How to Be an Explorer of the World

Periodically throughout this year, we will be taking a "break" in between our highly structured units of study to focus on "Explorations." These are specific artistic challenges designed to be largely self-directed, and to help us improve in the areas of problem-solving, critical thinking, self-reflection, divergent thinking, and choice-making.

The "Explorations" are drawn from such inspirations as Keri Smith's How to Be an Explorer of the World, Yoko Ono's instruction paintings, and students' own suggestions.

The premise of the "Explorations" is supported by the celebrated art educator and researcher Elliot Eisner's "10 Lessons the Arts Teach:"

1. The arts teach us to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach us that problems can have more than one solution, and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach us that in complex forms of problem-solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach us that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach us to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help us learn to say what cannot be said. When we are invited to disclose what a work of art helps us feel, we must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source, and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.