Beyond the Lab: Influencing Practice and Policy

Abstract

In this article, the authors describe over 20 years of work with Ellen Winner at Project Zero, a research and development group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This included a cross-arts curriculum and assessment project aimed at practitioners (ArtsPROPEL, 1989–1995), 10 meta-analytic syntheses of the effects of arts learning on nonarts achievement (REAP, 1997–2001), and an observational theory-building study of the dispositions intended to be learned in high school art classes and the structures through which they are taught, meant for audiences of both practice and theory (Studio Thinking, 2001–2013). Ellen’s perspective as an experimental psychologist interacted with ours in fertile ways to make richly rewarding collaborations in our efforts to make sense of art education practices. From how she chooses what she studies, to her eclectic approaches to research, to addressing her work to broad audiences, psychologists have much to gain from Ellen’s methods.

Keywords

arts research habits of mind Studio Thinking reflection art education

The authors have known and worked with Ellen for over 20 years, primarily through a research and development group, Project Zero, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She mentored two of us, and we are certain others in this volume will address her generosity and skill in that role. Here, we describe our work with her in the arts, the important role she played on our teams, and what others might learn from her. From how she chooses what she studies, to her eclectic approaches to research, to addressing her work to broad audiences, psychologists have much to gain from Ellen’s methods.

While at Project Zero, our work with Ellen included a cross-arts curriculum and assessment project aimed at practitioners (ArtsPROPEL, 1989–1995; Winner, 1991; Winner, Davidson, & Scripp, 1992; Winner, & Simmons, 1992; Camp, & Winner, 1993), 10 meta-analytic syntheses of the effects of arts learning on nonarts achievement for scholarly and policy audiences (REAP, 1997–2001), and an observational theory-building study of the dispositions intended to be learned in high school art classes and the structures through which they are taught, meant for audiences of both practice and theory (Studio Thinking, 2001–2013). We all worked with Ellen on the Studio Thinking project, using our skill sets as teachers, psychologists, and artists. Her perspective as an experimental psychologist interacted with ours in fertile ways to make richly rewarding collaborations in our efforts to make sense of art education practices.

Ellen is a research psychologist who dives into the public sphere, puts her work out to audiences beyond psychologists—parents, educators, New York Times op-ed readers—and watches how it plays. She sees her research as for the public and wants it to matter in the world. In ArtsPROPEL, a project with Project Zero, the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and the Educational Testing Service, she entered the multiple, messy, and often at-odds worlds of arts, education, and assessment, because she values students’ access to quality arts education. Her synthesis and editing of the project’s handbooks shows another quality she exemplifies: she gets the job done. And that quality was especially valuable in the work all authors conducted with her: Studio Thinking.

Studio Thinking, Phase I

Project Zero was founded in 1967 to conduct empirical studies that extended the philosophical work of Nelson Goodman (Gardner & Perkins, 1994); the Studio Thinking work flows from that tradition. In the 1980s and 1990s, Project Zero designed a number of frameworks. Derived from studies of practice, the frameworks are armatures for practitioners that offer enough structure to guide planning and enough openness for individual interpretation—something David Perkins refers to as optimal ambiguity (Project Zero Classroom Institute, 2002). Like these, the Studio Thinking Framework built on earlier work from Project Zero—in that case, the dispositional ideas of David Perkins (Perkins, Tishman, & Jay, 1993) and the arts assessment work initiated by Howard Gardner (1991).

The immediate predecessor to Studio Thinking, however, was a set of meta-analytic reviews from the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP; Winner & Hetland, 2000). That project conducted an exhaustive search and review of studies from 1950 to 1995 that had asked whether arts learning transferred to nonarts learning and achievement. The study’s 10 meta-analyses revealed that only three areas of arts learning showed robust positive effects (Winner & Hetland, 2000).

