The Arts: Selected Art Education Theorists

All of these entries are from Wikipedia and include hyperlinks to that web site.

Giambattista Vico
Immanuel Kant 1724-1804
John Dewey
Jean Piaget
Jerome Bruner
Herbert Simon
Paul Watzlawick
Ernst von Glasersfeld
Edgar Morin
Victor Lowenfeld, Art Stage Theory

Confusion between constructivist and maturationist views. Many people confuse constructivist with maturationist views. The constructivist (or cognitive-developmental) stream "is based on the idea that the dialectic or interactionist process of development and learning through the student's active construction should be facilitated and promoted by adults" (DeVries et al., 2002). Whereas, "The romantic maturationist stream is based on the idea that the student's naturally occurring development should be allowed to flower without adult interventions in a permissive environment" (DeVries et al., 2002).

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952)

Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism. He's also known as the father of functional psychology; he was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. education during the first half of the 20th century.

As can be seen in his Democracy and Education Dewey sought to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the democratic or proto-democratic educational philosophies of Rousseau and Plato.

• Self-Action: Prescientific concepts regarded humans, animals, and things as possessing powers of their own which initiated or caused their actions.
• Interaction: as described by Newton, where things, living and inorganic, are balanced against thing in a system of interaction, for example, the third law of motion that action and reaction are equal and opposite.
• Transaction: where modern systems of descriptions and naming are employed to deal with multiple aspects and phases of action without any attribution to ultimate, final, or independent entities, essences, or realities.

• Transaction is inquiry in which existing descriptions of events are accepted only as tentative and preliminary. New descriptions of the aspects and phases of events based on inquiry may be made at any time.
• Transaction is inquiry characterized by primary observation that may range across all subject matters that present themselves, and may proceed with freedom to re-determine and re-name the objects comprised in the system.
• Transaction is Fact such that no one of the constituents can be adequately specified as apart from the specification of all the other constituents of the full subject matter.
• Transaction develops and widens the phases of knowledge, and broadens the system within the limits of observation and report.
• Transaction regards the extension in time to be comparable to the extension in space, so that “thing” is in action, and “action” is observable in things.
• Transaction assumes no pre-knowledge of either organism or environment alone as adequate, but requires their primary acceptance in a common system.
• Transaction is the procedure which observes men talking and writing, using language and other representational activities to present their perceptions and manipulations. This permits a full treatment, descriptive and functional, of the whole process inclusive of all its contents, and with the newer techiques of inquiry required.
• Transactional Observation insists on the right to freely proceed to investigate any subject matter in whatever way seems appropriate, under reasonable hypothesis.

Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) CONSTRUCTIVIST

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) on August 9, 1896. He died in Geneva on September 16, 1980.

Piaget was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children and his theory of cognitive development. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing" (in An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical, 1990) and "the most prolific constructivist in our century" (in Aspects of Radical Constructivism,

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as

·          Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)

·          Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills)

·          Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)

·          Formal operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).

The theory concerns the emergence and acquisition of schemata—schemes or representations of how one perceives the world—in "developmental stages", times when children are acquiring new ways of mentally representing information. The theory is considered "constructivist", meaning that, unlike nativist theories (which describe cognitive development as the unfolding of innate knowledge and abilities) or empiricist theories (which describe cognitive development as the gradual acquisition of knowledge through experience), it asserts that we construct our cognitive abilities through self-motivated action in the world. For his development of the theory, Piaget was awarded the Erasmus Prize.

Major works

Piaget, J. (1950). Introduction à l’Épistémologie Génétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Piaget, J. (1967). Logique et Connaissance scientifique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade.

Inhelder, B. and J. Piaget (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.

Inhelder, B. and Piaget, J. (1964). The Early Growth of Logic in the Child: Classification and Seriation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1928). The Child's Conception of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.

Piaget, J. (1952). The Child's Conception of Number. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1953). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1955). The Child's Construction of Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Piaget, J. (1995). Sociological Studies. London: Routledge.

Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in Reflecting Abstraction. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (Лев Семенович Выготский) (November 17 (November 5 Old Style), 1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet developmental psychologist and the founder of the Cultural-historical psychology.

