Teaching creativity in art and design studio classes: A systematic literature review

What I read

In this article, the author performs a literature review focused on art and design studio teaching. The result is a set of themes related to how art and design studio is taught, challenges in teaching in this manner, and opportunities for further study.

The author begins by describing a backdrop of pedagogical change, urging instructors to move from instructionist approaches to constructivist approaches. This is true in both higher education and in K12 education. But typically, little guidance is provided on how to actually go about implementing this form of change. The author then conducts a literature review to identify more details about what this change might entail, with a goal of highlighting themes of contemporary art and design education.

The author describes his selection method in great detail, which I will largely skip here, except to note that he read approximately 2000 abstracts in full, and then was able to reduce the total number of papers to analyze to 65. Analysis produced themes through comparative analysis.

Before speaking of the themes, the author notes that the various papers had different levels of rigor; he maps these to four levels. Level 1 is descriptive, without mention of methodology. Level 2 includes a named methodology, and may provide short utterances. Level 3 describes a full transcription of content, and “almost always used a grounded theory methodology.” Level 4, the most rigorous, includes a detailed description of coding, a goal of saturation, the use of multiple members checking the output, and a description of validity measures. The vast majority of the papers were Level 1.

The author then provides his core findings, spread across three clusters: pedagogical practices, learning outcomes, and assessment. These are broken into themes.

The first theme, discussed extensively, is that the teaching pedagogy is flexible, open-ended, and improvised. Course content is not predefined, and students play a role in developing what is taught and learned (often provoked by what they make.) Pedagogy may shift to be student-focused and adaptive. Learning is described as having “flow,” being “negotiated,” and taking an “open-ended” form.

The next theme described students as active and independent parts of the educational process. Students are encouraged to take risks, make mistakes, and play.

Theme three describes the classroom as a community of practice, where the role of the instructor is established as equal to the students. This might take the form of a master/apprentice. It always attempts to minimize the view of an instructor as authority figure. In higher education, instructors often focus on how creativity may show up in a professional context. This is related to theme four, as art and design instructors in higher education are often practitioners; they view themselves as educators second.

The next theme discusses, in depth, the relationship between open-ended learning and students’ desire for structure. These are in tension, where instructors want students to be curious and learn on their own, often through experimentation, while some students are looking for detailed indications of what to do. This is referred to as a “teaching paradox—the difficulty fostering creative learning through open-ended constructivist methods, while at the same time providing the appropriate level of structure and scaffolding.” This is often addressed by instructors who avoid an authoritarian style, even when being more prescriptive. Instructors may struggle with this. Most students appreciate the open-endedness of the teaching approach.

Focused then on learning outcomes, the author describes the theme of making things. Instructors focus both on the process of making things as well as on the thing that is made, and students appreciate more emphasis on process than on the work; this is true when students are experimenting, as they may not even have a finished piece of work. Students should be able to describe their process and tell a story of its development, and their learning approach.

Theme seven very briefly describes the relationship between technical skills and creativity, and only in the context of K12 education. Theme eight, also mentioned only briefly, indicates that art and design studio education is often focused on developing personality styles of abilities, and helping students develop their identities.

Theme nine describes that students are often confused about the goal of their assignments and what they are “supposed to learn.” The learning outcomes aren’t always actually described, and may emerge through critique. There is sometimes a conflict between what an instructor feels is the goal of a project and what students thought they were learning.

The last two themes are related to how work is assessed. Theme ten describes how students receive feedback and criticism. Critique is not viewed positively by students, as it is considered to be high-stress and high-stakes. While some feel that it is exciting, others indicate that they don’t learn from it at all. The last theme, described only briefly, focuses on the use of formal rubrics; instructors have “complex feelings” about them, as they feel they may be useful, but don’t capture the “richness” of the student’s work and growth.

The author then discusses his findings. He summarizes his primary finding, that the “studio pedagogy is constructivist, active, hands-on, and participatory.” A challenge in using this approach, both in art and design and in a broader context, is the teaching paradox; some instructors were able to resolve this though a balance of improvisation an structure, but some landed too hard on one side or another of this balance.

A second challenge in this pedagogical approach is that students often are confused by it. The author notes that “some degree of student confusion may be a necessary part of the studio experience,” but it needs to be presented in a safe context. Part of that safety is related to the third challenge, which is ensuring that students understand the intended outcome of the learning experience, and what they will be graded on.

Last, the author notes room for further study. The articles he reviewed were often of poor quality in rigor. Only a small portion focused on the actual interactions that occur in studio. And while many articles emphasized constraints, none described the actual class assignments and how they were selected and built, or how they relate to the learning outcomes.

What I learned and what I think

The theme that stood out to me the most was The tension between open-ended assignments and the need for structure. When I see students struggle, this plays a big part in it. There’s all sorts of reasons why. One is that, in most educational contexts (and probably most contexts overall), they’ve been told what to do. Expectations have been set, there’s a right way to do things and a correct outcome, and they are judged based on that performance. In a studio context, there’s no right way to do things, and there’s no correct outcome, and both taken together can be really confounding and uncomfortable.

Confidence plays a big role here, because it takes a commitment to then take a course of action without any feeling that it may be right or wrong. And the communal aspect of studio then plays a role too, because students look to each other to see what they are doing, and judge or emulate it. This is also where resentment towards the professor seems to pop up, as too little guidance is sometimes (often?) seen as lazy or disorganized teaching. It probably is, too. Students are pretty sensitive to that, particularly when they have high-dollar expectations.

Critique then slams this back in their face. No one told me what to do, I tried things, and they were wrong, and now I’m embarrassed that they were wrong. Critique may be a ridiculous match in this context; it’s literally unfair. On the other hand, life is unfair…

There really has to be a staged approach to understanding how to behave in a studio context. Assignments need to start really constrained, and expectations need to be really clear, and “grading” either needs to be non-existent or highly structured and rubric-tized. Maybe these things happen in foundations; at least constraints are often obvious, because the additive, subtractive, color assignments are so narrow. But educators hate the rest of that stuff. Often, actually, the curriculum is inverted, where students see almost no structure in their first few years and then assignments get tighter and tighter as they learn more technical skills. Later studios in industrial design have sponsors, and the sponsored projects are highly managed.

There’s a weird and probably obvious miss there; the sequencing is backwards. And if I don’t trust you because we started off vague, then I’m going to carry that lack of trust with me for a while.

I appreciate this article for its summary, too; it’s the first “literature review” style paper I’ve read that I have gained real understanding from (as compared to just a surface-level perspective.) I will duplicate the themes here, so I have them all in one place:

1. The pedagogy is flexible, open-ended, and improvisational
2. Students are active and independent
3. The classroom is a community of practice
4. The pedagogies of professional creatives
5. The tension between open-ended assignments and the need for structure
6. The creative process of making
7. The tension between technical skills and creativity
8. Non-academic personality outcomes
9. Student confusion about the learning outcomes
10. Assessment through feedback and critique
11. Use of rubrics