Following the REAP study, Winner and Hetland wondered why arts advocates were drawn to instrumental arguments, which were revealed by REAP as not scientifically valid (Winner & Cooper, 2000). A next study that explored what intensive, arts-focused programs in high schools intended to teach could offer practitioners and advocates a language for describing arts learning and catalyze more rigorous research around arts learning. With funding from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Winner and Hetland recruited Patricia Palmer, Kim Sheridan, and Shirley Veenema for a research team, which worked from 2001 to 2010, with ongoing writing projects in 2013 and 2018.

Methods

The first stage of the Studio Thinking study (2001–2003) focused on five artist-teachers in two, arts-focused high schools in the Boston area. The Boston Arts Academy is an urban public school; Walnut Hill is an independent boarding school in a western suburb of Boston. Both schools accept students who focus on one of the arts, and their teachers are practicing artists committed to teaching. The school’s differences maximized the observable variation in student and program characteristics and ensured a strong and authentic dose of arts experiences for analysis. The researchers intended their findings to support educators who strived to provide authentic arts experiences and learning across a range of settings, not only in intensive arts high schools.

The Studio Thinking research employed qualitative methods with interviews and video observation. Each month for the 2001 to 2002 academic year, the research team videoed and took notes on 3 hours of class in each of four or five classrooms, summing to 38 classes and 103.5 hours of video. We also collected photographs of student work and curriculum documents. After reviewing notes and a memo written after each observation, the researchers designed follow-up interviews from a standard protocol modified to address the particular data from each class. Audio-taped interviews with the teachers were held about a week after the observations and included teachers watching selected video clips from the classes observed that showed instances of teaching we wanted to learn more about. We asked, “what are you teaching here, and why are you doing it like this?” We also observed how teachers structured their classes, identifying categories and checking them with the teachers. That resulted in three named formats to facilitate learning that we called Studio Structures: Demonstration-Lecture, Students-at-Work, and Critique.

Researchers reviewed transcripts of classroom segments in which students made work while teachers supported them (Students-at-Work) from four classes selected randomly as code development cases. We looked for types of thinking being taught and used the teachers’ language to describe the concepts. Iteratively, we grouped examples of similar types of artistic thinking as we gathered data over the 2001 to 2002 academic year; we continued analysis for another 15 months until August 2003.

The analyses evolved into a code book that identified 11 thinking dispositions, based on the Students-at-Work segments, using the interview transcripts and videos to triangulate. To ensure usefulness for practitioners, we collapsed the 11 categories to eight; hence, three of the resulting Studio Habits of Mind are diptychs (Understand Art Worlds: Domain and Communities; Reflect: Question & Explain and Evaluate; and Develop Craft: Technique and Studio Practice). Eventually, the code book settled enough that pairs of researchers who coded independently achieved high levels of interrater reliability (α ranges from 0.7 to 0.9). The eight Studio Habits of Mind for the coding book and the three Studio Structures became the Studio Thinking Framework.

Studio Thinking Stage II

The authors continued to work with Ellen to explore Studio Thinking in two contexts: (a) identifying levels of learning from student work at the two Boston-area schools and (b) working with five artist-teachers in Alameda County, CA, with whom we explored the use of Studio Habits in arts assessment. The J. Paul Getty Trust and a US DOE grant supported the work, including work with teachers in three urban schools in Oakland to understand how generalist teachers learned and might use the Studio Thinking Framework in arts integration. During this period, we published our first book, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, & Sheridan, 2007), which described the research and the framework itself.

Studio Thinking Catches On

The Studio Thinking Framework has legs. It has been used by researchers (e.g., Alexander, 2010; Alexander & Cassell, 2011; Clark, 2011; McComb, 2010; Sheridan, 2011; Sheridan, Clark, & Williams, 2013; Sheridan et al., 2014), policy makers (National Arts Education Association, 2009), artists and art teachers across all arts disciplines (dance, music, theater, media arts), and elementary generalists and single-subject teachers across the disciplines. The Studio Thinking Framework focuses teachers on what is important for students to learn so that the students can think like artists—that is, using the multiple, embodied, and interacting ways that artists think to develop understanding as they make artworks.

