Visual Understanding in Education

My work began with this: how could viewing art make some uncomfortable, others bored or edgy, and still others animated and excited? Fascinated by these distinctive reactions, I wanted to know more about what I would later call aesthetic development. How do people experience art? What goes on in their minds as they stand in front of a painting? What goes on over their lifetimes as they stand again and again in front of many paintings? From a pedagogical point of view, I wanted to know what aesthetic skills are developed in looking at a work of art. What causes such development? I decided that only by understanding viewing from the viewer’s perspective could I understand how to support and nurture and, finally, foster aesthetic growth. Initially, I developed a research method to measure the art-viewing experience. Then, after years of teaching and research, I collaborated with Philip Yenawine to create educational practices that help learners move to new levels of aesthetic experience. Stages of Aesthetic Development In the 1970s, I demonstrated that, regardless of cultural or socioeconomic background, viewers understand works of art in predictable patterns that I call “stages. ” My research showed that we process artwork in a sequence of these stages (Housen, 1983). In the ensuing decades, I, with my colleague Karin DeSantis, demonstrated this fact in research studies where we showed that, if exposed to a carefully sequenced series of artworks, viewers ’ ways of interpreting images would evolve in a predictable manner. We also found that given certain key elements in the design of aesthetic encounters, growth in critical and creative thinking accompanied growth in aesthetic thought. In other words, in the process of looking at and talking about art, the viewer is developing skills not ordinarily associated with art. These findings were consistent over a wide range o