Week 8 Reading & Reflection

The Barett’s perspective toward dialogue about art is, in a rough way, similar to those of VTS discussion. She especially recognizes that focusing on artists’ intention or background information when having a talk about art is not beneficial to students. Like the founders of VTS, she believes that whatever comes to students’ mind, they would be able to share and speak what they think and how they feel about the work of art in the discussion without regard to the artists’ intention.  

 However, her some ideas and rules are methodologically different from those of VTS. The questions she utilizes in the discussion such as “What can we say about this work?”, “Who would you like to get us started?” or “Who can add to her thought?” seem to be similar to the questions of VTS. But these questions don’t contain more detailed directions which would be easily grasped by participants like VTS questions. Besides there’s nothing which can replace the second question of VTS, “What do you see that makes you say that?”. Since the second question enables students to not only develop thinking skills but also to practice for building an aesthetic perspective, without the question which could be a substitute for the second question of VTS, I think the discussion’s would be much less effective.

She utilizes these three rules; 1) No side conversation. 2) One person speaks at a time, and everyone attentively listens to that speaker. 3) Limit comments to one thought at a time so that everybody can better follow the speaker. I think VTS would agree with the rule 1 and 2. However, as far as I know, VTS wouldn’t strongly limit students’ comments to one idea. However, from my experience, using this limitation would be good in order to make discussion clear and effective. Sometimes, I was having a hard time paraphrasing because some students share more than three ideas at once. This behavior made not only me but also the rest of students confused. I would like my students to keep in mind that it would be a better idea for them to speak one idea at once.  

 Saying that she never uses the phrases like “There are no wrong answer in here- this is an art class”, she believes there are many wrong answers she has heard in response to questions about art. In addition, she does not want to reinforce the notion that anything one says about art is relevant or valid. This idea would be totally different from the point of view of VTS. VTS believes that active participation is required in order to make discussion effective so VTS facilitators try to eliminate students fear about the possibility that their answers would be considered wrong or their answers would be critically judged by teacher. I doubt that every student is able to get actively involved in the discussion if she keeps this critical stance.     

  From her examples, the good answer might be like “I see the large green face of a man staring at the face of a large white goat” and bad answer would be like “I don’t like it, or It’s really cool”. VTS would agree with it but VTS certainly helps the students who answer like the latter change or develop their answering rather than only access or evaluate the answering. The second question of VTS and facilitator’s paraphrasing function for that. If one student said “I don’t like it”, in the VTS discussion the facilitator ask the question “What do you see that makes you say that?” and then the students would be trying to explain why he or she doesn’t like it. Even if the student’s expression was not good, he or she could learn how to express more intelligently and clearly from the facilitator’s paraphrasing.  

  Even though she took the similar stance to VTS, there are many methodological differences. That is because the author doesn’t fully focus on the possibilities of development of interpretation unlike VTS. Thus, I anticipate that there might be more students left out of the discussion and the effectiveness would be less than VTS.