In the complex and often messy day-to-day practice of classrooms, the Studio Thinking Framework provides a set of lenses for teachers to understand what they see and respond to the learning needs of their students. The habits of mind help teachers decide what is important to teach, to plan, and to use a clinical eye during classroom practice and assessment. This eye parallels other practices where diagnosis and treatment are central, including artistic, medical, and therapeutic approaches. The structures help teachers set up their classes and classrooms to better teach their goals. In addition, both the habits and structures help teachers to reflect: Did I do what I planned? How well did that meet my students’ needs? What else do they need? Do I need to do anything differently?

Studio Thinking gives language to what teachers in the arts have seen as important in their practice but were not previously able to describe using a shared language. Our findings have helped advocates for the arts highlight what is central to the arts: particular ways of embodied thinking and working. With Studio Thinking, everyone can more easily explain the types of thinking that are important to artistic practice and that can be learned in a studio classroom. For teachers in the arts who work on interdisciplinary teams, the habits and structures help to make clear what is essential to include in shared courses.

A second edition, Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (Hetland et al., 2013) includes what we learned from people influenced by the work, some of whom have told us how our findings reflect thinking in their own disciplines. A follow-up study of transfer from arts learning to geometry had inconclusive results (Walker, Winner, Hetland, Simmons, & Goldsmith, 2011). Most recently, a new book collected data about elementary and middle school teachers using the Studio Thinking Framework: Studio Thinking from the Start: The PK-8 Art’s Educator’s Handbook (Hogan, Hetland, Jaquith, & Winner, 2018).

Learning From Ellen

Having worked with Ellen on five projects—ArtsPROPEL, REAP, Studio Thinking, Geometry Arts-Transfer, and the Studio Thinking Handbook—the authors see Ellen from many angles. We close this article by asking what others can learn from our experiences working with her. The ways she selects issues to study, her methods of working, and her presentation to a wide range of audiences suggest approaches from which other psychologists and researchers may benefit.

Study Selection

Ellen is careful about what she selects to research. She is curious and alert to opportunities where her expertise and interests have the potential to contribute to studies of importance.

Real world problems: Doing work that matters in the world matters to Ellen, and that often involves investigating new contexts and processes. When psychologists and other researchers choose problems important to people on the ground, science can profoundly influence practice. Ellen often works in contexts beyond the laboratory—with other types of researchers and practitioners—to make sure her research creates usable knowledge. ArtsPROPEL, REAP, and Studio Thinking are but three examples.

Embracing controversy: Ellen runs to issues where others fear to tread. Despite her long-standing support for the arts and education, she embraced the work on the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP) that required her to challenge claims by advocates that education in the arts caused growth in other areas of learning. When David Hockney asserted that Vermeer and other Renaissance artists must have used a camera obscura or other photographic tools in their paintings, Ellen jumped into the fray, citing the photographically realist drawings of autistic children from her previous research.

Methods

Ellen’s methods are eclectic, respectful, and responsive to the questions that interest her.

Flexibility: Ellen explores issues that intrigue her, regardless of the methods needed to address those questions. In PROPEL, synthesis and editing was needed to get the findings to practitioners, so she produced texts. In REAP, the methods of searching and meta-analytic analysis was required, so she learned those. In Studio Thinking, ethnographic observation and qualitative analysis were required, so she employed them. And the geometry transfer research needed test design in mathematics and visual arts. Where the questions lead, she follows.

Rigor: While Ellen listens carefully and embraces ideas from everyone at the table, she never abandons her own, bringing the rigor of her expertise to whatever other methods are needed for the current study. Her approach is vividly present in every conversation, and that augments the skill sets of her collaborators. For instance, in the Studio Thinking project, we coded over 4000 interactions between teachers and students to develop a robust and reliable framework of the thinking that art teachers intend to teach. The infusion of rigor with flexibility and respect creates an energetic push–pull among the teams with whom she works, and that results in a vibrant, playful, and challenging research process. That makes the precision of empirical science accessible to practitioner audiences, expanding access of those who might benefit from the study.

