Resources Technology Workshops Services

Program Staff

TEPlist

Private Consultations

Classroom Observation

Document Feedback

Midterm Feedback

Videotaping

House Calls

Departmental Training

Teaching Portfolio

GTF Teaching Award

Search TEP site

 

 

 

...Home > Services > Newsletter > Lizard Index > 1992-1993 Issues > Visual Inquiry

Visual Inquiry

Imagine a class with no mid-terms and no finals. All the weekly assignments are intriguing and thought-provoking and you can't wait to explore your own ideas and thinking about them. Imagine a class where you are able to use both your linguistic intelligence and your artistic sensitivity (regardless of your facility for rendering), to express your thoughts and feelings to whatever level you want to take them. Imagine steady, consistent support and encouragement to do all this. Imagine reaching a place where it no longer matters what the assignments are. You are able to move ahead independently and productively. Imagine being able to use what you have learned this term for the rest of your life.

Using the idea of this kind of visual processing and thinking, a class called Visual Language was developed some years ago in the Fine Arts department. It generated a lot of excitement because it was designed to bring together students from all over the campus to explore their thinking in a new way.

Bob Wenger, who took Visual Language as a fine arts graduate student, currently teaches the Visual Inquiry class offered through FAA. It continues to be open to all students and draws a curious mix from departments as diverse as accounting, anthropology, biology, psychology, architecture, marketing, sociology, and international studies.

I enrolled in this course last term and became so excited by my own learning experience that I asked Bob if I could interview him and pass on some of what happened through this experience to you. I think that many of the techniques Bob used could be adapted to other disciplines and would allow the instructor to assist students with a new perspective on ideas presented in the course.

Lizard: What do you want students to get out of Visual Inquiry?

Bob: I would say in a general sense that the course allows them to see in a different way. At the end of the term I do individual reviews, and if that new way of seeing is present, I'll see it then. Occasionally students will come to me later and talk about this as a benefit of the course. This gets me excited. The course allows them to see things they may have missed, broadens their excitement about their own experiences.

Lizard: How did the class change when the name went from Visual Language to Visual Inquiry?

Bob: I don't think the class changed, but part of the difference in the class that I'm teaching is that my excitement is for the individual. I try to pull things out of the student. Some of the other approaches may have been more specific to the exercise. There's something else about the person that I'm interested in which comes up sometimes not as a direct result of the classes or any particular exercise or thing I've said. So there's a difference between dealing with the exercises and dealing with the person. It's very hard to predict exactly what's going to come out.

Lizard: There seems to be a lot about this course that's unpredictable. It makes sense that some students may not fully realize what they got out of the class until some time in the future. The class is more focused on process rather than product.

Bob: By the end of the term when I do a flip through the notebook. I sort of listen to it rather than look at any specific drawing or even read the writing because the patterns that develop, if you have enough work, is what's most telling. The patterns reveal something - a person's choices or potential for choices. There's always more in the drawing than you know when you did it. And as you keep drawing, that drawing or idea will get buried unless you do some retrospective which could come along a lot later. That's the magic about drawing regardless of one's facility. The drawings always contain something else that would take someone else's eyes to see.

The appearance of the notebook in the earlier stages is like a class assignment, fairly dry, in some ways unexciting. You can't always see the discoveries that are being made. When the course ends, the student begins. The notebook becomes more than a collection of class assignments. It becomes a vehicle through which the student is able to explore his/her visual thinking. It is when a student is able to sustain the inquiry based on their own excitement, their own curiosities, that the learning really begins. Most students already know enough about accomplishments in terms of product. The sustained inquiry concept is hard for them to understand. They need to experience it before they understand it. They need to take their thinking to new levels. By the end of the term students feel more confident with their own ideas. They're really ready for a Visual Inquiry II class. One thing I realized in writing this article is that it is difficult to talk about this course without visuals. When I tell people about my experience, I always show them my notebook. In one exercise we explored the idea of entrances and exits. We were to find different entrances and exits and draw them. The exercise raised a lot of interesting issues for me. The entrances I drew were inviting - entering a forest, a secret garden, being drawn to the mystery behind a beaded curtain in a doorway. When I thought of exits, I could only think of the long bar you push on the exits of hospitals and schools and federal buildings - institutions I am happier exiting than entering. I connected entrances and exits to beginnings and endings, to the unknown and the known, to arriving and leaving. I realized that it is always easier for me to enter than exit many aspects of my life.

In the review that accompanied each assignment I was always fascinated by how differently individual students interpreted the exercise. Without a word spoken I was keenly aware of other perspectives and could appreciate and respect someone else's point of view. One distinct advantage in the arts is the opportunity to see and follow the development of other students' work. This process often stimulated new ideas for me and gave me an easy way to talk with others about what they had done. Bob has expressed a willingness to talk with instructors about ways of incorporating a visual inquiry approach in other disciplines. It might be interesting, for example, to experiment with the idea of giving students an assignment to render or find a visual that represents their concept of "slavery" as a prelude to that section of their history assignment. Who knows what they might choose - a bird with a broken wing, heavy chains, an animal in a cage. Visuals could be displayed or simply left on desks with five minutes for everyone to circulate and look at each other's visual thinking on the topic. The subsequent discussion might be very interesting. Think about it.

Lizard 13 Spring 93

 

---