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Teaching Visual Art with the Brain in Mind

A thesis presented

by

Karen G. Pearson

to the

Graduate School of Education

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Education

In the field of

Education

College of Professional Studies

Northeastern University

Boston, Massachusetts

August 20, 2019

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ABSTRACT

Critical periods of perceptual development occur during the elementary and middle school years. Vision plays a major role in this development. The use of child development knowledge of Bruner, Skinner, Piaget and Inhelder coupled with the artistic thinking theories of Goldschmidt, Marshall, and Williams through and the lens of James J. Gibson and his ex-wife Eleanor J. framed the study. Sixteen 8-10-year-olds over eight one-hour weekly meetings focused on how they see and learn how to draw. The study demonstrated that the perception of the participants followed the development of the visual pathway as described in empirical neural studies. Salient features presented themselves first and then, over time, details such as space, texture, and finally depth can be learned over many years of development. The eye muscles need to build stamina through guided lessons that provide practice as well as a finished product. It was more important to focus on the variety of qualities of line, shape, and space and strategy building through solution finding and goal setting. Perceptual development indicators of how 8-10-year-old elementary students see and understand images will be heard from their voices. The results indicated that practice exercises helped participants build stamina that directly related to their ability to persist in drawing. The findings have shown that the development of the 8-10-year- olds’ visual pathway was found at the global lower level visual field of V1 and V2 where the processes of orientation of direction sensitive retinal cells are still processing salient features.

Key Words Affordance, ambiguous, art, art education, art history, binocular, chiaroscuro, disambiguate, disparity, drawing, eye movement, haptic, image, learning, neuroeducation, perception, scaffold, schema, seeing, senses, sketching, strategies, teaching, uncertainty, vergence, vision, visual art, visual brain, visual thinking.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 2

Chapter One: Introduction to the Study and Theoretical Framework ...... 5

Background and context ...... 6

Research Problem and Research Questions ...... 16

Definition of Key Terms ...... 24

Applying Theory to Study ...... 50

Chapter Two: Literature Review ...... 53

Binocular Development and Ambiguities ...... 57

The Science of Art ...... 72

Drawing Pedagogy in the United States ...... 82

Chapter Summary ...... 95

Chapter Three: Research Design and Methodology ...... 98

Qualitative Research Approach ...... 104

Participants ...... 110

Procedures ...... 110

Data Analysis ...... 114

Ethical Considerations ...... 118

Trustworthiness ...... 119

Bias ...... 120

Limitations ...... 120

Chapter Four: Findings & Analysis ...... 120

Theme 1 ...... 125 4

Theme 2 ...... 136

Theme 3 ...... 145

Conclusion ...... 154

Chapter Five: Discussion and Implications for Practice ...... 157

References ...... 179

Appendix A: Interview Protocol Template ...... 203

Appendix B: Participant Images ...... 204

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Chapter One

Standardized education is extinguishing visual arts in public school systems (Rabkin &

Hedberg, 2011, p. 21; Robinson, 2006). Large-scale assessments of eighth grade students’ ability to respond and create an original work of art have shown no improvement, in art, when comparing scores between 1997 and 2016 (U.S. Government NAEP, 2017; Sabol, 2013, pp. 37-

38; Gallagher, Campbell, Esch, Malin, Mayes, & Woodworth, 2008; Stites, & Malin, 2008, pp. vii-viii; White & Vanneman, 1997, pp. 80-117; Persky, H. R., Sandene, B. A., & Askew, J. M.

1999, pp. 83-117). However, the variety of media and processes available to be assessed resulted in inconsistency, because standard language and repertoire has not yet been established (Sickler-

Voigt, 2018, n.p.; Tucker, 2003, pp. 3-20). According to an article by Seymour Simmons drawing instruction in school has declined (Simmons, 2019, p. 14). The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) conducted a 2008 survey that showed a deficit of art education in adults, who were educated during the time of deep budget cuts during the 1970s, have passed on their lack of interest and exposure of art to their children, thus, perpetuating their dis-interest in museums resulting in the development of a generation of people who lack exposure, understanding, and interest in the arts (Silber, & Triplett, 2015, p. 17).

The erosion of the art curriculum is reinforced in schools whose focus is on test-prep subjects replacing the arts with remedial programs geared to pump up large-scale assessment test scores (Hardiman, 2016, pp. 1914-1915). This erosion is particularly evident in the severe narrowing of the curriculum in low-income schools creating a divide between the wealthy schools that are able to afford “licensed teachers and expensive tools and supplies” (Hardiman,

2016, p. 1916) while the low-income schools use funding for remedial classes to boost test scores to meet the annual yearly progress (AYP) requirements. Policymakers continue to 6 overlook the importance of visual art education and its effects on over-all learning as access to art education erodes (Sabol, 2013, pp. 41-42). Instead policy continues to emphasize information pertaining to test-prep subjects as is seen in many school mission statements creating a built-in tension that narrows the arts creating a small niche labeled “talented” or “gifted” that stigmatizes art giving the sense that art is not meant for all students (Gaztambide-Fernandez, Nicholls, &

Arriz-Matute, 2016, p. 33).

“No doubt standards will come and go as time moves forward, but they need to be

underpinned by a clear vision of art education as a discipline of mind and of teachers as

promoting learning that is both personally and socially meaningful rather than narrowed

to predetermined lists of skills and routines amenable to single-criteria assessment”

(Judith M. Burton, 2019, p. 1649).

Assessment in visual art has not yet included specific scaffold of language, process, and criteria for the developing child to be able to reach the attainment of national assessment mentally or physically.

Background and Context

Throughout time visual art has demonstrated its flexibility. It might even be considered the first written language of humans as a means of communication and has developed over

70,000 years. Drawings, for example, have been considered a universal language that has the ability to transcend language and culture in communication (Sharon A. Brusic & Joseph G.

Steinmacher, 2015, p. 10). Research has shown that geoglyphs, petroglyphs, cave paintings, ancient scrolls, and architectural images have been used for spiritual, economic, political, and educational purposes. Shifts in beliefs and ways of thinking through the arts has been influenced by historical epochs demonstrating the evolution of the human race. Within each epoch people 7 used visual art for different reasons (i.e. stone-age building, iron-age toolmaking, ancient Egypt civilization, etc. . . .). Images continue to influence civilized societies, on a global scale, through the latest medium of digitized communication. There has often been, however, ambivalence toward the powerful influence of visual art. Plato’s Republic, for example, simplified visual art as “mimêsis” defined with the negative connotation of imitation (Pappas, 2008, p. 5). The negative connotation of images has been powerfully influential for both good and bad throughout human history (Berger, 2000, p. 39; Cleaver, Luxford, & Mittman, 2016, p. 74; Harris, 1993, p.

1711) necessitating the importance of a visually literate society with the ability to recognize and understand visual meaning.

Plato’s negative influence, for example, has lasted over a thousand years showing up, implicitly, in The Smith Hughes Act, 1917 with the creation of a two-track education that separated classes of impoverished skilled workers from the elite colleges. The post-industrial gap between college and vocational has continued to widen in the United States (Carnevale, 2008, pp. 23-24). The Cardinal Report, 1918 was an example of widening the gap by restructuring high schools into two separate school. One school to prepare high school students for college and a vocational school to prepare students for factory work (National Education Association of the

United States, 1928, p. 1). David Snedden was the first Commissioner of Education in

Massachusetts (Labaree, 2010, p. 172). As the Commissioner he widened the separation of college preparatory high school and vocational high school by defining them as a liberal education for broadening the leisurely life of the intellectual and vocational education for the primitive processes of imitation (Snedden, 1910, pp. 4-9). Even though the philosophy of John

Dewey’s progressive education was well received during that time Snedden’s social efficiency framework had been easier to implement (Hunter-Doniger, 2016, p. 4; Labaree, 2010, p. 181). 8

The division of the high school into college bound and vocational educational tracks also divided art education into fine arts for the aristocratic college-bound educated, and crafts for the poor factory-bound working class. This same argument re-emerged in the 1970s perpetuating the division of socio-economic classes (Labaree, 2010, p. 163).

Until these influences are changed, and the arts are full valued, visual arts will continue

to suffer the consequences of history; socioeconomic inequity and racially discriminatory

practice will remain pervasive in modern education policy; and students will continue to

suffer from antiquated and ineffectual practices as a result. (Hunter-Doniger, 2016, p. 9)

Education continues to powerfully marginalize populations of individuals by placing constraints, through the use of standardized testing and bar raising that force low-income populations to cut their art programs in order to afford, newer highly promoted, curriculums that promise to boost student test scores (Sabol, 2013, pp. 33-45; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2013, pp. 16-20).

The latest way in which schools marginalize their art programs is through the policy- driven science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) initiative. Many schools have infused art into STEM thus adding the “A” making the acronym STEAM for the purpose of adding the importance of design (Kean, 2016, p. 62). The design element is important, but, the aspect of greater importance has been the hands-on experience of manipulating materials and processes.

Manipulating materials helps students develop their visual perception system that provides multiple bits of sensing information that an individual picks-up about her/himself simultaneously, for example, “. . . when he touches his own skin he feels both his hand and his skin at the same time. He feels his head turning, his muscles flexing, and his joints bending”

(Gibson, 2015, p. 108). Touching and seeing allows for learning to happen by the opportunity to compare. 9

The Race To The Top (RTTT) initiative was an allocation of funds on top of what was already being spent on mathematics and science education that might have as easily incorporated art, however, continues to be marginalized “. . . in both [sic] American society and the school curriculum” (Piro, 2010, pp. 1-2). This loss of art budget to fund policy initiatives strips away the materials available for students to use thus eliminating experimentation opportunities and relegating students powerless to engage in enriching educational experiences (Root Bernstein &

Root Bernstein, 2013, pp. 17-20). Many districts, however, have discovered the power of visual art and its alignment to all other subjects and have included the “A” in S.T.E.M. and changed the acronym to S.T.E.A.M (Piro, 2010, p. 3). The use of S.T.E.A.M. has enabled students to make connections to other subjects, teachers to collaborate, students and teacher cooperate learning through visual art as the bridge.

Visual art has the flexibility to flourish in a budget crunching, standardizing, school curriculum. Connections can be made between art materials mathematics, science, and English language arts. Students participate in visual art once per week from kindergarten through fourth grade. The school year is one-hundred eighty days. The once a week art class provides elementary-level students the equivalent of only one year of art education throughout the whole of primary education. With so little time on learning in visual art students need to develop skills that enable them to practice at home. Drawing can provide practices with the minimal amount of materials. Most students do not have time or resources to use multiple media at home. Visual art can impact student learning with the infusion of other subjects that students have learned.

Drawing at the elementary level might serve to help students get ideas down quickly and reflect on learning. Developing the appropriate level of drawing skills for individuals can help students develop drawing as another method of communication. Aligning drawing to grade-level concepts 10 would help them practice drawing as well as develop a stronger memory of what has been learned in mathematics or English language arts. The use of students’ perceptual outcomes inform teaching practices by giving students an inner visual voice. The purpose of this qualitative research will be to discover the drawing perception subtleties of 8-10-year-olds in order to develop drawing methods and strategies that motivate drawing practices at the elementary level. The drawing study will be done as a participatory action research that focuses on 8-10-year-old level participant voices to demonstrate their developing perceptual skills.

Drawing uses a coordination of visual, physical, and mental skills. Children see differently than adults as has been recognized in leveled reading and mathematical concept building. The physically and mentally developing elementary-level student does not, yet, have the same muscle and mental capacities of an adult. Visual art might use the learning of leveled reading and math to align with the child’s visual, mental, and physical development. The eye, for example, is a complicated organ with many parts specializing in handling light waves so people can see. The six muscles that control eye function also contribute to the changing growth and balance that the become, eventually, a self-awareness of position and movement of the body know as proprioception. Visual art provides exercise for binocular vision through acts of hand- eye coordination and a variety of eye movements used in both distant viewing and close-up viewing. While in drawing mode, artists typically shift their vision back and forth, from distant viewing of an object to close-up work on the drawing being done by their hand onto the drawing surface. As with all types of exercise the 8-10-year-old elementary students experience eye muscle fatigue when drawing.

The action of drawing can be both felt and seen by creating marks by dragging a drawing tool over the surface of a paper and it is the marks created by the drawing tool that capture the 11 interest of the child (Gibson, 2015, p. 263). The quality of the lines created by the child’s mark- making exceed the child’s language, yet, the marks can be considered invariants as the same lines will eventually be repeated as well as noticed, not only in the child’s own mark-making, but in the pictures, drawings in books, graphics, and in the world (Gibson, 2015, p. 264). The study intends to discover how the muscular development of 8-10-year-old students’ eyes play into their ability to draw images and if stamina effects persistence. Ambiguity is found in language as well as images and the study will consider the role that binocular disparity has with ambiguity in drawing images. Artists have developed strategies to overcome visual discrepancies and often close one eye to alleviate binocular disparity. The eye should be studied as it plays an important role in the self and learning. Orientation is a mapping tool and might help students’ awareness to positioning the image on the page while drawing “. . . little is known about how object orientation is represented or processed in adults or children” (Emma Gregory, Barbara Landau &

Michael McCloskey, 2011, p. 1). What participants say and/or do will inform teaching.

Throughout history people have shared knowledge explicitly, imaginatively, and through the use of technological tools; “The arts, thus, act as groundings for complex constructions of thought in which mind, body, and material act in powerful and reciprocal dialogue”(Burton,

2019, p. 1644). Gibson believed that the how-to-draw manuals, for example, were “. . . thoroughly confusing, . . .” (Gibson, 2015, p. 262).

Rationale and Significance

This rationale for the study concerns a change of visual art philosophies that have led art educators. There have been two philosophies that date back to the early nineteenth century; “Art for art’s sake” and “Let the child create” that might be reconsidered as “Create art for child development sake.” Methods used by adult professionals in the field of design were found that 12 can be used to help children understand how artists create and discover ideas. The use of these methods should create a dialogue between the researcher and participants that promotes an inquiry process. The development of interpretation will be co-created in collaborative participation between researcher and participants. The use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) inquiry has been used to prompt informal conversation for empirical research and also used successfully in the fields of nursing and art museum education. The researcher intends to take reflective field notes, photograph artifacts, and record interviews with participants about their work. Visual thinking strategies (VTS) methodology will be used to capture, through language, how 7-10-year-old participants build concepts, interpret, and depict what they see. Source materials such as pictures, objects, and other textiles will provide both visual and tactile experiences to facilitate drawing development.

The study will use three coding devices implemented by professional designers each targeting a specific modality. The three targeted modalities will demonstrate participant use of reasoning, spirituality & emotion, and awareness. The reasoning modality resides in the decision-making process and coded in an “as/that analysis” of moves and arguments

(Goldschmidt, 1991, pp. 123-140). The spirituality & emotion modality reflects spiritual connections that celebrate cultural identities through imagination and emotional connections coded as an “imagining that/imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) of feelings, behaviors, and empathy spoken through empathic connections to ancestral pasts (Marshall, 2007, pp. 1-5).

The awareness modality creates carefully crafted encounters and a wide-awakeness as tools for both the researcher and the participants coded as “being with/being there” (Williams, 2017, p. 7).

The researcher will use Winger Sei-Wo Tseng’s idea of uncertainty in drawing to provide 13 scaffolding to help participants dis-ambiguate the image and find alternatives based on Nigel

Cross’ seven strategies with flexible approaches to solution finding (Cross, 2001, pp. 96-98).

The findings generated from this study are expected to inform teacher preparation programs. The use of two data sets will provide action research development of professional practice goals and student learning goals to improve teaching and learning through the use of student voice to inform practice. Student perception has been interpreted by researchers, but it seems that the students’ voices about their perceptions have been missing from empirical studies.

Perception enables the individual to solve ambiguities found in the environment (Shimojo,

Paradiso, & Fujita, 2001, p. 12340).

This chapter begins with a statement of the problem with evidence from the literature supporting the knowledge of perceptual individualism. The significance of the study is discussed next, drawing connections to the importance of understanding perceptual development in all aspects of education, followed by the research question. The theoretical framework will serve as the lens from which to understand the role of visual art in an individual’s developing perception supported by anthropological evolution presented by Alfred Gell (1998) in his book Art and

Agency. The rationale will highlight the use of mapping skills such as the cardinal coordinates as well as line, shape, tone, and space direction that is meant to enable mental rotational skills and the development of seeing negative space (the space between images sometimes referred to as the background). The background has been differentiated from the subject often through the use of patterns, texture, and size. The physicality of drawing will be practiced with the use of artists tricks such as closing one eye to remove binocular disparity, the practice of pencil pressure, and the use of proportional conventions related to the horizon line (the Egyptians used registers to separate scenes and schools use them as baselines for writing). 14

Interviews will be conducted with the use of video equipment to capture student voice in order to understand participant’s point of view, how they develop drawing concepts, and what motivates them to practice drawing.

Positionality Statement

My approach to the research is to discover an array of participant understandings of drawing that will benefit all future students. Throughout my teaching career I have become aware that people have different ways of viewing their world. Attempting to discover and understand how these different ways of seeing the world affect student drawing methods has helped me to better understand how the student teaches the teacher. Breaking down lessons into concepts has allowed for creative freedom while, at the same time, enabled students to understand the qualities and limits of different media. A student once stated something to the effect that I encouraged students to put their own twist on the lesson. While I have come to understand that the medium becomes the teacher I believe that students need help in breaking down images into parts so that they are able to develop the whole image piece-by-piece by learning how to read line, space, and shape (Wilson & Wilson, 2009, p. 23).

Drawing has been the foundation of all media yet the precision that drawing affords is unparalleled by any other media. Curiously, it seems that, students prefer drawing over other two-dimensional media. I once had a student who had done a pencil drawing of a flag. The student was proud of the drawing and its quality. When I had the student paint the drawing the student obliged and then commented “I knew that I would ruin it if I painted it.” I understood the student’s frustration as the drawing was obliterated by the heavy coat of applied tempera. This was the result of letting the child create without teacher interference and it backfired for this student. I should have helped students to understand the materials better. After that incident I 15 began to teach students about washes and solids in painting and they seemed to appreciate learning the qualities that could be achieved. Students needed help in learning how to control the medium but they also needed to learn that each medium has its certain qualities. The quality of tempera paint medium, for example, are its thick chalky texture that make it look different than a drawing. Children learn patience with the knowledge that less is more and that if they try to apply one thick coat that the paint will take a longer time to dry and crack when it does finally dry. Students might take more pride when they create drawings that demonstrate their growth through their own culture rather than the culture of a twentieth century master painter. When children learn about themselves they take more interest. Throughout the doctoral program my action research has continued to delve into practices that resonate with my students by taking suggestions from them. Listening to students gives them a voice in their learning by providing the give and take important in teaching and learning.

Following author leads from within the many articles related to visual art, memory, and perception I was able to make connections to the principles of design used in art with the way in which human eyesight senses the natural environment. I remembered seeing a study on television many years ago in which an infant was placed on one side of a platform with the baby’s mother located on the opposite side. The platform was transparent yet firm and sturdy so that the baby could crawl over it. The mother tried to coax the baby to crawl to her, over the transparent platform, but the baby did not. This experiment by Eleanor Jack Gibson (Gibson & Walk, 1960, pp. 64-65) resurfaced in an article I had come across during my research. Eleanor’s husband,

James Jerome Gibson, was the psychologist whose lens I used to frame my research. I also recalled a time when I had after-school duty to be sure that the children were being picked-up by their parents. On a particular occasion a kindergarten student was waiting and when I saw the 16 student’s parent I said to the child “There’s your mother, see her?” and the student could not see the parent until the parent was only about ten feet away. This made me wonder and question at what distance a young child is able to recognize someone familiar, especially in a crowd.

Another time that I wondered about the way in which human vision worked was with my own child who had to take a visual perception test. When I met with the psychologist and saw the visual test, I too was confused in how to break it down (it may have been the Rey–Osterrieth complex figure). The psychologist explained to me the expected way in which the test was to be broken down, then I was able to see it clearly, but I couldn’t help imagining the difficulty my elementary students were having break-down an image in order to learn to draw. Many adults too, I discovered, felt that they were not good at art often replying “I can only draw stick figures” as if drawing stick figures was something to be ashamed of. This test became the turning point in my approach to teaching. I began to listen to my students and ask them questions about their ideas and creations as well as encourage the adults that I work with to embrace their artwork too.

Art can be learned by anyone that wants to try and elementary level education is the place to help children find success and a love for visual art.

Research Problem and Research Questions

There is a gap in education in which the student voice is silent. Curriculums are designed through government initiatives, written by the testing industry, packaged by big corporations, and sold to public schools (Ravitch, 2014) creating sweeping changes to teaching methods yet the children remain passive participants to their educational dreams and aspirations. Little research exists on the perception of children and how they develop their ability to represent their mind’s eye pictorially (Wimmer, Doherty, & Collins, 2011, p. 6). Artist educators and psychologists, however, agree that the depth of what early elementary students know can emerge 17 when they are allowed to talk about their art (Gardner, 1990, p. x; Arnheim, 1949, pp. 269-270;

Kellogg, 1967; Lowenfeld, 1987, pp. 116-117; Lowenfeld & Edwards, 1985, p. 15; Eisner, 1967, pp. 19-20; Housen, 2002, p. 100; Gude, 2007, pp. 8-9). Student manipulation of wet and dry media help individuals to learn at their own pace through a trial and error approach. Students learn the subtleties of material handling such as pressure, timing, and quality. However, schools continue to suffer from disenfranchise with wealthier schools offering visual art education while poor schools have been forced to fundraise for what have been considered enrichment activities with visual art education falling into the category of an extra, special, or enrichment activity

(Good & Nelson, 2020, pp. 16-18). Meaningful art practices are important to child development and include knowledge of materials and processes help students to understand themselves through the history of human existence. Visual art helps students see the connections to technologies that have been developed to facilitate living. Fluidity and growth of human knowledge is garnered through an understanding of the arts. Art depicts historical human lifestyle changes and human innovation through preserved ancient paintings and sculptures.

Human knowledge is rooted in antiquities of the past enabling the creation of work in the present, and to pass methods of working on to the culture of future generations (Word Press,

2015, pp. 494-496; Wolf & Wolf, 2015, p. 66).

Listening to student voice both informally and through structured interviews the researcher intends to interpret what is most meaningful to 8-10 yo participants at the in order to improve teaching and learning in visual art. Practice improves drawing and if students are motivated to draw on their own then they will improve their skills and their skill improvement might provide an intrinsic reward that perpetuates learning through drawing. 18

The researcher’s awareness to student motivation will provide informed instruction. The use of interviews will capture student voice as a means to inform teaching practices that fulfill student needs and provide a better understanding of student perception. If students are not motivated to draw, it might mean, that the drawing is too difficult because their perception does not yet meet the level of drawing.

Understanding perceptual learning of elementary students from the participant’s perspective will enable the adjustment of visual art instruction by listening to participants talk about their ideas, how they process their ideas into a drawing, and what they have to say about their completed drawing. Listening to participants will inform the researcher of their individual interests, struggles, preferences, and goals with drawing. Instruction in visual art, then, will become individualized rather than general, and explicit about an individual participant’s developmental perceptual ability.

The individual’s perceptual ability has been often referred to as their personal aesthetic or their preferred medium, content, and manner of working through visual art. Children often draw in a variety of genres (Wilson & Wilson, 2009, p.75). Some children draw from their sense of touch while others draw from their sense of vision (Lowenfeld, 1945, pp. 104-106). Time limits affect the child’s choice of genre. Art education should help students grow in their knowledge and ability. The elementary student needs help to build the capacity to sustain persistence.

Perhaps considering how students uniquely depict their images might help build confidence and motivate students to continue developing their unique skills. Participants may learn to work through, what they think might be drawing mistakes, and embrace them as new approaches of depicting images. 19

The participatory action research study will be generally defined as an investigation of pedagogical practices, at the elementary level, informed by student voice that will improve engagement for all students in visual art. The researcher and participants will work together to generate knowledge of methods that motivate drawing practice in order to improve skills that will provide an intrinsic reward and perpetuate learning through practice.

Understanding the importance of student voice in determining how and what they want to learn through drawing might establish a change in how teachers and students work together to communicate learning and understanding. Marjatta Saarnivaara and Juha Varto (2005) describe art education as a trap bounded by authority and present critical theory that, seemingly, accumulates to question how art educators might emancipate the child. Presenting a series of wonderings about the school environment, a study, recognized the teacher-student relationship as unbalanced holding the student under the power and direction of adult perception (Saarnivaara &

Varto, 2005, pp. 488-490). Listening to student ideas and desires of drawing content helps the art educator’s understanding of each student’s experience and what s/he understands for her/his particular developmental level. Understanding the student’s interests and view of the world might be a good start toward unrestricting student viewpoints. Rather than the teacher delivering a prepared lesson that participants follow and finish, the lesson becomes a jumping-off point for student expression and feeling through improvisation. The teacher becomes the students’ visual art coach by creating individualized attainable goals. Knowledge generated from this study is expected to inform the learning community of the importance of the role that visual art plays in self-education.

Visual art provides teachers and learners with a tool that can be used to contrast or complement all subjects by promoting personal feeling with symbolic, metaphorical, or 20 allegorical stories through images, that give meaning, and help students to remember (Watts &

Christopher, 2012, p. 411). Visual art and culture are fluid and help to depict people of the past, bring past practices of culture into the present, and project old and familiar practices into the future. Artists have always used the abundantly available technology to imaginatively express culture in a creative manner (Gell, 1998). Ancient works of art enable a glimpse into the past and provide an understanding of what life was like, to show how people dressed and what was important to them. Visual art allows playful imagination to enable creativity so that the future becomes part of a plan to improve on the present. Creativity stems from artistic practice and is important in human development because it allows individuals to rehearse their lived experiences. Imagination enables an internal type of creative process that helps to extend ideas to imagine possibilities. During a 2009 John Hopkins summit on learning, arts, and the brain

Jerome Kagan, Ph.D. was quoted in saying; “One of Einstein’s great insights, which was the basis of relativity, occurred when he imagined he was riding a light wave” (Rich, & Goldberg,

2009, p. 32).

Rehearsal often involves trying out different combinations of experiences through the use of mentally manipulated experiments. Mentally processed experiments exercise the mind’s internal perception without the presence of the external physical manipulatives allowing interpreting, combining and inventing in multiple, unusual ways (Marshall, 2007, p. 2).

Physically manipulating materials become internalized mentally to permeate the knowledge base in order to help discover creative uses of old materials with new technologies. Artists figure out how to make old materials and processes work with new ones. Cindy Foley stated, “Imagine art, math, and science being in service to ideas” (Foley, 2014). Math, science, and language might be 21 better as handmaidens to the arts rather than the other way around, therefore, applying subject through art as “transdisciplinary research” (Foley, 2014).

The use of visual art throughout the curriculum has been a testament to its power to help students remember what they have learned. Prior to Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) classroom teachers use to enrich their lessons with projects that offered a memorable experience that solidified student learning. Standardized education and testing, however, have streamlined student time on learning so much that, classroom teachers cannot seem to find time in the curriculum to enrich other subjects through the arts. Funding and more time on learning have been placed on mathematics and language. Since visual art is a non-tested subject it is being squeezed out of the curriculum (Bowen & Kisida, 2019, p. 2). The recent arguments for the benefits of visual art have been that its practice enables students to solve problems in more than one way and come up with multiple, convertible, answers that are capable of change. Yet, the very action of applied synthesis of knowledge, improvising, cannot be measured, “. . . lack of rigorous empirical evidence is attributed to a paucity of experimental investigations” (Bowen &

Kisida, 2019, p. 4).

However, the Gibsonian lens offers a means to demonstrate the physical development aspect and the importance of art practices as a fundamental graphic act performed by the developing child (Gibson, 2015, p. 263). Figuring out a problem, by working through it, rather than beginning again, helps students gain a sense of touch, how to manipulate a tool, and feel the success by developing the ability to fix problems. Movement and touch are important forces that help individuals understand space and objects in the environment accompanied by interacting senses (Gibson, 2015, pp. 108-112; Gibson & Bridgeman, 1987, p. 2; Gibson, Reed, & Jones,

1982, pp. 385-388; Gibson, 1967, pp. 162-172; Gibson, 1963, p. 694; Gibson, 1958, pp. 182- 22

194; Gibson, 1955, pp. 480-484; Gibson & Robinson, 1935, pp. 45-47). While the body moves, the head and eyes move, looking, and physically touching to understand environmental space and the objects in that space have been the natural investigative perceptual manner in which learning happens (Gibson 2015, pp. 41-84). James Gibson developed his ecological theory throughout his lifetime, not as an end-all absolute theory, but instead as a means of understanding human nature from the inside out rather than the typical outside in. Rooted in his research to develop improved training to help pilots land planes he began with visual perception.

He determined that individuals learn to maneuver their body within and around their environment using of all their senses; Gibson named this type of learning “affordances” (Gibson,

2015, pp. 119-135) and continued to develop the theory throughout his lifetime crediting his beginnings to the gestalt theorists (Gibson, 2015, p. xix). Visual perception arises from compiling physical experiences, through all of the perceptual systems, to arrive at personal understanding that, eventually, becomes the way that individuals are able to recognize their panoramic environment over time (Gibson, 2015, p. 105). Perceptual development requires all the senses to be used so that the individual develops sensitivity by using both proprioception and

“exteroception” as an “egoreception” perceptual system that, in a harmonious way, builds simultaneous knowledge of the self in the environment (Gibson, 2015, pp. 108-110; Gibson,

1982, pp. 385-392). Ambiguity arises when an individual is not able to move around, touch, make sense of the environment, and experience it reciprocally through their senses (Gibson,

2015, pp. 213-226). The use of the perceptual system allows for engagement to determine the possibilities of action within the environment as well as the qualities of objects within that environment. The qualities or “affordances” of the environment and the objects within it can include but are not limited to: wet, dry, hard, soft, sharp, smooth, big, small, rough, heavy, dense, 23 hollow, round, protruding, shiny, dull, colorful, short, tall, and all the perceptions that Gibson refers to throughout his book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition, as directional, textural, variant, and invariant (Gibson, 2015). The affordances were important for ancient human survival (Gibson, 2015, pp. 126-129). Therefore, the researcher, will look for perceptual levels of ambiguity and investigate how specific teaching strategies rooted in neuroeducation might be helpful in student learning. The use of recorded student interviews will help the researcher to discover student preferences, difficulties, and implicit knowledge.

The spiraling approach to comprehensive visual art education has lent itself to adult perception but new studies in neurology are revealing that perception develops, and changes over time, based on individual knowledge and experiences. Just as visual art is gaining a hold in providing alternative ways of learning, budgets have again been cut, providing more funds for new methods of education such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)

(Sabol, 2013, p. 37). Children at the elementary level learn through their senses. Their senses are developed through their perceptions. Visual art provides a method of learning that encourages trial and error through experimentation and getting to know and understand multiple materials and processes. This heuristic approach to learning is used successfully in pre-schools that practice the Reggio Emilia method (Gandini, Hill, Cadwell & Schwall, 2015, pp. 136-137). The research intends to look for perceptual development indicators to understand how elementary level students see and understand images to inform practice, policy, and begin discussion for collaborative best practices based on empirical studies in order to benefit all students.

As art educators have begun to get a foothold on better art educational practices, budgets are cut, and art disappears from the curriculum creating a dissonance in the fluidity of art education practices in the United States. When artists are supported in collaboration great strides 24 are made to advance culture and civility as was seen with the Public Works of Art Project

(PWAP) during the Great Depression. The lack of consistency and continuity in visual art education practices due to historical budget cuts, however, leaves a pedagogical gap causing generations of individuals without visual art knowledge. Most adults have a level of understanding, for example, that has remained at the middle school level because it was the level where their art education ended (Rush, 1987, p. 208). Little is known, however, about visual perception development in children (Taylor, Hipp, Moser, Dickerson, & Gerhardstein, 2014, p.

1). This leads to the over-arching question of the study, based on the wondering about student learning and performance, through practice in a class that only meets one time each week: How do 8-10-year-old elementary students see and learn how to draw? Throughout the study the questions evolved as participant information bubbled up and the researcher was able to interpret the questions from the methods used to find them (Agee, 2008, p. 437).

Research Questions

How do participants overcome uncertainty?

How do participants make decisions?

What has made participant perception different than the adult researcher?

What enabled participants to know what to draw?

How have participants used baby schema?

What type of schema have participants developed?

How does copying facilitate drawing?

Definition of Key Terminology 25

Aesthetics – has been an ambiguous term that has evolved with the use of language and is context dependent. It’s many uses have included beauty, feeling, and emotion. The context used for this study will mean attraction of the senses as an attention-grabbing mechanism (Gell, 1998).

Affordance – is a term that was made up by James Jerome Gibson that means to offer, provide or furnish for both good and evil. The term “affordance” is not used to differentiate an individual from their environment but instead refers to the individual within their environment as a means of better understanding the knowledge and learning that the environment has afforded the individual (Gibson, 2015, p. 119). Affordances are unique and measured according to the individual. The affordance for one individual is not the same for another, for example “Knee- high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relative to the size of the individual” (Gibson, 2015, p. 120).

