How do you teach students how to create?
A conversation with Keith Sawyer on his book "Learning to See" (2025, MIT Press)
Professor R. Keith Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovations in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a world renowned expert on creativity and learning who has published numerous influential works and is the host of the podcast titled, “The Science of Creativity with Dr. Keith Sawyer.”
He sat down with Professor Anna Abraham and Dr. Desiree Sharpe from the Torrance Center at UGA to discuss his latest book which was released in April this year.
Below is link to the full audio interview. We recommend listening to the interview while reading through it. Audio excerpts are embedded within the interview transcript if you prefer a brief listen. Enjoy!
Anna Abraham:
We have with us Professor Keith Sawyer, who is no stranger to anyone in the field of creativity and a huge, illustrious voice. He has very kindly agreed to have this first conversation with us in our new Substack newsletter.
We've chosen him not only because he's written so much work that has inspired what we do in the Torrance Center for professionals, but also because he has a wonderful new book out called Learning to See, which is now out in bookshops, virtual and real.
We've had the wonderful opportunity to read this book and we are huge fans. It's just been delightful, and I feel bad we have only an hour to talk about this, but we will dive straight in.
Welcome, Keith. Thank you so much for being willing to do this.
Keith Sawyer:
Oh, thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Anna Abraham:
Excellent. I will start with the ‘why’ behind your book. You've written many, many books and many on a lot of different topics that are related in some way to creativity, the spirit of creativity.
Why this book and why now?
Keith Sawyer:
This new book, Learning to See, is a book about art and design professors in BFA and MFA programs, which is something I've never written about before.
So, it was sort of an accident - all the way back in 2010, I had a sabbatical coming up from my university, and I was thinking about where I might go for my sabbatical. I had an opportunity to go to Savannah College of Art and Design; they invited me. They said, "You know, we're an art school. Keith Sawyer is a well-known creativity researcher, so let's have him come here and teach some classes about creativity.”
I love Savannah, which is one of the main reasons I agreed to go there.
I didn't know anything about art school or just barely had heard about SCAD, as it's called, Savannah College of Art and Design. My wife loved Savannah, so we said, "Let's go." We moved to Savannah. We got an apartment in the Historic District, which is beautiful if you've been there.
While I was there, I thought, “You know, I should talk to some of the professors because I'm interested in creativity.” I also am a learning scientist, so I'm interested in teaching and learning. I thought, “Surely art and design professors will be experts in teaching for creativity and I don't know anything about art teaching. Why don't I go interview some of these art and design professors?”
Really, it was almost accidental that I ended up on a sabbatical at SCAD because they had invited me, and then it was opportunistic on my part to say, "Let me start interviewing these people." Once I started interviewing them, I was just so compelled by their stories, about what they do, and how they think about creativity and how they think about teaching. It really did blow my mind. I decided to keep interviewing people because it was so fascinating.
Anna Abraham:
That's fantastic. What comes out of the book is a lot of the consistencies that these experts that you spoke to have in terms of their pedagogical strategies. A lot of it is captured in the title of your book, which is Learning to See; when I saw it, I was immediately reminded of John Berger's Ways of Seeing.
I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the choice of naming it Learning to See. Because of course as we read the book, we realize the intricate nature of making, playing, actually doing, plays in Learning to See. Thinking about it plays in the whole process of coming up with creative or generative ideas in the space, so can you tell us a little bit about the title itself and your decision-making?
Keith Sawyer:
I don't know anything about art education or professional art. These people I was interviewing were professional artists and professional designers. You can't get a job teaching at one of the top leading art schools or design schools unless you really are a rock star. I went to New York City. I went to Los Angeles. After I left SCAD and my sabbatical was over, then I started going around the country.
I didn't know about the importance of seeing. I didn't know about John Berger's book that you mentioned and there are several other books with seeing in the title that are written by artists. I was going to call the project Learning How to Create. In fact, that's what I did—Learning How to Create – I thought that was going to be the title of the book. All of my documents that I had on my computer on Microsoft Word had Learning How to Create at the top.
I learned in my first interview—I was interviewing a painter, and she was teaching at SCAD – her name was Sandra Reed, and I had this questionnaire I had developed, like a good researcher. I had an open-ended questionnaire and I was going to use these questions to guide my interviews and the first question I had on the page was, “How do you teach students how to create?”
