Playful Mindfulness: How Singapore Adolescent Students Embody Meaning with School Art

Ateenage research participant shared his pivotal artistic learning experience:At first I couldn't figure out what was missing. I just couldn't catch it - the essence. I kept checking [but became] oblivious because I couldn't really capture the essence, so It is like sort of very aimless. I cut [paper for a project], then stroll [around in the classroom] and do whatever my mind tells me to.... I realized after sometime halfway through when I [had spent] a lot of time on it already. . . that it is something not so easy. It is challenging. The challenge is the precision.Focus!An aspect of Efland's (1976) initial contempt for School Art Style was its lack of attention to skilllearning. Once dominant in U.S. art education, this infamous style entailed artistic creation by pseudoactive schoolchildren under the instruction of noninterventlonist teachers. Subsequent caveats targeted the noncritical tenets of meaningless skill drills In schools - the repetitive and tedious practice of developing fine-motor control to handle a particular art medium or tool. Paralleling the shift away from the creative paradigm in art education (Zimmerman, 2009), inquiry Into studio art skill learning dwindled, yielding implications for education that were only minimally significant. Moreover, the current definition of cognition, appropriated from disciplines outside the arts, nullifies the contributions of arts education In school even further by shifting emphasis in the art curriculum to the cultivation of intellectual reasoning and discursive practices in preparation for future rational citizenship (Eisner, 1998).Defining cognitive processes through the manipulations of linguistic and mathematical symbols can be somewhat problematic in international school art research. In most Asian secondary school art curricula, skill acquisition is almost always a required component. My study drew upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with Vygotsky's sociocultural learning theory as a conceptual framework to investigate this facet of adolescent artistic learning In Singapore schools. How secondary students embodied various dimensions of meaning as they acquired the mandatory artmaking skills expanded into other means of sociocultural Interpretation.An underlying assumption in this research is the notion of art as a complex but ill-structured domain of knowledge (Efland, 2002). Efland challenged Bloom's Taxonomy for its veneration of cognition and discrimination against the affective and psychomotor domains of learning. Although the learning of general skills involves algorithmic steps, conveniently accepted by classical cognitive scientists for their inquiries, the learning of artistic skills is often less systematic and relatively unpredictable. Characterized by openness to risk and happy accidents, artful knowing quite likely grows organically - rooted in the flexible buoyancy of the body - and springs forth when learners tacitly understand how indefinable bodily knowing takes place.Conceptual FrameworkIn his Phenomenology of Perception, MerleauPonty (1945/1962) offered two concepts - intentional arc and maximum grip - that challenge the narrow definition of cognition as a rational progression of symbol processing (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1999).The intentional arc acknowledges the reciprocal relationship between the body and the world In an effort to embrace the potential physical manifestation of "I can." Such primordial knowing that exists between bodily intentionality and each transcendental fulfillment of that Intention strengthens a template of being. Over time, a repertoire of intuitions develops through interaction with life situations and eventually transforms dispositions. This part of his embodiment theory thus opens up the possibility of integration with Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural learning theory, which highlighted learning within a context as well as interactions with cultural tools,' Including artifacts and language exchange. …