Visual learning in the community school

Author: Shirley Brice-Heath and Shelby Wolf

Institution: Stanford University and Brown University

Full reference: Heath, S.B., and Wolf, S. (2004) Visual learning in the community school. London: Arts Council England, Creative Partnerships

Summary of key findings

The five booklets in the series Visual Learning in the Community School describe several types of creative bridging and partnering that took place in 2003 and 2004 within a community school in Kent. The researchers looked closely at how language, attention, inspiration, and collaboration within the school changed through artistic partnership.

• Sharing a common vision: community learning for community futures explores how the arts are used to engage parents, children, administrators, teachers and artists in creating a common vision for their school.
• With an eye on design: the power of presentation describes how engaging with the display of art develops young children’s capacity to empathise with audience and artist.
• Art is all about looking: drawing and detail explores how children’s language and cognitive abilities develop when they learn to look carefully and draw in detail.
• In Hoping for accidents: media and technique, through working with intention and imagination across different media and techniques, young children learn to talk about process, expected and unexpected consequences, and emotional assessments of their creative work.
• It looks to me as if: talking about picturebooks shows how in producing their own visual art, children studying picturebooks as ‘narrative props’ had to articulate the meaning within visual details as well as the relationship between pictures and stories.

Research Questions & Methodology

The research is based on transcripts and field notes recorded and analyzed during the year and is reported here through thematic patterns.

Read the report.