Ambiguous – Words can be ambiguous or have more than one meaning forcing the listener to question the speaker for clarification. The same type of ambiguity can also occur with images.

The viewer can begin to understand the image when the artist is available to speak about the work, its process, and inspiration. Time and place become important aspects of understanding meaning. James Gibson, a twentieth century psychologist, studied ambiguity as it pertains to natural ambulatory vision rather than the fixed vision studied in laboratories (Gibson, 2015, pp. xv-xvi). His interest in the ambiguity of visual perception began during the 1950s teaching pilots how to land planes. Pilots become disoriented in flight, because humans are oriented to the ground and when flying in space, they experience conflicting information between their vestibular system and their eyes creating spatial disorientation (SD). Spatial disorientation is due to the loss of the horizon line to orient the body’s position and movement (Antunano, n.d., pp. 1-

2; Holmes, Bunting, Brown, Hiatt, Braithwaite, & Harrigan, 2003, p. 957). Gibson referred to the 26 outdoor ground or the indoor floor as a “fundamental” surface that an individual can both feel and see and concluded this supportive surface as “a law of ecological optics” (Gibson, 2015, p.

148).

Exteroception – the portion of the perceptual system that provides information about external sights, sounds, movements, and sensations of an individual (Gibson, 2015, p. 108).

Egoreception – sensitivity to the self (Gibson, 2015, p. 108). Gibson further defines it as a combination between the self and the environment, “Self-perception and environment perception go together” (Gibson, 2015, p. 109). It is the use of both terms in which Gibson divides proprioception into two categories in order to categorize the distinction between the self and understanding the self within an environment. The categorization can relate to the emic and etic in relation to the inner and outer self, “Egoreception accompanies exteroreception, like the other side of a coin. . . One perceives the environment and coperceives oneself” (Bahrick, 2013, p. 1, quoting J.J. Gibson, 1979).

Perception – information pickup (Gibson, 2015, p. 251). Perception as an action is described by

James Gibson as a direct act by an individual that provides the individual information about environmental affordances. Gibson’s explanation of perception was defined at a time when behavior psychologists were referring to perception as the result of a stimulus. Disagreeing with the behavior psychologists Freud, Pavlov, and Skinner, Gibson refutes the idea of perceiving as a stimulus in favor of movement to differentiate (Gibson, 1960, p. 695). Gibson contrasts

“imposed” information by the researchers who promoted perception as the result of a stimulus explaining that an individual would use a form of walking or “locomotion” to intentionally

“obtain” information about what was seen in the world as a means of clarifying (Gibson, 2015, p. xx). 27

Proprioception – the awareness of one’s self in mind and body in relation to the world (Gibson,

2014, p. 133). Individuals rely on spatial orientation to be able to move around in their environment. Spatial orientation relies on the integration of perception, vestibular (inner ear organs of equilibrium) and proprioceptive (receptors in the skin, muscles, tendons, and joints) sensory information (Antunano, n.d., p. 1). Barbara Montero (2006) describes proprioception as an aesthetic sense. Montero describes the bodily feeling that individuals receive by watching a dancer’s performance and also how it feels to view the subtle smile of Leonardo DaVinci’s

Mona Lisa (Montero, 2006, p. 236). Gibson divides proprioception into the two categories of exteroception and egoreception defined above as to be understood as the poietic or the emic and etic of perception.

Schema or schematic – A schema is a plan or an outline that is also a diagram. Piaget’s studies, albeit on his own children, “remain so central to modern child psychology as to be almost invisible” (Piaget & Cook, 1952, p. 36). According to Piaget, people assimilated to their environment by developing individual physical schemas that are eventually combined and imagined mentally (Piaget & Cook, 1952, pp. 25-36). Elliot Eisner (2002), formulated meaning- making schema with the use of the three modes: mimesis, expressive form, and conventional signs plus the embodied knowledge that resonates with the gut, eyes, fantasies, and tactile experiences (Eisner, 2002, pp. 15-19). The following section of this chapter will include a description of Gibson’s Ecological Theory which will serve as the theoretical lens for this study.

Theoretical Framework

James Jerome Gibson’s ecological theory of perception has been used as the theoretical framework. Gibson’s lens differs from the Gestalt theorists in that individuals use locomotion or movement to perceive their environment whereas the Gestalt theory is rooted in the phenomena 28 that occur during perception (Cherry & Gans, 2017, p. 2). Gibson’s theory differs from the

Gestalt because instead of the individual being stimulated by something from outside of the self, individuals are driven by internal curiosity that impels them to investigate (Gibson, Reed, &

Jones, 1982; pp. 385-391). Gibson’s studies form an understanding of perceptual development providing the rationale and significance of the study placing visual art as an important aspect of whole child learning. Visual art touches both mental and physical aspects of individual interpretation suggesting the use of learned motifs applied to images, thus, creating visual interpretation. The mental and physical aspects that become visual art have been explained in the book Between Memory and Museum where the authors share their interviews with native people and learn about the ancient beliefs, depicted in art practices, still being used in this century, “Bhil art is, in fact, often traced back to early cave painting. It is an aesthetic particularly hard to place, straddling the past and the present in ways that make it difficult for a museum to pin down”

(Wolf & Wolf, 2015, p. 61). The research questions will follow the significance of the study to provide the wondering and inquiry of the study. Finally, the theoretical framework will be introduced and explained in a way that weaves Gibson’s ecological theory with recent studies of the brain and theories of mind to explain how visual perceptual understanding of the elementary level student might be relevant to learning.

The theory has been approached through elementary pedagogy in visual art for the purpose of arriving at an understanding of what students at this level find perceptually difficult as compared to what may facilitate their visual perceptual growth. Students at the elementary level experience a lot of growth both physically and mentally yet even within one grade level student development and experiences vary widely. The use of autonomy in the art classroom requires a delicate balance that minimizes extrinsic motivators that can hinder creativity such as 29

“free draw” that rewards students for early completion of their work (Jacquith, 2011, p. 15).

Interventions have been used to enhance creativity such as mindfulness of the purposes of instruction as well as solution finding (Jacquith, 2011, p. 18). Elementary level students are just beginning to learn how to move and work carefully within the confined space of the classroom.

James Jerome Gibson’s ecological theory relates to individual visual perception within the physical environment. The theory developed throughout his career began with locomotion theory, continued with affordances theory, to direct perception with his division of proprioception into two categories related to the self. Eleanor Jack Gibson and James Jerome

Gibson were husband and wife as well as colleagues in research. Eleanor’s studies were interwoven into James’ theories, because she developed biologically based benchmarks for infants through pre-school and has provided a beginning point for understanding the study, as it pertains to the developing pedagogy, for elementary level students. The theoretical framework summary provides a transition to the methodology where related empirical data aligns brain studies to vision as it relates to pictorial knowledge building a pedagogy through practice and conversation. Schematic representation may turn out to be a method that may inform teaching practice as a foundation from which elementary students build their knowledge base through perceptual exploration and learning that might be considered visual hermeneutics. This schematic foundation lends itself to the individual’s ontological development through James

Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception to provide the reader with a theoretical framework from which to understand the many influences that enhance or deter an individual’s visual art education. The researcher has followed leads from empirical studies that suggested authors consisting of educators, psychologists, and historians who had written empirical studies and books demonstrating a variety of teaching beliefs related to visual development (Tadd, 1899; 30

Bailey, 1909; Dow, 1912; Bell, 1914; Dobbs, 1992; Gardner, 1994; Gombrich, 1995; Brookes,

1996; Willats, 2006; Bailey, 1914, p. 73; Freeman & Cox, 2009; Wilson & Wilson, 2010;

Edwards, 2012; Kellogg, 1967, 2015). Some of these authors’ teaching beliefs seemed to coincide with more recent visually related brain studies in drawing and have been used to help with planning this research. In turn, many artists too, have included how they learned to draw within their artwork as was seen in Winslow Homer’s watercolor titled The Blackboard (1877) depicting a figure in front of a chalkboard with drawings of geometric shapes, parallel, and perpendicular lines (Davis, 1996, p. 142). Artists works seem to demonstrate their knowledge of human vision. Some of the art movements seem to demonstrate the development of the visual pathway. For example, the Fauves used heavy dark outlines and dark outlines were represented in the retinal cell direction sensitivity work of David Marr’s figure/ground separation in his

“primal sketch” (Marr, 1976, p. 484). Marr’s primal sketch, developed for computer vision, separates the figure from the background using a variety of intensity changes that create the quality of the edge of the figure. The multiple iterations used in Cubism were done to create the feeling of movement. Cubism demonstrated how the constraints of available media promoted innovation, creativity, and transformation “through recombination” of available media (Olive-

Tomas & Harmeling, 2019, n.p.). The Cubism movement changed the way in which image generation was understood and bridged the image from the twentieth to the twenty-first century with its uncertainty rooted in risk-taking experimentation (Olive-Tomas & Harmeling, 2019, n.p.).

The tonal ranges used in cubism required visual experiences which develop slowly over time and have been found deeper in V5 the area of the primary visual cortex responsible for motion (Ebrahimi, Pouretemad, Khatibi & Stein, 2019, p. 1). These thoughts, while base, might 31 be helpful in the education of understanding visual development as it pertains to the image.

Therefore, this study promoted the start of a conversation pointed at how educators might provide students with methods and tools that enable students a means of interpreting knowledge through exploration and imagination “. . . rather than simply fabricating predetermined end products” (Burton, 2019, p. 1650).

The theoretical review has used the understanding of human meaning through visual perception affordances, and environmental influences in combination and created a concept, based on visual perception, as a way to create developmental teaching strategies. Much like learning to read words, people, learn to combine art elements to produce images and structures.

Most practiced artists work in an intuitive manner, but elementary students tend to work in a discursive manner, therefore, it was interesting to learn that certain aspects of art should be taught in a hierarchy. Contrast, for example, is necessary for survival as it communicates an edge or a possible cliff (Hubel & Wiesel, 1998, p. 403; Marr, 1976, p. 484; Walk & Gibson, 1960, p.

88).

Theoretical underpinnings, outlined below, will be the basis from which the framework was conceptualized. The theoretical concepts that Gibson developed into theory lend themselves to natural pedagogical exploration and development through the materials and processes used in visual art. Visual art has been a socially interactive field developing the skills most in demand for the constantly shifting culture. The skills gained from visual art include but are not limited to communication, collaboration, cooperation, self-efficacy, quality, and persistence.

The forty years of work by James Jerome Gibson on visual perception have been compiled in the classical edition of his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:

Classic Edition. His perceptual studies began by helping World War II pilots to orient the 32 horizon and land planes (Gibson, 2015, p. xviii). Gibson’s many articles demonstrated the evolution of his theory through locomotion (Gibson & Robinson, 1935, pp. 39-47; Gibson, 1955, pp. 480-484; Gibson, 1958, pp. 182-194; Gibson, 1968 pp. 335-346), active touching verses being touched (Gibson, 1962, pp. 477-490; Gibson, 1963, pp. 1-15; Gibson, 1967a, pp. 533-534;

Gibson, 1967b, pp. 162-172), affordances theory (Gibson, 2015, pp. 119-135; Gibson, 1986, pp.

127-143) and finally his ecological approach to direct perception (Gibson, 2015, pp. 139-161).

Locomotion and Optical Flow Theory

As a young boy, James Gibson, would often accompany his father to work. His father was a surveyor for the railroad which gave James many opportunities to ride on trains. From the early age of eight, James was fascinated with the view of the world from a moving train. He noticed that, from the back platform of a moving train, the landscape on either side of the tracks seemed to flow inward yet the view from the front of the train showed the opposite, the landscape from the front of the train expanded outward and away from the sides of the tracks (J.

J. Gibson, 2013, p. 1). The names Gibson gave to these two optical patterns of motion were expansion and flow (Gibson, 1955, p. 481). The expansion pattern of motion is orientated along the horizontal or frontal view so that when an individual is in motion, and moving forward, objects in the frontal view expand symmetrically. The flow pattern indicates the ground-covering speed of the individual as s/he moves forward in space indicated by both the rate of the ground passing underneath and the vertical objects passing on either side (Gibson, 1955, pp. 482-483).

The observation of the invariances in the natural environment such as the sky and the earth were

Gibson’s primary sources for understanding perception (J. J. Gibson, 2015, p. 13). These early observations would later be described as “optical flow” of motion and evolve into his development of “ecological optics” (J. J. Gibson, 2015, p. 13). Gibson spent his life 33 distinguishing and categorizing variances and invariances in the environment and how humans perceived and navigated those differences.

James and his wife Eleanor both advocated that perceptual learning had to do with an individual’s ability to differentiate qualities of the environment such as textures and surface reflections in order to distinguish the solidity of objects in the environment and that discrimination gets better with practice (Gibson & Gibson, 1955, p. 40). The illumination of ambient light on surfaces surrounds objects and varies as the earth moves throughout the day.

Light from a source, Gibson explained, was radial in that it moved out from a single point, equally, in all directions “Such forms are the circle and other radially symmetrical patterns which look about the same in any position within the frontal plane” (Gibson & Robinson, 1935, p. 39).

The ambient light and light from a source were different because the ambient light illuminated the environment whereas light from a source was radiant, meaning that, it originated from a single point. By studying the invariants of the optical structure, Gibson, was able to notice variants or “disturbances” in the optical light structure. This type of work, however, needed the use of motion. Laboratory work promoted only experimental fixations, in which the participant was acted upon, rather than studying the participant active in the environment. The choice-based art room offers opportunities for students to move about, talk to peers, and to collect supplies needed for their work.

The perceptual system involves the movement of the eyes, head, and body. The legs, for example, operate as part of the visual perceptual system to move the individual closer, or locomote, to an object to get a better look “Orientation is an intrinsic part of the perception—it is internal to perception” (Gibson & Robinson, 1935, p. 46). The perceptual system is in continuous operation it does not rely on a stimulus (Gibson, 2015, pp. xx-xxi) and “Locomotor behavior is 34 intimately bound up with visual space-perception” (Gibson, 1955, p. 481). Two different views or orientations of the same object may yield two different looking forms. This often happens with similar letters, that with changed orientation, yield different letters e.g. d, p, q, b (Gibson &

Robinson, 1935, p. 40). Gibson and Robinson state the importance of orientation for children when they are learning shapes and how difficult the learning transition from shape to form can be if shapes are not presented, first, in the most recognizable way (Gibson & Robinson, 1935, p.

47). Orientation is important for an individual’s perception. The ground, for example, is horizontal, related to the locations of both gravity and the horizon line. The ground is solid and supportive for humans to walk on. Anything that is solid and vertical is a barrier to human locomotion (Gibson, 2015, p. 124).

Through locomotion people are better able to perceive their environment. An individual recognizes their own forward motion by the flow of the ambient ray. Locomotion enables direct perception meaning that occluded edges can be defined by moving the eyes, head, or body into a position that enables a person to understand what they are seeing. As Gibson had noticed riding the train as a young boy the optical flow held true for human locomotion. Expansion indicates forward motion and the environment’s invariant, or unchanging features specify an unmoving terrain so that the individual perceives “a rigid world and a flowing array” (Gibson, 2015, p.

115). It was Gibson’s work in teaching pilots how to take-off and land planes that prompted him to use Gruber’s mathematical formula to produce empirical data for his optical expansion pattern in aerial locomotion and promote the necessary function of movement for his research (Gibson,

1955, pp.480-481). Art teachers help students discover their personal interests by guiding students to not only look but to see (E. W. Eisner, 2002, p. 217).

Affordances Theory 35

The term “affordances” is a neologism, a term that Gibson made up, in order to describe his theory (Gibson, 2015, p. 119). An individual’s perception is affected by the environment

“each man learns the meaning of the world for himself, within the framework of his up-bringing and the society in which he lives (p. 206)” (Bently, 1951, p. 443). Affordances are the qualities of objects that have potential to offer something to the individual such as the shade offered by a tree as protection from the sun, or other potentials like a rock on which to sit. Gibson’s affordances have influenced ergonomics based on human function (Doorey, 2017, p. 1). James

Jerome Gibson’s book Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (2015) explains perception as it relates to the individual within their particular environment. Eleanor Gibson (1988) describes the exploratory behavior of infants as they develop, perceive, and their associated behaviors, as they acquire knowledge about objects in their environment. By triangulating perception, action, and cognitive development to the individual’s affordance and ability of meaning-making,

Eleanor, was able to capture three developmental phases of the infant. The significance of the study to the research is when the infant, at five months of age, gains exploratory skill of the hands (Gibson, 1988, p. 11) that, “As the hands become active and controllable, a whole new set of affordances is opened up for the baby' s discovery; things can be displaced, banged, shaken, squeezed, and thrown actions that have informative consequences about an object's properties”

(Gibson, 1988, p. 20). These same types of actions can be seen when students explore art materials. Eleanor refers to the developmental phases as a “spiraling [sic] process” (Gibson,

1988, p. 34) in which each new event builds new cognition providing new affordances by means of differentiating actual properties of things. Thus, the spiraling process continues in an organized manner reaching new depths of understanding as the individual grows and explores 36

(Gibson, 1988, p. 37). The phases that Eleanor has provided will be a valuable guide in discovering foundational phases of learning with elementary level students.

Direct Perception and Active Touch

Typically, laboratory research, kept individuals in one location and studies were done to the individual. Gibson argued against the idea that perception was the result of the individual having been stimulated and wrote an article in which he demonstrated eight areas of disagreement, between psychologists and physiologists, on the definitions of a stimulus, therefore, defining stimulus as “Whatever could be controlled by an experimenter and applied to an observer…” (Gibson, 1960, pp. 694-702). This was an unnatural manner to gather data from individuals who typically navigate through space to make sense of their environment. Laboratory research was not a reliable method to gather data to study human perception, according to

Gibson, so he shifted data collection from the lab to the environment to conduct tests for his theory of ecological optics. Direct perception is when an individual perceives the environment naturally and directly, in reality, external to the perceiver, rather than being prompted by an action taken to elicit a response in a fixed laboratory setting, with the use of tools, i.e. telescopes and microscopes (Gibson, 2015, p. 6, 119). Direct perception is active using an active perceptual system rather than passively receiving information through the senses (J. J. Gibson, 2013, p. 1).

There are invariant properties in the world that people depend upon to better understand their natural environment. As an individual learns to navigate the environment s/he learns to notice details that went, at first, unnoticed and perceives new properties of objects thus noticing them in a new way, “Every time you look at something you are seeing it again for the first time” Peter

Geisser (personal communication, July 6, 2017). 37

Active touch is important in differentiating. Touch perception produces stimulation. The fingers actively use “tactile scanning” (Gibson, 1962, p. 477) and are a lot like the quick short eye movements called saccades, when scanning an image. The sensitivity of active touch allows the individual to decipher the shape, concavity, protrusions, indents, and the many different surface textures that distinguish one object from another (Gibson, 1962, p. 484). Touch and vision have similarities. However, the differences are that, vision is frontal, and touch is front and back at the same time (Gibson, 1962, p. 488). Gibson points out that the term ‘kinesthesis’ does not explain, well enough, the elaborate process of active touching and suggests that such sensitive systems should be called “esthetic systems” (Gibson, 1962, p. 484). The individual is able to distinguish invariants in nature from the self by texture, therefore, perception is learned by exploring with the combination of looking and touching (Gibson, 1963, pp. 1-15).

Proprioception

James J. Gibson’s perceptual system can be described as the evolved vestibular system.

The vestibular system provides the human body with both internal and external balance in order to move around in the environment. The individual orients to the environment through an elaborate vestibular perceptual system by detecting the information within the environment to gain active control of behavior. Gibson provided a snapshot by explaining that, in order for an individual to feel an object, the individual must position the head and body relative to gravity in such a way as to free-up the arm and hand to allow posturing of the fingers to be in a feeling for perception position (Gibson, 1962, p. 479). Gibson defined proprioception as a sensitivity to the self and called it ‘egoreception’ and that all perceptual systems are propriosensitive and exterosensitive at the same time (Gibson, 2015, p. 108). This meant that that an individual was self-aware of their breathing, footsteps, clothing touching the skin, and that these feelings, are 38 picked up simultaneously. Coperceiving is a continuous stream of perceiving the self in the environment from stimulus produced from within the self.

Critics of the Theory

The critics of James Jerome Gibson’s developing theory were vast and well-known theorists in their own right. Rudolf Arnheim, for example, criticized an article of Gibson’s by describing it as disappointing, undefined, and vague referring to such descriptions as “invariants” as not being concepts, knowledge, or abstractions (Arnheim, 1979, p. 121). Defending laboratory experiments of psychologists, in which Gibson had deemed irrelevant, Arnheim stated that

Gibson’s remarks were absurd and unacceptable dogmatism (Arnheim, 1979, p. 122). Cognitivist theorists too have regarded Gibson as ‘melodramatic’ with his ideas constantly shifting from mental structure denial to questioning heuristic values that generated research (Costall, 1984, p.

109). Madison Bentley reviewed Gibson’s book, The Perception of the Visual World, and claimed that Gibson had pointed out the inadequacies of the gestalt theory in order to open “the door for his own theory” (Bentley, 1951, p. 441). According to Brian J. Rogers, however, Gibson supplied human behavior and knowledge that, even though it differed from other scientific knowledge, was still pertinent (Rogers, 2009, pp. 273-275). Gibson’s direct perception theory with its ecological approach to perception has received the widest controversy by the indirect perception theorists who take the stimulus approach to perception (Wagemans, 1986, p. 267).

Both A. P. Costall and Johan P. Wagemans conceded that researchers should let go of the bad part and bring forward the good parts of theories (Wagemans, 1986, p. 268) and the separatist approaches of cognitive and ecological theorists should come together and learn from each other

(Costall, 1984, pp. 114-115).

Rationale for Theory Usage 39

The rationale for this study is the researcher’s interest in continuing to move forward the important work of visual art in all aspects of education not just for art’s sake but, art for child development sake. Visual art plays an important role in developing the whole child. Visual perception is unique to the individual based on their affordances; therefore, student voice is necessary to discover a new lens in which to view education in order to address this misalignment of art education practices. Children need to move about and heuristically manipulate materials to understand the visual art process and develop their perception of the world. However, the use of materials and material manipulation has stemmed from practices in drawing. Exploration and manipulation of materials needed to be rooted in the context of drawing so that students’ actions with different materials can be goal oriented. Understanding the different media might be better understood if students make comparison to the different qualities of processes.

The method, named after a town in Italy, Reggio Emilia, uses combined visual and verbal teaching to assist pre-school children to develop reading. It is a holistic method. The classroom is set-up neatly so that the child has a beautiful environment from which to learn. The arts are woven into all aspects of learning. The children learn responsibility and how to care for their environment by allowing them to take their time and explore. Public schools, however, rush students through the learning process and use only standardized testing as a determinant for student learning success.

The marginalization of visual art in public school contradicts knowledge that holistic approaches to learning help children remember (Edwards, 2012, pp. xvi-xvii). Rehearsal in visual art involves improvising, comfort with ambiguity, and idea generation by encouraging the use of knowledge development through a figuring-out process. The significance of the study was 40 to discover how beginning of the year third-grade participants see and learn how to draw.

Exploration in drawing practices and styles demonstrated that participants needed more work in learning the qualities of line, shape, and space. Artistic work might be considered as

“transdisciplinary research” and classrooms might become places where art, math, and science combine to foster ideas (Foley, 2014).

The internalized sensations produced from an individual’s manipulation of materials can be termed “metaperception” (Joanne Haroutounian, 2017, p. 50). These sensations become a way of knowing and actively engaged during art practice through interpreting and on-going decision making. Visual art boosts individual learning through comparative judgement, especially, for students who were not afforded opportunities to explore a variety of materials before entering school (Biscombe, Conradie, Costandius, & Alexander, 2017, pp. 1-18 Root-Bernstein & Root-

Bernstein, 2006, p. 421; Thompson & Bales, 1991, pp. 43-55;). Gross and fine motor skills are developed through material handling and processes (Finley, K., 2007, p. 1). Eye-hand coordination, for example, develops pressure sensitivity for: sketching, cutting with scissors, folding paper, forming sculptures, and applying a variety of adhesives. Students learn differences between natural and man-made materials as well as how to recognize when something is wet or dry. Students who have not been able to experience, physically, the use of a variety of materials may demonstrate a learning deficit of affordances (Biscombe et al., 2017, pp. 15-16).

Physical application of mathematics, science, social studies, and writing are the affordances gained through visual art practices that, with applied learning, aid in educating the whole child offering opportunity for the student to extend learning through experimentation and mistake-making and discovering that there is more than one answer to learning (Eisner, 1999, p.

17; Eisner, 1998b, p. 44). There are educational models that incorporate visual art because they 41 understand the importance of heuristic practice and continue to be successful as a result (LaPrise,

2009, pp. 49-70). Reggio Emalia, Montessori, and Waldorf models, for example, are three such models (McClure, Tarr, Thompson, & Eckhoff, 2017, p. 158). Standardized testing works well for short term knowledge but when a student is able to internalize learning through experimental investigating students will remember longer (Rinne, Gregory, Yarmolinskaya, & Hardiman,

2011, p. 94).

The importance of practice has been exemplified by an incident that happened during the

1800s in Vienna. The incident demonstrated that science does not always provide the solution to a problem. Pettenkofer, a scientist, had the idea to regenerate the varnish on paintings in order to clean and restore the paintings by using ethyl alcohol vapor. However, Pettenkofer’s chemical method, ruined a number of paintings (Rampley, 2011, p. 75). Engerth, an art critic, later explained that an artist is better able to understand the subjectivity, has the trained eye, understands the process, and is able to perform the process better by hand (Rampley, 2011, pp.75-76). The artist has the experience of “subjectivity, fine feeling, practiced eye, knowing hand and decision” (Rampley, 2011, p. 75).

Regardless of the profession an individual pursues, each approach, requires subtle nuances in the manner of expertise. An artist learns to practice a gentle, subtle, approach to working. A nurse, for example, learns to recognize subtle differences in a patient (Bardes,

Gillers, & Herman, 2001, p.1157), thus, practicing the art of nursing. It is possible that visual art holds many answers to assisting in the remedial work of education that has been kept, exclusively bound, in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Works of art “. . . can be the glue that binds the curriculum together and helps kids synthesize all of their learning . . .” (Beattie-Moss,

2015, pp. 1-2). 42

Practice in art becomes a manner of living a “modus vivendi” (Eisner, 2002, p. 71). The artist is self-critical and can experience a feeling of being crushed when another criticizes his/her work. Assessment of student work can, then, become either a crystallizing or paralyzing moment, which means, that a conceptual rubric should be used with a specified goal while, at the same time, allowing for creative and expressive freedom. Subjective judgement should, instead, be held as professional knowledge and used only for the positive purpose of helping students to feel good about themselves and understand their goals. Putting a score on an individual’s personal artwork creates uncertainty of talent and knowledge, undermines successes, and tears down individuality, and self-esteem (Brandt, 1988a, p. 31). Understanding of art practices may become a tool to help educators to locate student development, encounter individuals at their development level, guide with encouragement and give just enough challenge to provide individuals with personal, attainable, goals that motivate and build a ‘can do’ spirit (Saarnivaara

& Varto, 2005, pp. 488-490).

Public education attempts to motivate students with new approaches to curriculum that create an emphasis of learning, where it needs a boost, based on large-scale assessment

(Niemann, Martens, & Teltemann, 2017, pp. 175-181). Policy makers and administrators need explicit demonstration, in order to realize, how affective visual art can be at boosting student motivation, creating self-efficacy, promoting cooperative and collaborative learning. Visual art can do all the things that STEM is doing without burdening districts with additional curriculum and supplies (Eisner, 2002, p. 70). A robust visual art program allows students the opportunities for learning in ways that are hands-on providing them affordances (Gibson, 1979, p. 3; Gibson &

Gibson, 1955, p. 481), helping them to learn through their senses, gain an understanding of 43 materials and processes, and see from multiple perspectives. Individuals learn that, in art, failure offers possibilities. Failing and trying again builds knowledge and persistence.

Understanding how to handle and use wet materials teaches patience because time is needed to allow them to dry. The concept that, processes require different amounts of time, builds planning skills that lead to perseverance. Students learn that when working together in groups they can accomplish more through collaboration and cooperation. Learning to improvise is a decision that adds innovation and enables knowledge acquisition (Eisner, 2002, p. 232;

Gibson, 1988, pp. 29-30). Materials in art teach individuals that there are many answers to the same problem. Students discover the meaning of addition and subtraction; parallel lines and angles; the necessity to include descriptive writing in the form of an artist statement; the importance of remembering history; and that technology becomes new media that can be combined with old media to create and express individuality in new ways. When students embrace and share their individuality, through art, they are teaching each other multiple ways of seeing.

Technology has provided educators with new ways of teaching too. Educational neuroscience or “neuro-education” (Hardiman, Magsamen, McKhann, & Eilber, 2009, p. 2) is giving educators a new lens from which to understand educational practices particularly in the visual art domain. The compulsion to humanize robotic function has resulted in an explosion of brain studies. New technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled brain studies on visual perception. The visual sense works in conjunction with other senses and, as a result of combined workings, it accounts for the largest portion of perception in the brain (Zeki, 1999, pp. 60-63). Newer studies are beginning to break down the areas of brain that are affected by vision (Segev, Martinez, & Zatorre, 2014, p. 9). Artists have been aware of 44 visual ambiguities, blind spots, and the fact that what the eyes transmit can be confusing (Samuel

Edgerton, 2006, pp. 159-161).

Exploring visual art practices in public education show the vast expanse of diversity.

There are so many materials and processes to know and understand that visual art teachers, typically focus on either a smattering of different types of art processes or focus in depth in one media category. Visual art is broad in materials and processes dating back to the Paleolithic era and have brought forward knowledge of ancient processes combined with today’s digital media.

At the elementary level, teachers, attempt to expose students to many different media and processes. Perhaps these are too many because students, at the elementary level, seem never able to delve deeply into any one particular medium. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, has figured out that to become an expert in anything a person must put in a minimum of ten thousand hours (Gladwell, 2008, p. 29). Students need practice with manipulating materials and understanding how the materials can be used. Visual art builds creative capacity promoting innovation and “technology-inventing capacity” (LaMore, Root-Bernstein, Root-Bernstein,

Schweitzer, Lawton, Roraback, Peruski, VanDyke, & Fernandez, 2013, p. 222).

The use of the world-wide-web, as a new technological medium, has introduced a new type of global participation in art that creates a socially cultural practice of collective creativity.

While participatory art is not a new concept it tends to carry with it a creative capital, exclusive to people with access to advanced technology, excluding people without such access segregating and socially marginalizing certain populations of individuals (Novak-Leonard, Baach, Schultz,

Farrell, Anderson, & Rabkin, 2014, pp. 26-27; Literat, 2012, p. 2972).

Visual art continues to be an over-looked and under-funded core academic taking a back seat to reading and math even though it provides an opportunity for students to apply other 45 subjects in multiple ways. It has the ability to bridge domains to allow individual students to have their unique learning experiences as a viable method to, not only understand multiple perspectives, but to actually see them. This type of learning speaks clearly to social constructivism theory where students and teachers continue to question learning, learn from each other’s perspectives, and come to understand quality and order by making mistakes and trying new approaches. Standards based learning has caused so much competition for funds that classroom teachers have been forced to stop infusing visual art into their curriculum due to the structure of time on learning to ensure the highest possible test scores. All this test-prep, time on learning, has left a social gap in student learning robbing students of the freedom of cooperative, collaborative, and communicative opportunities. “Reform is no use anymore, because that’s simply improving a broken model” (Robinson, 2010).

Currently many adults tend toward the belief that visual art is for gifted students whose talents excel. This can be witnessed in school mission statements where wording such as

“talented, gifted, and other ways of learning” are used to segregate the arts and marginalize them from core academics (Gaztambide-Fernndez, et al. 2016, pp. 31-32). Research has demonstrated the flexibility and importance of visual art to facilitate student learning by promoting personal meaning and encouraging individualistic voices and talents (Hetland, Winner, Veenema &

Sheridan, 2013, pp. 20-27). The elementary student is learning to read, write, and count, and often underestimated in ability based on large-scale summative assessments (Shute & Rahimi,

2017, p. 1). Visual art offers students an alternative method to demonstrate who they are, formatively, and how they contribute to the school and greater community. Standardized testing promotes math and language as academic success when students have so much to offer their community than what these tests have demonstrated. When children are asked to talk about their 46 art it is surprising to learn the depth of their ideas, inspirations, and richness of description

(Freeman & Cox, 2009, p. 191). “. . . teachers of academic subjects might well benefit from making their classes more like arts classes” (Winner & Hetland, 2008, p. 31).

Images dominate twenty-first century culture (Freedman, & Stuhr, 2004, p. 816). Edging the highways are digital billboard signs and digital televisions have been found in doctor’s office waiting rooms. Images are constantly streaming in front of individuals wherever they go.

Students understand visual media differently than adults. They make sense of media based on their internalized knowledge of basic concepts and as a result media has to be carefully chosen.

The study has demonstrated that the participants have levels of visual concept development (i.e. perspectives, contour, contrast) and that there is an order in which concepts should be presented to meet the development of students. The study revealed art concepts at the elementary level.

