Problem Creation
What if art class wasn’t just a place to solve creative problems, but also a place to create them? One of the characteristics of 21st-century learning that educational scholars often emphasize as a vital life skill is problem-solving. But in teacher-directed, project-based art classes, students are given an artistic problem to solve by the teacher. In some instances, teachers even give away the answers to the problems when they walk the students step-by-step through how to solve them. In our TAB studio, students are first challenged to CREATE an artistic problem to solve. These problems are born from ideas, which are mined from issues of importance, from artistic skills artists want to learn more about, or from their desires to try materials or methods in new ways. Problem-creation - ideation - is no small task. The variety of problems, depth of student focus and engagement, and quality of reflection in our art studio always amaze me. I love that I work with these incredible problem-cr