The middle way
Whatever trends and theories have come along, throughout my long career I have always maintained a pretty consistent approach to teaching. It may be unglamorous to sit on the fence rather than espouse extremes, but I firmly support what I call the middle way in teaching. I do so simply because extensive experience has shown me that it is what produces the best outcomes for the almost all children.
Neither extreme is good
On the one hand, teaching that is continually very heavily directed, which allows children little or no choice and narrowly pre-defines both activities and outcomes, is stifling to initiative and creativity and is ultimately soul-destroying for children,
At the other extreme, too much liberty, allowing children simply to ‘do their own thing’, to find things out for themselves, is good for very young children, but soon becomes a very inefficient way of learning, Continued too long, it leaves huge numbers of children never picking up the skills they need, often disillusioned and frustrated because they simply cannot do properly the things they want or need to do.
But there is a middle way. It involves providing the structured learning experiences necessary for children to build up appropriate knowledge and skills, balanced with ample opportunity to practise what they learn in ways that allow individuality of expression and outcome. It is not always easy to achieve this balance, but it is both possible and necessary. This applies to art teaching as much as to many other areas of the curriculum.
Teaching art the middle way
In teaching KS2 art, this means avoiding ‘craft’ activities where the children merely follow stage-by-stage instructions, producing a copy of an example shown them, usually with varying degrees of success. This is the ‘Blue Peter’ approach: “Here is one I made earlier.” This is not art and in most cases does not grow children as creative artists.
However. always to ask children simply to draw or paint their own picture, when they do not have the skills to do so, is not helpful either. What is often done with the very good intention of supporting creativity is actually counterproductive. Just as with reading and writing, some naturally-gifted children, will pick up skill in drawing and painting from sufficient open-ended opportunity, but the vast majority do not.
The middle way in art teaching is to support children to build progressively greater skill in creating images, understanding what particular materials can or can’t do, whilst providing practice activity that that leaves enough room for individuality of style and expression, for outcomes to be significantly different and creative for each child.
In future Commentary Pages on this blog I will try to provide notes on how we sought to achieve this in our school, not presuming to create hard and fast ‘rules’ for art teaching, but merely to share what worked for us.
