Teaching for Artistic Behavior: Lower School Visual Arts

In Colorado Academy’s Lower School Visual Art studios, tucked among the other painting and drawing spaces, ceramics workshops, and photography and digital classrooms inside the Ponzio Arts Center, students from Pre-K through Grade 5 learn much more than technique and process: They learn how to think and act like artists.

Lower School Visual Art Instructors Elizabeth Delap and Jorge Muñoz ground their approach in a philosophy known as “Teaching for Artistic Behavior” (TAB), a methodology that first and foremost recognizes students as independent art makers, deserving of a studio experience that is parallel to how artists work in the world. For Delap and Muñoz, students are the ones empowered to search for inspiration, envision an idea, design a plan of action, reflect on and persist through difficulties, and see their projects through to completion.

As Delap explains, the artworks that CA’s Lower School students create look like they are designed and created by students—strikingly different from whole-class sets of teacher-directed artworks executed according to step-by-step instructions. The student-owned artistic process is by far the most important artifact of learning.

“I don’t come into class with a project already figured out for them,” according to Delap. “They won’t necessarily find passion in something that I create for them to do. Young artists are most engaged when they are working on something that genuinely interests them.”

Teaching art, then, means fortifying students’ creative toolkit—their understanding and experience with a variety of techniques, materials, and styles, which empower them to discover their own ideas through art. 

“If we give them the skills and ‘habits of mind’ that all artists require—the willingness to take risks, to persist through challenges, to reflect, to develop craft, and to express meaning—then the art classroom looks like a productive, busy, and joyful place in which kids are in charge.”

A creative pathway

Thinking and behaving like an artist are no simple task. From the youngest creators in Pre-K to the experienced makers of Fifth Grade, constant experimentation and scaffolded learning encourage every student to stretch themselves and the art they aspire to create.

Pre-K artists, just getting used to the tools and materials of the studio, focus on process and the slow accumulation of skills and techniques. They might explore different ways to use paint—brushes, dot tools, stencils, or stamps—and then move into collage, adding objects like beads or paper cutouts to their painted works. 

In Kindergarten, artists continue their experimentation with media and techniques, as Delap “front loads” instruction in painting, drawing, and collage on the way toward letting her students loose on a more independent project built around a theme or idea. “I give them targets and goals to guide their creative efforts,” says Delap. “Let’s create something that’s visually interesting—through contrast, or texture, or color values. That’s part of an artist’s job.”

By Third and Fourth Grades, when the students make the transition from Delap’s cozy studio to Muñoz’s larger space—situated right next to Ponzio’s main gallery—artists are ready for more complex ideas and assignments. They begin to think about line and form in their work, or about the differences between tone and value that create dimension and visual interest. 

In one project unit, Muñoz first teaches his students basic techniques of working with paper to create three-dimensional shapes; he then sets them free to choose structures to build into a coherent scene, with each student contributing something unique to a collaborative final work. 

“We start with a focus on craft,” Muñoz explains, “then give them the opportunity to experiment and put their own creative stamp on something based on what we’ve been practicing.”

By Fifth Grade, he continues, artists are ready to branch out into photography and design, developing an understanding of foreground, background, shape, and perspective as they create a portfolio of works based on photos captured on their iPads.

“We are really building them a creative pathway that begins with skills and materials and culminates with their thinking about how to synthesize all those ‘building blocks’ they’ve acquired into something that represents their own ideas,” says Muñoz.

21st century skills

The TAB methodology that underlies everything Lower School artists do is valuable not only because it helps educate true artistic thinkers, but also because it emphasizes the core abilities and behaviors that will determine their success—across all disciplines—through their school years and well beyond.

“Art is universal in its power to teach 21st century skills,” Delap states. “As they think through the stages of the creative process, they are learning the importance of planning, the courage that’s required to create, the resilience and patience needed to refine and revisit their ideas—or even start again.”

Every age may be at a different developmental step along this path, she adds, but all make their own kind of progress toward this vision of competency.

Muñoz notes, “Every student coming out of our classrooms is emerging as a better artistic thinker, and a better thinker overall. Our Lower Schoolers end up more prepared to make the connection between what they want to communicate or achieve, and how to get there.”

Inherent in the learning arc that Lower School artists pursue is the notion of rigor—the understanding that expressing an idea effectively or achieving a goal is never a given.

As Delap explains, “The world all around us has color, line, shape, and perspective. The thoughts in our heads may be complex, with many possible angles. Careful observation, breaking an idea into smaller parts, devising a plan, reflecting, and seeking feedback—this is what rigor looks like for young students, whether they are in the art studio or the homeroom.”

“There are other layers that never appear on the canvas or the clay,” adds Muñoz. “Our students learn how important it is to keep an organized work space, care for their materials, and support their peers.” These are the foundations that allow artists to produce the work they’ve envisioned, he says.

But, Muñoz and Delap underscore, the children in their studios also learn that freedom and curiosity are rigor’s essential complement: “Sometimes we don’t know what the result will be, or why one particular medium or shape is so intriguing,” Delap says. “We can be innately drawn to things, too.”

“Not everyone will grow up to be a visual artist,” she continues, “but everyone will find something they want to explore creatively, something they want to express. That’s what makes us human.”