Elementary level students have their own cultures from which they derive ideas and meaning for their art. Art, at the elementary level, can be learned through the basic drawing qualities of line, shape, and space through the concepts of pattern, proportion, and perspective.

Conflicts within art education have been long standing and continue within the public schools just as it had in Plato’s era. Artists, critics, and art educators have argued over which type of media is a “fine” art and which is the lesser craft art. “We cannot even agree on the most basic of definitions” (Duncum, 2009, p. 65). Additional arguments included the comparison of atelier training based on expertise in a discipline and the educational era-based art on drawing.

Colleges, too, went through a critical era arguing over what constituted good or bad art. The debate over whether or not photography could be considered an art was another long-lasting argument. Aesthetics, another loosely used term constantly needs contextual definition because it sometimes describes the work and other times describes the artist’s process. People have 47 continued to demonstrate creativity conflicts during the modern art era, the digital era, and the maker era of today. These conflicts have not done much to help the cause of the importance of art education, but it is precisely these conflicts that also make it creatively unique.

Neuroeducation

The changes in education trickling down through policy continue to affect the way in which children receive a public education. Classroom teachers are closest to the needs of their students, yet, policy drives packaged curriculum to all schools without considering the local culture and what creates meaning for the local school culture. The ease of implementing a standardized education is a continuation of David Snedden’s (Labaree, 2010, p. 168) streamlined educational policy when the United States was an industrialized nation.

It is time for visual art to make a shift in educational perspectives, to use the flexible, bold, creative nature that makes it unique and give voices to the youngest artists as a means of social justice for their education (Sabol, 2013, pp. 43-44). It is time for the students to teach the teachers by demonstrating that they understand the concepts learned in the classroom, to share their point of view, and demonstrate multiple answers to their wonderings. Freedom can be given to the oppressed, bubble filling test-takers, who have ideas and feelings beyond what is happening in their grade-leveled classrooms (Fuglestad, 2013, 20:24-20:27).

Research on art education has created action to delve into the idea that perhaps art education should change. Art education practices have used similar methods, since the introduction of discipline-based art education (DBAE) in 1982, almost forty years ago (Dobbs,

1992, p. 7). The popularity of the World-Wide-Web has placed all of these school-art style lesson plans on Pintrest, Etsy, and YouTube making teaching seemingly irrelevant, after all, students can find anything that they want to know and do on the internet. However, there is 48 meaning making that involves understanding subtle ways to use materials and processes, juxtapose images, and understand functions that art teachers use to help students see ways of working with images within a new medium (Knochel, 2016, pp. 71-73). Art teachers work intuitively with students, understand micro behaviors, and feelings. Art educators work carefully to enable students to problem-solve and build self-esteem as well as efficacy enabling perseverance (Eisner, 1998a, pp. 32-36).

How students learn has come to the forefront with the latest knowledge of how the brain works, it is a combination of education and neuroscience and referred as “neuroeducation”

(Hardiman, et al. 2009, p. 3). A monograph (Idan Segev, et al. 2014) compiled three years of brain studies pertaining to the different domains of the arts. While the studies on visual art were interesting there needed to be more explicit information pertaining to the way in which individuals understand what they see, how they are able to learn to create pictorially, and why some images catch their attention.

Kevin G. Barnhurst (2016) provided an historical account that used formalized theories describing the cultural and social construction of images and how this construction fluctuated over time. “But like the letters for sounds in some languages and icons for ideas in other languages, formal elements have no fixed or absolute value or meaning but are arbitrary, defined by custom and context” (Barnhurst, 2016, p. 3). Barnhurst seemed to describe human nature and the innate human need to migrate the earth, sharing and learning new customs and, similarly, to meld old and new cultural traditions together, breaking boundaries, and transforming into a new culture altogether. Thus, change in visual art is constant, and fluid, like culture, making it difficult to measure. 49

Many studies have been done on vision and perception. Most visual studies, however, were done in a laboratory setting. This is an unnatural setting as it requires the participant to remain fixed in one position during testing (Gibson,1968, p. 344). Rebecca Chamberlain and

Johan Wageman (2015) described perception as flexible and being able to attend to two different modes that they described as distal and proximal. Rebecca Chamberlain and Johan Wageman postulated that there was growing support that, depending on how a participant interprets task instructions, determines which mode they choose, thus explaining inconsistencies of perceptual constancy (Chamberlain & Wageman, 2015, p. 203).

A study on the functional organization of the brain between adults and seven to eight- year-old children demonstrated the immaturity of neurophysiological mechanisms relating to attention and working memory of the children (Farber, Machinskaya, Kurgansky, & Petrenko, abstract, 2014, pp. 479-480). A monograph study demonstrated that perceptual development occurred in children between the age of four and five. While viewing ambiguous figures four- year-old children could not see both images even after both images were pointed out to them, however, five-year-old children were able to see the ambiguous figure and were able to switch back and forth between the perception of both images, at will, strongly suggesting continuous mental imagery development (Wimmer & Doherty, 2011, pp. 70-71).

Ancient people created the ability to develop their memory by developing an ordinal concept revolutionizing human planning and reasoning through a repertoire of cultural practices

(Wynn, Overmann, Coolidge, & Janulis, 2016, pp. 2-3). The use of fingers for counting, extended to notches on a stick, and eventually to stringing beads which are then worn as an extension of the ‘self’ (Wynn et al. 2017, p. 4). Alfred Gell, an anthropologist, explained the extension of the ‘self’ in his book Art and Agency where he described the extension of the ‘self’ 50 through the development of artifacts, to dispel human fear of the unknown, with the use of effigy offerings (Gell, 1998).

Studying the evolution of ancient human development and use of technologies through elaborate craft development demonstrated an extension of the ‘self’ through an on-going improvement process that included: problem assessment, alternative solutions, error-reduction execution, changing tasks without knowledge loss, and practice for mastery (Coolidge, Haidle,

Lombard, & Wynn, 2016, pp. 4-5). A functional imaging study of the human brain suggested that the medial parietal region might be responsible for linking new information to what is already known and that the location of perception in the right parietal cortex is where the mental self is represented (Lou, Luber, Crupain, Keenan, Nowak, Kjaer, Sackeim, & 2004, p. 6831).

When an individual can understand the ‘physical self’ within an environment then s/he can self- represent mentally (Lou et al. 2004, p. 6831).

Applying Theory to Study

Some research included ontology theory as it pertained to visual art and its relation to recent studies of the human brain. The idea of the effect of ontology on visual learning might affect confidence and self-satisfaction based on an individual’s perception. Therefore, by promoting pedagogical practices that inspire students to practice drawing on their own might help them to develop their visual perception. It is through continued practice that the student will become self-judgmental in order to affect her/his own path to learning thereby fulfilling the needs that will promote continued growth. Numerous studies of the brain may provide age- related stages to facilitate teaching visual art concepts according to a student’s perceptual readiness which may help students in other subjects as well. The discovery of appropriate 51 information needed to facilitate how to depict images might motivate students to delve into a personal level of inquiry.

Endel Tulving (1972) explained two types of memory associated with the ‘self.’ The two types of memory are episodic and semantic. Episodic memory related directly to the actions of the individual and is autobiographical in nature. Semantic memory related to the language gained from describing and communicating learning. Both types of memory work as “two parallel and partially overlapping information processing systems” (Tulving, 1972, p. 401). The autobiographical nature of human memory relating to the individual aligned well with James

Gibson’s theory of ecological perception because learning is active, individually motivated, relating to personal choice in visual art (Jaquith, 2011, p. 15). The individual affords learning based on what is available in the surrounding environment. The environment is different for individuals thus, effecting their development. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory explained that the individual’s environment expands as the individual grows and participates in her/his immediate and extended community (Bronfenbrenner, 1986, pp. 724-732). The research gained from the study might demonstrate that adjustments to teaching practices may be needed to fit the brain development of individual students for the purpose of promoting persistence and a love of learning through visual art so that all students realize success.

Visual art education links ways of knowing through hands-on experiences that apply skills such as math, language, science, and history. It involves a different way of knowing that has deep roots in human history. Children’s drawings have demonstrated developmental stages.

Children prefer a lot of space surrounding their drawings and, as they grow, they are able to include more detail (Baker & Kellogg, 1967, p. 383). Brain studies, that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), continue to reveal more about visual perception. Irving 52

Biederman (1987) used his recognition by components theory to suggest that the language that a child uses correlated with the ability to perceive objects (Biederman, 1987, pp. 115-116).

Perhaps teaching to a student’s perceptual level can be discovered in the educational environment with the use of video to record and observe social interaction and student exploration of materials and finally an interview in which the student is able to talk about their art (Ecker, 1973, pp. 60-62). Temple Grandin’s book The Way I See It (2011) described the many combinations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and that no two individuals can be categorized because each individual has a different combination of disorders (Grandin, 2011, p. 158 and p.

280). It appears that perhaps visual perception, too, may have a variety of combinations that individuals apply to their work. This would account for the variety of work that people are able to produce. As with ASD, however, being able to recognize where differences are located will enable teaching practices to facilitate student learning.

The theme throughout the studies of theories discussed above demonstrated that Gibson’s theories integrated into one ecological theory of perception and continued to evolve as new information becomes available. Researchers gather pieces of theories and apply them to empirical studies to provide different angles from which to see how the theory might be applied to the constant change and fluidity of human culture. It is, however, important to be able to understand the origins of theory and which tangent projection to take, in order to keep track of where and when human concepts have emerged, and be able to track the growth and change in time and place. Good research provides the roots of the theory, describes what parts of the theory are used, and how the theory connects to the research.

53

Chapter Two: Literature Review

The purpose of the research was to gain an understanding of how elementary level students see and learn how to draw. Echoes of answers by philosophers, scientists, psychologists, educators, and artists have been repeated throughout time. Visual art teaches students to see (Eisner, 2002, p. 17; 2001, p. 9). Vision uses multiple senses within a visual system (Gibson, 2015, p. 296). Practicing visual art enables students to discover patience, persistence, nuances, conceptualize learning, and to make decisions in the absence of rules

(Eisner, 1987, p. 16). Art often levels the playing field as a method that transcends language, has no wrong answer, offering a voice for everyone.

Students enter public school at a variety of development levels with critical periods of learning opening and closing at different intervals, “Children’s visual perception varies with their age and developmental stages. A child’s learning experience is a unique aspect of his or her visual perception, which involves conceptual change and refinement of visual perception”

(Xinyu Yu, 2012, p. 294). Knowledge can be obtained in a variety of ways: explicitly through language; through the suspended reality of imagination; through the use of technological tools; and through the visual system of perceiving (Gibson, 2015, p. 251). Four categories of knowledge are semantic, exploratory, technique, and point of view. Knowledge has been produced through the senses in four learning modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile.

The visual system requires the use of all four. Student attention and inhibitory control have depended on explicitly instructed attentional cues across the number of modalities (Kirkham,

Rea, Osborne, White, & Mareschal, 2019, p. 27). The visual system was designed to help the individual dispel disparities and ambiguities through movement. Networking with every part of the brain, visual system development is slow, and dependent on experiences (Zeki, 1993, p. 155). 54

The researcher will learn from the participants how best to accommodate their learning desires through interviews, observations, and artifacts. Introducing participants to an understanding of binocular disparity might help participants to understand the ambiguities that arise while drawing. The researcher hopes to enable participants to work through ambiguities in drawing, caused by binocular disparity, in order to build their confidence so that they are motivated to practice drawing on their own. Artists have commonly used the practice of closing one eye to resolve visual disparity, flatten the scene, and gain monocular cues to depth (Wade &

Hughes, 1999, p. 1115). Occlusion, shading, and brightness have been the monocular cues used to create the illusion of image depth (Swain, 1997, n.p.). Squinting, another practice used by artists, helps to “. . . better see the lighting structure . . .” (Hughes, 1998, n.p.).

The literature review began with a study that spanned the historical growth of visual art and found that cultural, economic, and political demands have continued to promote the growth of visual art. The demands of twentieth and twenty-first centuries have experienced a cultural shift that has emphasized science. Narrowed through the Gibsonian lens, the research focused on visual processing to understand the developing elementary child’s perception. Understanding how the human eye functions might help elementary-level students learn to draw. This might also help to make the link between art and science explicit. One example of an art and science link was with Semir Zeki’s alignment with Clive Bell’s significant form (Zeki, 2013, pp. 1-12).

Secondly, the literature has defined the Gibsonian lens and found analogies between scientific studies and visual artistic works to demonstrate a link between these complementary fields. This link demonstrates how explicit instruction based on student perceptual levels might benefit visual art pedagogy. Teaching for understanding that muscles and neurons of the eyes develop along with the rest of the child mean that, even in art, there are concepts yet to be 55 achieved because development has to catch up to readiness. Just as the developing child must learn to walk before s/he can run so too must the child develop eye-muscle movement before these movements can begin to coordinate with the hands (Kelly, 2000, p. 8).

Thirdly, the literature has revealed that children have a variety of drawing genres.

Designer’s genres typically fall under spiritual/emotional, awareness, and reasoning. These genres become categories of responses that have been proven to be measurable with Bloom’s

Taxonomy. The 7-10-year-old participant responses will involve spiritual/emotional, reasoning, and awareness categorization. The responses may lead to demonstrating the importance of visual art as an indirect bridge to other subjects. By using empirical scientific evidence to scaffold drawing levels and use math, science, and historical concepts participants might develop intrinsic rewards that motivate personal persistence.

Finally, the analysis, has demonstrated the need for policy makers to understand the crucial role of visual art education and the role it plays in perceptual development during primary education and beyond (Blanken-Webb, 2014, p. 57). The study will use drawing as the medium because the action of drawing has been determined to improve memory (Rosier, Locker, Jr. &

Naufel, 2013, p. 265).

Throughout the history of art, drawing, has been the foundation from which all other art forms originate (Kozbelt, 2017, p. 2). It has been possible for drawing foundations to fade away due to the variety of media that have been incorporated within the visual art education processes

(Lindsay, 2015, pp. 18-19). Designers working digitally still prefer rough sketching as the means of formulating ideas because the “fuzzy stuff” within the sketch is full of possibilities

(Goldschmidt, 1991, p. 130). One study, for example, helped elementary students to use their imagination by including a “fuzzy stuff” scaffolded prompt that stated, “Sometimes when you 56 look at clouds, it makes you think of something. By adding a few lines with your crayon, maybe you can make item one look like something” (Liu, 1996, p. 154). While practices at the elementary level have been to engage students with a tangle of multiple media this type of exposure creates a broad spectrum that, without repeated exposure, lacks depth of learning

(McClure, Tarr, Thompson & Eckhoff, 2017, p. 158). Pedagogical practices such as “free art” at the completion of an art project contradicts the necessary persistence needed to develop quality, and instead, teaches students to rush through their work (Jacquith, 2011, p. 15).

The first step on the new Bloom’s Taxonomy has replaced ‘knowledge’ with

‘remembering’ yet, visual art, does not have the same time on learning as math and language, nor has there, yet, been a drawing program with the developing child in mind (Gibson, 1978, p. 229).

Typically, visual art classes, meet one time per week culminating to, approximately the equivalent of one year of learning, sparsely sprinkled, over five years of primary school.

Students have not been provided enough time during the school week to develop their artistic perception (Gardner, 1989, p. 71). Learned concepts go unpracticed and have, therefore, been forgotten by the next class. The re-writing of the visual art state frameworks has mandated that public schools within the commonwealth use computer media in all subjects. Drawing practices might better prepare students to reach competency in this digital medium, “Do we now have a coherent theory of the cooperation of eye and hand? Not yet, but perhaps we can make a beginning” (Gibson, 1978, p. 229).

The literature review has taken the perspective of the Gibsonian lens to determine if a method for teaching drawing might be facilitated by working directly with elementary-level students and discovering their thoughts through their voices. The Gibsonian lens will combine the art of drawing, the science of seeing, and the stages of child development under the umbrella 57 of Hardiman’s “neuroeducation.” The idea of neuroeducation is that all subjects have been networked together to scaffold pedagogy. This scaffolded curriculum has been designed to help the developing child receive an education that networks all his/her subjects to enable the child to make connections. Connections have been enabled through the senses so that the student may grasp and use what has been learned with the hands-on exploration of materials offered through visual art.

The strands that follow have delved into the science of seeing, eye-hand coordination, and the development of patience, persistence, and perspective-taking through the act of drawing.

The analysis intends to demonstrate the need for more art training methods in drawing within teacher preparation programs so that the classroom teachers too will have the confidence to guide students at the appropriate level, as is done with all subjects, to disambiguate learning.

Binocular Development and Ambiguities

The act of drawing might be likened to a magic trick. The artist can transform line, shape, and tone into a recognizable image. Knowledge of the visual system might offer a better understanding of how to teach drawing to children. Learning about the visual system might, reciprocally, help 7-10-year-old students learn how to draw by creating an awareness of how their visual system works (Flavell, 2000, p. 15). Recent empirical studies on the human brain have shown that seeing involves more than just looking. The portion of the brain used for seeing involves a system of processes that use all the senses, in multiple combinations, developing slowly over time (Gibson, 1978, pp. 229-231). Drawing might be considered a form of metacognition for which the individual continuously becomes more aware of subtle differences and develops strategies for remembering how to implement them (Schneider, 2010, p. 4).

Ambiguous figures, for example, have been used in perceptual development studies (Wimmer, 58

Doherty & Collins, 2011, pp. 1-87). More recently perceptual studies have been done at the neural level (Dyson, 2011, p. 61).

The earliest studies on visual cells, performed by Hubel and Wiesel, detected response to the contrast created by edges (Hubel & Wiesel, 1998, p. 403). These early studies related to the importance of being able to see an edge. Edges can be perceived due to differences in contrast.

Edges cue human vision to shape perception and are, therefore, the building blocks of spatial vision (Atkinson, 2015, pp. 1237-1241). Later, similar studies, by David Marr, determined that certain visual cells were orientation sensitive (Marr, 1976, pp. 508-516). Individuals are sensitive and prefer vertical and horizontal orientations which may be due to keeping the spatial map in the brain “. . . aligned with the world” (Mikellidou, Cicchini, Thompson, & Burr, 2015, p. 9).

The earth has horizontal and vertical axis as an underlying invariance that does not change

(Gibson, 2015, p. 67).

Children draw earth invariants and choose viewpoints that provide the most descriptive information including, “. . . straightness, curvature, symmetry, and parallelism” (Willats, 2008, p.

154). Defining features can be considered invariants that help the viewer recognize what the artist has drawn (Willats, 2008, p. 156). The artist differentiates a cup from a glass, for example, by drawing a handle to communicate that the drawing is a cup because a glass does not, typically, have a handle, “The handle is a defining characteristic of a cup, so it is likely to form part of the mental image” (Freeman & Janikoun, 1972, p. 1119).

Tracings that children create by making marks on a paper have natural invariants that eventually become “. . . identified with the graphic invariants” (Gibson, 2015, p. 264). Drawing has been considered a fundamental graphic act for which the eye and hand are tightly coupled.

Often belittled with descriptions such as scribbling, doodling, and scratching it should be studied 59 carefully (Gibson, 1978, p. 229). The eyes play a critical role in drawing and have been studied in great depth by many artists, scientists and psychologists, “Artists will not be any more famous for being scientific, but they are compelled to become scientific because they have embraced a profession which includes science” (Poore, 1903, pp. 14-15).

Clive Bell the post-impressionist art critic, for example, claimed that there were universal elements in the arrangement of shape, color, and line that promoted an emotional experience created by the artist. Bell defined the experience as an attraction and believed that there were universal elements in the arrangement of shape, color, and line that promoted an emotional experience for the viewer that had been created by the artist (Bell, 1919, p. 257). Zeki investigated Bell’s claims and found that there were separate areas of the brain that processed shape, line, and color (Zeki, 2013, p. 7).

A psychologist recognized, similarly to Bell, a highly focused emotional experience that he called “flow” (Cskiszentmihalyi, 1990). Csikszentmihalyi described “flow” as a highly focused mental state experienced, not just in visual art, but as a state of mind promoting optimal experience and intrinsically motivated persistence (Nakamura & Csikszentmihaly, 2014, p. 89).

Gibson had referred to this intrinsic type of motivation, that Csikszentmihaly called “flow,” as internal, and powerful enough to impel an individual to act from inner impulses rather than from an external stimulus (Gibson, 1960, p. 695). Intrinsic motivation comes to the learner by transmitting knowledge at the appropriate skill-level of the learner to encourage a love of exploration and avoid task drudgery (Csikszentmihaly, 1997, p. 13).

Irving Biederman built on Piaget’s stages, Marr’s segmentation of the image based on direction-specific retinal cells, organizational principles of design, and Gibson’s bottom-up approach of invariants combining all four to create a recognition by components (RBC) to 60 explain a way to segment the image and join together shape combinations (Biederman, 1987, p.

117). The joining of concave and convex boundaries, for example, demonstrate that humans, intuitively, pair a concavity with a convexity (Biederman, 1987, pp. 117-118). However,

Biederman admitted that his 36 geon volumetric primitives exceed “. . . the three—cylinder, sphere, and cone—advocated by some ‘How-to-Draw’ books” (Biederman, 1987, p. 126).

The act of drawing has created a wonderment throughout the centuries and all cultures create imagery as a form of communication stemming from spirituality, reasoning, emotional feelings, and awareness. The next sections describe how the human eye develops and functions.

Scientists and artists, over many centuries, have been fascinated with the disparities created with binocular vision, how seeing two images can be used to “trick the eye,” and the ambiguities that arise from looking at an object from a fixed point of view (Wade & Hughes, 1999, p. 1115).

Developing motor skills along with the visual disparities work together to disambiguate what an individual can see and recognize, thus, validate the importance of the physical experience or embodiment of understanding.

The literature review has been arranged to consider the developing child at the 7-10-year- old elementary level, who has just begun to grasp basic language, and motor control. Visual- motor skills have developed enough for the child to coordinate observation skills with drawing.

Prior to this level of development, younger children (4-6 yo), typically, look at an object once and then draw it without looking back and forth from paper to object (Sutton & Rose, 1998, p.

96). Younger children draw from internalized schema whereas older children begin to draw visually. Studies have also validated the knowledge of critical periods and have been able to place these time frames within human age brackets for which the 7-10-year old student may be in 61 the midst of a critical period, “. . . a phase of increased susceptibility to certain types of sensory input . . .” (Levelt & Hübener, 2012, p. 310).

Binocular disparity.

The movements of the eye develop similar stamina to other muscles in the body. It is through physical movement, described above by Gibson’s locomotion theory, that the individual is able to disambiguate the environment in order to navigate safely. Navigation of the environment develops slowly over time as part of the perceptual system, “Our perceptual system is optimized to disambiguate and interpret the visual information as fast as possible . . .”

(Kornmeier & Bach, 2012, p. 17). Drawing requires the synchronized movement of the eyes in conjunction with the drawing hand. Drawing might be thought of as a mapping technique locating invariants of line, shape, and color within a constrained space. The back and forth looking from object to the drawing substrate takes stamina that might only be the result of lengthy drawing practice (Miall & Tchalenko, 2001, p. 36).

The physical attributes of the eyes help to better understand the difficulties in mapping out a drawing. Binocular vision requires both eyes working in coordination to focus, yet depending on the distance of the object, each eye sees a slightly different view of the object due to the space between each eye, stereovision, also called stereopsis. Binocular disparity has to do with the space between right and left eyes for which Kepler’s 1604 Optics presented his theory of “binocularism” out of the perspectivist tradition of distance perception, “He argued that the perception of depth was due to the combined action of the two eyes” (Goulding, 2018, pp. 498-

544). The visual attributes that contribute to the disparities are the very workings of binocular vision. Every person with two eyes has binocular disparity but each disparity differs due to an individual’s unique differences such as the spacing between an individual’s eyes. 62

Parallax or stereoscopic vision is the effect of binocular vision and results in each eye seeing a slightly different two-dimensional (2D) image. The brain accounts for parallax resulting in three-dimensional (3D) depth perception (Poggio & Poggio, 1984, p. 379). Parallax is the result of a visual shift due to the space between the two eyes. The shift effect results in, each eye, seeing a slightly different point of view of an observed object. Parallax can be seen by looking at an object, from a fixed position with one eye closed, and then quickly closing the open eye and opening the closed eye in rapid succession. The object will appear to shift closer to the open eye.

Acuity is related to the binocular focal point. Visual acuity or the merging of both eyes enables a focal point so that the two slightly different points of view seen from each eye come together, in focus, enabling an individual to see a three-dimensional object. Visual acuity happens when vision in both eyes converge and provide the individual with a focused view of the world. If any one of the attributes does not function properly then vision clarity will suffer.

Amblyopia, for example, is a common eye disorder effecting visual acuity. Visual acuity matures anywhere between 5 and 15 yo (Siu & Murphy, 2018, p. 30). Stereopsis is another eye disorder for which the two 2D images do not correspond (Poggio & Poggio, 1984, pp. 379-412). The ability to lift the pencil off the paper and be able to re-connect to a drawn line requires good visual acuity. There have also been studies that have related to visual development of the brain in addition to the studies of the physical developmental variables of vision.

Critical periods.

The basic visual characteristics described above mature slowly over time developing along with individual growth until approximately age 20 (White, Boynton & Yeatman, 2019, p.

2). Critical periods also known as sensitive periods have been described as developmental intervals vulnerable to experience and “. . . different visual functions, . . . develop along different 63 time courses, which correlate with their sensitive periods” (Kiorpes, 2016, pp. 11384-11385).

Vygotsky referred to critical periods as zones of proximal development. “Adults with strabismus acquired after the critical period for development may have a permanent deficiency of fine stereoacuity, despite successful surgical eye realignment, particularly when the treatment is delayed” (Fawcett, Wang, & Birch, 2005, p. 525). Although each person has a different developmental time frame, generally, “Critical periods in the visual system fall between eye opening and puberty” (Daw, 1998, p. 503). The growing and developing child has critical periods (CPs) regulated by inhibition (Hensch & Bilimoria, 2012, pp. 4-5; Hensch, 2005, p. 883-

884). It is during this time that experience is vital to learning. The critical period of visual development is “usually around the age of 7 to 8 years” (Papageorgiou, Asproudis, Maconachie,

Tsironi & Gottlob, 2019, n.p.). This 7-10-year old age range, typically would involve, end-of- school-year second graders and beginning-school-year third graders.

Visual perception uses more than sight for understanding since human sight can be easily fooled (Bellan, Gilpin, Stanton, Dagsdottir, Gallace, & Moseley, 2017, p. 451). People see with their eyes but understand through their visual system. The visual system helps individuals to differentiate what is seen by movement within the environment as well as reaching and touching and sometimes grasping and rotating objects integrating touch and sight to discriminate one thing from another. Vision and touch become tightly coupled over time. The production of art, “. . . should be linked intrinsically to perception and reflection (Brandt, 1987, p. 32). Perception means learning to see better, to hear better, to make finer discriminations, to see connections between things” (Brandt, 1987 p. 32). Visual art teaches children to see (Eisner, 2002, p. 17;

2001, p. 9), “But in childhood that process is slow, and in some perceptual experiences may not reach completion at all” (Langer, 1964, p. 385). 64

Visual disparities hamper the student from the ability to see and translate images. Not only do some individuals suffer from physical visual impairments that effect perception of depth, motion, and color, but many individuals also suffer from neurological disorders that effect visual development. The art classroom may provide the opportunity for perceptual development.

Tracing images, for example, can be an effective route to enable students with visual acuity difficulty, “. . . children are commonly advised to perform near activities or activities requiring hand-eye coordination” (Papageorgiou et al., 2019, n.p.). The latest studies have shown that brain plasticity allows treatment for children with amblyopia after the critical period has passed up to fifteen years of age (Papageorgiou et al., 2019, n.p.).

Visual Attention (bottom-up and top-down)

Visual processes have been traditionally considered, “. . . mechanisms of attentional control [and] have been divided into two distinct classes: top-down and bottom-up” (Gaspelin &

Luck, 2018, p. 1). Visual perception has been described as “. . . a dynamic brain function modulated by both bottom-up and top-down processes” (Intaité, Noreika, Soliunas & Falter,

2013, p. 24). Gibson’s ecological theory of direct perception was rooted in the bottom up approach (McLeod, 2007, p. 1).

Gibson referred to the etic or externalized proprioception for which an individual is impelled to locomote toward an object to see it, as well as, egoreception for which the emic or internalized state is realized from within to create the concept of contrast between “there” and

“here” respectively. Optical changes can be caused by the natural changes in light causing transitions of lightness and shadow, the movement of the person causing different points of view, and the accretion and deletion of near and far perspective transformations when walking towards 65 or walking away causing magnification or minification of objects within the optic array (Gibson,

2015, p. 100).

The perceptual system disambiguates the natural environment out of necessity to successfully navigate (Kornmeier & Bach, 2012, p. 1). The visual system, alone, receives so much information that it would be impossible to process all of it (van Moorselaar, Theeuwes &

Olivers, 2019, p. 1). One way of separating the information has been to dichotomize visual processing into bottom-up and top-down processes (Rauss & Pourtois, 2013, p. 1). Bottom up processing has been described as a method of fast sensory perception. Saliency has been used to describe the bottom-up process, with the example of a prominent feature that stands out from the background, as the guide for visual attention (Katsuki & Constantinidis, 2012, p. 1165). An example of a salient feature would be the attention-grabbing pop-up ad that showed up on the computer screen while using a web browser. Salient attributes disturb the typical invariant environment and become different enough to be visually noticed.

Top down processing has been widely accepted to be associated with strategies and plans

(Egeth, 2018, p. 1). Top-down theories have been considered as “. . . higher order information”

(Wimmer, Doherty & Collins, 2011, p. 7). Based on study findings, the attentional system belongs to the combined efforts of “. . . skilled movements of the hand and eye” which are relative to internal thought processes and it is this type of internal process that enables mental rotation (Posner, 1980, p. 22). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated that, “. . . visual objects require a complex integration between “top-down

(internally generated) and “bottom-up” (sensory-driven) signals” (Harel, Kravitz, & Baker, 2014, p. E962). The creative processes used in visual art exercise the dual complexity of internally generated and sensory driven signals. The knowledge of embodied experience coupled with the 66 senses help the brain to invoke “. . . prior knowledge in a “top down” process so that it can be compared with the sensory mix from the “bottom up”” (Mathewson, 1999, p. 44).

Ambiguity awareness.

Understanding the concept of dual meaning has been studied in children and found to develop close to the age of five (Wimmer, Doherty & Collins, 2011, p. 30). Homonymy, synonymy, and image ambiguity, for example, develop at the same time. The ability to understand multiple representations have fascinated people since the Paleolithic era where constraints of drawing space, on the cave walls at El Castillo, have demonstrated the ambiguity of a bison tail combined with the horns of an ox (Melcher & Wade, 2006, pp. 719-720).

The Medieval era was filled with trickery to entertain the public with pages of a book purposefully left blank and realistic painting that fooled the eye that the French phrased as trompe-l’oeil. The fixed eye can be fooled by what is seen but, with a simple movement of the head, binocular rivalry has helped to disambiguate what an individual has seen. Image ambiguity is different, however, and “Perceptual reversals are very rare or even absent, when observers do not know that alternative interpretational possibilities exist (Kornmeier & Bach, 2012, p. 2).

Ambiguity creates uncertainty which triggers the creative process.

The uncertainty of image creation creates a playfulness, with the image becoming, rather than being (Goldschmidt, 1991, p. 129). Triggered creativity necessitates the need to disambiguate the image by converting the image into tangible fixed shapes that become recognizable to represent design concepts (Tseng, 2018, p. 548). Combining images has been the mark of invention with the possibility of creating something new.

Eye movements. 67

The eye movements of human vision help to locate images on the fovea within the retina.

Vision has its best focus at the fovea, a small divot on the retina, where there is a concentration of cones. The central focus of vision, visual acuity, exists at the fovea. Different eye movements enable the viewer to locate and follow a targeted image by changing the position of the eye to keep the target fixated on the fovea. Even the gaze position requires minute continuous adjustments, to keep an area of interest, repositioned, in focus, and on the fovea “. . . low- resolution visual surround” (Henderson, 2003, p. 498). The four basic eye movements that change the foveal fixation include: saccades, smooth pursuit, vergence, and vestibulo-ocular movements (Purves, Augustine, Fitzpatrick, et al., 2001, n.p.). Saccade eye movements are rapidly coupled, and abruptly change the point of foveal fixation. Smooth pursuits happen “After a quick saccade to capture the target, the eye movement attains a velocity that matches the velocity of the target” (Purves, et al., 2001, n.p.). Vergence movements, unlike the eye movements where both eyes move in the same direction, “. . . align the fovea of each eye with targets located at different distances form the observer” (Purves, et al., 2001, n.p.). Vestibulo- ocular movements create a stabilized vision so that the external world exists in focus rather than a blur, “The vestibular system detects brief, transient changes in head position and produces rapid corrective eye movements” (Purves, et al., 2001, n.p.).

Visual Development

The perceptual process involves combinations of multiple processes with overlapping start and end times that cannot, yet, be separated—it is a “perceptual system” (Gibson, 2015, p.

