Week 6 Read & Reflection

. Critically examine this article through a VTS lens. How might Housen and Yenawine respond to Zander’s ideas?

VTS could be a good model which perfectly materialized Zanger’s claim. VTS not only involves all kinds of requirements of good dialogues in art classroom but also highly develops each requirement in detail for the meaningful dialogue. What I was surprised when I met VTS discussion for the first time is that it is very different from what I did with art appreciation in the previous art classrooms. The dialogue or discussion hadn’t been provided often and they were always teacher-centered. There were definitely correct answers and art teachers were often accustomed to directly delivering the artists’ intentions without meaningful dialogues. However, VTS discussion opens many kinds of possibility. It doesn’t allow teacher to be a person who is teaching but encourage them to be a facilitator. This is a absolutely student-centered discussion. In VTS discussion, participants could be taught to use “I” messages when talking about their beliefs and to avoid generalizations such as “everybody knows” or “you ought to” as Zander mentioned. In terms of that, dialogues in VTS could satisfy the requirement that the ideal dialogue in art classroom has to be about sharing, and exploring different points of view.

Zanger said that having the meaningful dialogues in art classroom is pretty challenging because of time, opportunity or willingness of both teachers and students. But I think differently that the most important reasons that art teachers are having a hard time to have dialogical relationship are because they are not familiar with doing that and they don’t know how to do in detail. If VTS discussion which is scientifically concrete was very popular in school curriculum, it wouldn’t be so hard for them to have meaningful dialogues. While learning VTS, teachers could be accustomed to having dialogical relationships with their students by mastering the VTS discussions’ guidelines.   In terms of London's claim that teachers should learn to speak from their heart and with a non-judgemental point of view, VTS would be a perfect instruction which could allow teacher to have to aim to share ideas rather than impose their own thinking on students.

Terry Barratt suggests several questions which could be used for encouraging dialogue in art classroom such as “What do you see?” “What is that artwork about?” “How do you know?”, “How does art relate to my own interests?”. These are very similar to the VTS three questions. But the VTS questions would be much more efficient because each question has logical correlations one another. Besides, VTS also perfectly found a shape in rules or guidelines Zander said which are needed in order to demonstrate courtesy and mutual respect rather than to defend one’s own opinion. As Walker mentioned that current recommendations for teaching increasingly call for meaning making and discussion, VTS would be a perfect instruction which enables teachers to help students to communicate in ways that require them to listen to one another and engage in meaningful dialogue.