BPS Podcast: Constructivism in a TAB Art Room

In this episode, we discuss constructivism and how it relates to a TAB artroom. As mentioned in the podcast. Here are the twelve indicators (TAB) adapted from In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms by Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Martin G. Brooks

1. Choice-based art teachers encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative. 

2. Because of the very nature of visual arts education, choice-based art teachers use primary sources and raw, physical, manipulative interactive materials to inspire and catalyze learners.

3. Choice-based art teachers encourage students to generate, utilize and create their own ideas and artistic problems when engaged in art-making activities.

4. In order to facilitate ownership, choice-based art teachers allow students to drive artistic activity, shift instructional strategies and alter instructional content.

5. Choice-based art teachers make inquiries into student’s previous knowledge of artistic content and encourage students to express their knowledge before sharing their own understandings.

6. Choice-based art teachers encourage students to engage in dialogue and artful conversation, communicating art ideas, knowledge and creative processes with one another.  

7. Choice-based art teachers encourage students to research their art and ideas.

8. Choice-based art teachers seek and encourage student reflective thinking expressed through ongoing dialogue, reflective writing and artist statements.  

9. Choice-based art teachers engage students in experiences that contradict their initial understandings of content or hypothesis and then initiate discussion for student’s further consideration.

10. Choice-based art teachers afford students time for artistic ideas to incubate.  

11. Choice-based art teachers allow students time to develop understandings of art content.  

12. Choice-based art teachers facilitate learning through the use of discovery, the introduction of concepts and concept application. The “Learning Cycle Model” (discovery learning) is a distinctive feature of choice based art education.       

Constructivism in a TAB classroom