Education, Arts and Sustainability by Mary Ann Hunter Arnold Aprill Allen Hill & Sherridan Emery

Author:Mary Ann Hunter, Arnold Aprill, Allen Hill & Sherridan Emery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

Critical Thinking, Reflection, and Arts Education

Critical thinking as a cognitive skill set has long been aligned with arts education, particularly via the writings of Eisner (1965, 1985, 2002). Skills of aesthetic judgment, for example—applying logic, criteria, and a certain level of pragmatism in making and responding to art—are valued and practised across all art forms. These skills are developed as much via the study of art history and the arts’ place in cultures and society as they are in the making of artworks. Discernment of aesthetic values and the application of aesthetic knowledge to the interpretation of art relies on reasoned critical thinking, and is a vital component in any quality curriculum-based arts education.

An integration of arts and sustainability education, however, calls for a more explicitly affective and action-oriented dimension to critical thinking. This is a shift in orientation from using critical thinking skills to solve problems to critical thinking to serve transformation and foster the ability to participate in change. This is where arts education’s unique and generative tension between discipline and creativity (Gardner 2008) yields opportunities to recognise and value critical thinking differently: that is, beyond teaching critical thinking as a set of cognitive skills, to engaging students’ creative capacity to perceive and imagine the world in diverse ways. Studying the arts can mean evaluating how an artwork makes or expresses meaning in relation to specific contexts, cultures, traditions, or purposes. This process inherently requires critical thought. When arts learning is integrated with sustainability principles, these critical thinking capacities become broadened and strengthened. They can be used to unveil discourses and practices of power and marginalisation, leading to the kind of critical questioning and thinking that becomes the basis for action. What makes the arts unique in this regard is their capacity to communicate in symbolic languages that can embrace emergent and uncertain thinking as well as a diversity of perspectives and experiences. The arts reach beyond reason. They can appeal to, deepen, unsettle or even repel the senses. This, we argue, enables a more open and empathic process of acknowledging multiple worldviews : a subtle but significant shift that expands critical thinking from a set of skills to solve problems into a catalyst for interpreting, imagining, and potentially re-narrativising the past, present, and future.

This view of critical thinking affords opportunities to diffract the process of sense-making by “reading insights through one another, building new insights, and attentively and carefully reading for differences that matter in their fine details” (Barad 2012, para 8). Viewed in this light, the arts enable a creative criticality in attending to what matters. In Greene’s words, this means the capacity “…to look inquiringly and wonderingly on the world in which one lives …” (1973, p. 267). With this new sensing of the world, accessed via the affective dimension of the arts, the development of a creative criticality becomes the basis for action.

In a Western philosophical tradition, Francis Bacon’s famous 1065 treatise describing the “study of truth” highlights some of the qualities we see as important in a contemporary pedagogy of critical thinking.

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