Collaborations and teams: Because Ellen foregrounds work that matters in the world, she is compelled to conduct research with a wide variety of partners. She is flexible and responsive to the ideas and questions of others, eager to work with whatever team comprises the skills needed to address the question at hand. In PROPEL, she worked with visual arts, music, and imaginative writing educators. In REAP, she learned from social psychologists. In the Studio Thinking project, she collaborated with a team who had expertise in qualitative methods, educational contexts, and artistic practice. In the geometry transfer project, she worked with mathematics educators, artists, art educators, and cognitive psychologists. Whatever the study, she builds research teams in response to the current question and, when that project concludes, builds new teams responsive to the next question she wants to address. She is a great wonderer, quick to frame questions and throw them out to the group for further thinking, to push details toward synthesis, and then to wonder again.

Presentation

Studies Ellen conducts with multiperspectival teams often lead to robust solutions to challenging, field-based problems that are accessible to a wide range of audiences.

Remember the audience: Ellen’s work hooks people; she thinks about her audience from start to finish. She considers what troubles them, what they care about, what they could use right away, and how they can understand and remember. She translates findings into ordinary language and finds building blocks for individual practice such as the Studio Habits of Mind. Ellen doesn’t allow herself to be distracted from what the audience needs, so she keeps in mind the next study whenever complexities arise. She likes to dive into intricate, contextualized conversations, but she likes to resurface with just a few pearls that can be remembered and shared.

Use controversy: Unlike many experimental psychologists, who often think more about the study before and the study to come than the current study’s impact, Ellen looks for places where research can inform controversies, shape advocacy and policy, and otherwise influence and impact the world. Her analytic perspective and tendency toward clear, clean data points are invaluable in complex, field-based conversations. We’d urge more experimental psychologists not to wait for someone to discover the impact and relevance of their work, but to dive into the conversations of practice.

In all these themes—selecting areas of interest to study, focusing on real-world questions, building teams with diverse perspectives, inserting experimental rigor into conversations while listening openly to perspectives from other areas of expertise, using methods beyond the lab that suit the question at hand, and presenting work memorably for impact, Ellen retains her fundamental research psychology lens. By looking across experimental methods and findings, teaching and art practices, and the richness of social contexts, her work brings inquiry out of the lab and changes conversations in the field to raise levels of quality in both laboratories and practice. Whether describing psychological phenomena, synthesizing others’ research, addressing learning in art, or justifying arts place in schooling, she brings an experimental mind to important problems and enriches a spectrum of endeavors.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Lois Hetland, EdD, professor of Art Education and graduate coordinator at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, is a teacher, cognitive psychologist, researcher, and, by training, a vocalist and visual artist. She taught PK-12 students for 17 years, conducted research at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1992-2011, and now teaches art education to undergraduates, graduate students, and practicing educators. Her research addresses arts cognition and professional practice in educational settings, and she is a currently co-PI on an NSF grant integrating art with climate science. She is co-author of Studio Thinking from the Start: The K-8 Art Educator’s Handbook (2018) and Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (2013, 2nd edition), and she consults frequently across the US and internationally on arts education, arts-integration, and arts assessment.

Kimberly Sheridan is an associate professor of educational psychology and art education at George Mason University where she also co-directs the Mason Arts Research Center, a National Endowment of the Arts funded research lab. She has published dozens of scholarly articles, is a co-author of the book Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, and is the recipient of a number of fellowships and grants including from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Fulbright Scholar program and Spencer Foundation. She received her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Shirley Veenema is an artist/educator currently working in media, mixed media drawing, and artist books. One of her recent artist books (Witches, Magic & Early New England), produced to show what makers can do with the Digital Public Library of America collection, has interested educators looking for alternative ways of assessing student understanding. While conducting research at Project Zero, Harvard University Graduate School of Education from 1987-2006, she focused on thinking in the arts, portfolio assessment, technology, and schools using multiple intelligences theory. She is a co-author of StudioThinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, (2013, 2nd edition). A printmaker by training, her teaching includes Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, where from 2006-2012 she served Art Department Chair.

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