Talking, Thinking, Responding and Creating: A Survey of Literature on Talk in Art Education

The study of talk in art education is almost entirely limited to talk analyzed as teacher/student interactions or talk that relates to making and responding to art in the classroom. Except for the work of a few early childhood researchers (Thompson & Bales, 1991), discussion of the potential of talk to create a classroom "community" with common understandings and beliefs is virtually absent in the literature of art education. This is not the case in related educational disciplines such as literacy and science. In these fields, perspectives from discourse analysis have led some educators to conceptualize the classroom not as a place where teachers inform learners, but as a community in which students create meaning and deeper understanding by being involved in multiple forms of discourse (Brown & Palinscar, 1989; Gee, 1992; Michaels, 1981). My own search for a creative classroom led me to conceptualize the classroom as a community in which students create meaning by participating in a variety of discourses. In these classrooms, teaching is carefully interwoven with an understanding that there are definitely times to speak but also times in which silence is important for both the teacher and the student (Gallas, 1994). In many instances, it wasn't what the teacher said that encouraged creativity so much as how the teacher created opportunities for multiple forms of discourse and how he or she constructed a safe place in which to share ideas (Zander, 1998). This often involved knowing when to refrain from offering or imposing opinions in order to encourage student exploration. Often, refraining from talk empowered students to think and speak for themselves. Research in a wide variety of disciplines theorizes that understandings between two or more people are negotiated through talk and that meaning is not fixed or static, but created (Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1979). Therefore, meaning is elusive in that understandings taken from any classroom depend on communication in a variety of contexts. Similarly, individual disciplines have specific terminology, attitudes, and ways of using language that are closely related to the discipline. Students not only learn content from using this vocabulary, but they also learn from the patterns of interaction and social contexts involved in its use (Lemke, 1990; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Each of these influences work together to create what Hymes (1974) calls a "speech community" in which styles of communication become particular to that community. I maintain that conceptualizing the art classroom as a community of discourse may have significant implications for further research in our field. Studies of Classroom Talk Chomksy (1957) was one of the first to introduce the concept that language can be studied as a predictor of patterns in thought or as representative of creative activity. He hypothesized that people involved in discourse negotiate understanding through a complex set of internalized rules that are present at birth. Chomsky felt that meaning is "generated" through spoken interaction. As such, an understanding of how humans use language has the potential to predict patterns in thought and represent creative activity between participants. This perspective was revolutionary because it suggested that not only could texts and utterances be analyzed for linguistic structure, but that talk between speakers could be analyzed as units of thought representative of cognition and human understanding. This theoretical positioning led to an explosion of research on language in multiple disciplines-including psychology, anthropology, sociology, semiotics, and pragmatics, as well as education. Linguistic research followed two basic lines of thinking (Cazden, 19886). One studied frequencies of categories of classroom talk while the other was more qualitative and evolved into the study of discourse. Both perspectives valued the classroom as a research setting because it seemed to be an environment in which talk and patterns of talk were relatively controlled. …