The Held Question - How do the arts support critical thinking?
Before we can explore this, it seems a good idea to back up and explore first: what exactly is critical thinking? Why is it such a hot topic currently?
Critical thinking is the process of thinking systematically, utilizing cognitive skills to listen, learn, think, understand, question, retain, justify, and evaluate. Critical thinking has less to do with intelligence and more to do with a process of sifting through and evaluating new information.
We have the world at our fingertips, thanks to the internet and these lovely search engines. Why retain definitions, or recipes, or driving instructions, when you can just google it or map it? Don’t get me wrong, nothing against looking things up- GPS changed my lost little self’s life!
But...all this information at our fingertips + a human tendency to give more weight to written down words and suddenly... everything looks scientific!
Only, we can all reasonably agree that not everything on the internet is true. Right?
With a billion conspiracy theories propagating and spreading on the web, there is a great need to develop ways to sift through massive amounts of information; enter the hot topic: critical thinking.
What is Learning?
Learning is the accumulation of scaffolded experiences, reflected and built upon. Learning is a process, driven by a need to develop skills to navigate survival, relationships, and the general world around us. Learning happens in the not knowing phase, it happens off centre. It is critical for growth to bump into what you don’t know- failing has the potential to be so brilliant because it forces you to reconsider what you think you know. But no one wants their surgeon or even their hairdresser, to be failing brilliantly on them- enter the arts: a safe place to explore process and risk failing.
I can speak only to my own experiences as an artist and as a teaching artist. In my training I have heard the word ‘process’ a million times! I was convinced the word was as overused and itch inducing as ‘practice, practice, practice’ until one day I had my own face palm moment and realized- ‘oh that's what my teachers were saying’: you gotta’ develop a process to practice.
In short here is my previous process, boiled down:
Have an idea
Attempt to create idea
Think ‘Wow! I’m brilliant’
Followed swiftly by ‘This is a terrible idea, what was I thinking?!’
Eventually (or, hopefully) land on: ‘Hey look, I made a thing and it’s pretty all right’
I’ve been in enough performance creation productions and enough education rooms to know that this process might look familiar.
No one wants to experience step 4 and often when they do, they stay there. However, hating everything is part of the process- it's the discernment phase where you confront whether your skill set is equal to your dreamy ideas. It’s brilliant for pushing you to grow and learn fresh new skills, provided you can see it as part of the process and not a judgement on your identity as an artist. It is also a very specific step in the process that has to happen at a very specific time- it can’t happen in the 1st or 2nd phase of creating - that’s like trying to shift from 1st gear to 5th gear- if you don’t loose your transmission on the highway there is a good chance you’ll burn out your engine and leave the arts and become a grownup who thinks they are not creative. Of course you are! But maybe your inner editor needs a time- out?
As I developed my own process to practice, I discovered through much repetition that what I was really practicing was: holding the unanswered questions. Exploring what I didn’t know. Observing what was going unnoticed. Making relationships between what I did know and what I didn’t, to see what grew in that metaphoric garden of the unknown. In other words: I was practicing mystery. Which is a difficult thing to do when the answers are all a short google search away. There is a great deal of comfort to be found in trading in mystery for logic and facts.
Mysteries can be solved but they don’t get solved if someone isn’t curious about them.
Keeping curiosity alive, embracing the mystery in the everyday, constantly living in wonder at how little we individuals can know- like really, really know. To me, this is the foundation of both art making and critical thinking. Both require an open-minded reflection of what is before you. They both require starting at the beginning and recognizing what you know and what you don’t know. They both require a process to study how it is you’ve come to know what you know. We are taught that having knowledge is powerful, which leads to a tendency to seek out only the things we feel confident that we know, or at least the topics, situations and themes that we can bluff like we fully understand them.
Something different happens in the arts, something braver and more wild. Artists dance all the time with mystery, they face down the unknown when they pick up a paint brush or a pen. They have a thought or an idea or a gut feeling that something new needs creating, and they develop a process where they can bring that into the world. Real magic, real mystery the home place of curiosity is in the held question- the one that can’t be immediately answered but instead needs to be listened to, reflected on, thought on, revaluated, retained, nourished and eventually understood.
Over the years my process went from the one above to this one below. It’s the process that I use to shape the arts experience when I’m facilitating,
What do you know?
What, and how, do you know what you know?
What do you not know?
What you need to learn?
What you want to learn next?
If you just googled it or had the answers given to you straight away, there is a good chance you stay in phase 1 of the process. But when you hold a question, one that isn’t answered, when you’ve given space to consider the shape and contour of it, it will bring up more questions. You begin to develop a process for thinking systematically, using previously learned knowledge to understand, categorize and evaluate
In other words: to critically think.
The arts improve critical thinking because like critical thinking they require you to learn, develop hone, edit and refine a personal process to explore the unanswered, maybe even yet unformed questions to make sense of your self, the world, and your place in it.
I propose, for the purposes of developing critical thinking the following question: What if instead of asking students to repeat information, we instead to teach them to craft questions about the world around them and support them in developing a process for learning that’s as unique as them.