47; Zeki, 1998, p. 365). Scientists have attempted to put an order to the development of human vision: “Edges are the building blocks of spatial vision” (Atkinson, 2015, p. 1237); “. . . early visual processing focuses on the extraction of object contours, . . .” (Shimojo, Paradiso & Fujita, 68

2001, p. 12341). An empirical study determined that the retina contained cells that specialized in direction detection help to delineate an object in motion from its background (Marr & Ullman,

1981, p. 159). This separation was due to the contrasts that were, in retinal simple cells, discovered earlier by Hubel and Wiesel (Marr & Hildreth, 1980, p. 206). The cells aligned vertically, horizontally, and diagonally based on the contrast luminosity differences along the edges of the object to its background (Marr, 1976, p. 486). Similarly, to Gibson’s ecological theory, the concept of an edge has both a visual and physical meaning (Marr & Hildreth, 1980, p.

211). Interestingly, contrasts have been the first stage that artists use when developing an image.

Artists, first and foremost, balance their darks and lights (Poore, 1903, pp. 25-62; Bothwell &

Mayfield, 1991, pp. 8-38; Koller, 2008, pp. 7-14). A contour edge has been described as an outline where the quality of a line follows the outside of an object and define a shape when the line is closed. Edges mark the boundaries of images providing a separation of figure and background (Poggio & Hurlbert, 1993, p. 2) by corresponding “. . . to the locations of sharp intensity changes in the image, . . .” (D. Marr & Hildreth, 1979, p. 4).

Marr and Ullman (1981) have studied the movement of an object which relates directly to what Gibson writes about when he compares variant objects to an invariant background (Gibson,

2015, p. 79). Movement explains the division of the variant colored shape from the invariant or the unchanged quality of the background. An empirical study, investigating Clive Bell’s theory of significant form, showed that the consciousness of color precedes its orientation (Zeki, 2013, p. 9). Imagination allows the envisioning of an invariant background. Consider, for example, a beach scene. Imagine a view of the beach through a horizontally oriented window frame. The frame, divided horizontally, into three equal rectangles with each rectangle containing a different color and texture to make a landscape. The closer parts of the scene would be at the bottom 69 portion of the window frame. The bottom rectangle would represent the light brown sand; the middle rectangle would represent the bluish-green ocean; the top rectangle would represent the light-blue sky. Line added to the shape would represent texture. The light brown sand shape, for example, might have texture represented in the form of tiny dots to create the sense of small grains of sand, a squiggly line added to the bluish-green ocean shape might create the sense of waves, and wispy lines added to the top light-blue sky shape might represent the textured look of clouds. The variant feature of the beach scene might be a beach umbrella.

Gibson described the division of textural difference of a scene as “terrestrial” or natural background. Specific textures within the shape of their particular invariant such as the bark of a tree, or the granules of sand, or the blades of grass etc.… (Gibson, 2015, p. 79). Variant objects of a scene, however, might not be noticed right away, when moving, depending on size and color, if the variant object happened to move along the contoured edge of the invariant background. The variant object might be a small black ant, for example, travelling along the edge of a black contoured edge (Marr & Hildreth, 1979, p. 5). The variant object might only be noticed only if it moves perpendicular to the contoured edge, otherwise, it might remain unseen

(Marr & Hildreth, 1979, p. 6).

A different study demonstrated how edges can be blurred or camouflaged. The coloration of a wild animal, for example, has a disruptive order that tricks the eye of its predator. The disruptive coloration of lights and darks reflect and absorb light creating the illusion of edges that disrupt the natural outline of the animal and help it blend into the lights and darks of its natural environment (Cuthill, Stevens, Sheppard, Maddocks, Párraga & Troscianko, 2005, pp.

72-73). The idea of countershading in plains-animals with their pale under-bellies and the sun shining from above, for example, reduce the shadow darkening effect from the animal casting a 70 shadow onto itself, thus, preventing it from popping-out from the background (Kleffner &

Ramachandran, 1992, p. 34). Binocular disparity, however, provides an advantage to disambiguate the disruptive pattern (Adams, Graf & Anderson, 2019, p. 3).

Object recognition has been given three categories of recognition defined as: segmentation, classification, and identification (Poggio & Hurlbert, 1994, p. 2). Segmentation has been described as figure-ground separation by textural vision (Gibson, 2015, p. 79; D. Marr,

1976, p. 501). Classification has a set of features with either boundaries or location that gives the possibility, for example, as a demarcated face; a nose, mouth, and pair of eyes (Poggio &

Hurlbert, 1994, p. 2). This spatial arrangement might be compared to line, shape, and color arranged to create a “face aggregate” (Kellogg, 2015, p. 94). Identification involves a form of visualization stored in memory that works in conjunction with segmentation and classification along with some transitional or patterned information (Poggio & Hurlbert, 1994, p. 2).

Another type of visual-spatial study was performed with the use of ambiguous figures over five studies and demonstrated visual development (Wimmer et al., 2011). The first study demonstrated age-related tasks where children were able to see both figures in an ambiguous image and that, “Despite an enormous body of evidence on children's developing understanding of representation in various domains, the development of children's understanding of pictorial representations warrants further investigation” (Wimmer et al., 2011, p. 20). Ambiguous figures have been used as a “. . . valid measure of the development of pictorial metarepresentation”

(Wimmer et al., 2011, p. 91). Along with the ability to view two pictorial interpretations around the age of four, the perception of reversal develops about a half of a year later with the development of “executive inhibition and mental imagery” (Wimmer et al., 2011, p. 104).

Conclusion 71

Art has shown to provide, qualitative learning, that can positively impact and relate to all other academics. The act of drawing teaches elementary students the subtleties of pressure, balance of lights/darks, to be careful and organized (Biscombe et al., 2017, pp. 15-16). This type of learning builds knowledge from previous experiences that develop a self-critical type of metacognition that forms awareness and spatial reasoning through application of knowledge and material manipulations that lead to the mental rotational abilities (Wimmer & Doherty, 2011, p.

20; Posner, 1980, p. 22).

Visual functions mature in correlation with sensitive periods that have been found to be present throughout the elementary school years and well into adolescence (Daw, 1998, p. 503).

The eye muscles develop along mental capacity and physical ability that work in conjunction as a visual system (Gibson, 2015, p. 296). The development of visual perception has an effect on other academic skills such as observation for science, stamina for reading, and applications for mathematics. However, it is not just vision that develops, more importantly it is the integration of

“. . . two independent processes named “spatial” (external) and “motor” (internal)” (Crollen,

Albouy, Lepore & Collignon, 2017, p. 7).

The developing child learns to create art slowly over time just as s/he learns to walk and talk (Wimmer & Doherty, 2011, p. 13). Art educators have been standing on the shoulders of giants that have demonstrated the predictable way in which children develop their ability to draw, however, “The progress of the development of a human being is very flexible, and rigid criteria of what is normal are not valid” (Lowenfeld, 1987, p. 137). The capacity to be able to study the neuron activity in the human brain has demonstrated, empirically, that visual art provides the type of development, different yet essential, for all. 72

The next section of the review will demonstrate how art and science practices that, seemed to have operated in parallel in education, have been typically used together historically, to develop collaborative brainstorming practices that have led to major discoveries. These collaborative skills have been used across the world-wide-web and have moved knowledge throughout the world into the twenty-first century.

Art and Science

Gibson has provided for educators a science of art. The method of breaking down, incrementally, the manner in which the human eyes embody what can be seen in the environment, offers a lens into teaching the developing child. Nature, as a system of learning human development, has been empirically studied by focusing a variety of combinations between the human body related to vision and the inner workings of neurons. The auspiciousness of human vision and the idea of visual art enables a neurobiologist to conclude “. . . that the overall function of art is an extension of the function of the brain” (Zeki, 1998, p. 72).

What does the millennium student need to know about art? How might art educators provide students with an updated curriculum? Without an answer to these questions, art education, might fall into the educational trap with the possibility of getting ousted by the latest and newest educational reform (Hess, 2010, pp. 28-29). Educators know and understand the importance that visual art has on student development. By offering materials and processes that teach students through their senses, “Arts education provides much more than artistic skills” (de

Eça, Milbrandt, Shin, & Hsieh, 2017, p. 104). Students learn to be careful with tools and materials, listen, and develop intrinsic motivation skills “. . . not susceptible to standardized quality control” (Hess, 2010, p. 138). Since such subtleties learned by doing cannot be measured on standardized tests how do they effect the knowledge base of the students? 73

New studies have been developed most recently driven by interest in computer vision. It has been, typically for new technologies, to reveal knowledge about human development and help people learn more about themselves. Digitized technologies have brought about new studies that have revisited Gibson’s tenets of ecological perception. The interest in developing computers, that see like the human eye, have produced better understanding of the workings of human vision, particularly how vision pertains to learning.

Prior to digitized technology perception was “. . . divided into either of two camps that might be described as mosaic versus Gestalt. The mosaic represented the image and the Gestalt represented the linear point-for-point “. . . elementistic, or wholistic” (Hurvich & Jameson, 1974, p. 88). These two types of images have also emerged into digitized computer graphics image creation applications. Two such applications have been, for example, Adobe Illustrator with vector or point-for-point image representation, and Adobe Photoshop with its pixel or mosaic image representation. With reference to the “retinal mosaic” (Gibson, 1957, p. 294) the pixelated image has been made of tiny tile-like mosaic squares. Children have a natural affinity for the square form which can be attested by their interest in the video game Minecraft.

Humans have a natural affinity to certain drawing processes (Lowenfeld, 1951, p. 6;

Kellogg, 1973, p. 9). Visual culture influences what children draw (Freedman, & Stuhr, 2004, p.

816) and drawings have been classified into predictable spatial developmental representations

(Lowenfeld, 1951, p. 6; Piaget & Inhelder, 1967, pp. 422-445). It is this natural affinity that needs to be attached to the learning process for drawing and perhaps this affinity can be found by following the natural progression of the elementary-level child’s visual pathway development.

As a greater empirical knowledge base develops so too does the understanding of the manner in which all things interconnect. The ways of thinking of image creation, for example, 74 have been rooted in constructivist stage theory while schema has been rooted in the repeated practices that establish symbolism in long-term memory (Stevens, 2012, p. 1065). As humans develop more knowledge base, the realization of co-mingling learning mechanisms requires learning combinations with explicit connections, rather than separations. Delicate and precise combinations of internal mechanisms are developed when using a hands-on approach to learning.

The subtleties learned by doing cannot be measured standardly. The conflicts and separatism of theories have often impeded good ideas (Derry, 1996, p. 163). The constructivist and schema camps have been able to come together to advance education through the realization that individuals arrive at the same destination by taking different routes (Derry, 1996, pp. 163-173).

The same can be related to drawing. Individuals have developed neurological structuring based on experiences that have produced different types of schema. Embedded in memory, schema for drawing, becomes an individual’s repertoire (Wolf & Perry, 1988, p. 18). Art education and science have begun to come together on a neurological level, as has been seen above with Semir

Zeki (2013, p. 7), and Clive Bell (1969, p. 339) based on the idea that there seems to be something in art recognizably common in all individuals.

Artists as Scientists

Empirical studies of the visual pathway have suggested that edges result from differences in contrast, texture, and luminance (Gibson, 2015, p. 26; Biederman, 1987, p. 117; Marr, 1980, p.

206). These differences separate the monochromatic (one chroma/color) object from the background with “. . . grey-level changes . . .” (Marr, 1976, p. 484). Artists use these same tonal methods for creating the illusions of objects and scenes in drawings (H. R. Poore, 1903, pp. 25-

62; Bothwell & Mayfield, 1991, pp. 8-38; Koller, 2008, pp. 7-14). However, the effects of different types of geometry used in foreshortening, perspective, and viewpoint require 75 development from experienced comparisons which have often been absent at the elementary level (Waterman & Gordon, 1984, p. 334). Elementary-level students might benefit better from concepts of surface geometry such as concave, convex, the embodiments of line (i.e. stick, fissure, fiber), edges (i.e. margin, border, frame), because a surface has substance such as texture, and it can be seen at different opacities (Gibson, 2015, p. 30). Perhaps the vocabulary of surface geometry might better serve the conceptual teaching of drawing elements. The development of the visual pathway within the visual cortex develop slowly over time as does the skill for drawing images. Therefore, for elementary-level students the embodiment of line ordinates, for example, through a scaffolded vocabulary such as “sleeping lines, standing lines, and slanted lines” (Tada-Dada Art Club, 2016, 1:50-3”50).

There have been two ways of thinking about how images have been created: constructivist theory and schema theory. The constructivist theory has been rooted in stage theory while schema theory has its roots in long-term memory resulting in repeated practices that, over time, become symbols sustained in memory (Stevens, 2012, p. 1065). This study intends to use elements from both theories to better understand drawing as related to the senses.

Empirical studies on drawing have demonstrated leaps in universal drawing development, yet, between these leaps have been various sub-stages from which individuals figure out how to discriminate between a variety of graphic formats (Wolf & Perry, 1988, p. 24). These graphic formats include different genres of pictorial representation with the relative viewpoint dependent on the context of graphic communication too, the understanding of different visual systems continues to evolve “. . . even as accomplished draftsmen, children (as well as adults) elect to represent their visual or conceptual experience with points or stick figures or flat shapes when those forms serve their ends” (Wolf & Perry, 1988, pp. 24-31). 76

Artists have experimented with color, line, and form as if they have attempted to scientifically express, visually, how the human eye sees. Aesthetic has been a term often used to describe both the artistic process and product. The ease of interchangeability of the term,

“aesthetic,” has been confusing and might be better defined as “the study of the arts” (Puerto,

2017, p. 9). Many artists have spent their lifetimes in visual study. A universal affinity for aesthetic was suggested by Clive Bell. Bell suggested that art attracted human attention through the creation of “significant form” and his idea has been recently empirically upgraded by Semir

Zeki as “significant configuration” (Zeki, 2013, p. 9). Significant configuration suggests that all humans have a sense of meaning as a result of the arrangement of shape, line, and form of an image. The other four senses help disambiguate images by feeling edges, shapes, and lines.

Certain arrangements innately induce, familiar feelings about what has been seen. Bell’s

“significant form” and Zeki’s “significant configuration” seem to validate Gibson’s invariants.

Gibson’s invariants have been defined as the unchanging objects within the ever-changing optic array (Gibson, 2015, p. 132).

Piet Mondrian, a modern era painter, created the invariants of horizontal and vertical line with the addition of primary color to create a series of paintings. Mondrian minimalized what he saw using the cardinal ordinates for line, shape, and color, “What is important here for color is that in some way it is invariant across changes in light . . .” (Handel, 2019, p. 149). Mondrian’s work could be related to human neural ventral and dorsal streams that respond to orientation discrimination (Saj, Borel & Honoré, 2019, p. 4).

The artist, James Turrell, created empty interior installations that emphasized line and space. Audiences experienced light levels on the walls in an empty room. The smooth walls of the room reflected different tones (lightness and darkness) of the reflected light. Turrell’s 77 installation Mendota Stoppages (1969-1970) controlled the light, for the audience’s experience, often removing the light completely so that the audience would experience total darkness within the room. The audience participants reported that phosphenes (pressure on a closed eye stimulates the retina) of inner neural firing gave the illusion of light being present in a room of total darkness (Beveridge, 2000, pp. 306-307). The wall texture was smooth forcing the viewer to concentrate on the intonations of subtle light, “The surface of any material contains molecules that can be excited by energy at specific wavelengths of the incident light” (Handel on reflectance, 2019, p. 147). Turrell’s ideas have been rooted in the Enlightenment and “. . . supported by the theory of perception developed in James J. Gibson’s second book, The Senses

Considered as Perceptual Systems, . . .” (Beveridge, 2000, p. 309).

Josef Albers, a color field artist, created a series of paintings that analyzed the function and perception of color. Albers’ color studies have been influential on art education (Murawski,

2008, 0:00-2:41). Albers studied the interaction of colors noting that a color was affected by the colors that surrounded it (Handel on reflectance, 2019, p. 147). It was in the use of knowledge of reflectance that Albers was able to challenge his students to make two different colors look as if they were the same (Holloway, Weil & Albers, 1970, p. 460). Color shifts were created depending on the surrounding color. Opposite colors on the color wheel, such as red and green, for example, would push and pull at each other for dominance. Therefore, red, will never look redder than when it is next to green, and green, will never look greener, than when it is next to red. Albers emphasized the importance of color through values of gray tones by having students perform a similar exercise as the one above but instead of using color he had his students “. . . make three values of gray appear as four . . .” (Kelly, 2000, p. 15). 78

The notion of vertical and horizontal as well as light and dark seem to resonate with the very nature of human eyesight. From a neural perspective, contrast of light and dark, were studied and thought to be an early visual process in which a shape can be extracted from shading

(Kleffner & Ramachandran, 1992, p. 18). Contrast as a design principle balances lights and darks within a composition as exampled in the perfectly balanced Yin and Yang symbol. The Japanese word “notan” describes the concept of light and dark harmony (Dow, 2012, pp. 7-10; Bothwell &

Mayfield, 1968, back cover). Leonardo da Vinci emphasized the importance of “chiaroscuro.”

Chiaroscuro was defined by da Vinci as the balance of light and shade. The balance of light and shade was to be done first, color was secondary to the balance of “chiaroscuro” (Shearman,

1962, p. 13). Drawing horizontal and vertical elements along with light and shade is how artists have produced a record of invariant awareness (Gibson, 1978, pp. 229-230).

Scientist and Art Studies

There is a threshold for which the human eye has more sensitivity. When drawing, for example, an artist will place the most detail in the mid-tone areas and leave the highlight and shadow areas almost void of any details (Dunn, 2013, 4:30-5:10). Gibson had similarly stated that, “There is no information in utter darkness. And at the extreme, perception fails in blazing illumination” (Gibson, 2015, p. 207). What visual threshold do 8-10-year old elementary students have? Howard Gardner has recognized the important differences between the child and the adult artist and queried “. . . whether the schoolchild must pass through further, qualitatively different stages in order to become an artist (as it has been argued that he must pass through qualitatively different stages on route to becoming a practicing scientist)” (Gardner, 1994, p. xii).

Children have demonstrated that they have the ability to understand the depicted passage of time. The use of temporal cues to depict the passage of time has been used by artists in two 79 distinct ways; deformation, and series (Actis-Grosso & Zavagno, 2008, pp. 317-318).

Deformation and series concepts have been used since the time of the ancient scrolls since at least the time of the “toba-e” style “. . . recognizable by the grotesque caricaturist drawings with skinny figures, which resembled sticks . . .” (Steiner, 2014, p. 19-20). The use of series creates a stroboscopic motion with a sequence of static images (Actis-Grosso & Zavagno, 2008, pp. 317-

327). Image sequencing seems to relate to the elementary level of learning. The repeated use of a key character has created a double representation understood by children at two different levels.

Before children have the ability to understand the concept of time, they recognize the double image of key-character in the scene, as a sequence or movement of the same character. However, once children have a concept of time they understand “. . . the double representation of the key- character as two different people co-existing in time” (Actis-Grosso & Zavagno, 2008, p. 332).

The visual pathways travel from the external organ, the eye, to the inner workings of the brain, “What we see does indeed seem to be trying to tell us something about the way the visual nervous system is functionally organized” (Hurvich & Jameson, 1974, p. 91). Memory helps to disambiguate images through the integration of sensory cues such as tone (Hegde & Kersten,

2010, p. 15131). Intent also plays a role when drawing has been used as a means of communication, for example, “a picture drawn with the intention of representing a balloon cannot be a lollipop” (M. L. Allen & E. Armitage, 2017, p. 159).

Conclusion

The science of art has involved the ability to understand that the massive amount of visual information is too much to attempt to be processed. Artists have devised methods to divide visual information into segmented chunks that relate to the senses with the elements of art and principles of design. Scientists related visual input to the senses at the cellular level. The senses 80 help to disambiguate visual information through movement and touch. It has been the ambiguity that has fascinated artists and scientists.

Leonardo da Vinci was both an artist and scientist and spent his life studying how to create images and new inventions. Throughout history it has been the innovations that have been considered as new technologies (Ieva Moore, 2013, p. 740). Moving pictures became a new medium for artists with the technology of film. Its very beginnings have been influenced by images of ancient scrolls (Koyama-Richard, 2014). Painters too created the passage of time having used the techniques of series and sequence (Actis-Grosso & Zavagno, 2008, pp. 317-

327). These same techniques have been used in animation.

The technology of the future has been concerned with creating human-like machines, yet, the most difficult aspect to emulate has been the human eye, therefore studies have been done at the cellular level with the use of fMRI (Harel, Kravitz, & Baker, 2014, p. E962). The development of new technology and the empirical work gained from its development propels education.

Even with the latest technologies the visual image continues to be produced using the same drawing methods that have been used since the Paleolithic era with the only exception as having been the use of different media. The pixelated image used in Photoshop, for example, has emulated, in a smaller way, the North African mosaics. The mosaics had been created through the invention of many cultures that came together and demonstrated a society of a refined culture of “. . . multiple cross-fertilisations” that demonstrated the fluidity of culture that defined the

Mediterranean area between the second and fourth centuries A.D. (Fatta & Mediati, 2019, n.p.).

The empirical studies of the visual pathway have validated what artists have demonstrated in epoch works of art over hundreds of years. Contrast, shape, and line have been 81 the foundation of successful works of art and have also been shown as foundational to human vision. Vision develops slowly over time with the experiences of the individual. Learning happens through natural exploration and the use of all the senses to understand what the eyes see.

Binocular vision while allowing for the ability of depth perception can cause ambiguity, therefore, movement becomes necessary to see around and in-between to get a sense of volume by the surrounding space. The temporal pathway enables an individual to identify objects, and the parietal pathway enables an individual to interact with an object. Both pathways integrate to enable individuals to “. . .both identify and interact with objects” (Li, 2019, p. 146). The qualitative difference between adult and children’s perception has been indicated with the use of the concept of time. Key characters placed in a series or sequence were recognized by young children as a time lapse or movement of the character. However, once the concept of time had been learned, children see the key character images as two separate individuals in the same scene

(Actis-Grosso & Zavagno, 2008, pp. 317-327).

The literature has demonstrated the emerging evidence of the plausibility that visual art has been empirically studied as a uniquely human event. Historically, art has evolved as a method of technological exchange between communities developed from natural resources using human ingenuity and judged by the quality of goods (Etro & Pagani, 2012, p. 429; Jan De Vries,

2009, p. 183; De Marchi, 1995, pp. 203-221; Unwin, 1900, pp. 394-403). Technology has been a result of human exchange well rooted in the historical migrations of the world controlled culturally, economically, and politically. The world-wide-web has taken over the cross- fertilization of cultures and ideas have been exchanged at a faster rate.

Digital technologies have enabled empirical studies to look at the neuron-level processes of the visual pathway. The use of the latest medical technologies has allowed scientific 82 researchers to study the inner impulses of the brain with functional magnetic images (fMRIs).

The empirical work of Hubel and Wiesel and David Marr figure/ground separation seems to be the first order of image development based on retinal cell sensitivity to tonal ranges and reflective properties. A recent study has given some evidence that what artists, psychologists, and scientists have surmised was that vision develops slowly over time and relates to what has been learned. These findings have provided a lens for which to view how students learn to draw.

Drawing Pedagogy in the United States

Children naturally use a variety of visual genres. The genre that a child chooses for his/her drawing has depended on context, time, and experience. Drawing images develops along with an individual’s perception. This has been evidenced with the studies of drawings done by both children and adults. Typically, more detail elements have been added to an individual’s drawing as perception develops. These elements seem to gain clarity, over the development of the individual, based on the need to communicate more effectively. Metacognition and Theory of

Mind (ToM) have been tools that have helped add to using an explicit instruction to help students understand why and how to learn. When student learning has been scaffolded it gives each individual the tools to discover and embrace his/her own path to understanding.

Designers have discovered unique methods that help understand the creative process.

These methods enable the designer to develop the creative process as an aid to overcome constraints and uncertainty and remain focused on the task. However, as new technologies throughout time have emerged designers have developed particular methods unique to the workable needs and qualities of the medium.

These methods, developed over epochs of time, have consistently included the spiritual, cultural, political, and economical temperature through the most easily available media of each 83 particular epoch. This has been seen through the artifacts that map out visual human history with an array of materials, processes, and intentions. Intentions of material use have been made plausible based on the ancestral practices still in existence (Gell, 1998; Wolf & Wolf, 2015).

One of the most ancient human practices, drawing, can still be considered elusive. Dating back to at least the Paleolithic era humans have practiced mark-making. The many known practices of visual art not limited to but inclusive to people all over the world: ground painting, body painting, flutings, cave drawings, petroglyphs, tattoos, Nazca lines, frescos, canvas paintings, printing, photography, and digital imaging. The materials and processes involved have included combinations of the materials and processes above with a variety of material combinations and unique techniques resulting from interlopers. These newly learned combinations sparked more creativity through the experimentation with new ideas that have made many artists famous. Children learned art, as crafted practices, by working alongside skilled adults.

The introduction of visual art pedagogy has been relatively new and began more recently after the child-study movement of the late 19th early 20th century (Bolin, Amburgy &

Stankiewicz, 2004, p. 39). The rise of empirical psychology and the beginning of school reform in America would shift from teaching memorization to teach children to learn how to learn

(Humphries, 1985, pp. 79-81). G. Stanley Hall began the scientific study of children to discover what children knew and did not know in order to implement a better curriculum (Humphries,

1985, p. 81). The data gathering methodology used by Hall was widespread and emerged in four movements for which, the third movement, led by Earl Barnes, collected thousands of children’s drawings, questionnaires, and stories (Humphries, 1985, p. 83). 84

Mandated as a core subject into public school curriculum, December 1859, to keep up with the demand for skilled labor, drawing, became a required subject (Bolin, Amburgy, &

Stankiewicz, 2004, p. 39). During the early part of the 20th century visual art would lose its place as a department within the National Education Association to be absorbed under the umbrella of the Department of Manual Training (Jensen, 1976, p. 26). Using historical contexts to provide the foundational learning that would propel its use with new and future technologies, 20th century art education, would continue to slowly evolve and improve. Project Zero was one such example.

Founded in 1967 by Nelson Goodman, Project Zero, has continued to evolve and shift its on- going empirical research about artistic practice (Gardner, 2000, p. 245). Twenty years later,

Project Zero helped create an art education curriculum, Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE).

Largely funded by the J. Paul Getty Corporation, DBAE, would set the tone for art education to return as an academic subject (Hausman, 2007, p. 5).

Arts Propel was another Project Zero experiment in which the process and product were emphasized. This differed from the DBAE curriculum. The DBAE curriculum had slotted one quarter of its curriculum to process and product whereas, Arts Propel, emphasized art production while “. . . art history, criticism and aesthetics . . .” was infused into the individual production activities (Rich, 1997, p. 171). Elementary level students, however, were being educated with a curriculum designed for middle school aged students and older (Leeds, 1989, p. 102). Project

Zero has continued to forge ahead with fluid initiatives that have supported and advanced teaching and learning through art. The projects that were begun in the new millennium have continued to move toward educating students and teachers toward visual thinking by scaffolding through books based on published empirical studies such as: Habits of Mind, Studio Thinking, and Making Thinking Visible. 85

Drawing Pedagogy

Children’s innate ability to draw has been extensively cataloged by Rhoda Kellogg.

Kellogg has studied and cataloged pre-school children’s drawing development all over the world

(Kellogg, 1973, p. 8). Pre-school children begin with scribbling as they do not yet have control of their gross and fine motor functions. Over time their muscles and nerves become accustomed to their drawing actions as they acquire more and more control over their movements. Kellogg has cataloged thousands of pre-school children’s drawings showing that they follow predictable patterns of development. These predictable patterns of development have been captured and categorized into a classification system (Baker & Kellogg, 1967, pp. 384-388).

Many art educators have written books with methods on how to draw. Gibson found the books to be confusing stating that, “The permanent trace is what interests the child” (Gibson,

1998, p. 230) and he emphasized the importance of tracing exercises for the young child. The idea of tracing might be considered an exercise for eye tracking movement and visual acuity.

Drawing pedagogy might be reconsidered so that all children find it rewarding because drawings can become ambiguous to children. Understanding ambiguity might challenge rather than discourage. Generated curiosity by perceptual level might keep students interested because most students stop drawing by middle adolescence (Lowenfeld & Edwards 1985, n.p.).

The use of visual processes in the learning environment, through repeated practice, play a critical role in student success by building memory (Yu, 2012, p. 294). Students need the necessary combination of top-down and bottom-up processes for the creation of mind that the arts provide (Eisner, 1997, p. 1). Gibson has demonstrated that the body and mind work in conjunction and that the total coherence of mind and body create the individual, “Even the simplest actions and decisions about visual objects require a complex integration between “top- 86 down” (internally generated) and “bottom-up” (sensory driven) signals” (Harel, Kravitz &

Baker, 2014, p. E962).

Vision and learning also align with the child’s attainment of language and mathematical concepts. Concepts such as homonyms and mental rotation, for example, have been studied and age related (Wimmer & Doherty, 2011, p. 20). Student level interpretation of meaning has a direct relation to the development of concepts. Explicit instruction of what is known in language and mathematical educational concepts and applications can be directly applied to art production

(Yu, 2012, p. 292). The concepts in-front-of, next-to, and behind, for example, take time for elementary level children to acquire. An embodiment or experience of this concept has been seen when trying to get children in line to leave the classroom. The order of images would be too difficult for children beginning kindergarteners until they are able to embody the experience.

Ambiguous figures, for example, have been found to be age related where 5yo children have been able to see both figures whereas 4yo cannot. This ability has been attributed to the ability to inhibit both bottom-up and top-down processes in order to switch between images

(Wimmer, Doherty & Collins, 2011, p. 26). Attention is a mechanism related “. . . to saccadic eye movements and to various brain systems controlling perception and motion” (Posner, 1980, p. 3). Some individuals draw according to their vision while others draw according to their sense of touch. A drawing that is visual compared to a haptic drawing have different points of sensation that can be seen as stylistic differences (Lowenfeld, 1945, p. 105).

Artists have exhibited works that seem to emphasize what scientists have learned about how the neurons react in the visual brain. Art educators have used modern art works to emphasize the elements of art and the principles of design. Maybe knowledge of the working brain, the inner space, will become the next epoch in human history. David Marr, for example, 87 used the idea of mapping when he described processing of visual information. Perhaps the mapping language Marr has used to describe visual processes might be the language that would disambiguate elementary-level students understanding of drawing. Selecting art that exemplifies mapping skills has seemed to be influential in pedagogical understanding of modern art.

Elements and principles of art support a language created by critics to talk about art, yet, “The elements and principles of design were never the universal and timeless descriptors they were claimed to be” (Gude, 2004, p. 12). As technology changed so too did the language used to describe the medium.

Some examples of what the modern era artists have emphasized about visual information can be seen in the works from: Mondrian’s neo-platicism style (1937-1942) emphasizing the orientation of the cardinal directions; Robert Motherwell (1950) used contrast and large scale;

Henri Matisse (1906?) created a Fauvist painting that used spatial density with the bright colors and thick dark outlines emphasizing edges that separated the figure from the background. Each of the artist’s works capture the viewer’s attention and perhaps each work exemplifies the concept that has been described as significant form emphasizing line, color, and shape to captivate the viewer’s attention as intended by the artist (Bell, 1919, p. 257). Studies of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) have given validity to Clive Bell’s significant form theory, for which artists have been able to arouse attention, due to certain configurations in the brain that arouse interest (Zeki, 2013, p. 11).

Constraints.

Primary school age children have been constrained by lack of experience with material handling, and idea generation. Historically, this group has been shown exemplars of adult master artists that have lived in the distant past while the current popular styles that provide meaning 88 have been “. . . frequently absent from children’s school art” (Wilson, 1997, p. 155).

Conceptually this age-range has been exposed to the images in picture books and popular culture

(Yu, 2012, p. 292). The idea that educators took from modern artists concerning the child as an innate artist born with the ability to create has been proven to be a myth because, “. . . children’s art-making has a variety of functions, . . .” (Wilson, 1997, p. 167). However, to present the art room to primary level children as a studio might be an ideal situation for some situations but for other situations “it is not realistic to assume that most art classes in school settings can (at least initially) function as open studios in which each student re-invents his or her own methodologies of making” (Gude, 2013, p. 6). Students need to develop an understanding of materials and processes first. At the elementary level, for example, concepts of man-made in comparison to nature made, or the subtle differences of dry, damp, and wet.

Uncertainty.

What do students think about images? What images should be used to enhance student experience? How would children prefer to use images so that they can develop personal experiences, routines, schema, and motor control to produce their desired work? Differentiating the learning meets students where they are in order to enable them to stretch, explore, grow, and reach their personal goals. What strategies will facilitate their goals? The uncertainty of creating a finished work prompts judgment, decision making, and often frustration for some.

Schema.

