Studio-based teaching is well-established in creative disciplines such as the arts and architecture, but is less frequently employed in other disciplines. The wider use of the studio model for teaching, originally proposed by Donald Schon, can be seen in teaching innovations such as problem-based learning. Students practice skills and techniques and learn new concepts while working in an environment that encourages learning by doing, working together, and seeking advice or assistance from mentors and tutors. The studio is often an environment similar to that which students will experience in the workplace.
Peter Jamieson
A Studio-Based Approach to Teaching Information Technology
A studio classroom is where students work in groups and are responsible for their own learning. Studio classrooms are not all the same, but all share common elements. They involve longer, fewer, class sessions with focused, intense, student activity. Any disconnect between laboratory and lecture time is absent because lab and lecture are combined. In fact, lectures are de-emphasized or eliminated altogether. Instead, students work together to solve in-depth problems and answer questions, sometimes moving from one workstation to another. Teachers serve as guides or mentors. The interactive classroom promotes holistic skills, including thinking, inquiry, creativity and reflection by students, frequently involving peer review and critiquing.
Dexter Perkins
Studio Teaching in the Geosciences
Walk into a studio art class, and you may feel you have left school. The students look relaxed; sometimes they sit on the floor or music plays softly. After materials are set up students dig in, not concerned about getting clay on their hands or paint on their jeans. You see the teacher introducing concepts and demonstrating, and then you watch as students become engrossed in the day’s project. Often their work is part of a much longer project, already begun, extending for weeks. Sometimes a work of art by an established artist is displayed and discussed because something the artist did relates to today’s work. Students talk among themselves quietly as they begin to work, and the teacher circles around, watching for teachable moments and zeroing in on individual students with a comment, suggestion, question, or critique. At the end of class there is often a critique in which students gather to share and discuss their work, a session in which critical judgment and metacognition are nurtured. A studio classroom is much more complicated than it look at first impression. The students who originally appeared so casual are actually working hard – they are thinking visually, analytically, critically, creatively.
Studio Social Climate
Studio teachers design informal and sometimes more formal ways that students interact with one another to create a social climate that nurtures learning.
Teacher-Student Interactions. As students make artworks, teachers observe and intervene. Such observation and responsive teaching is critical to student learning. Teachers are also aware and thoughtful of students’ needs for privacy at times to develop a relationship with materials, tools, and their own work. By stepping back, teachers set an atmosphere of unobserved independence for the students, while remaining close enough to see what is going on and being ready to intervene with questions, suggestions, or demonstrations as the need and opportunity arise. Studio teachers’ use of language models artful talk for students that helps them think about their work in more sophisticated ways. The language also conveys important messages and what is valued and possible in the classroom. This kind of talk encourages the studio habits of Reflection (describe it), Envision (think about it), and Stretch and Explore (experiment). Students internalize the vocabularies for thinking about art that teachers model.
Peer interactions. Teachers also need to ensure that students feel safe and respected by each other. They create a climate where students are engaged with each other, collaborating and learning to participate in a community of artists.
Studio Teaching Formats
Studio teachers organize space, time, and interactions in their classes by using variations on just three studio structures: Demonstration-Lectures, Students-at-Work, and Critiques. These structures foster an apprentice-master-craftsman relationship between student and teacher creating an atmosphere in which student artists work as artists with other artists (teachers and peers).
Demonstration-Lectures convey information, so they forecast whatever the assignment is meant to teach. The Students-at-Work structure emphasizes the growth and development of individual students, because it keeps the making of art at the center of the learning experience and allows teachers to shift attention flexibly f from student to student and to carefully observe students and evidence of their learning as they work. Critiques support a dynamic flow of thinking among teachers and students that connects the intended learning in particular assignments with the ongoing enacted learning of individual students.
Studio classes usually begin and end with a management structure, Studio Transitions, when teachers use different easy to minimize the time spent setting-up and cleaning-up, which unless carefully managed, can use up a lot of time that could be spent on learning. Teachers vary and sequence these structures in a host of ways, depending on their goals and projects. The most basic way begins with a Demonstration-Lecture, followed by a Students-at-Work segment, and concludes with a Critique. Many times, however, these structures are ordered differently, last for varying lengths of time, and may repeat with a single class.
Lois Hetland, Ellen, Winner, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly Sheridan
Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education
Studio Habits of Mind
In addition to two basic arenas of learning – teaching the craft of the visual arts and teaching about the art world beyond the classroom, at least six other important kinds of general cognitive and attitudinal dispositions are developed in serious visual arts classes. These dispositions are central to learning in many subjects, and may well transfer to non-arts subjects.
Develop Craft
Technique: Learning to use tools, materials, and artistic conventions
Studio Practice: Learning to care for tools, materials, and space
Engage & Persist
Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus and other mental states conducive to working and persevering at art tasks
Envision
Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed and imagine possible next steps in making a piece
Express
Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning
Observe
Learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary “looking” requires, and thereby to see things that otherwise might not be seen
Reflect
Question and Explain: Learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one’s work or working process
Evaluate: Learning to judge one’s own work and working process, and the works of others in relation to the standards of the field
Stretch & Explore
Learning to reach beyond one’s capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan, and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes and accidents
Understand Art World
Domain: Learning about art history and current practice
Communities: Learning to interact as an artist with other artists (i.e., in classrooms, in local arts organizations, and across the art field) and within the broader society
The dispositions bear some striking similarities to those that Elliot Eisner, in his book The Arts and the Creation of Mind (2002), has argued that the arts teach (e.g., learning to attend to relationships, flexibility, and the ability to shift direction, expression, and imagination).
Lois Hetland, Ellen, Winner, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly Sheridan
Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education
