Article in Review: "Aesthetic Thought, Critical Thinking and Transfer" by Abigail C. Housen

This article, out of all of the articles I have read for this independent study, was a complete dud in terms of educational interest and development. There were a few key points that are worth mentioning, and I will take the rest of this post to discuss these things.

Abigail C. Housen has confirmed through research that there is a relationship between the Visual Thinking Strategies curriculum that she has created and the development and use of critical thinking skills throughout a range of life experiences. Through a longitudinal study conducted in 1993, Housen has confirmed that along with accelerating the pace of an individual's aesthetic growth VTS also "causes the growth of critical thinking and enables its transfer to other contexts and content" (100-101). These critical thinking skills include the following: reflection, decision-making, active looking skills, the ability to change one's mind, ability to work in groups, "to observe carefully, evaluate, synthesize, and justify and speculate," among other things (101).

Dewey himself articulated the importance of developing these skills through educational endeavors. He said that the role of education was to develop "effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions [...] sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and [...] methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves" (101).

Along with developing these critical thinking skills, Housen discovered that they transfer to our daily lives both contextually and through content. Context Transfer relates to "critical thinking strategies in a social setting different from the one in which such thinking was originally learned," while content transfer refers to using critical thinking skills within a different subject matter (106-107). Context Transfer also occurs earlier than Content Transfer (11).

So, what can all of this teach us museum educators? Does it teach us that we cannot count out VTS as a means of developing critical thinking skills? Or, does it simply teach us that developing critical thinking skills is a necessary part of learning in art museums? Surely, VTS assists in developing these necessary skills; this I do not doubt. However, as mentioned in the previous post, is this truly the sole goal of education in art museums? Is it better placed in academic settings? Should our visitors come to our museums with these skills already developed? Couldn't we go farther in terms of learning potential if this were the case? Is it our job to teach art or a way of looking at art? Does it even matter if the viewer learns in some capacity?

In the end, I am left to ponder the following questions: What is the purpose of a museum? What is the purpose of museum education? What is the purpose of art museum education? These are the issues we need to address before claiming to accomplish effective learning in our museums.