Tracing, copying, and practice exercises provide a repertoire for the student to begin to develop techniques and eventually style. Just as when learning to dance, sing, play an instrument, or a sport the fundamentals need to be developed. When learning to draw students need to learn the fundamentals of drawing which include lines, shapes, and ways to connect them. Leonardo 89 da Vinci has commented that “a painter ought always to have in mind a kind of routine system to enable him to understand any object that interests him” (Kozbelt, 2017, p. 4). The drawings that a seven-year-old child produces often have all objects in the drawing lined up in a row. The drawings are lined up facing the child, like puppets on a stage, because “. . . the youngster himself is actually involved in every drawing. He is a spectator and an actor at the same time”

(Brittain & Lowenfeld, 1982, p. 43).

Attention – seeing as” and “seeing that.

Both Eisner and Lowenfeld have commented on how the arts teach in the absence of rules (Eisner, 2004, p. 5), and that art provides the experiences central to self-direction

(Lowenfeld, 1987, p. 113). Attention has become a valued skill. Computational models of visual attention have become popular because of the testable predictions as well as their use in technological applications for the engineering sciences (Itti & Borji, 2015, p. 1). One study demonstrated the limits in working memory of 7-10-year old and determined that participants were not yet able to prioritize a three-item sequence and that the most recent or last item observed was the one that was consistently remembered (Berry, Waterman, Baddeley, Hitch &

Allen, 2018, p. 4). Creativity should, therefore, be built one item at a time, as a study, so that the student has the opportunity to figure out combinations on her/his own. Individuals learn through their personal experiences through their sensory system to form concepts by engaging in their own knowledge making and building on the different nuances and qualities of their surroundings and the objects that make up their multi-dimensional world (Cole & Knowles, 2008, p. 60).

Visual art both informs and engages the student in emotion, thought, and action, “The use of the arts in research is not for art’s sake . . .” (Cole & Knowles, 2008, p. 62). 90

Children have a variety of ways of depicting images. Time constraints determine the types of images that they can complete during an art class. Anna M. Kindler described a participants’ variety as “pictorial repertoires” from which she presents a case study validating the selection of drawing systems that children use to fit the communicative need: iconic gesture as a pictorial representation; action maps for which the participant uses the vectors of movement to focus on an action sequence; show and tell in which the act of drawing is combined with talking; and a drawing from observation which takes a long time (Kindler, 1999, pp. 334-341).

Qualities – imagining that and imagining how.

Visual art teaches children how to be gentle, to take care of tools and materials, to learn the sensitivity to pressure, that oil and water do not mix, and understand the subtleties of wet, damp, and dry. Art teaches qualities such as dark, medium, and light, thick and thin, opaque and translucent, heavy and light. Image depiction creates an array of uncertainties forcing decisions to be made, thus, developing habits of mind that enable divergent ways of thinking leading to creative problem-solving methods (LaMore, Root-Bernstein, Root-Bernstein, Schweitzer,

Lawton, Roraback, Peruski, VanDyke, & Fernandez, 2013, p. 228). The emphasis at the primary level should demonstrate the knowledge that, “To be art, it must, as far as possible, be expressed in the language, structure, and form of art” (Wachowiak & Clements, 1977, p. 2). Developing the multiple qualities involved in material handling and the creative combinations of product production promote material manipulations that help individuals be able to “imagine that” and

“imagine how.”

Brain Pedagogy – being with and being there

The studies done at the cellular level by Hubel and Wiesel have given an age range between 6-7yo for the critical periods of learning (Hubel & Wiesel, 1998, p. 406). This might be 91 helpful for the planning of future drawing curriculum. The understanding of direction-specific cells by David Marr gives pedagogical insight into making students aware of mapping methods within their drawing (Marr, 1976, p. 488). Marr also brought an awareness to the quality of the edge as being smooth or fuzzy (Marr, 1976, p. 486) as well as a foveal format that can be used as qualities to consider when helping students map-out their drawings and these qualities carry with them some of the language used in the drawing process they are: orientation, size, contrast, spatial density, and texture discrimination to separate regions (Marr, 1976, pp. 508-509).

There are multiple tasks that can be separated to facilitate drawing based on what has been learned about computer memory. Computer segmentation, classification, and identification knowledge might describe a visually categorized internal template that might promote learning how to draw (Poggio & Hurlbert, 1994, p. 2). Segmentation bounds the image and “Symmetric objects are better recognized from novel viewpoints than asymmetric objects” (Poggio &

Hurlbert, 1994, pp. 1-2). Symmetry, for example, is used in visual art to balance line, shape, darks, lights, and space in a drawing. Classification is the process of discriminating demarcated features within the bounded object with location mapping. When considering children’s drawings of the face the placement of eyes and a mouth are mapped so that the eyes are placed north, the mouth is south, and bounded by a circle. Identification is a level of recognition based on an internalized schema based on the conditions of segmentation and classification (Poggio &

Hurlbert, 1994, p. 2). The child’s drawing can be identified as a face by the placement of the demarcated features within the bounded shape. Talking to students about what they can see may help to shape their experiences in drawing because, “many visuospatial skills improve throughout the first decade” (Dekker, Schwarzkipf, de Haas, Nardini & Sereno, 2019, n.p.).

Drawing Preferences in Children 92

The primary school years are an important time for children to learn drawing skills,

“Visuospatial abilities such as contrast sensitivity and Vernier acuity improve until late in childhood, but the neural mechanisms supporting these changes are poorly understood” (Dekker, et al., 2019, n.p.). Some examples of visuospatial improvements that happen during the first decade of life include contrast sensitivity for gratings that mature between 8-10 yo, naturalistic textures at about 10 yo, and Vernier acuity for positional resolution for adult-level performance between 10-14 yo (Dekker, et al., 2019, n.p.). The knowledge “. . . that dark targets are perceived faster and more accurately than light targets . . .” (Komban, Alonso & Zaidi, 2011, p. 8657) will help to establish benchmarks when teaching students to add darks and lights to their drawings.

These results can be recognized in Viktor Lowenfeld’s stages of drawing (Lowenfeld &

Edwards, 1985, n.p.). Making students aware of how their eyes work and that ambiguity exists might enable an awareness that might help them to focus on materials, processes, and their ideas, thus, enabling them to persist by “being with” and “being there.”

Baby schema.

First introduced by Konrad Lorenz in 1943, child schema was defined “. . . by a set of infantile physical features such as a large head, a high and protruding forehead, large eyes, and chubby cheeks” (Kuraguchi, Tankguchi & Ashida, 2015, p. 1). The early primary level student prefers to draw cartoon-type images especially when they have the physical characteristics typical of babies, “. . . such as a large head compared with the body, a rounded body shape, and a soft body surface” (Nittono & Ihara, 2017, p. 1). The cuteness of the image produces positive feelings that have been studied and believed to evoke tender feelings and care taking behavior towards infants (Nittono, Fukushima,Yano & Moriya, 2012, p.1; Luo, Li & Lee, 2011, p.

116).The artist Paul Klee had saved his childhood drawings to use as sources for his work and 93 his work was criticized with “. . . charges of ‘infantilism’” (Leeds, 1989, p. 100). Japanese popular culture captured the cuteness or kawaii with Hello Kitty during the 1980s (Dale, 2016, p.

6). The kawaii figures are rounded and appear cuddly, cute, gentle, and innocent. Dale (2016) explains the etymology of the differences in the translation of the words between American and

Japanese clarifying that, “The English word ‘cute,’ derived from ‘acute,’ has negative connotations such as ‘cunning’ and ‘shrewd’ that are not found in continental European nor

Asian languages” (Dale, 2016, p. 6). Further, Dale reminds that, the earliest form of Mickey

Mouse exhibited dangerous and cruel behavior (Dale, 2016, p. 6). American children seem to prefer the kawaii style. Japan exports “. . . $4 Billion annually. . .” to the United States in anime related goods (Cooper-Chen, 2011, p. 85). In Asia many children have been able to draw anime from popular culture before they enter their first year of school. Yet, in the United States art education has continued to be taught “. . . from an adult point of view” (Leeds, 1989, p. 102).

Conclusion

Empirical work by Lowenfeld and Kellogg has been instrumental with helping policy makers understand the development of children through art education. Drawing books continue to be created related to the adult mind and have been confusing for the perceptual level of 7-10- year old children. Methods of learning that children seem to do naturally, like tracing and copying, were scorned by Franz Cizek (1865-1946) and still carry negative connotations, yet, these were the methods used to learn how to draw centuries earlier (Effland, 1976, pp. 41-43).

Studies on the visual system from a cellular level have begun to reveal a means to recognize and facilitate learning due to a targeted, networked, developmental order from which to build a knowledge base. Learning has been developed with the use of methods that included 94 rote practice, schema memorization, and embodied experiences. Yet, something seems to be missing in art education because many give it up by middle school.

Drawing differences throughout history have depended on culture, economics, and policy which become embedded into an individual’s inner self (Duncum, 1997, pp. 69-70). People from the world over produce art according to what they have experienced and the materials that have been most abundantly available. Migration of people, the growth of the nation, and increased speed of shared knowledge has forged new understanding of learning. A gap still remains, however, of elementary student perspective. Perhaps building initiatives that move toward greater confidence in shared learning between teacher and student through collaborative alignment of learning level might build confidence and move students toward greater responsibility in self-learning. Building the art curriculum scaffolded around grade levels might help dissolve frustration and facilitate focus on individual learning needs to promote progress for all students. Old notions of “art for art’s sake” have left many students struggling, causing them to give up on art, and leaving them with a false sense of inadequacy.

Overcoming visual disparity, being able to draw by lifting the pencil off the paper and reconnecting where the line left off, as well as having the confidence and visual acuity to be able to do it. This development takes place from eye-opening to puberty (Daw, 1998, p. 503).

Drawing is a near activity that might help develop visual acuity (Papageorgiou, et al., 2019, n.p.).

Gibson emphasized the importance of tracing activity as an exercise for visual acuity (Gibson,

1998, p. 230). Being aware of student development to provide students with exercises that will enable each individual to reach his/her goals requires planned scaffolding and understanding typical drawing development uncertainties.

Chapter Summary 95

The history of visual art has produced a visual record of the past. This record works as an integrated validation along with generational stories and the written word. However, nothing can substitute for the lived experience of the time, that, has been left to the imagination. The way in which people learn have been through exploration and through the opportunity to figure out certain problems on their own.

The child study movement initiated empirical studies of child development to take the guess work out of education (Davidson & Benjamin, Jr., 1987, p. 41). Visual art pedagogy, a late comer to the public education scene, had been designed for the middle school level with the idea that teachers would make the necessary adjustments to fit the curriculum at grade level.

However, when DBAE was first introduced, there was much criticism and push-back due to a variety of misunderstandings. It was not the concept of DBAE that was problematic but the implementation (Smith, 2004, p. 6-12; Duke, 1988, pp. 8-9; Hamblen, 1988, p. 33; London &

Brigham, 1988, pp. 5-6; Rush, 1987, p. 214). The introduction of DBAE began conversations within art education that included the use of cultural art projects that were “. . . outdated, ill- conceived, problematic and in need of substantial change” (Delacruz & Dunn, 1995, p. 48).

The empirical works of Viktor Lowenfeld and Rhoda Kellogg have been instrumental with helping policy makers understand the development of children through art education.

Lowenfeld and Kellogg’s combined studies have contributed to the knowledge of how to classify systems and stages of development in visual art and opening the conversation for debate,

“Educational theories are often ripened in opposition to some other theories” (Delacruz & Dunn,

1995, p. 48). Since their work many art educators have written books concerning teaching and learning pertaining children’s drawing (i.e. Drawing with Children by Mona Brooks; Making

Sense of Children’s Drawings by John Willats, and Teaching Children to Draw by Majorie 96

Wilson & Brent Wilson). These books demonstrate a type of action research done by art educators sharing their “how” techniques along with their observations. Combining their drawing techniques with the empirical evidence of perceptual development might facilitate drawing pedagogy for public education classroom practices.

It has been clear, though, that the evolution of education has been slow to progress.

Students have continued to be taught in age-related chunks and teachers remain within isolated silos of learning (Molebash, Lee & Heinecke, 2019, p. 20). The technological culture has been shifting so fast that public school budgets have not been able to afford to keep pace. Teachers have a difficult time keeping students focused on the practices involved in learning and

“Procrastination is still the thief of time” (King, Jr., 1967, n.p.).

The concern that began with the child study movement has continued with a curriculum that has been struggling to align with all subject areas (Davidson & Benjamin, 1987, p. 42).

Visual art might be the bridge that education needs for the benefit of enabling students to explicitly make meaningful connections by applying mathematics, science, social studies, music, physical education, and language arts to visual art. This would require art teachers to become aware of explicit teaching through grade-level curricula and would help administrators recognize the benefits of applied learning at the elementary level. The mission, forty years ago, was to gain a “. . . more comprehensive understanding of how the arts are taught and why” (Duke, 1988, p.

7). However, a gap remains, not between theory and practice, but between practice and alignment of the curriculum.

Scaffolded education has meant to meet the student at his/her particular level. Scaffolding for a seventh-grade skill needs to begin, as educators know, in kindergarten. However, visual art education has often been used in a general rather than explicit sense. Standard curricular design 97 has not worked well with the complexity of visual art methods. Art educators in the past have typically minimized the complexity of art instruction through process where every student in the class has created a similar product (Gude, 2013, p. 6; Effland, 1976, pp. 41-42). Scaffolding might be better considered as action research through trial and error instruction where teacher and students develop an integrated understanding for which students “. . . apply their ideas to personally relevant problems” (Linn, 1994, p. 4). This way students come to understand whether they need to finish so that they can understand the steps needed in the process before they refine their product or, decide, if corrections made along the way better serve their product.

Planting the seed, for thinking ahead, might begin to help students reflect and synthesize in order to modify (Linn, 1994, p. 3). This process leads students to metareasoning through discovery, self-evaluation and the ability to “. . . make reasonable decisions about when to persist and when to abandon attempts at syntheses” (Linn, 1994, p. 6). Students develop spatial reasoning with drawing systems that enable them to figure out the system to put into use for the intended outcome, for example, many elementary-level students use a map style verses a drawing style as two separate genres (Wolf & Perry, 1988, p. 25).

The literature review has shown that the process of empirical work to implement change has taken centuries. The work of aligning the curriculum that began during the last half of the

19th century continues into the 21st century. Creating, responding, and performing (CRP) have been implemented as 21st century national standards for the arts. This small study on drawing intends to implement action research to determine drawing practices that work best for elementary-level students.

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Chapter Three: Research Design

The purpose of this qualitative research has been to understand how 8-10 yo elementary students see and learn how to draw. The questions listed below have been used to uncover how

8-10-year-old level elementary students see and learn how to draw in order to provide teaching practices that develop strategies that serve all learners. Through basic qualitative research 8-10- year-old level participant voices have demonstrated their developing points of view. The goal has been to work with participants to uncover what teaching strategies work best. The questions listed below have driven the research:

How do participants overcome the uncertainty?

How do participants make decisions?

What has made participant perception different than the adult researcher?

What enabled participants to know what to draw?

How have participants used baby schema?

What type of schema have participants developed?

How does copying facilitate drawing?

The next several paragraphs have demonstrated the use of combined theories. The combination includes psychologists, art educators, and designers to create a hierarchal model of teaching and learning that have guide teaching and learning toward a spiraled cycle of intrinsic motivation that would boost practice and, thus promote continuous learning. The model has been influenced by the new Bloom’s Taxonomy and Uri Bonfenbrenner’s ecological model.

The purpose of the next several paragraphs has been to conceptualize the iterative model

(see p. 123) to demonstrate the use of combined theories as they have related to the internal and external art processes of the participants. One set of theories has related to child development 99 external behaviors through the psychologists Skinner, Bruner, Piaget, and Inhelder. The second set of theories related to the internalized artistic ways of knowing as described by Goldschmidt,

Marshall, and Williams. As an instructional designer, the researcher, has implemented Irit

Sasson’s (2019) three-dimensional methodological framework to gauge participant learning in the study. The researcher has combined the theories and models above and interpreted them through Sasson’s three-dimensional framework as an iterative, spiraling cycle for which instruction has been scaffolded to construct successful participant learning through task analysis and goal setting. Success has been demonstrated through a series of transitions within the cycle.

The completion of a cycle produces an artifact that becomes the intrinsic motivation to begin the process again. Visual art education, as with all other subjects, requires behaviors and practiced skill sets that need to be learned to enable student success.

First, B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism has been used to develop procedural knowledge with the use of low-order thinking skills that instill simple mental tasks through rote learning.

Procedures have been divided to guide participant thinking with care and safety through “. . . repetition and information recalling” (Sasson, 2019, p. 167). Behaviors have been established for the purpose of developing good habits as a foundation for building knowledge and skills to be remembered and performed at a quality rate. Repeated good habits create good thinking skills in an ordered environment to enable growth of learning. The scaffolded element consists of low- dose practices. Generalized learning becomes rote and participants begin to anticipate.

Anticipation might be considered as a step toward demonstrated internalized knowledge.

Internalized behavior becomes a cognitive process for which specific concept knowledge may be emerging. Participants at this level may be ready to explore learned processes on their own. The behavioral routines and processes established in visual art have been initiated for safety, care in 100 exploration of materials both for self and others. The safe and careful handling of materials and processes has indicated readiness to move to the next step of assessment on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Second, Jean Piaget’s cognitive theoretical framework has been used to understand internalized thinking. Internalized thinking has been recognized in expected behavior assessed using the first step of the new Bloom’s Taxonomy “remember” (Voskoglou, 2019, p. 295). When participants exhibit procedure or rule following, they have internalized the process as a way of knowing. These thought patterns have been linked to specific content, therefore, participant thought patterns fit specific knowledge structures as determined by the researcher (Sasson, 2019, p. 167). Participants have begun “seeing as” and “seeing that” with the combination of drawing elements. The researcher has demonstrated, reminded, and encouraged the participant to explore the balance of dark and light tones to help clarify what s/he sees “The concept of cognitive apprenticeship is analogous to that of apprenticeships in many occupations where one learns on the job by closely working with a master” (Applefield, Huber & Moallem, 2000, p.10). The participant must connect to a reasoning modality by way of the decision-making process

(Goldschmidt, 1991, pp. 123-140). As a participant’s externalized knowledge has become internalized, higher-order thinking skills spiral, and continue to construct new knowledge.

Third, Jerome Bruner’s constructed knowledge has been linked to specific psychological learning approaches. The introduction of a new element applied to the old, begins the scaffolding process again as a spiraled combination of newly learned knowledge has been built on old knowledge. Participants have experienced the practice of constructive learning. Participants given a new task have demonstrated the ability to repeat knowledge given a new task. In other words, participants did not leave learned tasks behind but instead incorporated old learned tasks with new learned tasks (Sasson, 2019, p. 171). Participants have shared through interviews, how 101 the transfer of learning has happened (Sasson, 2019, p. 171). “Imagining that and imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) have been connected to spiritual and emotional modalities. The behaviorism for the particular medium in use has become automatic for care and safety, yet still in the exploratory or remembering stage for materials, but the process has spiraled to Bloom’s

“apply” level. Individualized learning becomes guided by the researcher for participants ready to take their exploration to the next level. The researcher looks for repeated symbolic images and has helped the participant to further clarify his/her image. Images have been spiraled with participant’s application of different points of view, inclusion of personal experience, and reflective thinking by self-critiquing aligns with Bloom’s parallel assessments; create, evaluate, analyze (Sasson, 2019, p. 171).

The use of the educational principles and practices of combined psychological theories enabled the tasks to be matched to the goals. Behaviorism belongs to B. F. Skinner and, typically, instills repetitive routines and practices. These routines and practices can be seen and considered as an external point of view. The transformative learning from behaviorism to cognitive practices can be seen when the learner follows the rules and routines established for behavior. This transformation has become automatic and internalized. The transformation from an external behavior process to an internal thought process can be seen in active learning. When the learner becomes self-directed, for example, s/he has used internalized thinking or cognitive planned action that advances learning. Higher order thinking skills have been considered as cognitive only (Sasson, 2019, p. 164). Internalized knowledge can be observed by the researcher through language as well as noticing that the participant has the ability to apply the repetition of tasks in different contexts. Exploration becomes constructive, thus creates the spiral of more learning. The principles and practices in education have external and internal views of learning 102 that enabled students to mastery of specific goals. The study has been dependent on the researcher’s ability to match the appropriate task to the intended goal. The lessons were planned within a modality created by, “being with” and “being there,” translated as a wide-awakeness tool that can be evidenced by both researcher and participants (Rebecca Williams, 2017, p. 7).

The awareness has been an explicitly crafted encounter.

Internal processes have used the Bloom’s Taxonomy model as a measure or guide for cognitive only, higher order thinking learning objectives. Bloom’s model has been improved over the years being revised in 2000 by Lorin Anderson who changed the six levels of nouns into

“. . . verb forms” reading from the first level beginning on the bottom with the use of action words to help state what students should be able to do. The inverted triangle representing the hierarchy of action might also provide a visual for level of difficulty with the simplest action on the bottom and the three most difficult in parallel at the top. The action words read from bottom to top respectively; remember, understand, apply, analyze-evaluate-create (Voskoglou, 2019, p.

294-295). These verb forms helped the researcher plan student learning objectives.

The three dimensions listed above weave together with the psychological approaches and constructivist learning environment that supports knowledge and practice through the process of scaffolded tasks to enable the participant to construct her/his own learning (Sasson, 2019, p.

171). Once behavior has been established participants transition from external behavior to internalized thought or cognition. External success has been seen in transitional behaviors that exhibit a transfer of learning to other contexts. Internal success has been seen as self-directed learning, motivation, and ultimately persistence. Participants spiral from low-order thinking skills to high-order thinking through scaffolded lessons. Lesson plans have been developed to target, in sequence, “behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.” 103

How do 8-10 year-old elementary level students see and understand an image?

Throughout the development of art education practices the perspective has been taken through adult perception and recent studies of the visual system have demonstrated that children and adults perceive in developmentally different ways (Yu, 2012, pp. 292-298).

The interview process in this qualitative action research study required a collaboration between the researcher and the participants. Co-created interpretation provided student voice.

The use of open-ended “how” and “what” questions were used. VTS interview questions served the needs of the researcher’s data better than the survey questions directed toward the participants (Yin, 2018, p. 99).

Qualitative Research Approach

There have been two main umbrellas under which all research methods reside; one has been labeled quantitative and the other qualitative. Quantitative methods pertain mainly to capturing scientific data through “. . . careful control of empirical variables” and qualitative methods pertaining to a wide range “. . . of empirical procedures” surrounding the social sciences

(Ponterotto, 2005, p. 128). Qualitative methods use the information provided by participants in the context of their setting while quantitative collects and measures particular causes by comparing large amounts data (Ponterotto, 2005, p. 128). The epistemology of qualitative research lends itself to the social sciences while quantitative lends itself to physical science (van

Gigch, 2002, p. 199). Conversation or discursive methods have been used to provide internal evidence. The epistemology of drawing, then, has been to understand the internal structure of conceptual systems of meaning that connect conceptual and procedural knowledge. (Rata, 2019, p. 2). The qualitative design method was chosen for the study due to its use in research in the social sciences. 104

Qualitative research methods of inquiry use rich descriptive data to describe meanings, purposes, context and insight, of human participants (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 106). The qualities of qualitative research method pertain to the particular paradigm used for research inquiry and has been referred to as “interpretive research” (Creswell, 2007, p. 21). The approach that researchers take using qualitative research has been linked to action for reform to improve the lives of participants by providing oppressed participants with a voice to change oppressive policies (Creswell, 2007, p. 21). Interviewing participants has been a method of qualitative inquiry that has been used to elevate participant voice in order to persuade change.

The constructivist-interpretivist paradigm has been described as “. . . the primary foundation and anchor for qualitative research methods” (Ponterotto, 2005, p. 129). The goal of the constructivist-interpretivist paradigm is to understand the participant’s experience.

Knowledge is interpreted and constructed into meaning (Schwandt, 1994, p. 118). Objective knowledge and truth have been socially determined by active mind constructs of knowledge through the senses that make accumulated impressions that become concepts (Schwandt, 1994, p. 125). The only way in which to understand the experience of the participant would be through dialogue because the reality of the experience happens in the participant’s mind, therefore, interpretation “. . . cannot properly be said to be verifiable . . .” (Schwandt, 1994, p. 122).

However, social science belongs to the family of persuasions for which constructivist- interpretivist epistemology belongs. Through an interactive dialogue between the researcher and the participant a co-construction of emic interpretation becomes etic through shared dialogue and symbols (Ponterotto, 2005, p. 129). Understanding begins with the recognition of ourselves in others and is a form of analysis (Dilthey, 2012, pp. 7-8): 105

“From the thought processes involved in understanding we can first separate the kind of

grammatical and historical spadework which only serves to transpose one who attempts

to understand a fixed remnant of something past, spatially distant or linguistically

foreign, into the situation of a reader from the time and milieu of its author” (Dilthey,

2012, p. 137).

Furthermore, Dilthey describes the production of art as the highest task of understanding because it involves the re-creation of lived experience, that he refers to as a creative “re-experiencing”

(Dilthey, 2012, p. 17). Gibson’s theory related individual understanding, not as a dualism of mind and body, but instead, described an individual’s awareness and relation to the world as inseparable (Gibson, 2015, p. 133). The literature review has demonstrated anthropologically, economically, and politically that people have created knowledge through social constructivism by “. . . the collective generation of meaning as shaped by conventions of language and other social processes” (Schwandt, 1994, p. 127). Action research lends itself to the social aspect of social constructivism through knowledge sharing in collaboration using mutually acceptable ethical practices within an organization that promotes positive growth (Wilson, 2000, n.p.).

Knowledge has been demonstrated by a transformation in perception from inquiry to an appraisal of the experienced qualities (Schwandt, 1994, p. 125). Knowledge is actively constructed, and qualitative inquiry is subjective, making it complementary to physical science’s objective form of inquiry (Schwandt, 1994, p. 131). The constructivist-interpretivist paradigm provides a natural approach to knowledge construction that aligns with Gibson’s economy of perception for example, gravity is a simple reality, but it is lengthy and difficult to describe

(Gibson, 2015, p. 127). Gibson used a constructivist method and demonstrated that the active mind constructs knowledge by fusing the senses to create a schema (Gibson, 2015, pp. 241-242). 106

Schwandt described these constructs as making impressions that accumulated into concepts

(Schwandt, 1994, p. 125). Schema, then, might be described as an internal concept or interpretation created through physical experiences.

Qualitative research was chosen due to the many variables that affect the developing individual. Interpretation of one person by another has been considered a judgement, because no one person can get inside the mind of another person. Interpretation requires thick description

(Schwandt, 1994, pp. 221-235).

Triangulation has been a method used to offer an alternative validity to the hermeneutics of a study on the basis that “Objective reality can never be captured” (Denzin, 2012, p. 82).

However, Ellingson’s crystallization framework might offer alternative validity especially if participants use different genres of pictorial representation as has been mentioned in the literature (Wolf & Perry, 1988, pp. 24-3). Therefore, to develop triangulation in action research might best be served from feedback with the inclusion of the administrators, community members whose participants have been involved with the study, as well as the participants

(Wilson, 2000, n. p.). This addition of community as public intellectuals has been indicated as a method to enhance the research (Ellingson, 2014, p. 6). Providing data feedback to the community has been the defining mark of action research (Wilson, 2000, n. p.).

The theoretical framework will be used as the lens to understand the ontological growth of the perceptual system and the fluid, transformative, nature of how individuals begin to recognize and understand themselves in their environment (Creswell, 2018, p. 62). During the era of child development studies researchers used Piaget’s stage theory to investigate the cognitive development of children. Studies of children’s drawings were also investigated proving that drawing was developmental, and proceeded in predictable stages (Lowenfeld, 1987, p. 137; 107

Baker & Kellogg, 1967, pp. 384-388). Since that time studies on the human brain have begun to demonstrate that in addition to progressing in developmental stages at particular age levels, human development has also depended on experience, and can be both progressive and regressive, something that Gibson regarded as affordances; “. . . an awareness of the world and of one’s complementary relations to the world are not separable” (Gibson, 2015, p. 133). The strength of the action research process has been attributed to satisfying “. . . an educator’s need for “fit”” (Sagor, 2000, p. 5). The particular qualitative method used for this study was General

Inductive Analysis (GIA).

General Inductive Analysis (GIA)

The three key characteristics used in General Inductive Analysis (GIA) helped the researcher to: 1. Condense raw data into a brief summative format; 2. Create links that can be demonstrated and defended between research objectives and findings; 3. Develop a framework based on the underlying processes and experiences found in the raw data (Thomas, 2006, pp.

237-246). The study used three levels of data analysis. The first level condensed the recorded participant social talk and the informal interviews`.

The first level of analysis aligned responses from the VTS interview format to the study questions to interpret responses as evidence. Second level analysis categorized participant responses using Piaget and Inhelder’s stages of drawing development as related to the intrinsic artistic processes of Goldschmidt, Marshall, and Williams. The third level of analysis used the first two levels to interpret and provide evidence that answered professional practice questions

(see Appendix A).

The study was guided by specific evaluation objectives established by the themes:

“seeing as/seeing that” (Goldschmidt, 1991), “imagining that/imagining how” (Marshall, 2007), 108

and “being with/being there” (Williams, 2017). The concepts were derived through

interpretations that emerged from the data. This type of analysis is inductive as opposed to

deductive. The difference being that deductive analysis sets out to test previously identified as

goal-driven assumptions in comparison to existing data. Inductive analysis findings are goal free

meaning that the data bubbles-up as a result of the study.

GIA has been commonly used in the social sciences because it involves procedures for

taking a broad range of data and plugs into themes and categories. Even though this type of

analysis may seem to describe pattern finding coding, it does not, because it involves individuals

with different responses. The findings of the data have also demonstrated that the participants’

responses fell into domains of visual perception not a set of specific findings. The GIA approach

involves categorizing the data into key themes for which the researcher whittles down from

multiple interpretations of the raw data.

GIA 5-Step Inductive Coding Process for Study

1 2 3 4 5 PREPARE RAW READ THE DATA CATEGORIZE THE NOTICE CATEGORY DATA DATA CATEGORY REFINEMENT • First iteration CROSS-OVER • Transcribe audio. familiarizes. • Define categories from • Categorized quotations • Weekly reflective field • Second iteration notice participant phrases. • Some responses can be convey the essence of notes for Site A and common threads. • Define themes using coded into more than the category. Site B. • Third iteration look for elicited participant one category. • Photograph participant themes. responses from VTS images. • Memos

Participants

The participants of the study were sixteen children who volunteered from two public

elementary schools within the same school district. The children volunteers consisted of nine

girls and seven boys. Nine participants were from Site A and seven participants were from Site 109

B. The participants volunteered to participate in the afterschool drawing study. The purpose of the study was to discover how participants saw images and learned how to draw. The ages of the students at this level ranged between eight and ten years-old. The sampling of students was random and resulted from their parents’ consent and permission as well as the participant’s willingness to volunteer and consent to participate. Participants were volunteers and could leave the study at any time without question.

Procedures

Procedures followed a spiraling continuum of Bloom’s Taxonomy model that enabled the assessment of both process and product. Each phase of learning began with a “remember” task, followed by an “understand” feature, then the opportunity to “apply” and develop knowledge through exploration and experimentation, and finally to stand back and reflect on what was applied to make judgements through the parallel processes that included “evaluate—analyze— critique.”

Scaffolded lesson plans were developed with the use of backward planning. Since

Bloom’s Taxonomy would help with the assessment of student growth, then, lesson plans needed to fit participant’s individualized personal goals at the appropriate developmental level. Material handling had to be addressed first to establish safety, order, and classroom cleanliness as remembered, responsible routines. Routines establish positive high classroom expectations that enable collaboration.

Once routines were established the transition to materials and processes included what the materials were made of how they were made, the availability, variety, and how to use them safely and carefully. Participants were given the opportunity to explore and experiment with the 110 material, share findings and critique the medium based on Josef Albers’ concentration exercises

(Kelly, 2000, pp. 5-6).

Based on individual participant drawings the researcher evaluated use of line, shape, and tone to establish a baseline in order to target growth for each participant. Then the researcher interviewed each participant to find out their drawing goals. Participants have been interviewed with the use of a video camera viewing the image to capture the produced drawing along with the participants discursive data. Goals were categorized as emotion, thought, and action (Cole &

Knowles, 2008, p. 62). Participants were encouraged to bring to class their own exemplars or have the researcher find and print one.

The next class began with the researcher modeling positive evaluations based on the previous learning task, analysis, critiques and established goals, thus providing a review. The researcher used imagination categories to scaffold visualization techniques used by designers to help participants plan and produce a drawing; “seeing as/seeing that” (Goldschmidt, 1991) and

“imagining that/imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6), and suggesting the genres haptic map style or visual drawing style (Wolf & Perry, 1988, p. 25; Lowenfeld, 1945, pp. 104-106).

Participants were interviewed for their personal analysis of the lesson, what they thought, what they learned compared to what they already knew, what they would add to their work or take away, if they were satisfied with their drawing, and what they would change.

