SchoolArts - May/June 2008

Editor’s Comments

and Meaning.

Another resource I would like to

recommend is Howard Gardner’s

newest book, Five Minds for the

Future (Harvard Business School

Press, 2007). Gardner’s pivotal work,

Frames of Mind: The Theory of Mul-

tiple Intelligences, first published in

1983, proposed eight different intel-

ligences: linguistic, logical-math-

ematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic,

musical, interpersonal, and intraper-

sonal.

In Five Minds for the Future,

Gardner proposes, similarly to Pink,

that there are different kinds of men-

tal abilities or “minds” that will be

necessary for success in the twenty-

first century. Gardner’s include:

MMulutilptilpicliitcyity

• The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.

In my classroom, a major indicator of the success of an art lesson is the multiplicity of student responses to the art problem. I look for multiple solutions in my students’ artwork—no cookie-cutter similarities or copies of exemplars, but evidence of divergent thinking. (As the editor of SchoolArts,

I look for the A major indicator of the ^same ^evidence success of an art lesson is ⁱⁿ ^student ^work_when _considering the multiplicity of student _manuscripts _for responses to the art problem. publication.)

How can we as art teachers best encourage our students to find multiple solutions? I think of my personal approach as “freedom within structure.” In general, my goals for an art lesson are to propose and discuss an art problem with my students, present appropriately related art examples from different times and cultures, question students and encourage responses and questions from them, provide as many choices as reasonable in response and media, and share with the class divergent

• The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.

responses from their fellow students as they occur.

Of course, this ideal doesn’t happen with every lesson or unit, as

I must adapt for time constraints,
attention spans, differing abilities,
special needs, and learning styles for
the six different levels of students
that I teach (K–5), but I try to keep
my goals in
mind. Having a
student teacher
every semester
also helps me
reflect on my
goals and holds

me accountable, as I am constantly explaining what I am doing and why. I continue to look for guidance from multiple resources.

This past year, SchoolArts’ themes have been based on an engaging resource, Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead, 2006). Pink believes that success in the twenty-first century will be based on the mastery of multiple right-brain directed aptitudes or senses he calls Design, Narrative, Empathy, Play,