·          psychological tools, mediation, and internalization

• the zone of proximal development, often abbreviated ZPD, is the gap between a learner's current or actual development level determined by independent problem-solving and the learner's emerging or potential level of development. Vygotsky's often quoted definition of zone of proximal development presents it as

“the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86, [1] )

His work covers such diverse topics as the origin and the psychology of art, development of higher mental functions, philosophy of science and methodology of psychological research, the relation between learning and human development, concept formation, interrelation between language and thought development, play as a psychological phenomenon, the study of learning disabilities and abnormal human development (aka defectology), etc.

VICTOR LOWENFELD

STAGES OF ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT

1.             SCRIBBLE                                                           (2 to 4 years)
2.             PRESCHEMATIC                                          (4 to 6 years)
3.             SCHEMATIC                                                  (7 to 9 years)
4.             DAWNING REALISM                                                  (9 to 11 years)
5.             THE PSEUDOREALISTIC STAGE               (ll to 13 years)

CREATIVE AND MENTAL GROWTH, Viktor Lowenfeld, Macmillan Co., New York, 1947.

Rudolf Arnheim – (born July 15, 1904) is a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist.

Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954

The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982)

Visual Thinking, 1969

·          perceptual abstraction,

·          container concepts,

·          perceptual thinking,

·          on abstract language,

·          symbols of interaction,

·          pure shapes,

·          productive thinking

 “Reasoning, says Schopenhauer, is of feminine nature: it can give only after it has received...” 

1928: Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen zum Ausdrucksproblem. Psychologische Forschung, 11, 2-132.

1932: Film als Kunst. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt. Neuausgaben: 1974, 1979, 2002

1943: Gestalt and art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2, 71-5.

1949/1966: Toward a Psychology of Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

1954/1974: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

1962/1974: Picasso's Guernica. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1966: Toward a Psychology of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1969: Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1971: Entropy and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1972/1996: Anschauliches Denken. Zur Einheit von Bild und Begriff. Erstausgabe 1972, nun Köln: DuMont Taschenbuch 1996.

1977: The Dynamics of Architectural Form. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

1977: Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film. (Hrsg.: Helmut H. Diederichs) München: Hanser.

1979: Radio als Hörkunst. München: Hanser. Neuausgabe: 2001 (Suhrkamp)

1982/88: The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1986: New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1989: Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1990: Thoughts on Art Education. Los Angeles: Getty Center for Education.

1992: To the Rescue of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1996: The Split and the Structure. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1997: Film Essays and Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2004: Die Seele in der Silberschicht. (Hrsg.: Helmut H. Diederichs) Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Arnheim springs from the original school of Gestalt philosophy. He believes that a certain degree of inbred responses to certain shapes, colours and movements exist, “Shape perception operates at a high cognitive level of concept formation” (29). He also spends a great deal of time describing the way that images are meaningful only in a context, “Things fit together by assimilation and contrast” (65). “To lift something out of its context means to neglect an important aspect of its nature” (71). His writings on figure and ground have been particularly influential (Schriver, Kostelnick, and Kress and Van Leeuwen).

Arnheim also analyzes metaphor and the notion of “routine metaphor” (112). Mark Johnson, who studies the way the body and bodily motion contributes to the metaphoric system underlying all language, makes direct reference to Arnheim.

Pure thermodynamics, in the words of Planck, "knows nothing of an atomic structure and regards all substances as absolutely continuous"

“In that book, Arnheim intended to narrow the gap between scientific and artistic knowledge, to use scientific findings to better understand the arts while preserving the equally pivotal role of subjectivity, intuition, and self-expression. In a subsequent book, titled Visual Thinking, published in 1969, he challenged the age-old distinctions between thinking and perceiving, and between intellect and intuition.

Contending that "all perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention" (1974), he attacked the established assumptions that words, not images, are the primary ingredients of thinking, and that language precedes perception. Rather, Arnheim argued, "the remarkable mechanisms by which the senses understand the environment are all but identical with the operations described by the psychology of thinking" (1969). Like scientific discovery, he wrote, artistic expression "is a form of reasoning, in which perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined. A person who paints, writes, composes, dances, I felt compelled to say, thinks with his senses" (1969)..