Each successive lesson proceeded following the Bloom’s Taxonomy order. The lesson order also followed the order of visual pathway development according to the scientific research from the literature review: Lesson 1] Students will be able to balance lights and darks; Lesson 2]

Students will be able to create shapes and lines (sticks & blobs); Lesson 3] Students will be able to connect shapes (concave and convex); Lesson 4] Students will be able to create different 111 points of view (genres); Lesson 5] Students will be able to create shadows (disambiguate the image). During the production of drawing still pictures and reflective field notes were used to collect data.

Visual thinking strategies (vts).

The VTS strategy was developed by Abigail Housen’s study which linked responses to aesthetic development (Housen, 2002, p. 100). Here the term aesthetic has been used to mean

“judgement” which is a form of analysis and demonstrates the ability to take an image apart in order to evaluate its overall structure (Voskoglou, 2019, p. 295). The VTS curriculum has demonstrated transferability across both social context and content areas (Housen, 2002, p. 117;

Yenawine, 2013, p. 25). The use of open-ended questions enabled participants to share their views and generate meaning (Creswell, 2018, p. 8). VTS uses three qualitative style open-ended questions as prompts to facilitate talk about art (Yenawine, 2013, p. 25).

• What is going on in this picture?

• What do you see that makes you say that?

• What more can we find?

The purpose of using VTS interview was to help new knowledge “stick” by enabling students to notice and connect what they see with language (Yenawine, 2013, p. 7). Inquiry begins with a wondering and VTS enabled students to explore visually and vocally their wondering (Yenawine, 2013, p. 8). The first question prompts the eye and mind to work together engaging the “. . . sensory perceptions and the brain’s language centers” (Yenawine, 2013, p. 25-

26). Each question is paraphrased by the researcher which provides validity to the student’s answer thus building observation skills and scaffolding deeper learning (Yenawine, 2013, p. 30).

These questions have been used to prompt participants to talk about their art. The interviews 112 were transcribed and analyzed using the formats below to categorize individual participant’s interview data. The purpose of the interview was to discover how participants created their images. The categories have been used to determine generalizations among interview data.

Recruitment and access.

The initial approval from Northeastern Institutional Review Board (IRB) provided access to the forms to be used for the recruitment of participants. Since the participants were children a careful review of the study was necessary. Permission was granted in a hierarchal process beginning with the assistant superintendent of schools in the district and the principals of both schools. Then student-participants were recruited by way of a consent form sent home to all 7-10 yo level students’ parents/guardians as well as having been included by posting on each school’s website. Students’ participation will be random and based solely on returned and signed consent forms. The study was offered as an after-school program.

Data collection.

Interviews were conducted with individual participants. The participants were seated so they were able to view their artwork in front of them with the video camera positioned off to the side so as not to view the participant, but only their work, and to audio-record their responses.

Each participant received two interviews using the same VTS protocol questions. The first interview happened at the beginning of the study when participants were asked to create a balanced drawing that included the “three Ps”: pattern, perspective, and proportion. The participants then participated in eight weeks of drawing classes. Five lessons provided a design concept to explore for each one of the concepts (The three Ps: pattern, perspective, and proportion). Students were provided with additional instruction, as needed, during the class. The

3Ps were scaffolded according to student experience and practice level. At the end of the five 113 lessons participants were asked to draw a picture and apply the concepts and techniques that were practiced during the weekly lessons to create a balanced work. This was done to determine if students were able to use expression which will indicate greater confidence and demonstrate learned visual reasoning.

Data Analysis

The operational measures for the concepts that were derived from the VTS were in themselves a form of triangulation of concepts promoting engagement, reasoning, and meaning making (Yenawine, 2013, pp. 25-26). The VTS questions were used to prompt participants to talk about their artwork in order to provide data during the interview. VTS was used to generate the data from the interview process in which the participants were asked the three protocol questions to generate discussion about their own artwork. The interviews were transcribed by the researcher by listening to the video recording and typing individual responses into a Microsoft

Word document. Each participant’s interview was analyzed and interpreted by the researcher.

The interpretation was clarified by the participant and the collaborated interpretation was categorized using: “seeing as,” “seeing that,” “imagining how,” and “imagining that.” Each of the categories were coded based on the interpretations given for each particular description. The data was analyzed using triangulation of the protocols below to provide evidence of visual reasoning, spiritual/emotional, and applied strategies. The data analysis was used to discover if explicit teaching of certain images removed ambiguity to reveal how students see and understand visual images. The results of the triangulation of the researcher’s interpretation analysis were verified by students’ feedback and a better understanding of student meaning and student responses were recorded to correct researcher misinterpretation as needed. Common generalizations were looked for and similarities were considered as indicators of analogous 114 ambiguities. While analogies at first may seem like “thin generalizations” over time generalizations may be narrowed down (Yin, 1981, p. 62). This narrowing down of generalizations might demonstrate a particular level of visual perception that has developed or one not yet attainable for the 8-10 year-old elementary level such as involved with depth perception: occlusion (overlap, atmospheric perspective), scale (size), point of view (front, profile, foreshortening). The use of the triangulated protocols, below, combined with participant art and interview documentation will provide a chain of evidence that will enable an understanding of how children see and understand images.

Winger Sei-Wo Tseng.

The idea of uncertainty when performing a work in visual art has been found to be caused by ambiguity of drawing. It is the ambiguity of the image that has inspired designers to find alternative approaches to their work (Tseng, 2018, p. 524). Tseng has used two categorization systems developed by Howard Jones (1998) and Fish & Scrivener (1990) to assess the visual properties of sketched strokes and the attributes of sketches respectively (Tseng, 2018, pp. 525-

526). From the assessment of the visual properties it was discovered that uncertainty was triggered by eight properties and visual reasoning was based on four cognitive actions (Tseng,

2018, p. 527). The uncertainty and visual reasoning were used to understand the eight strategies that help to overcome ambiguities. Below are the categorical descriptions for which the researcher will use to focus and discover through participant interviews and field notes.

Nigel Cross.

Uncertainty has been determined the nature of creating. Professional designers typically generate solutions to conceptual design activity through an iterative process of “analysis- synthesis-evaluation” (Cross, 2001, p. 82-84). Cross evaluated empirical studies of design 115 protocols and summarized three major aspects of design knowledge: problem formulation, solution generation, and the use of design process strategies (Cross, 2001, pp. 79-98). The findings indicated that intuition was the most effective and relative to the nature of design

(Cross, 2001, p. 98). The limitations to design protocol process have been due to the difficulty in capturing non-verbal thought processes. Although Cross believes that more studies are needed to understand how students might be enabled to gain design expertise, he outlines seven strategies that can be used to generate ideas, five solution generators: fixation, attachment to concepts, generation of alternatives, creativity, and sketching; and two process strategies: structured process and opportunism (Cross, 2001, pp. 96-97). These might be helpful for participants who have difficulty with deciding what to draw.

Rebecca Williams.

The use of “being with” and “being there” facilitates the act of wide-awakeness through relational and intellectual components of pedagogical practices (Williams, 2017, pp. 7-26). The qualities for “being with” include listening intently, responding thoughtfully, being humble, cultivating care, awakening through carefully crafted encounters, and giving support, encouragement, sharing, contributing, relying, comforting, and remaining positive. The qualities of “being there” included crafting relevant encounters, unpacking prompts together, asking VTS type questions to engage student thinking, being thoughtful, reflecting and exploring ideas and/or materials, and recognizing that all encounters can be viewed differently. The researcher will be reminded that each art class should be special and that, “Every day we have to be able to come together differently than we might in another class” (Williams, 2017, p. 11). These qualities have been discussed earlier as behavioristic qualities related to procedural concepts that can be 116 measured according to the action on the first rung of Bloom’s Taxonomy as “remember” for the purpose of developing positive habits of mind.

Cora Marshall.

The creating of culture provides a spiritual connection during art making activities. The triangulation of three different levels of thinking; spiritual level, emotional level, and intellectual level, have been provided by Marshall’s empirical study and will be used to categorize the interview data. The use of “imagine that” helps to connect data to the participant’s spiritual connecting through the imagination for which the participant makes connections to the past and future to validate identity (Marshall, 2007, p. 3). The emotional level will be found through

“imagining how” where the researcher listens and watches for passion, energy, and purpose

(Marshall, 2007, pp. 5-6). The intellectual connections will be made by the participant when s/he is able to place ideas, words, and the work into a personal expression that provides continuity between what has been perceived and what has been imagined (Marshall, 2007, pp. 6-7). The purpose of this protocol is to notice if participants added expression to their work. These qualities have been discussed earlier as cognitivist qualities of constructing meaning that can be measured according to the action on the second rung of Bloom’s Taxonomy as “understand.”

Participants at this level are able to demonstrate internal thought through external behaviors.

These external behaviors are exhibited in the ability to explain personal interpretation with examples such as comparisons and classifications.

Gabriela Goldschmidt.

Visual reasoning can be developed through the act of sketching on tracing paper. Images can be constructed by breaking them down to the simplest shapes (i.e. circles, rectangles, triangles) and reconstructing them according to their relationships to create a coherent image 117

(Goldschmidt, 1991, pp. 123-129). Sketches can become the rough maps for the shapes and demonstrate decisions about size and orientation of shapes no matter the abstractness

(Goldschmidt, 1991, p. 130). The pictorial reasoning used by the participants will use the following for codification: “That” to represent the elements (lines, shape, and colors) and “As” to represent the arrangement and context of the elements (Goldschmidt, 1991, p. 131). This protocol will be used to demonstrate participants’ use of visual reasoning and to demonstrate participant ability to see how to break down an image to facilitate their drawing. Sketching might help participants to generate creative ideas from their imagination by looking for the “fuzzy stuff” within their sketches (Goldschmidt, 1991, p. 130). These qualities have been discussed earlier as constructivist qualities that can be measured according to the action on the third rung of

Bloom’s Taxonomy as “apply.” The measurable actions that the participant would exhibit at the application level include the use of self-learning strategies through the application and use of practiced knowledge in new situations.

Ethical Considerations

The study has gone through the Northeastern University Institutional Review Board for approval. The necessary permissions for student participation have been obtained by way of informed consent. The staging for the study was held as a one-hour, after-school program. The protection of the participants anonymity was secured with the use of pseudonyms. The study was used to enhance education in visual art and all students in the program benefitted. Participants were free to withdraw from the study at any time.

The data was collected by way of reflective field-note documentation, transcribed video- taped interviews, observation/photographs, and surveys. The data will be stored on the researcher’s personal password-secured external hard drive, slated specifically for the research 118 data, connected to the researcher’s personal password-secured computer. Interviews will be transcribed using a Microsoft Word document for each participant. Photographs will be placed in a PowerPoint application, and video will be stored on the password protected external hard drive.

Trustworthiness

The use of VTS for the data has been a proven method and has provided external validity and generalizability for the production of talk about art and its transferability for observation to the nursing domain (Moorman et al., 2017, pp. 127-129). The use of VTS validation provided member checking that also allowed for members to create meaning through consensus. Member checking was on-going and members openly state both their approvals and disapprovals.

Gabriela Goldschmidt’s use of ‘seeing as’ and ‘seeing that,’ in her article Dialects of Sketching, is a method of argumentative reasoning between mental imagery as being pictorial or discursive, and demonstrated that artists have a dialect that is used as a strategy to help them work through image uncertainty and ambiguity (Goldschmidt, 1991, p. 131). The use of Wittgenstein’s parallelogram and the use of imagined triangles to provide a measurement solution provides credibility of mental imagery as imagistic reasoning based on the ability to recall previously perceived images and provided internal validity (Goldschmidt, 1991, pp. 128-129). Cora

Marshall has given three levels of protocols to provide confirmability in preference to objectivity connecting art making to expand world views and cultural identities by “imagining-that, imagining-how, and seeing as” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 1-6). Rebecca Williams, in preference to reliability, has brought together protocols to create a wide-awakeness that will be used by the researcher to establish awareness of engagement to enable participants to persist with exploration of ideas to fuel personal agency development (Williams, 2017, p. 1). The use of solution generators and process strategies (Cross, 2001, pp. 85-93) along with an understanding of 119 concept (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967) and perceptual development (Gibson, 2015, p. 67; Zeki, 2013, p. 7; Marr, 1976, pp. 508-516) will help the researcher scaffold individual learning.

Bias

The researcher has realized that all studies carry bias based on individual knowledge and experiences. The researcher worked hard to keep an open and non-judgmental approach to the participants of the study in hopes that the study would promote a love of drawing and continued practice.

Limitations

The limitations of the study constituted time and number of participants. The study groups at each site met only once weekly for one hour over an eight-week period. A year-long study might have demonstrated the emergence of V3 pathway development which might have been recognized by participant willingness to include tones and lines inside shapes as had emerged with Grim/Pica’s drawings. The limited number of participants did not provide enough scope of what is typical in a classroom setting. The transferability of the study may or may not be applicable to other subjects, however, other subjects might enhance learning through the use of visual art practices.

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Chapter Four: Findings and Analysis

The purpose of the study was to discover how the participants learn to draw by determining if difficulties in drawing were due to perceptual development. “How do children learn to see and to draw? What methods of drawing motivate participants to practice on their own?” The analysis of transcribed interviews and artifacts of participant drawings have yielded three themes and nine sub-themes. The design of the model enabled the researcher to sift through the data and remain aware of the categories of the participants’ responses. Piqued awareness enabled the researcher to recognize where participants needed perceptual help to experience personal physical and mental growth. The model was designed based on the creative processes.

Typical or common strategies that all designers use were uncovered and aligned with Gibson’s theory of visual perception. Coordinated artistic growth in technique and knowledge of art materials and processes promoted a variety of perspectives for participants. The participants who had volunteered for the study were beginning of the year third-grade elementary-level public school students.

Study Site A

Pseudonym Gender D. O. B./Age (years.months)

Ava Female 12/26/2010/ 09.10

M & M Male 09/01/2010/ 09.01

T. J. Male 11/18/2010/ 09.11

Nia Female 05/31/2011/ 08.05

Diddo Female 02/24/2011/ 08.08

Mia Female 02/24/2011/ 08.08

Grim/Pica Male 10/12/2010/ 10.00 121

Be Stick Little Female 06/02/2011/ 08.05

Ham Female 01/07/2011/ 08.09

Study Site B

Pseudonym Gender D.O.B./Age (years.months)

Mindy Female 08/20/2011/ 08.02

Jeff Male 11/08/2010/ 09.11

Ava Female 12/31/2010/ 09.10

Nam Male 04/26/2011/ 08.06

NoNo Male 12/12/2010/ 09.10

Em Female 05/30/2011/ 08.05

Bananya Male 12/30/2010/ 09.10

The findings of the study have been categorized under the three main themes shown in the model (see model below): Seeing as & Seeing that; Being with & Being there; and Imagining that & Imagining how. These three themes became the “look fors” during the data collection process. The “look for” themes included B. F. Skinner’s external practices for remembering,

Jerome Bruner’s constructive application, and Jean Piaget’s planning for understanding. The systems that were used to keep track of the data were: participant survey, parent/guardian survey, participant parent contact and attendance sheet, weekly reflective field observation sheets, study memos, video recordings and transcriptions, interviews, photo images of artifacts, and an insight journal. Drawing lessons were planned from an array of art educator practices that aligned with empirical visual perceptual growth studies. The data was captured from the lessons, analyzed, 122 and iterated categorically into data worksheets. Based on the many questions from the proposal the data was broken down further into three matrices that separated the data to align with the three themes: a meta-matrix, an interview questions matrix, and a protocol questions matrix (see

Appendix A for Protocol questions matrix only).

Three sub-themes have been categorized under each of the three main themes for a total of nine sub-themes. The sub-themes have demonstrated the three main themes from an eight to ten-year-old point of view. The first three sub-themes found under the first main theme, “Seeing as & Seeing that,” have been recognized by the participants’ ability to notice, link, and regard.

These abilities were recognized when the participants remembered or recollected their knowledge. The second of the three sub-themes, under the second main theme “Being with &

Being there,” have been recognized by the participants’ ability to listen, respond, and participate demonstrated through exploration and experimentation in drawing. Finally, the third of the three sub-themes found under the third main theme, “Imagining that & Imagining how,” have been evidenced by the participant’s ability to modify the quality of shape, line, and space with their confidence to compare, decide, and edit. When the participant has been able to recognize that changes to line, shape, and space, change the appearance of the image then they have demonstrated internalized knowledge. 123

The educational objectives of the study were organized under Benjamin Bloom’s idea of the higher forms of thinking that would promote participants ability to analyze, evaluate, and create. Empirical studies of the brain have demonstrated the developmental aspects of human visual perceptual development relative to physical and mental growth. Vision touches all areas of the brain because it has been related not only to the external five senses but has also shown to play a critical role in developing the inner or proprioceptive senses. The developing participants demonstrated what they knew from what they had learned in the classroom as well as from their individual experiences and contacts that exist outside of public school. 124

Theme One: Seeing as & Seeing that

“Seeing as and Seeing that” means that what an individual has seen has been relative to what s/he has experienced and can connect with words that describe and communicate

(Goldschmidt, 1991, pp.123-143). Visual learning happens gradually over time. Learning by watching and paying attention has been typical practice of visual art. An individual with a visual deficiency has a loss in his/her sense of seeing to decipher, understand, and gain knowledge at this early elementary level. Visual learning at this level happens during a critical period of visual learning development. The individual has to be able to notice something to become aware of its presence. When an individual has been affected by the presence of what s/he sees, then new information has been linked to old, and has allowed the individual to connect, personally, with what s/he has seen. This effect has caused the individual to regard or think of what has been seen in a specific way. Seeing as/that has related to both personal and schooled knowledge and experience and develops slowly over time through disciplined levels of ability to notice, link, and regard.

Sub-theme one: notice.

The defined use of notice, for the purpose of the sub-theme, has been the use of the verb’s meaning to become aware. The mental action of sight and the physical action of drawing require an individual to notice and copy what they see. This has often been a source of frustration for young individuals who may not yet have the visual stamina, mental knowledge, or physical ability to perform. The researcher explained the importance of understanding eyestrain, drawing posture, and pencil pressure to the participants. Participants were encouraged to gently cup their eyes with their hands when they experience eyestrain, to use their non-drawing hand to rest on or manipulate their paper, and to learn how to use different pressure on their pencil. 125

“Researcher: Look at Grim/Pika’s hand position over here. Look at his hand position while he’s working. See how nice and relaxed this hand is. [. . .] your second hand needs to be relaxed so you can move your paper around” (see Appendix B).

The researcher also instructed participants to place marker caps on the back of the marker rather than clench it in their free hand. When three of the participants held the marker cap in their free hand it made them tense while drawing. Specific zentangle designs were used as exercise to warm-up for drawing and also helped the researcher understand the participants’ visual perceptual level. The researcher used three different zentangles, Ladybug, Hollibaugh, and

Paradox, during the first three-four weeks of the study to help participants to warm-up with shape, line, and space (see Appendix B). Typically, a zentangle contains a variety of patterns, however, the researcher used only one pattern each session. Since third grade participants were new to zentangle pattern styles the use of more than one pattern would have overwhelmed the participants. During site B’s first study the researcher tried several patterns that proved to be too many differences for at least one of the participant’s eyes. The awareness gained from noticing applied to both the participants and the researcher. Each of the three zentangles taught the importance of repetition and persistence. The Ladybug Zentangle introduced pattern with repetition and persistence, the Hollibaugh Zentangle introduced perspective, and the Paradox

Zentangle introduced proportion and order.

The researcher discovered that, rather than use the separate language of the elements of art and principles of design, it was easier for all participants to begin to grasp the elements and principles categorically as pattern, proportion, and perspective (the 3Ps). It has been much easier to point to one of three categories to help participants than fourteen (arguably seven elements and seven principles). It has also been possible to scaffold the 3Ps. For example, participants had 126 been presented with a limited pattern at each session with the use of a one pattern only zentangle.

The same was done later with proportion and perspective. As participants grow in the discipline of visual art their ability to combine traits has been defined as creativity.

Twelve out of sixteen participants were able to notice that persistence with their work would create a dazzling design and the researcher was able to notice the areas where the participants struggled. Four out of sixteen participants struggled with where their lines ended,

Seven out of sixteen struggled with the maintenance of space between lines, some had no difficulty, and seven out of sixteen showed lack of stamina by not finishing. Using the one- pattern only zentangle helped the researcher notice, specifically, where participants struggled with line and shape creation. Line endings and joinings were found to be difficult areas as well as keeping the space equal around the ladybug. The Hollibaugh proved to be a wonderful introduction to over/under-lap (a perspective) that seemed not yet to be developed at the beginning of 3rd grade. The paradox was achievable by one participant. That means that within the “notice” sub-theme there have been noticeable levels of differences between participant perceptual abilities. Using the one-pattern only zentangle helped the researcher notice, specifically, where participants struggled with line and shape creation.

The Ladybug Zentangle, for example, demonstrated that six participants struggled in accuracy with where to begin and end the line that surrounded the black half-circles. The line should have been drawn as an arc or aura that enclosed the black half circle. However, seven of the participants, connected the arc to the previously drawn aura or even to the solid half-circle and caused the space to be pinched closed when there should have been an equal amount of space between the small black shape and aura that surrounded it. One participant did not end the line completely and left it unconnected or open-ended, and five participants extended the line 127 beyond the zentangle’s frame (see Appendix B). Not knowing where to begin or end the line happens when the participant’s hand blocks her/his visual path while drawing the line. The participant needs to be shown how to use his free hand to maneuver the paper so that his eyes can have a clear view of what he is drawing.

The researcher noticed that there seemed to be a sense of uncertainty demonstrated by participants who had an incomplete zentangle frame. Six participants struggled with the persistence and lacked the quality of visual acuity (Vinter, Bonin, & Morgan, 2018, p. 15). The zentangle was used in the first three weeks of the study as an exercise to warm up the participants’ visual system and to introduce them to particular drawing concepts (i.e. rounded corners, overlap, and line direction). The Ladybug Zentangle, for example, was used to introduce participants to the quality of rounded corners,

“Researcher: . . . and turn your paper and go around that and go around each one. You go

around your ladybug. Diddo: I’m not done. Researcher: You turn your paper. [. . .] O.k.

then and then when you get all the way around you are going to go around again, and

you’re going to keep doing that. That’s why it’s called a Zentangle because it gets you in

the ZEN-Zone, . . . Mia: M & M yours looks good. Be Stick Little: I’m done. M & M:

Thank you. Mia: You’re welcome. Researcher: O.k. great. So that’s what this is, it’s an

exercise. M & M: I don’t have any more space. Be Stick Little: (giggling). M & M: I

don’t have any more room. Mia: Can we do a different one? Researcher: Do you want to

do a different one of these or do you want to get on to the drawing? Diddo: Drawing. M

& M: Drawing. Mia: Different one. Researcher: This is, this is, we just do this to warm

up, o.k. So that we can get to the drawing.” 128

Since the study took place at the beginning of the school year the researcher was mindful to remember to consider the participants as end of year second graders/beginning of the year third graders. All of the participants needed a lot of encouragement to persist in order to help them through uncertainty, build their confidence level, and to complete the Ladybug Zentangle.

The researcher had simplified the Zentangle to a one-pattern design that they repeated on a small square paper (6” x 6”) with a black felt-tip marker. The process of creating a pattern has been a common drawing method used to build a repetitive drawing routine common in visual art. Eight participants were able to complete the Zentangle, however, six were not.

When a participant was able to make a connection to what s/he was drawing then s/he had demonstrated what s/he noticed, linked the image to something known, and regarded the image with a word name, thus, demonstrating an awareness of seeing as and seeing that. Piaget’s stages provided the reasoning levels in the model and have been categorized in the stages ranging from Stages IA an awareness, IB an awareness and desire, IIA an awareness and memory, IIB the beginning of strategy use, IIIA a demonstrated use of strategy, IIIB an understanding of the process, and finally Stage IV the ability to combine processes. The ability to combine processes, as seen above, defined creativity.

Stage IA, for example, demonstrated a noticed awareness, “M & M: It looks like a spider web. Mindy: It might hypnotize you.” Ava, however, struggled visually, and demonstrated the possibility of eyestrain, “It’s giving me a headache.” The statements from the participants above have demonstrated their response to the dazzlement caused by the ambiguity of repeated line and space. Two participants enjoyed it and wanted to continue making zentangles, demonstrating

Piaget’s awareness and desire, while the rest of the participants wanted to move on to the kawaii style drawing. 129

The rounded Ladybug Zentangle practice had been intended as an exercise to help participants adapt and be able to change the quality of a rectangle shape by creating a rectangle with rounded corners. The link from the Zentangle to the kawaii style drawings was to create the quality of rounded corners. Rather than the use of typically sharp, pointed corners of a rectangle, for example, the rounded corners of the shape gave a sense of softness with a pillow-like quality.

The Hollibaugh Zentangle, however, presented perceptual developmental difficulty due to the created illusion of depth. Participants needed to be able to over/underlap shape to perform this particular Zentangle. While students were able to draw the Hollibaugh Zentangle they had great difficulty with the over/under-lap and the shading with the graphite as it created ambiguity between the shape created by the parallel lines and the background spaces indicating that they could perform the task of how to draw but could not perceive and understand the depth perspective effect, “Em: I’m stuck though. I can’t find my side. Jeff: It really looks so hard.

Bananya: Mine looks completely bad. Em: It looks like that’s plaid. Ava: We’ll you couldn’t have sewed that.” The participants expressed attempts to make sense of what they saw yet seemed to show that they could not get beyond the ambiguity of the image. Therefore, like a magic trick that has been too difficult to perform, none of the participants were ready perceptually, yet, to take on the illusion of depth through the performance of over/under-lapped shapes.

The over/under-lapped image caused an uncertainty because the shapes and spaces created an ambiguity between the background space and the foreground image. Visual ambiguity has been caused by binocular vision. Each eye sees a slightly different image, due to the space between the eyes, and has made it difficult for the participants to make sense of the pattern. In one instance, the background seems to recede, and the foreground seems to advance. However, 130 in the next instance the reverse occurs, and the background advances while the foreground recedes.

The researcher finally had participants add tones to the sides of the shapes where the shapes crossed over each other to try and help the participants distinguish the shapes from the background spaces. Two participants took notice and therefore made connections. Jeff made his connection to the Hollibaugh Zentangle’s parallel lines stating, “It looks like lasers.” NoNo connected to the image with his comment that, “It looks like a tic-tac-toe thingy.” The participants’ drawings of the Hollibaugh Zentangle demonstrated their ability to add shading.

However, it seemed that all of the participants struggled to understand the concept that the shapes over/under-lapped each other. When shading the Hollibaugh Zentangle participants indicated that it was too hard,

“NoNo: I feel like I’m done shading. [. . .] Jeff: Is this good? Researcher: Ya! Do it on

the other side too. [. . .] I think you’re doing a really good job. I didn’t do this with the

kids at Study Site A. You think I should try it with them? Mindy: Ya. Researcher: You

think they’ll like it? Mindy: No. Researcher: You don’t think they’ll like it. Why? Mindy:

I don’t know. Jeff: Maybe because it’s hard for you but it might not be hard for them.”

The above statements from the participants indicated that the over/under-lap was perceptually difficult. The artifacts demonstrated that the difficulty was not that the participants were unable to perform the over/under-lap; therefore, it must be that their perception has not yet reached this particular conceptual understanding or depth perception.

The Paradox Zentangle built on the concepts of the two previous zentangles and sharpened the participants’ attention and focusing skills. Participants needed to, not only keep track of their line direction, but they had to keep the order and placement of each drawn line. The 131 purpose of the Paradox Zentangle was to enable participants to map out kawaii style hair in a three-step process. The researcher had the participants number the corners of their zentangle frame and used the math-terms “less-than” and “greater-than” to describe how to draw the line within the frame. The numbered corners were to help them to keep track of their drawing direction. This zentangle proved too difficult for all but one of the participants. They all stuck with it and tried it several times because they had the desire to persist due to the magic dazzlement of the finished pattern. The difficulty was in the maintenance of close spacing between the drawn lines. This development has been comparable to writing words on a line with letter spacing, and accuracy in the alignment of stacked numbers for addition and subtraction in math, and even the abilities of physical performance. The proprioceptive understanding became evident when the researcher and participants discussed differences between wooden and mechanical pencils,

“Jeff: Ya, they’re not wood. Ava: (raising hand) that these ones you press the top and it comes out. Researcher: Well, you press the top and the graphite comes out, but, if you’re drawing . . . Mindy: They break easier. Researcher: They do break easier, ya . . . NoNo: If you’re heavy handed. Researcher: What’s that? If you’re heavy handed, that’s right NoNo. So, it kind of teaches you to be, um, how to draw lightly, but if we wanted to smudge something we need to use, ah, the graphite from the wooden pencil because the graphite pencil, I mean the mechanical pencil does not, um, smudge . . .”

The participants have demonstrated different levels of notice with the materials and processes through personal experiences. Two participants at this level have been able to control their pressure when drawing and others have not yet developed that sensitivity, “T. J.: O.k. I’m not going to use that. They keep breaking.” This participant explored the different graphite 132 materials but returned to the wooden pencil because he could not yet control his sense of pressure and became frustrated when the thin graphite in the mechanical pencil continued to break.

Sub-theme two: link.

Link means to make, form, or suggest a connection with or between an idea and image.

The link that individual participants make to the image connects them in both a universal way as well as a personal way. Participants have often blurted out what the image looks like to them and often four participants would agree while three disagreed and saw something else. The pillow- like quality of the simplistic kawaii style emphasized the soft, cuddly, characteristic that created cuteness in the image for which young participants have been attracted referred to as “baby schema” in empirical studies. Drawing the kawaii style produced a Stage IB response that demonstrated an awareness of the image and the desire to create it, “Mia: It’s a pig! Nia: A koala. Be Stick Little: It’s a koala. Mia: Mine looks like a bear. Mine looks like a bear.

Participants: Ohhhh (sounds for cuteness).”

The use of memory and desire allowed the researcher to interest the participants in three more kawaii animal drawings. The worksheets for the kawaii-bear, kitty, bunny and porcupine had three simplified visual steps rather than written steps. All the participants seemed to appreciate this type of worksheet, “Researcher: . . . Does it help to have a worksheet to look at?

Nia: Yes. T. J.: Yes. M & M: Yes.” Since the participants had been guided step-by-step in drawing the kawaii bear they had developed confidence and were able to refer to the worksheet while they explored drawing on their own. Two participants had demonstrated how visual art builds collaborative learning at the height of blooms taxonomy through analysis, “M & M: Like 133 this (showing Nia) you draw the ears. Nia: Too big.” However, the participants seem overly self- critical when they try to emulate visual worksheets,

“Ava: Mine is so bad. Ham: Mine looks so fat, er, weird, mine looks weird. Ava: I know.

Like this. T. J.: Mine looks terrible. Be Stick Little: Mine looks so wide it’s like (razz berry noise). Ham: I don’t know how to make it look like that. I mean I don’t like how they put the off the line. Nia: Imagine that. Ham: Mine looks weird because I didn’t do the ears yet. M & M: I want to make the koala bear. Nia: We already made the bear. M & M: Well, I can still make it.

Ham: I thought you already said you made it. M & M: I mean we did but you can still make it.

Ham: Mine looks terrible. Diddo Mine looks so fat. Look how fat mine looks. M & M look how fat. Nia Look how fat.”

The young participants do not understand, yet, the value of repeated drawing. Participants need to be explicitly taught to link practice with the idea of a newly learned image. They need to be shown how to explore the image with methods that explore how to join lines with the choice of convex or concave lines. They should also be shown, explicitly, how to explore the different qualities in pattern, for example, space variation, shape density, line thickness, solid and empty space and shape. One participant discussed his desire to explore the kawaii bear image again, “T.

J.: I want to make a koala bear. Nia: We already made the koala bear. Be Stick Little: We can still make it. M & M: We did, we can still make it.” This confirmed that participants needed encouragement to explore drawing through the expressive distortion of images. When participants learned to draw a particular image twelve did not explore the use of the image again when allowed to draw on their own during the study. Practice needs to be defined and emphasized as repeating and exploring the same image over and over again.

Sub-theme three: regard. 134

The term regard, for the purpose of sub-theme three, means the thought of the image and process in a specified way. Visual literacy involves individual understanding of the meaning of an image. Images have a long history and have demonstrated the fluidity of cultural change.

Images have evolved and changed over time and have supported a variety of meaning dependent on time and place. Knowledge and understanding of the historical time and place changes the image’s meaning. Naturally, participants do not see an image in the same manner as the adult researcher. The participants have just begun to have the opportunity to make their own connections and relate to an image in a personal way. To rule over the way in which an individual sees an image may cause an ambiguity that disconnects the participants from making a personal connection to how they see an image and interfere with the individual’s personal image evolution. Twenty-first century children have their own visual culture derived from popular images found in electronic games. When participants have been able to internalize an image in their own way they have been able to make connections from their perception. One participant, for example, related the kawaii-style softness to a “Squishy” a type of toy popular at the elementary level, “M & M: It looks like a Squishy.” This was an example of the participant teaching the researcher something about his world and how he saw the image as a popular toy.

This information has helped the researcher in drawing instruction by creating a connection between the image and the current culture. This connection to the “Squishy” toy would have better helped the researcher to enable participants to understand the contrast between the appearance of sharp edges/corners and soft ones.