That was my goal: To find out how these exceptional creators teach their students how to create at a professional level. I said, “How do you teach students how to create?”, and [Sandra Reed] was visibly uncomfortable. She said, “Well, I'm not sure I'm doing that.” She was trying to be polite, but I could tell she was not comfortable with the question.
To my credit, as a good anthropologist, my response was, “Oh, well, what do you think you are teaching, then?” Then the interview took off and I put aside my semi-structured questionnaire and just let her story guide the interview.
I realized with many other people I interviewed, the same thing happened, where I still started the interview with this question, “How do you teach people how to create?”, and every single artist and designer did not like that question. They didn't like the word “create.” But during the interviews, this notion of teaching students how to see came up over and over again.
I knew I couldn't call the book Learning to Create. In fact, some people said, "Do NOT put ‘creativity’ in the title of your book." I thought, “Well…learning to see was really what these students are doing.”
Desiree Sharpe:
Absolutely, that definitely stood out. Most of [the interviewees] seemed not just neutral or kind of ‘eh’ about the idea of using the word creativity, but adamantly opposed to it. We were wondering what you think it is about that term that blockades their teaching goals or even their own goals as artists? Or the concern they have for their students' outcomes?
Keith Sawyer:
Oh, it's very important for this interview, because you are the Torrance Center for Creativity, and I am a creativity researcher. I have several books with ‘creativity’ in the title.
After doing a hundred interviews and going all over the country, I believe they really are teaching students how to be creative, but they are uncomfortable with that word and that language. I think the reason is because of the misconceptions about creativity, these mythical views of creativity that are spread out through our culture.
These are professional artists. They were artists in high school. They got BFAs in college. They got MFAs. Their whole lives, their friends and their family members have been saying, “Oh, you're so creative, you should go to art school…you're so creative.” I think they get uncomfortable with that because I think the attitude of the general public is, “You're a successful artist because you're creative, and because you're creative, it's easy for you.”
True artists know that creativity, when you're doing it right, is very hard, and it's just as hard—maybe even harder—for someone who's good at it because they realize if it's easy, then you're not doing it right.
I think there's a little bit of discomfort with this mythical view of creativity that they've been encountering their whole lives…“Oh, it's easy for you because you're creative.” No, it's not easy for us and it's not because we have this special creative ability. It's because we've invested the effort to master a particular kind of deliberate process that consistently leads to successful creative outcomes.
Desiree Sharpe:
Right, it's a skill to be built, not just a gift.
Anna Abraham:
I noticed that they had similar misgivings—like they do with the word creativity or labeling what they're doing as creative—in relation to giving feedback, saying positive things like, “I like this,” or “This is good.” I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to that, as well. There's something about the valuation of something being good, creative… in the teaching and the educational context, it is something we do all the time, right? “Oh, good job”; even an attempt is always praised. I'm wondering if you could speak to what they were able to tell us about the bad sides of giving too much praise, or inserting yourself and your evaluations in the creative process and learning to see.
Keith Sawyer:
These professors give a lot of positive feedback and they need to because they describe the importance of experimentation and failure. They know these students are going to fail, and many of them are not comfortable with failure.
Again, all through high school, everyone loves everything they did. Their parents put it up on the refrigerator, so they're not used to being told that it's ‘bad’ or that it's failed. Even these exceptional students who come in at the age of 18—and they've been generating really good-looking stuff since they were 10—even they don't yet know ‘how to see’. They are doing things that don't work.
That's a common term that artists have decided to use – it's not working – and the students don't know yet, they don't know how to see. They don't know that it's not working, and they don't know why.
You're the teacher. You can't tell them, “This is a mistake and you've done a bad job”, because if you send that negative feedback, then they're going to learn not to experiment and they're going to be afraid of failure. Every one of these artists and designers says failure is a critical part of the process, and “I fail all the time in my professional practice”. To help these students understand that—and that’s chapter three of my book, about Failure—they have to provide a lot of support, emotional and moral support to the students.
It's not that they're not giving them positive feedback; what they're not doing is they're not saying, “The painting is good.”
Anna Abraham:
Yeah, that's a great distinction because you're giving a lot of feedback. Feedback seems to be the overwhelming thing that they're getting, way more than people get in schools, and a lot of it is not loaded. They tell them what is working and what is not working. I like that formulation of what you're getting. It's a little bit more distanced, but it kind of gives you a sense of the dynamics of what they're working on.
