner, "The Nature and Uses of Immaturity," American Psychologist, 1972, Vol. 27, pp. 1-22.

Art Education March 1983

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