Interpretive Conclusion of Theme One

“Seeing as and Seeing that” have been strategies that professional designers have used in their creative work (Goldschmidt, 1991, pp.123-143). The participants have used this same 135 strategy when they have made a connection to what they see. Even without the use of the Visual

Thinking Strategies (VTS) format, the participants made connections through the use of their own vocabulary and visual experiences. The participants demonstrated their openness to learning when they connected images to familiar physical objects and shapes that they had learned in school.

The difficulty seemed to be the stamina of looking. The ability to look at an image and then to return the glance back to the paper in order to draw the image demonstrated that tracking with the eyes was exhausting for the participants. Drawing difficulties and successes were easily assessed with the use of the simple Zentangle patterns that demonstrated perceptual levels of individual participants based on their personal experiences. Participants connected at different levels of notice, link, and regard. The use of a single zentangle pattern seemed to be a way to introduce drawing concepts to the participants in a manner that might promote practice. This type of practice would help to build the stamina of eye tracking which may improve visual stamina in other subject areas.

Line endings and joining were found to be difficult areas as well as keeping the space equal around the ladybug. The exercises have used specific zentangle styles to enable the researcher to quickly assess where the participants had success and where they struggled so that focus could be directed in a manner that helped them build visual sense through language. The art of zentangle seems to be a wonderful way in which to provide participants with drawing concepts that promoted exploration, persistence, and a finished design. They can combine the zentangle with other works and learn to see.

Theme Two: Being with & Being there 136

“Being with and Being there” means that only through the practice of material handling and witnessing the handling of the same materials by others will an individual understand the limitations of the material, which materials are compatible, and how to best manipulate the materials either alone or together (Williams, 2017, pp. 3-4). To help participants develop and understand “the self” both mental and physical knowledge need to combine to help participants gain knowledge of physical and mechanical properties of materials and processes through the development of listening, answering, and participating. Gibson described this process as an awareness of “the self” in the environment where mental and physical come together to gain knowledge as a visual system. When participants were listening, answering and participating they were demonstrating self-awareness through their visual system.

Sub-theme one: listening.

The defined method of listening for sub-theme one has to do with focus and attention in order to become receptive and open to make connections linked to personal experience. The participants at the elementary level demonstrated similar ways of seeing that has been different from adults. The participants demonstrated that, similarly to professional designers, they have a manner of trying to turn their fuzzy interpretations into something that they can personally relate.

Popular media has influenced the images that are preferred by the elementary participants. The images of popular media have often used “baby schema,” the physical features characteristic of an infant. The school age children have been drawn to the infantile characteristic of popular media. Popular media has most recently included images from the east. These pop-culture images lend themselves to a scaffold set of age appropriate images related to reading levels under the umbrella of Manga. 137

Performing Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with the participants showed they had a keen eye for sensitivity to adult art verses the popular media of age-related manga. The researcher used the playful image of Takashi Murakami’s mural Lots, Lots of Kaikai and Kiki.

Murakami’s mural image was based on Japan’s popular culture that included Hello Kitty and

Pokémon. One participant made connections right away with the style of drawing that they had been practicing, “Be Stick Little: It is like we just did. Researcher: Ya, like what we just did! The kawaii style, right! That’s what it’s called like Hawaii. Be Stick Little: (practices the word out loud but says it softly) Kawaii.” Then six participants began to make connections to the kawaii style found in popular media and recognized the influence they had on Murakami’s mural,

“T. J.: Um, it kind of looks like, whoever, I forget what his name, did the picture, looks

like he got, he kind of replicated some of them from like Pokémon. ‘Cause some of those

kind of look like Pokémon details. Like all the big ones looks like Pokémon details.

‘Cause . . . Grim/Pika: (interrupting) Like Japanese and stuff. Researcher: What do you

see that makes you say those things? T. J.: It’s like the eye, it’s like the eyes ‘cause they

kind of look like and then like the fangs. And what’s like around like that, the white and

the pink one like they have like the color around them . . . Grim/Pika: (interrupting)

Technically Pokémon is kawaii because, because its anime and anime is kawaii. T. J.:

Oh, ya. Researcher: That’s right. Mia: You can kind of tell that like it was like kawaii

because (inaudible) kawaii faces (inaudible). Grim/Pika: This is satisfying (snapping

something). Researcher: From Asia, Japan. Alright, so what is it that you see that makes

you say what you say? Nia: Some of the hair is different on (inaudible), their happy, their

screaming, their sad, it kind of looks like they just put in Emojis and colored them.” 138

However, five of the participants picked-up on the Murakami’s adult humor and found the mural to be creepy because of the sharpness within the faces depicted with pointy teeth,

“Researcher: (inaudible) O.k. So, this is an, um, an image that this artist his name is,

Takashi Murakami, he’s from Japan. Let me show you his picture so you can see,

whoops, (flipping through the pages of his book Ego). Jeff: (breathing in and out fast)

This is creepy. Em: I see one of them has ex-eyes, that means he’s dead. Researcher: Oh,

one of them has ex-eyes and that means he’s dead? [. . .] Bananya: I see a bunch of

creepy flowers in the background (giggling).”

The participants’ comments demonstrated that they had regarded Murakami’s work as creepy and preferred the “baby schema” style of cute manga or kawaii. The researcher chose the

Japanese Manga style because it offered levels of characteristics that scaffold styles targeted for different age groups. The kawaii style scaffolds into the chibi drawing style, which, in turn, scaffolds into the demographic anime styles, and beyond. The styles provide for an easy way to mix characteristics at the leisure of perceptual readiness. The kawaii styles have been geared toward the age of the participants in the study and the participants seemed to enjoy the interactive playfulness promoted by this style through popular culture.

While many art teachers struggle to overcome the lack of focus of young art students the research has demonstrated that meeting student culture has brought joy because their perceptual abilities have been met. Keeping up with popular culture while introducing methods and materials from the past has enabled participants the confidence to draw thus perpetuate the practice that will enhance their ability and build their confidence. By listening to one another the participants learned multiple ways of seeing.

Sub-theme two: answering. 139

Answering has been defined as a method of verbal response and emotional reaction.

Participants often respond to an image with a word prompting the attention of fellow participants to react with their own words. The participants seem to come to a group consensus in which four participants have come to an agreement of dialogue and experience. The participants often shout out what an image reminds them of which is typically not in line with what the adult wants them to relate to. However, it has been the participants’ method of trying to make sense of what their eyes have told them what they have seen based on their young experiences,

“M & M: It’s going to be a cat. Nia: Or a panda. Participant: Panda! Be Stick Little:

Panda bear. Researcher: O.k., then on the inside of that, you’re going to draw another one

so that it’s going to look like an ear. Do you see it? Mia: Is it a panda bear?.” Mia: It’s a

pig! Nia: A koala. Be Stick Little: It’s a koala. Researcher: From here, from your center

line, we’re going to make a little line down and then we’re going to make a little “U”

shape on this side . . . Diddo: Wait, it’s a koala, it looks like a koala. Nia: I’m going to

make big eyes. Researcher: . . . and a “U” shape on that side. Al right, we’re going to

make a “u” shape that’s at an angle here. Mia: Mine looks like a bear. Mine looks like a

bear. Participants: Ohhhh” (sounds of “oh” for cuteness).

The responses above demonstrated the participants’ anticipation of possibilities of what the image may become. These anticipated responses seemed much more positive than how the participants responded when given a worksheet with the printed images. Six participants were excited and happy when they were being shown how to draw step by step than when provided visual directions on a printed worksheet. The researcher did not give them an example to look at because their attention needed to be on the act of drawing rather than the outcome of the image.

The act of drawing teaches participants how to focus. 140

The combined act of mental focus and physical drawing can become overwhelming and frustrating. The researcher helped participants how to learn to find familiarity within their drawing to help them stay focused while having fun. The researcher created a playful, silly awareness to help participants enjoy and play to break-up the tediousness often involved in developing stamina for persistence. For example, while drawing the Ladybug Zentangle, the researcher suggested that the image looked like a bunch of eyeballs, “Jeff: There’s so many eyeballs. Researcher: Isn’t it fun?”

Nine participants mentioned that they had been taught how to draw by a parent or an older sibling. They seemed to prefer the intimacy and patience of another person to show them how to draw slowly, step-by-step, relating lines and shapes to images that they have already practiced daily in school such as letters and geometric shapes. The use of geometric shapes and letters aligned with their knowledge base and became a mechanism for them to draw since they have had more practice at letters and geometric shapes in their daily classroom activities than they have had in their weekly art class. The participants might be more apt to stick with the kawaii style as a learned method for a long time and be motivated to practice.

“Mindy: So, I like to um, draw real life people. Sometimes a little bit of it is just like not real and then I try to make it more realistic, so it looks like a real person, like making all these lines (inaudible) (gesturing with pencil over the portrait). Researcher: And how did you learn to put all those lines? Mindy: So, my mom taught me how to do it when I was. Like when I was like just drawing in my room my mom came in and said, What are you doing, and I said, drawing, and she just like came in and she like taught me how to draw like real life faces and so you just go like a dress and make, um, make a circle, put a line through the middle like this, three lines lightly, and then you just go eyes here, then like a nose here, and a mouth here. You erase 141 the other lines, so it’s perfectly lined up in the middle and where it starts to (the participant has learned a portrait grid from her mother).

“Researcher: Your mom must be an artist too, huh? Mindy: She draws a lot of things.

Researcher: Wow. That’s why you’re so good you both draw together. That’s really

special. Mindy: Besides, if you look closer here you see some of the (inaudible) lines

(participant is gesturing with pencil pointing out the lightly sketched grid lines for setting

up the portrait). Researcher: Oh, ya, you were able to do them so lightly. That’s really

hard to do. Good job. Mindy: And there I erased the lines.”

Mindy described an intimate time where her mother took time and patiently showed her the strategies artists use to create a portrait. Mindy learned from her mother how to create a simple grid to help her with the placement of the facial features. Mia, a different participant, shared how she had learned to draw a portrait from her older sister, “Mia: She, um, taught me, [.

. .], so she taught me how to draw, um, faces, and like we draw a line like very lightly and we draw another like curved line like that (gestures with whole arm).” Mia has described the intimate experience that she has with her high-school aged sister who has helped her to learn how to draw. Ava too described that her brother taught her finer details of drawing such as how to place the highlighted reflections in the eyes, “Ava: So, he always said if you put like that little like reflection in the eyes they both have to be facing the same way and they (inaudible due to interruption of another participant) look the same size so it looks the same (inaudible) kawaii.”

Ham’s mother also gave her instruction in which Ham explained that, “. . . she told me to do one step at a time.” It was these intimate details that the participants shared with the researcher that enabled the researcher to understand how the participants learned how to draw. The intimately collaborative experience of one-on-one instruction demonstrated that tiny bits of explicitly 142 stating methods of solution-finding rather than problem-solving seemed to resonate more and stick with them.

Sub-theme three: participating.

Participating with drawing means that an individual has become involved, engaged and persisting with personal agency. The ability to persist requires and inner dialogue, an argument within the mind for which an awareness of judgment and decision-making occurs. The decision- making becomes the individual’s interpretation through a figuring-out process for which imagination becomes her/his personal expression. Six participants demonstrated deep reflective thinking, which could be metacognitive in nature, because those six participants revealed that they understood the use of past work evolved into current work that has continued to be used,

“Ava: So, I like drawing picture frames and now I draw my frames and I draw the corners

like triangles and then I connect them from like the sides, so it makes it look like a

picture frame. Then I decorate the corners and then I’m going to color these in a color

(referring to the shapes created by dividing the square picture frame with diagonal lines

from the top of the picture frame to the bottom of the enclosed picture frame). And when

I was younger I loved painting and I painted a plaint, a plate, and I liked squiggly lines

and I drew a rainbow all over the plate, I painted a rainbow. With a pen, so, with a pencil

I drew squiggly lines and then I painted a rainbow on it. So, I remembered that, so I put

that in my, um, what’s it called? Frame. Researcher: Oh, so it was a memory. Ava: Um,

hum. Researcher: And are you putting it just like it was in your memory? Or are you

doing it a little bit differently? Ava: Ah, um, well a little bit differently. Cause when I

first, when I did it I was in kindergarten, so I really didn’t know um, how to draw the 143

lines and how they’d match and how to decorate the corners. So, I’m doing different for

the corners in the frame. And, but, everything else is practically the same.”

The participant has shared her process of combining images consisting of regular shapes and lines by creating the “triangle corners” first. In this way the participant has forced herself to lift her pencil off the paper and she has developed the visual acuity to be able to reconnect her lines to her corners. Ava’s recall and solution finding demonstrated that she practiced drawing and figured out on her own the importance of being able to lift the pencil from the paper to reconnect to the drawn line. She has also demonstrated the development of her internal schema when she related having done a similar drawing when she had been in kindergarten and how she had struggled with being able to connect the lines along the sides of her drawing to the drawn corners.

Interpretive Conclusion of Theme Two

The development of the visual system needs the repetition of practice so that students can delve into practices for which they have been given time to work and figure out problems on their own. “Being with and being there” (Williams, 2017, pp. 3-4) develops understanding through an authentic task. As with the idea of learning to hold a baby chick, the child develops sensitivities by performing the action of drawing. S/he learns about pressure, how to lift the pencil off the paper and reconnect to the drawn line. The elementary level student needs to be exposed to many materials and processes and therefore, practice in drawing, as with all other subjects, needs scaffolding to carry students more comfortably into other material processes. The use of the Japanese pop culture styles has built-in scaffolding that promotes a back and forth mixing of styles that has provided opportunities for students to stretch the level of difficulty as well as scale back and continue to practice within their personal comfort zone. Through the 144 action of participation an individual comes to understand limitations of the media, developing sense of touch, and the many different points of view that promote the evolution of style differences.

The use of pop culture in art education has been politically shunned in favor of fine arts.

This post-modern way of thinking has been racially charged and held back the progress of visual art within public education. Fine art methods have been utilized within the pop art media and have continued to move the work of artists forward. There have been generations of people educated to believe that visual art requires inborn talent and that some people have creativity while others have lacked it. Perhaps using pop-culture can have a positive bridge to enable all children to learn to draw. The Japanese pop culture can provide the scaffolding needed to assess developmental levels of drawing giving educators a better understanding of the participants’ point of view and internal understanding through conversation about what has been drawn.

Drawing, as a language, has been overlooked as a beneficial insight to progressive education.

Theme Three: Imagining that & Imagining how

“Imagining that and Imagining” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) how means that individuals make cultural connections through their visual artwork on a spiritual and emotional level. These connections demonstrated a combined effect for which the various parts of mental, physical, and emotional traits have worked together to produce a drawing with an enhanced result greater than the separate effects. Participants make comparisons, decisions, and edit their work when they have used their imagination.

Developing strategies to enable students to overcome uncertainties in drawing were noted by Gibson and found to include line endings, direction, and qualities. The researcher has used a structured process coupled with explicit teaching to enable participants to generate solutions. 145

Explicitly teaching students about concave, convex, vertical (standing), horizontal (sleeping), and slanted as well as top, middle, bottom, sides, greater-than, and less-than will help students to connect their learning by bridging to other subjects. Through demonstrations that show decision- making and self-talk, mistake making, and exaggeration, the researcher guided participants through drawing. The use of a structured process has been used as a strategy to overcome uncertainty through the practice of a drawing style geared to the participants’ perceptual development level. The researcher used a structured process through three different styles. The kawaii, Warli, and chibi styles were used as a method that bridged one drawing method to another. The kawaii style was made up of the basic shapes (triangle, circle, square) with rounded corners. The Warli style of drawing related to the kawaii with the same yet un-altered basic shapes with line attachments (see Appendix B). When the researcher demonstrated drawing the kawaii kitty the tail had been forgotten, “Researcher: Isn’t that adorable! Oh, I forgot the tail. Ya, we’ve got to put the tail on, right? M & M: How do I make this? Researcher: Just a little blob on the side.” The researcher has used the language learned from David Marr’s vision studies and

John Willats description of “sticks and blobs” as visual differences in the drawing process.

The chibi style built onto the kawaii and Warli by adding the parts to the whole to create a chibi style figure. The chibi style figure has distorted proportions with a head twice the size as the body demonstrating “baby schema.” Throughout history the human figure has been considered the most difficult image to draw. The researcher had hoped that teaching the participants how to draw a figure in their early stage of learning would build their confidence enough to inspire continued drawing practice. Unfortunately, the researcher was not able to demonstrate the opportunism strategy that would have demonstrated an exaggerated and expressive gestural drawing method. 146

Sub-theme one: comparing.

Compare means to point out similarities and differences, to notice different qualities, and to clarify ambiguities. The participants have learned comparison strategies in school and also have begun to figure out ways to make comparisons through verbal communication. The same has happened during the study with the comparison of image styles. Participants at the beginning third grade elementary level do not yet have the visual perception for subtle differences but in order for them to arrive at that level images have been bridged using both a contrasted style as well as a similar style.

Professional artists look back and forth many times when they copy an image whereas the child will look only once. The participants have not yet developed the muscle stamina in their eyes to look back and forth. Young participants have demonstrated difficulty in relocation of the position on their paper when they look far and then near again. Therefore, the researcher found that the elementary level participants seemed to prefer strategies that entailed one-on-one demonstrated strategies about an image rather than the physical strategies of looking back and forth to copy an image. This meant that the researcher helped participants find solutions by using a separate piece of paper to demonstrate. The researcher found images with minimal detail that used familiar shapes so that participants could avoid having to constantly look back and forth.

The use of the kawaii style and explicit instruction enabled the participants to draw images from the visual instructions on a worksheet. After having been given step-by-step instruction of the kawaii style bear for which the participants followed along, the researcher passed out a worksheet with three more kawaii style animals (kitty, bunny, and porcupine) for the participants to practice. The worksheets for the kawaii-bear, kitty, bunny and porcupine had 147 three simplified visual steps rather than written word steps and participants seemed to appreciate the visual worksheet,

“Researcher: Does this help (as I handed out the worksheets). Does it help to have a

worksheet to look at? Nia: Yes. T. J.: Yes. M & M: Yes.” Participants who had attempted

the porcupine, however, were unable to figure out how to create the shape of the

porcupine because of the concavity and convexity within the shape of the fur (see

Appendix B). Eleven participants did not attempt to try to draw the porcupine,

“Researcher: You can try the porcupine if you want to. “Be Stick Little: Ya, um, I’m

good. Nia: Ya, I’m good. M & M: I’m good. [. . .] M & M: It’s too hard.”

The following week the researcher passed out a worksheet of Warli stylized animals. The review of the video transcriptions informed the researcher that the participants were studying animals in their classroom. The participants connected the Warli style animal drawings to the stars and constellations, due to the geometric shapes that made up the head and body along with the lines for the neck and legs. The researcher had also added dots to the lines where they changed direction,

“Researcher: I have another drawing that I thought you might enjoy, and these are made

out of simple shapes that you’re already familiar with, o.k? Diddo: Stars. T. J.: Stars.

Researcher: So, um, let me know what you think about these. This is an ancient style of

drawing that goes back five thousand years. T. J.: What! Some of these look like

constellations.”

The participants were comparing the drawings to their school knowledge as well as their personal knowledge. Three of the participants seemed to enjoy the Warli style of drawing while other participants did not. Jeff demonstrated his understanding of the Warli style and found that 148 it facilitated his drawing, “Jeff: I like triangles design. [. . .] It just makes it easy to draw.”

However, Em and Bananya, demonstrated their dislike for the simplistic style, “I’m better at doing free draws then studying drawing what people tell me to draw. Bananya: Same . . . Em:

The second chicken is going to be hard.” Em and Bananya concured, “Em: Animals in shapes they’re not supposed to be in? Bananya: Someone created weird looking animals, that’s what I say.” Four participants felt that the Warli style had enabled them to draw with excellence, “Nia:

Oh, ya. This is the best drawing I ever did. Jeff: I’m doing that one too. (background laughing) [.

. . ] Em: Mindy How do you like mine? This is mine. Jeff, how does mine look? Jeff this is mine.

Jeff: Ooh, that’s good. T. J.: Actually, I kind of want to do more of those animals.”

The Warli style was abstract and it took Em time to break through the uncertainty to understand what her eyes had seen. Em had missed the first two study meetings; therefore, her first meeting was the drawing of the Warli style figures. Em seemed to warm up to the Warli style, however, when the researcher showed the book The Blue Jackal by Shobha Viswanath and Dileep Joshi with Warli illustrations, “Researcher: Look at how they draw the um, . . . Em:

Oh, my horse is up there.” Jeff, T. J., and Nia had expressed their delight in drawing the Warli style animals. Em seemed to develop pride of her Warli style drawing. She demonstrated her pride when she shared her drawing with Jeff. Jeff then boosted Em’s confidence when he complimented her drawing.

Sub-theme two: deciding.

Deciding means to come to a settlement, to make a choice, to determine, calculate, and resolve. Participants make decisions both internally and externally and often help one another in the decision-making process with suggestions. Often times participants fear mistakes and have 149 been reluctant to make a decision at all. One participant described the difficulty that he had in knowing what size to use,

“Researcher: [. . .] So, what did you find hard about it? M & M: Wait, what? Researcher:

About doing this? M & M: Um, like the circle. Researcher: Did you use your line of

symmetry? M & M: I don’t know, wait not that part, the whiskers, because, um, you

don’t know what shape they and how big they should be. Researcher: you can make them

as big or any shape that you want. M & M: You can? Researcher: Yes, because you are

the artist. Does that help you? M & M: Kind of, ya.”

Here the researcher should have first modeled slanted line direction to enable participants to see that the lines for the whiskers on the kitty were at an angle. Then the researcher should have demonstrated an uncertainty strategy and generated alternatives by drawing the whiskers too long, too short, too high, too low, and demonstrated self-talk that helped with the internal decision-making process that determined where the whiskers looked best. Demonstrated self-talk as a strategy may have helped participants to know that what they had been thinking internally was important in helping them with what they decided. The use of tracing paper as an overlay would also aid participant’s exploration because the exploration done on the tracing paper would avoid excess erasure on the drawing.

Jeff and Mindy’s kawaii style drawing of a bunny showed, through their conversation of what they saw, how a simple figure had become ambiguous,

“Mindy: Are you drawing a frog? Jeff: Bunny. Mindy: It looks like the ears were the

eyes. NoNo: It actually does. Researcher: And the eyes are spread way far apart. The eyes

are out at the ends of the shape. Jeff: How are your’s so good. Look at mine (whining

voice). Look at my bunny (other participant laughs) Nobody has to see it. Researcher: 150

And then right in line with the bottom of the eyes is the cute little bunny mouth like that.

Jeff: It looks like a frog. Researcher: And he’s got rounded teeth coming out like that.

Jeff: It kind of looks like a frog. It looks like a frog. Why does it look like a frog?

Researcher: Oh, for the teeth? Oh, I get it, I get it. I have two teeth. Jeff: Buck teeth.

Researcher: And then legs. Jeff: this is the real buck-teeth deal. Researcher: they angle in

a little bit and they’re little tiny, can you see it? They angle in a little bit. Jeff: It looks

like a frog instead of a, what is it? Instead of a . . . Mindy: A bunny.”

Mindy had seen the ears of the kawaii bunny as eyes and her suggestion of the image

changed the way in which Jeff had seen it too. Soon Jeff could no longer see what he was

supposed to be drawing and could only see the ears of the bunny as the big eyes of a frog

(see Appendix B).

Children typically put at least two dots and a curved line inside the shape that they have planned for the face (Kellogg, 2015, p. 46). This seems to support the idea that children have devised a strategy to disambiguate the shape as an image. Typically, the child places a face on the inside of the shape before s/he has continued to draw. Lines within shapes tend to be seen as a facial feature, “Grim/Pika: I just realized the “Js are the arms.” Grim/Pika had thought that the simple

J-shapes inside the body of the kawaii bear were the facial cheeks but later recognized that the Js represented the front legs.

Sub-theme three: editing.

Editing an image means to make changes, revisions, improvements, condense, and organize. Editing in drawing seemed to be an exhausting process for elementary level participants often erasing lines that have been drawn too dark. Participants have just begun to develop some control of their drawing tool. However, they have the ability to change the quality 151 of the line as a method of editing. Changing the qualities of lines as drawing edits might be best referred to as a drawing strategy,

“Researcher: Ya. And it doesn’t matter if you happen to go outside the line then you just

make the shape bigger. Does that make sense? Be Stick Little: That’s what I do.

Researcher: Ya, you already figured that out. Nia: That’s exactly what I do. Ava: I do too.

Researcher: That’s a strategy. Grim/Pika: Artists always mess up before they have their

fin, their final picture. M & M: Yup.”

“Imagining that and imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) can boost confidence when participants have arrived at a consensus about the process as evidenced by the participant comments above. A piece of tracing paper has been a wonderful solution finding remedy because students can place the tracing paper over their drawing and try out different solutions without erasing so much.

Often times the participants collaborated to help each other get better at drawing. Nia, for example, helped M & M improve his drawing,

“M & M: Wait, what are we doing? Nia: Draw a line across. Researcher: (inaudible)

Make it really light. So, from my line that I drew down here I’m going to draw a line over

here . . . Nia: A little lighter.”

There have also been times when frustration occurs. One participant had compared an imagined image to her drawn image. Mia shared a time when she had been frustrated. She had found it difficult to draw what she had pictured in her mind’s eye,

“Researcher: And what is the hardest part about drawing? Mia: That like, sometimes

when you draw it doesn’t come out the way you want it and then you get like angry cause

it’s not the right way and then it makes you like, work and work and work so then you 152

finally do it the right way. Researcher: So, how do you know that it’s not the right way?

Mia: Well, not really the like, the right way, but like the way you wanted it to turn out.

Researcher: You mean like the way you had it pictured in your mind’s eye. Mia: Ya. Ya,

like you have it pictured and then you, um, do it and it doesn’t turn out right.”

Editing her imagination was a difficult uncertainty for Mia as it would have been for an adult too, however, her idea was there. Mia’s imagination offered the perfect opening for the researcher to share the strategy of opportunism that could have showed her a way to introduce expressive drawing through exaggerated gesture, however, the researcher missed it.

Interpretive Conclusion of Theme Three

When participants make personal connections in their drawing it indicates that they have used their imagination. Imagination helps their thinking grow and connect to other areas of learning. It enables them to build memory that helps them to construct knowledge. Constructed knowledge helps them to imagine how to create strategies and strategies perpetuate knowledge- building. Lines, for example, relate to letters that have been used to build words and create numbers. Lines and shapes combine in visual art to create communication with images as was demonstrated with the Warli style. Participants at the elementary level need to focus more on a variety of line and shape qualities before leaping forward to shading and perspective because their brains have not yet developed to that perceptual level. The qualities of line can be related to the students’ everyday vocabulary and offer a different perspective for opposites such as thick, thin, tall, short, long, wide, curved, pointy, smooth, and can offer students an alternative language of expression. There have been many qualities of lines and shapes that have been missed while rushing students into using more materials. Students would better understand other materials if they had a better drawing foundation that they could use to bridge to other materials. 153

The eyes play a critical role into the physical and mental learning of individuals.

However, the stamina of the eye as a muscle seems to be overlooked. The eye has been studied and found to be in constant motion. Small and gross movements have been used when the eyes need to look far and re-focus onto a paper. The eyes and hand become tightly coupled over time.

When the researcher had listened to the audio recordings participants compared, made decisions, and edited their work through a socially collaborative process that helped each other to

“imagine that” and “imagine how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6). People learn best when afforded the multiple perspectives that become available through collaborative work. Visual art has demonstrated that it has been a vehicle for collaborative, cooperative work.

Conclusion

The study helped to answer the research questions; How do children learn to see and draw? What motivates them to practice? The themes presented were taken from Gabriella

Goldschmidt’s “seeing as and seeing that” (Goldschmidt, 1991, pp.123-143), Rebecca Williams’

“being with and being there” (Williams, 2017, pp. 3-4), and Cora Marshall’s “imagining that and imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6). The three themes helped the researcher recognize where participants needed methods of solution finding with the help of Nigel Cross’ solution generating process strategies (Cross, 2001, pp. 91-98). The reason for conducting the study was to inform and adjust practice based on the learning needs of eight to ten-year-old participants.

The three themes categorized processes typically used by professional designers and the study found that the participants used these processes in a similar way.

Theme One was situated with “seeing as/that” (Goldschmidt, 1991, pp.123-143) to help the researcher listen for clues to the way in which the participants recognized or interpreted images. The participants revealed connections to the images that related directly with the 154 language and knowledge that they had learned through their expanding ontological experiences at home, in school, and through individualized interests. Constructive application of lessons planned for the participants had been considered through the studies of developmental drawing.

The scaffold used for the study began with the lines and geometric shapes of Warli style drawing, then to Japanese kawaii style drawing, and finally to the use of whole figure chibi style that integrated kawaii and anime styles. The hope was that the drawing styles would create an internal schema that acted as a pneumonic device to facilitate drawing and enable the motivation for participants to practice. One participant revealed that her drawing motivation depended on her drawing needs which were sometimes emotional through memory, or technical with the need to know how to draw something in particular, and sometimes just an exploration of the medium.

Theme two revealed that three participants needed to understand that rough action with materials would cause some materials to break, marker tips to be blunted, and heavy pencil lines un-erasable. Gentle handling and manipulation of materials as a proprioceptive activity became a drawing goal for two participants to reach. Expectations in visual art provide a proprioceptive awareness that promotes thought and attention to the handling of materials and processes.

Beginning of the year third graders need to understand that their bodies and spatial awareness continues to develop and change. The researcher offered several sizes of paper to accommodate individual participant proprioceptive drawing needs and encouraged the use of both hands while drawing. Control of pressure on the pencil, for example, was a source of frustration for two of the participants. Participants were coached to use one hand for drawing and the other hand to move the paper, as necessary, to facilitate the ability to see what the hand was drawing because without turning the paper the drawing hand often blocks the line of vision. Helping the participants understand how their eyes work would also dispel difficulties they may have had 155 with image production. Knowledge of parallax, blind spots, and that each eye sees a different image would have helped them to be less self-critical and embrace their developing ability to draw. Much encouragement and praise has helped participants embrace their ability and continue to practice and, as a result, has promoted improved ability.

The use of the zentangle proved to be a means of perceptual assessment not as a physical task, because all participants demonstrated they were able to do it, but as a perceptual understanding. The Hollibaugh Zentangle, for example, demonstrated that through step-by-step instruction, the participants were all able to create the design, however, when they drew images they indicated that they were not yet ready to include underlap perspective into their drawing repertoire. This was demonstrated when one participant did not use the underlap, even though it had been learned, when she ran out of space on the side of her kawaii bunny drawing she did not attempt to draw the lollipop behind the bunny. The lack of attempt was due to the ambiguity that perspective style drawing causes at this age level. The participant would need a separate lesson, perhaps even one-on-one, that showed her how to draw behind her image and she would then need time to practice.

Theme three emerged when participants worked collaboratively to help each other with drawing. This had been seen between two of the participants at Study Site A. M & M had asked

Nia what she thought about the bunny’s ears in his drawing. Nia analyzed his drawing and commented that the ears were too big helping M & M to see and understand how to change a particular proportion of his image. The participants demonstrated the need to know how to develop the many different qualities of line, shape, and form so that they would be able to develop more ways of generating images. Gibson had also mentioned the importance of the qualities of drawing and referred to them as principles of line drawing (Gibson, 2015, pp. 274- 156

275). “Imagining that” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) referred to the individual’s cultural experiences that enrich the subject of the drawing but “imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) described where participants had struggled. According to Gibson’s theory children draw the invariant surfaces of the environment (Gibson, 2015, pp. 265-266). One participant in the study, for example, was puzzled by how long he should make the lines that represented the kawaii kitty’s whiskers. He also was puzzled by the angle or axis of the whiskers. The puzzlement of the angle or axis of a diagonal line has been empirically studied as the oblique effect. The oblique effect represents human sensitivity to the gravitational pull of the earth and has been related to visual preference for horizontal and vertical rather than diagonal orientation (Mikellidou et al., 2015, p.

9; Wasserman, Emrani, Matusz, Peven, Cleary, Price Ginsberg, Swenson, Heilman, Lamar, &

Libon, 2020, p. 2). The oblique effect could be considered another type of perceptual development benchmark for students at the second-grade level (Jamil, 2007, p. xxxiii).

Chapter five will demonstrate how teaching to the participants visual perceptual level enhanced the experience for teaching and provided on going coached improvement. An awareness of the participants’ visual system included the categories of vision, movement, and touch. Mindfulness of the subjects of ELA, math, social studies, music, physical education, and health have been implicitly incorporated to the lessons for the purpose of the study. However, within the educational practices should be explicitly expressed whenever possible to help students see how all subjects of study are connected.

