Coaching by Conceptual Focus: Problems, Solutions, and Tutored Images

Abstract

The nature of suggests that visual imagery contains an internal logic. Many artists consider creating to be a problem-solving activity even though the vocabulary and procedures of problem solving come from science. When children employ nonverbal aesthetic properties or concepts to solve artistic problems posed by teachers, the results are called tutored images. When a teacher designates problems to be solved, conceptual focus or consistency throughout all lesson components is essential to learning. The reliance of discipline-based education (DBAE) on problem solving in production suggests a need to extend DBAE's Content-Curriculum-Context theoretical base to include a fourth dimension called Coaching, the use of conceptually focused instruction to encourage students' artistic expression. Many artists refer to the creative process as the solving of visual or compositional problems. Problem solving in this sense is the testing of one or more aesthetic hypotheses by employing nonverbal concepts during the creation of an artistic image. Although adult artists set and solve their own aesthetic problems, viewers of the completed work may not know what challenges the artist perceived or what predicaments he or she resolved during the work's evolution from internal to external image. When children make artistic images, they are capable of solving aesthetic problems just as adults do. In solving aesthetic problems, both children and adults can create images that convey meaning by deliberately manipulating nonverbal properties or concepts such as line, color, balance, and rhythm to express moods or ideas. This knowledgeable use of aesthetic properties for expressive purpose is the definition of artistic expression used in the following discussion of conceptually focused instruction. Artistic expression differs significantly from what is known as creative selfexpression, the dominant goal in education during the last 40 years. In creative self-expression art is seen as an instrument for developing what is assumed to be each child's inherent creativity and [idiosyncratic] expressive abilities (Clark, Day, & Greer, 1987, p. 133). Problem solving during instruction allows children to be expressive in the same way that artists are, that is, it allows them to convey a message about the human condition because they knowingly incorporate in their images the grammar and syntax of the language

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