The Intuitive Reasonings of Jessica

What is art? That is a question I had often asked myself throughout my own educational experiences. As a young child, I thought that art was something flat that could be framed and hung on the wall. At that time, my art schema only included drawings and paintings. However, as I encountered sculpture at the art museum, I accommodated my art schema to include three-dimensional objects as well. 

Everybody’s mind organizes information into schemas—groups of concepts and actions that can be revised by new information. When I went to the art museum as a child, I encountered many paintings and drawings that I had never seen before. I assimilated that new information into my existing schema for “art”. By assimilation, new information is put in an existing schema. However, when I encountered sculpture, I had two choices. I could either accommodate my existing schema for “art” and make it include three-dimensional art as well, or I could create a new schema for “sculpture” and not include it as “art”. Accommodation is when an existing schema is modified to include new information, or a new schema is created for the new information.

When new information is introduced that does not fit into a person’s existing schema, one is forced into a state of cognitive disequilibrium. As a young child at the art museum, being in a state of cognitive disequilibrium enabled me to learn new concepts about art. As a future teacher, I want to give my students as many opportunities as possible to learn new information. In Block 1, I had an exciting opportunity to teach 10th grade ceramics students a lesson about anything I wanted. Hoping to challenge them as much as possible, I decided to introduce functional art, and consequently create cognitive disequilibrium in some of the students.

I taught the 16 high school students in the ceramics class how to make mugs. Most of them had a schema for art that included things like painting and sculpture, as well as anything made in art class. However, most of them did not include the contents of their kitchen cabinets in their schema for art. As the students began to work, I could tell by their conversations that I had successfully created cognitive disequilibrium in their young minds. Many of them were accommodating their “art” schemas to include cups, plates, and even silverware. Some decided that these functional objects were only art if they were handmade, thereby only slightly modifying their schemas. Others did not see the mug that they were making as something that they would ever use. Those students assimilated their handmade mug into their existing schema for art, which included only handmade objects created solely for aesthetics.

As a future art teacher, I believe that it is important to constantly present students with opportunities for cognitive disequilibrium. Those situations offer students ample opportunities to learn. Teachers can successfully create such situations by placing an object, such as a mug, in a situation, such as art class, where it doesn’t seem to belong. As a result, students are pushed to ask questions, to accommodate their schemas, to think things through, and most importantly, to learn.