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Chapter Five: Discussion and Implications for Practice

The purpose of this study was to find out how beginning of the year elementary third- grade level participants conceived visual art and learned how to draw. The use of James Jerome

Gibson’s ecology of perception guided the science of seeing and demonstrated that people see with a visual system. The visual system, as explained by Gibson, has both internal and external perception where vision, touch, and movement work together to provide knowledge about the world. Individuals see and navigate the world based on emic insight as well as developed proprioception accompanied by the etic exteroception. Gibson’s neologism “exteroception” for which an individual has developed the ability to locate the external self in the world. The external self cannot be realized without the internal self and Gibson referred to self-awareness in the world as egoreception. Internal and external coexist. Empirical studies have demonstrated protracted development at the neuronal level (Ciesielski, Stern, Diamond, Khan, Busa,

Goldsmith, van der Kouwe, Fischl, & Rosen, 2019, p. 2; Parrish, Giaschi, Boden, & Dougherty,

2005, p. 827; Zimmermann, de Carvalho, Atihe, Zimmermann, & Ribeiro, 2019, p. 1).

The core of the aggregate studies consisted of Gibson’s theory, Wimmer, et al. theory of mind (ToM) study rooted in ambiguity, and Eisner’s art education philosophy situated in knowledge that the arts teach what other subjects do not. The ways in which professional designers work describe many of the visual system features described by Gibson, studied by

Wimmer et al., and philosophized by Eisner. Goldschmidt’s idea of “seeing as and seeing that” accounted for the comparison necessary for an individual to differentiate one thing from another.

Marshall’s “imagining that and imagining how” (Marshall, 2007, pp. 3-6) accounted for the variability based on an individual’s cultural beliefs and feelings. Williams’ “being with and 158 being there” accounted for the variety of experiences an individual has based on what s/he has come to be aware of as well as level of awareness.

The chapter is organized to demonstrate how the researcher used what had been learned about visual processing and development and applied it to drawing lessons geared for entering third grade level participants. The investigative work involved the biological science of the human eye, the psychological characteristics of visual neurons, parsed into comprehensive lessons that help develop the foundation to enable participants to draw human and animal forms.

Gibson’s theory demonstrated that individuals develop a “visual system” throughout childhood well into adolescence and into early adulthood. The researcher used a constructivist-interpretive approach to understand Gibson’s perceptual theory. Empirical studies of the visual system demonstrated both emic and etic systems involved in visual perception with critical periods of visual development that take place throughout elementary and middle school (Gibson, 2015, p.

296).

Vision

Learning how the organ of the eye functions within the visual system created an understanding how the visual brain works at the elementary third grade level. The researcher explored the biological science features of visual art through James Jerome Gibson’s perceptual theory and related it to the gradual historical development of human images in art. Gibson’s theory enabled the researcher to use a constructivist-interpretive approach to understand the ecological approach to visual perception and apply it to visual art education. The visual system was found to incorporate every part of the brain in a hierarchy of development that gradually enabled the individual to develop senses to navigate the environment through an awareness of ecological events that Gibson described as invariants (Gibson, 2015, p. 103). 159

The trees and the earth, for example, were two familiar ecological invariants that the elementary participants know and often include in their drawings along horizontal and vertical axis. Prior to attendance within the school environment, however, the environment has been limited to the watchful eyes of the parents. Visual development cooperates with the expansion of an individual’s environment. The infant, for example, has been close to its mother and focused on the mother’s face. The infants vision becomes oriented to the location of facial contrast of the mother’s eyes during the first year of life (Towler, Fisher, & Eimer, 2016, pp. 35-36). As the child learns to crawl his environment becomes more expansive and his visual sense develops more and helps him to maneuver around objects in a room.

Edges.

David Marr’s collaborative empirical studies shed information on the importance of the visual sense in object definition and the order in which the brain processes visual impulses (Zeki,

2013; Hubel & Wiesel, 1998; Poggio & Hurlbert, 1993; Marr & Ullman, 1981; Marr & Hildreth,

1980;). Edges excite visual cell neurons that respond to directional and contrast-based saliency.

Ecological perception demonstrated the edge as a possible cliff (Gibson, 2015, p. 73). Edges create a noticeable difference to the eyes through a variety of contrasts. Visual saliency is an eye- catching quality that gives rise to a clearly visible environment. The visual system takes advantage of a variety of different types of contrast that the sense of touch and movement of the body have the ability to disambiguate what the eyes see. Artists use the variety of contrasts to control the eye of the beholder. Vision develops with salient features and, over many years, subtle details are learned. Categories taught in education begin with basic over-arching understanding and become more expansively differentiated with details that an individual would study to become an expert. Visual perception develops in the same way. Salience has been 160 described in the studies on the manner in which humans see. Visual salience differs from taste, smell, and sound salience although synesthesia often can be attributed to cross-over of combined sensual experiences. Features essential to visual salience include but are not limited to contrasts.

The many types of visual salience match the variety of contrasts that artists use to emphasize and/or camouflage areas of a drawing. Hubel and Wiesel in 1958 (1998, p. 401) also noted that retinal cells reacted to the edges of a microscope slide and Marr working with Nishihara later noted that complex retinal cells responded to a wider range that related to the shape of objects

(Marr & Nishihara, 1978, p. 31). Gibson, for example, referred to textured areas that create invariants of awareness. Patterns create the illusion of texture in drawing (Gibson, 2015, p. 271).

Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist, investigated the art critic Clive Bell’s idea that certain arrangements of form, line and color, created a pleasurable awareness, an aesthetic beauty, that he called significant form (Warburton, 1999, pp. 339-343). Zeki, however, believed that Bell’s significant form would be better described as significant configuration (Zeki, 2013, pp. 8-12).

While all areas of the brain share visual functions, certain areas share specialized functions to process particular attributes of visual information. Zeki designed a study that searched for a common neuro-mechanism in the brain related to aesthetic emotion.

Zeki found that activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC) correlated with the ability to sense emotion. However, lines, colors and forms were found to be processed in separate neural systems in the brain dispelling the idea of a common set of characteristics for beauty (Zeki, 2013, p. 6). It seems that Gibson’s ecological theory of horizontal and vertical invariants of the earth aligned better with Zeki’s findings. Gibson believed that children draw invariants (Gibson, 2015, p. 264). Gibson’s theory related to Bell’s in that there seems to be an innate response to human actions on earth. The oblique effect has demonstrated visual preference 161 to horizontal and vertical arrangements (Mikellidou, Cicchini, Thompson, & Burr, 2014, p. 1;

Shaikh, Zee, Taube, & Kheradmand, 2020, p. 205). Gibson related to individual affordances and

Bell related to individualized emotions. More studies continue to uncover new information about the visual brain.

The visual regions or clusters develop in a hierarchy that work together and result in a unified percept (Petra, 2001, p. 190). For example, the V5 complex for motion, V4 for color, V3 for perception of form, and V1-V2 process the orientation of direction selective cell area to process different attributes about the environment (Zeki, 2013, p. 7). This order was connected to human survival and related to what Gibson had stated about movement recognized by crossing the vertical axis, something Hubel and Wiesel had discovered with the eye cells sensitive reaction to the edge of the microscope slide. Marr also found that the retinal cells were mapping mechanisms for intensity values (Marr & Ullman, 1981, p. 153), and the eyes see contrasts as sticks and blobs (Marr & Nishihara, 1978, p. 39; Marr & Poggio, 1979, p. 302). Vision salience is stimulated with a consciousness of color before a consciousness of orientation or direction

(Zeki, 2013, p. 9) and the face has demonstrated a strong configuration as an attentional mechanism (Zeki, 2013, p. 12). A framework of visual representation was suggested to have three categories: intensity variations, visible surfaces, and shape recognition (Marr & Nishihara,

1978, pp. 41-42).

Faces.

Coupled with this knowledge the research investigated the developing child and discovered the uncertainty that would arise when participants had created drawing. The strong need to uncover facial features was evident when participants were not guided to place facial features until after the exterior shapes had been created. Participants’ eyes followed the trace of 162 their hand while they were concentrated on drawing. During one of the study meetings Em had finished her drawing before Jeff. When Em looked at Jeff’s unfinished drawing of the kawaii bunny Em distracted Jeff and caused him to change his perception:

“Em: It looks like the ears were the eyes. Researcher: And the eyes are spread way far

apart. The eyes . . . Jeff: It actually does. Researcher: . . . are out at the ends of the shape.

It’s like mapping. Jeff: Yours is so good, look at mine. Researcher: o.k. Then right at the

bottom of the eyes is his cute little bunny mouth like that. It looks like a frog.

Researcher: And he’s got rounded teeth coming out like that. Jeff: He kind of looks like a

frog. He looks like a frog. Why does it look like a frog? [. . .] Jeff: It looks like a frog.”

Even after the instruction of how to place the eyes, nose, and mouth for the bunny, Jeff, could not stop seeing the ears as the eyes and to him his drawing looked like a frog instead of a bunny. Jeff’s confusion over what he had seen in his drawing was ambiguity as it related to theory of mind (Wimmer, et al. 2011, p. 59). The ability of an individual to suppress one image in order to see another was directly related to the ability to understand homonyms (Wimmer, et al. 2011, p. 15). Since the visual system is made up of categorized regions, Jeff’s memory and perception interacted with the extrinsic verbal input from Em and distracted him from his drawing task. Em’s distraction coupled with the researcher’s verbal instruction, biased his working memory (Mallett, Mummaneni, & Lewis-Peacock, 2020, p. 11; O’Rawe, Huang, Klein,

& Leung, 2019, p. 159).

Face patterns can be seen as simply as two eyes and a mouth demarcated by two dots and a line used to categorize and distinguish face from non-face in the human visual system (Poggio

& Hurlbert, 1993, p. 2). Neuroimaging has shown that the development of face processing develops slowly over the first twenty years of human brain development (Haist & Anzures, 2017, 163 p. 1). Face processing proficiency, for example, critical for an individual’s social interaction begins developing in early childhood and extends well into adolescence (Haist, et al., 2017, p. 2-

4). The invariant features of the face provide a map in the brain for which to use as a comparison to all other faces, in particular, the eye and mouth regions where the individual learns subtle changes in emotion (Haist, et al., 2017, p. 4).

Geometry.

Drawing methods were presented to the participants based on visual hierarchy discovered and studied by Hubbel and Weisel, Marr, and Zeki. The use of the Warli style art was used based on participants’ knowledge of geometric shapes (circle, rectangle, and triangle). These shapes could be both named and drawn by the participants. Drawing development parallels language development. Children learn to draw much the same way that they learn to talk (Willats, 2005, p.

1). The Warli style related to Marr’s primal sketch for which he used the terms sticks, blobs, and axis points to interpret visual information (Marr, 1980, p. 206). Looking to the eastern traditions of visual art provided the history that dated back to cave drawing in the Warli style found in

India. The addition of the Warli style proved foundational to the sticks and blobs found in visual development. From this aspect the historical images of Egyptian art can be seen as fluid development with the development of the profile perspective from the Warli frontal style and the

Greek style can be seen as continued drawing development through a melding of traditions.

Geometry has been used to describe the ancient star patterns that make up the constellations in the night’s sky. One participant made the connection between the Warli style and the constellation, “T. J.: What!? Some of these look like constellations.” Two different participants, one from each school, expressed their success with this style of drawing, “Jeff:

Thunder cloud. Thunder cloud. Too bad Nam is absent. Yeah. It’s so good, obviously. Yay, I’m 164 doing so good” and then from the other school, “Nia: Oh, ya. This is the best drawing I ever did.” When a participant related easily to what s/he had drawn then s/he was more likely to persist with drawing independently. One participant’s parent contacted the researcher at the end of the study and stated that her child was drawing more and using methods learned in the study.

One method that was learned from the Warli style was the vocabulary choice for orientation. The researcher used vocabulary related to body position. Rather than describing line direction with the terms horizontal, vertical, and diagonal the researcher described line as sleeping, standing, and slanted instead.

The focus required from the participants when engaged with zentangle warm-up drawing required them to persist. This exercise also promoted lifting the pen or pencil off the paper. The repeated lines and shapes used in zentangle create pattern. During the first day of the study the researcher had the participants divide their paper with a line called a string and create several zentangles within each section of the string. One participant complained of getting a headache,

“Mindy: It might hypnotize you. Researcher: It might hypnotize you, ya. It’s kind of

peaceful isn’t it? Ava: (inaudible). Researcher: Ya, when you’re doing this you can’t like

look at the whole thing because it will make your eyes go wonky. You have to just

concentrate, it’s a lesson in focusing on what you’re doing, focusing your eye on what

you’re doing. Jeff: To me it looks like, oh my god. Ava: It’s giving me a headache.”

The participant who complained of getting a headache from drawing the zentangle also wore glasses. The researcher had her rest her eyes by closing and gently cupping her hands over her eyes for thirty-seconds, a method known as “palming” (Brookes, 1996, p. 57). The researcher interpreted this as too much focused drawing for beginning third grade and that participants would need to gradually build up stamina for drawing. The zentangle was modified so that 165 instead of having several patterns on one paper that the participants would concentrate on one pattern. The type of focused eye movements required participants to follow the line that their hand drew would require them to use good visual acuity for that task. This could be difficult for students whose visual acuity was weak and would need to be considered moving forward.

The researcher commented that perhaps the zentangle paper should have been smaller so that participants had less repetition, but one participant had said “No, bigger” and made the researcher realize that this participant enjoyed the process of creating patterns. The bigger pattern style might be thought of similarly to the large lined paper that children use when they first learn their letter formations. The gross movement of their arms with larger letter sizes enable them to work toward tighter letter formations. The same would hold true when learning to create zentangles.

Touch

The use of physical visual knowledge in art education was studied by Betty Edwards,

Mona Brookes, and John Willats. Lessons were designed using knowledge from Rhoda Kellogg,

Mona Brookes, Wilson and Wilson, and John Willats. Willats had also made connections between visual art development and language development (Willats, 2005, p. 1). Participants connected their words with their images during the study by giving images names or by using word bubbles to create conversations. The artist, Katsushika Hokusai, connected language and art based on ancient scrolls to create magazine comics known as Manga (Hanchek & Brockey,

2019, p. 1). Popular culture has transformed this comic style into multiple demographics targeted stylistically for adults as well as children. Some comics have been animated as cartoons known as anime. 166

Subjects in education typically provide exercises for students to practice. For example, spelling in ELA, solutions to problems in mathematics, jumping jacks in physical education, rhythm exercises in music, and reading in social studies. Visual art has typically used sketching as a warm-up for drawing. However, the difficulty for creating an image takes too much time to come up with an idea, and elementary level participants often need to learn how to draw images.

Copying a written idea from a warm-up list such as draw a giraffe surfing on a bicycle assumes that the student knows how to draw. Drawing books offer line work exercises much like worksheets that students use for learning the strokes of writing. The use of zentangle design, however, can be used to target specific elements of drawing that supply the teacher with a method of assessing an individual to compare what they have drawn to their past work to check for progress. This method of checking the student to their own work offers opportunity for coaching to see if students can self-correct and enables students to compare what they have drawn to a sample. The study used three different zentangle patterns to help participants build stamina for drawing. Each zentangle was targeted for a specific skill; the Ladybug targeted pattern, Hollibaugh targeted perspective, and Paradox targeted proportion. This was done to help participants focus on the skills that would be needed to build toward the completed character form. The researcher had participants create one zentangle on a 6” x 6” white paper and use a #2 soft Ticondaroga pencil, mechanical pencil, and black Paper Mate felt tip pen. The study found that the zentangle warm-ups helped participants build eye-stamina, drawing persistence, and developed pressure sensitivity.

Comparison.

Participants at the beginning third grade elementary level have demonstrated that their drawing ability describes the invariants that separate the image from the background and need 167 help with figuring out how to make connections with lines and shapes. These connections have been also called “joinings” (Gibson, 2015, p. 274). Joinings with the use of concave and convex lines need to be taught as a strategy to facilitate participant decision making. The way in which the porcupine shape was made included both convex and concave lines connected to create the image. The contrast between concave and convex had been something that the elementary level student struggled with and has made the researcher aware that the participants needed to be explicitly taught how to draw them together to use as a strategic approach to drawing.

Texture has been typically depicted with patterns but children’s vision at the elementary level has not development enough to categorize their shapes into textured patterns (Gibson,

2015, p. 21). This was demonstrated when participants were asked to add shadows to their drawings. The participants were able to add the shadows but when left to their own they did not include shading. This was an indication of their nascent visual perceptual level. They were not, yet, visually ready to produce tonal ranges in their work. They still needed clean separation between the figure and the background. Occlusions have been a difficult area in which children also struggle and it seems that, perceptually, they may not be ready to apply an overlap perspective until the end of third grade beginning of the fourth grade. The participants in the study demonstrated their ability to create over/underlap, however, they did not seem to grasp the concept of depth. Depth, faces, bodies, and landscapes have been discovered to be processed in different regions of the visual brain (Zeki, 2013, p. 6). Gibson’s theory related vision to human survival. The way in which the binocular vision works alerts the individual to movement because it is sensitive to movement across invariants. Retinal cells are sensitive to vertical and horizontal direction and these are the same as the invariant features of the earth.

Feeling. 168

The researcher gave participants the choice between Ticonderoga soft number two pencils or Target brand mechanical pencils. At first the participants all chose the mechanical pencils, however, some participants realized that the graphite in the mechanical pencil kept breaking and reverted to the use of the wooden pencil. One participant knew that the use of the mechanical pencil required sensitivity to the pressure used. Some participants had not yet developed control over their hand pressure and reverted to the wood pencil. The researcher learned from the students that mechanical pencils could be used as a tool to teach students how to control their hand pressure and learn to draw lightly.

During the first week of the study one participant at the Site A stated, “My lead keeps breaking” while using a mechanical pencil. However, the participant learned to use the mechanical pencil more gently. This demonstrated that the media had taught the participant how to control her pressure. The ability to change the quality of the line was difficult for participants.

The ability to lift the pencil off the paper and return the tip where the participant left off was a habit that the zentangle exercises would begin to change over the eight-week study.

Tracing.

When participants were given a worksheet of the Warli style animals it was interesting to see that four out of the sixteen participating participants copied the animals onto their papers in the same locations as depicted on the worksheet. The participants did not change the composition and tell their own visual story. One of the participants copied the worksheet, marked the heading to her page as “animals,” circled and labeled each animal that she had drawn (Peakok, Bull, hores [for horse], and elephent). Two other participants had created word bubbles and lines that seemed to separate scenes making their images similar to comics. Five of the participants included the dots that the researcher created to aid in the change of line direction for some of the 169 animal’s legs. Only one participant showed difficulty in connecting the lines representing the legs to the triangles representing the bodies. All of the participants had difficulty with the stick legs on the animals. The legs of the animals demonstrated uncertainty. It seemed as though these errors were due to participants not lifting their pencil off the paper to change the direction of their stroke.

Some of the comparative qualities of the graphic act that the child begins to show an awareness included: long, curved, ending, continuous, direction changes, lined up, closure, and connections (Gibson, 2015, pp. 263-264). The researcher learned that other drawing qualities to be learned related to the participants beginning third grade level vocabulary. Drawing should include the qualities of opposites such as: thick, thin, long, short, tall, wide, and extending the vocabulary to include concave and convex to help participants to figure out how to join lines and shapes together. The researcher coached participants to lift their pencil off the paper when their line changed direction. Lifting the pencil off the paper helped participants to create sharper corners on their triangle shapes.

The researcher realized that using the words “straight line” intimidated the participants.

Five participants indicated their struggle with drawing a straight line,

“Researcher: A zentangle is done carefully, a zentangle is done carefully and deliberately.

So, what we’re going to do, this is a really hard zentangle to do, so I’m going to draw two straight lines going from one side to the other (demonstrating the Hollibaugh and all was quiet).

See how I did that? NoNo: Wait, wait, nope. Mindy: Wait, wait, wait, nope. Jeff: (quietly nu, no, wait, nope). M: I’m not good at drawing straight lines (giggles). NoNo: (quietly) Net, net, no, no, no). Researcher: Yup, you’re right. Just do two lines close together. M: I can’t do straight lines. 170

Researcher: Well you just do the best you can. They don’t have to be straight. Jeff: I know, some people can’t even do straight lines. It happens.”

These comments, while playful by the participants, indicated the uncertainty that they felt when asked to draw a “straight” line. A different participant expressed the notion that the ability to draw a straight line defined a good drawing,

“Researcher: What do you find most difficult about drawing? Be Stick Little: Um, that

you have to actually get it in a straight line. I don’t even know how to draw a straight

line. Researcher: Do you think you have to draw a straight line when you’re doing art?

Be Stick Little: Yes. Like this (points with brush marker at the thick blue line at the top

of the drawing representing the blue sky line).”

One participant had done the typical invariants found in a child’s drawing with a separate blue skyline, that she had pointed out with her marker, at the top of the paper and a green thick line at the bottom of her paper. This was during the final study and she had chosen to use marker so that she could draw and color at the same time. This indicated that doing a drawing first and then coloring it after would have taken too much time and energy. Therefore, participants opted for markers to enable completion by the end of the study time. The researcher had been interested in why children choose to use color. So, during the first study meeting, presented the participants with highlight markers and neon color pencils. It was during the first study that the researcher learned that it was not the brightness of the color but instead the saturation or opaqueness of the color that children needed for their developing vision.

Movement

The oblique effect demonstrated greater sensitivity to horizontal and vertical orientations than to diagonal or slanted types of orientations. Gibson had related this sensitivity to 171 proprioceptive development influenced by the gravitational pull of the earth and a visual horizon.

People navigate vertically while horizontally grounded. This related to Hubel and Wiesel’s edge sensitivity because attention piqued when movement occurred between horizontal or vertical planes. Marr used the analogy of a black ant traversing unnoticed on a black surface until it crossed the edge perpendicularly.

Participants had difficulty locating the image on the page and demonstrated their difficulty in material handling due to developing proprioception. Beginning of the year third grade participants need help with pencil pressure. The researcher found that the use of mapping skills helped participants locate the image on the page. However, the use of the cardinal ordinates had confused participants so, the researcher gestured the locations of top, bottom, and sides of the paper; vocabulary words that were easier for participants.

Many art educators have written books with line exercises to help students begin to get into the mind-set of drawing (Brookes, 1996, pp. 42-45; Dunn, 2018, pp. 11-139; Bailey, 1914, p. 73). The researcher found that the use of zentangle scaffold enabled participants in the study to get in the mind-set or the “zen-zone” of drawing. The zentangle helped participants to focus by watching what their drawing hand was doing, helped the researcher enable the participants to develop good drawing posture by leaving their free hand relaxed and able to easily adjust their paper. The zentangle also provided the researcher with a method of formative assessment by showing where participants struggled (i.e. line ending, space, filling-in).

Experience.

The resistance to overlap can be seen in week three with some of the Warli drawings, in particular, with the elephant’s legs and the joinings of the legs to the bodies of the animals. Three participants drew the elephant’s legs as separate quadrilaterals. Another participant created the 172 legs of her elephant by drawing the horizontal line of the elephant’s belly very lightly and then erasing it after the legs were added. Interestingly, the participant overlapped the near larger legs over the far shorter legs creating a size perspective, however, the elephant’s belly did not overlap the far legs (see Appendix B). This demonstrated depth illusion strategies were still developing.

The use of the Warli style drawing related to Marr’s studies and indicated the development of vision from sticks and blobs to gradually being able to decipher more detail over time. Participants at this level continue to isolate figures from the background with defined edges. The aggregate of the face remains in the beginning stages and the study will introduce facial features gradually beginning with the Warli no face, the kawaii style with two dots for the eyes and curved line for the mouth, and eventually to the chibi baby schema style adding the short, chubby, simplified whole body.

Practice.

Persistence helped participants to discover new qualities about the medium that they used. The media eventually became the teacher when participants persisted long enough to discover the limits of the medium. This happened during week two. One participant noticed while drawing with a Sharpie marker and Ticonderoga #2 soft pencil, that the Sharpie resisted the graphite of the pencil. When he colored with the graphite over the Sharpie he noticed that he was able to easily wipe the graphite completely off the areas of his drawing that he had filled in with Sharpie. It was here that the participant used the science of art by exploring the combination of the two mediums and discovered differences in the materials and processes that he had used.

This type of discovery has been important in art especially when it comes to knowledge about material compatibility. 173

The use of persistence with a limited amount of material for these nascent artists forces them to concentrate on one medium, push, and discover qualities that they would have missed if provided with too many choices. Early art educators stressed the importance of teaching contrast before allowing students to use color. The balance of contrast, sometimes referred to as the

Japanese art notan, meaning black and white balance, also followed the trajectory of visual pathway development. Good balance of dark and light colors in design created a dazzlement for the eyes. This dazzelment or magical visual attraction (Gell, 1988, p. 9) caused intrinsic pleasure and has promoted persistence through pride in the work thus perpetuated the act of drawing and design.

Mapping.

The eye muscles too would have to learn how to build stamina for drawing. Professional artists typically gaze shift many times when drawing from life. Children have been found to typically look at an object once and draw what they saw without looking again. The saccades, pursuits, and gaze shifting require stamina and the ability to locate again where the artist left off.

The researcher used cardinal coordinates as cued drawing target locations to enable participants to locate their drawing position on the blank paper. However, after observation of the disagreement and confusion with north, south, east, and west, demonstrated by participants, the researcher adjusted the language to top, bottom, side, and side. The change of language enabled participants to become more confident to map out their drawing and created a gaze location that could be explicitly located. Participants were able to follow along, completed three kawaii style drawings and were able to work on their own and copy the kawaii style animals from a worksheet. The purpose of the exercises and lessons were to establish a foundational approach to observational drawing that included global and local processing (Chamberlain et al., 2019, p. 6; 174

Chamberlain, 2017, p. 2). The researcher adjusted teaching practice when three participants stated that the kwaii style porcupine was too difficult to draw. The participants needed to know how to join the convoluted lines that made up the body. The following week the researcher demonstrated how to join convoluted lines with concave and convex lines so that they would be able to draw the kawaii hair styles.

Conclusion

How do elementary students see and learn how to draw? The findings of the study have demonstrated that the third-grade elementary level participants are in the midst of visual system development. The empirical studies within the literature refer to this development as a critical period (CP). Psychological studies have demonstrated Theory of Mind and its relation to image ambiguity and the child’s physical and mental development (Wimmer et. al, 2011, p.59).

Scientific studies have demonstrated the importance of the coupling of visual acuity with the trace of the hand. The visual perceptual development of the child encompasses sight, action, and thought. Verisimilitude for the nascent artist has been found in popular media typically shunned by art critics. Popular media from Japan offered both a linguistic and visual scaffold that developed with the growth of the child. The baby schema used in popular media images related to the developing child’s point of view. The ability of the participants to communicate with each other visually was expressed playfully with their images used as puppets that bridged their social development. Two participants, for example, used created voices to project onto their kawaii drawings as imaginary talk. The two participants held their drawings vertically in order to animate them.

The development of drawing qualities helped participants to develop sensibility to materials and processes. Demonstration, always on a separate piece of paper, how to use a 175 variety of line quality helped participants consider more possibilities. Visual art related to participants on a personal level and to their visual sense. Drawing practices seemed to help participants to better understand themselves and to embrace differences rather than to promote frustration. The study demonstrated that at least two of the participants had been able to not only self-evaluate, a level of analysis that has been promoted as high achievement on Blooms taxonomy, but more importantly, drawing promoted collaborative, cooperative, and socially shared knowledge among all the participants. Visual art demonstrated that it developed metacognition because it required participants to constantly evaluate and make decisions according to their thinking. Decision making has always been such a large part of visual art. The ability to make a choice can be learned though the opportunity to make self-comparison to recognize personal progressive improvement. The participants needed to be explicitly taught how to use the variety of qualities of line, shape, and space to help them in the decision-making process. Offering strategies to participants enabled their ability to edit through a solution-finding process rather than a problem-solving process have significance in the process of visual art development. This was demonstrated through multiple solutions of how to create a solution based on thinking and testing a variety of line qualities, patterns, and shapes.

Understanding the development of children’s eyesight provided a different perspective on how the child learns and especially the ambiguity involved with line, shape, and space.

Imagining how the child sees helped to improve practice. More recent empirical studies continue to bubble up and shed light on brain development. New knowledge about the visual brain should slow shifts in educational practices to spend more time to help students based on action research on the importance of drawing practice for visual development (Vinter, Bonin, and Morgan, 2018, p. 25). The findings of this study have demonstrated that children seem to understand their visual 176 development and have been able to discern images that they have been able to follow and draw, not through adult vision, but through the developing perception that has been tied into the combined physical and mental development.

Recommendations for Practice

The use of visual art as a mnemonic device has been practiced throughout history and remains just as powerful for creativity (Cioca, Nerisanu, 2020, pp. 2). Art educators might collaborate with classroom teachers by helping to create art projects aligned with classroom studies to help students remember what they have learned. The importance here concerns projects that incorporated the learning for the purpose of student growth and development.

Visual art educators should push to collaborate with classroom teachers on creating projects that solidify student learning. Many schools have included the design planning aspect of visual art to the science, technology, engineering, and math to create the acronym S.T.E.A.M..

Recommendations for Future Research

Empirical studies continue to bubble up about the visual system due to strong technological interest in robotics. The most significant findings from the study have demonstrated the importance of vision in learning. The visual system couples with all senses and has several critical periods of development throughout the primary and secondary levels of education. Critical periods have been determined to be accelerated periods of learning that if missed individuals have no ability to adapt (Hofstetter, Sabbah, Mohand-Said, Sahel, Habas,

Safran, & Amedi, 2019, p. 1). That means that if the critical period has been missed during childhood there will be adverse effects in adulthood and “. . . function in the affected domain

(e.g., vision, language) may not fully recover” (Nelson, & Gabard-Durnam, 2020, p. 135-136). 177

Another empirical study, for example, found two accelerated periods of facial perceptual development targeted the first acceleration between eight and eleven years old, and the second between fourteen and fifteen years old (O’Rawe, Huang, Klein, & Leung, 2019, p. 160).

Art educators should be alerted to neuroscience to consider how new information in this area might change negative attitudes about teaching and learning in visual art.

Implications for Personal Practice

The challenges that have been faced in public education have been a matter of social justice. Students who have struggles in the MCAS subjects of reading, ELA, and mathematics have been pulled from their visual art classes to be instructed with more of the same subjects that they do poorly. Visual art class might be the only place where a student can have success. The study has demonstrated the collaborative, cooperative learning that happened during the time that the participants talked while engaged in the creation of art and thus learned from each other. The research demonstrated that visual brain development is protracted and therefore the students that have been pulled from art will never get the chance to excel at that either. As an art educator for twenty-four years in the service of public schools the research findings have helped to demonstrate the importance of visual art in whole child development, not just at the elementary level, but all the way through high school.

I plan to use this research to demonstrate that not all learning has to be quantitative and that the qualitative learning creates students who later become experts based on the nuances learned through art experiences that other subjects cannot teach. The research demonstrated, however, that other subjects have been enriched when they are learned through art processes. Art processes throughout history have been used as a pneumonic device as has been witnessed by the mantra “one picture is worth a thousand words.” 178

Reflection as a Scholar Practitioner

The study has allowed me to reflect on how this research has enhanced my ability to enable all students to embrace and develop art practices not just in image construction but as a way of understanding nuances in all that they practice. The intersection of visual art with economics, policies, and spirituality has helped me to understand art as a powerful source of influence and how it has shown and continues to demonstrate the fluidity of culture through the images produced at a particular time and place. Listening to my students inspires my lesson plans to try and reach students within their school culture and to help them to enjoy and embrace their individualized learning journey.

As a scholar practitioner my studies have been put into practice to transform art education to reach all students through images that relate to their present culture and use the past cultures to demonstrate where techniques evolved. Art practices intend to be used to benefit all students in their visual perceptual development and as a means to help them with their studies so that they can begin to grasp the interconnectivity of all subjects through evolving explicit teaching practices. Visual art methods will be used to provide students ways to develop self-motivation, good work habits, and pride through a sense of self-worth obtained through the completion of their work.

179

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203

APPENDIX A Protocol Questions Matrix

Interview Questions

Research 1: What is going on in this picture? 2: What do you see that makes you say that? 3: What more can we find? Questions “Seeing as and seeing that” “Being with and being there” “Imagining how and imagining that” 1. How do participants overcome uncertainty? 2. How do participants make decisions? 3. What has made participant perception different than the adult researcher? 4. What enables participants to know what to draw?

5. How have participants used baby schema? 6. What type of schema have participants developed? 7. How does copying facilitate drawing? 204

APPENDIX B

Participant images in order of reference:

1. Referenced from thesis page 125: Grim/Pika demonstrating good drawing posture with a relaxed free hand.

2. Referenced from thesis page 125: Participant zentangles pictured from left to right Ladybug, Hollibaugh, and Paradox Zentangles.

205

3. Referenced from thesis pages 126-127 concerning line and space with the Ladybug Zentangle:

• Seven participants connected the arcs/auras causing the space to be pinched closed.

• One participant’s lines not closed onto the frame or connected to another aura. 206

• Five participants extended lines beyond the zentangle frame.

4. Referenced from thesis page 145 concerning the use of basic shapes used in Warli style. 207

5. Referenced from thesis pages 146-147 participant’s porcupine images.

6. Referenced from thesis page 150 concerning the ambiguity of the image as frog/bunny. Jeff saw the bunny as a frog. 208

7. Referenced from thesis page 172 participant’s lack of overlap demonstrates nascent perceptual development level.