What can
VISUAL ART
teachers
learn from
SCIENCE
teachers?
BY JENNY LUCAS and CARRIE MARKELLO
Ask nearly any classroom-seasoned art educator how they
feel about their classroom practice amidst the call for handson, student-centered, project-based teaching strategies, and
they’ll most likely reply with tremendous confidence that
they’ve been implementing those practices for many years.
Art teachers are pros at project-based lessons and hands-on
activities: it’s what we do. However, in the face of critiques
about the declining state of creativity in the US (Bronson and
Merryman, 2010) and knowing that art education cannot
stand on old arguments of bolstering student performance in
math and language (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, & Sheridan,
2007), art educators must take a good long look at what the
arts do provide for students and what they are doing in the
classroom to ensure those things are happening.
The first realization that art educators must face is that
activities we identify as “hands-on” may engage students
with materials but not necessarily with the inquiry necessary
to engender creative thinking (Bronson and Merryman, 2010;
Stewart and Walker, 2009; Tweed, 2009), and that “projectbased” in the art classroom more often than not really means
“product-based” (Gude, 2013). School art practices can
come more into alignment with contemporary art making