You talk about your third chapter, and failure is part of the big the set of chapters—and is it Part One? Yes, it’s Part One - it’s one of the aspects of what I would think is all process, but you distinguish between process, materials, failure, and seeing as discrete parts of a larger process.
Can you tell us a little bit more about how you see these divisions and the way they integrate with one another, as well?
Keith Sawyer:
Oh, that's a great question, and I could give a very long answer. It's not in the book, but I'll try to make it concise.
So, yeah, Part One of the book I call “What You Learn in Art and Design School”. One thing you're definitely not learning is technique, how to hold a paintbrush, or how to use Adobe Photoshop or whatever.
The students have to learn all that, but that's not what art and design schools are focused on, or an architecture school…it's not about learning how to build a model out of foam core, although you do have to learn that.
Part One, I have five chapters. The first one is “Process”, then “Materials”, “Failure”, “Emergence”, and “Seeing”. They’re all pretty abstract things. They are components of learning how to see and also learning how to think.
Are the chapters separate? I think every one of the five chapters is related to process, even though “Process” is the name of Chapter One. I think they all go together, right? Learning how to build on failure and succeed, that is part of the process. So yeah, the chapters all weave together. They're all about the same thing that is being taught, this knowing how to see and think.
Desiree Sharpe:
That is such a great and fascinating way to distinguish all these elements about the whole picture of learning to see. I was wondering if you could give an example or two of how you think maybe these different elements interact—something like, ‘failure’, and then ‘emergence’ comes in, and maybe you have a new relationship with ‘materials’? If there was anything you witnessed or heard about from the people you interviewed?
Keith Sawyer:
Oh, absolutely, yeah, that’s one of my contributions in this book. I’m really telling the stories of these exceptional creators and the book is filled with quotations and epigraphs and block quotations and I don’t have citations at the end. My chapters don’t have a theory section or a methodology section, so it really is the stories of the professors.
What I’ve done is I’ve curated these 100 different professors—everything they said, which is all together when we do an interview. My job was to break those things out and put them into conceptual groups that would be a chapter, otherwise I would just have one 300-page book with no organization.
So, I’ve organized it around what I think are the key themes. For example, Chapter Four I call “Emergence”, and Chapter Two is called “Materials”.
The way they're connected, for example, is that professors say they're teaching students how to think through making, that it’s absolutely critical that they start working with materials early. They don’t wait to have an idea and then start executing it, but you need to start working with the materials even before you know what you’re doing. Then what happens is, ideas emerge from the dialogue that you’re having with these materials.
That’s why Chapter Four is “Emergence”, and it’s a big concept. How is it that ideas emerge when the creator doesn’t know what’s going to happen? You don’t know before it happens, but you have to engage in the dialogue with the materials so that this emergence will happen. So, yeah, that’s an example of how Chapter Two about materials and Chapter Four about emergence are closely linked together.
Anna Abraham:
I thought it was also kind of wonderful to have those five elements separated because I think, especially in the school context, things like failure are seen as separate from the process. It's a judgment on what you’ve created, and it’s seen as so separable. I just love that what you're doing, what you're making, what the material is—that all of that is seen as part of an intricate part of a larger process.
I think of the artists and the designers who are teaching these students and one of the great things that they have as an advantage is that they are practicing artists themselves, they are practicing designers themselves. As teachers and instructors, they have a unique understanding of what their students are going through. At some point, they've been through it themselves, or at some level, perhaps every day. This is very distinct from, let's say, teachers in schools.
When Desi and I were talking about the insights we got from your book and how we could apply them in a context of education, we were thinking, “Well, when teachers are trying to do something creative with kids, they’re kind of divorced from it.” You know, they just play the role of judging—good, bad, thumbs up, thumbs down. Often, they don’t really know about the process themselves because they’re not a part of it. They’re not doing it themselves. We were brainstorming about whether it might be a good idea to get teachers to do the task with…separately, perhaps…but engage in the process with the students in order to understand what it is students are going through.
Do you think that’s something that would make sense? To take the judgment out of it, and the audience out of it, and to be part of the process themselves?
Keith Sawyer:
A BFA and an MFA program, they’re professional degree programs, so the students who are going through these programs are doing it to—I mean, not to trivialize it—but to have a career, to get a job. It is very much an apprenticeship type of model, where the teacher is a successful or professional architect or designer. These are the people I interviewed. I was trying to get experienced professors. My average number of years of experience teaching, of all the people I interviewed, was twenty years. That also means they've been in professional practice for twenty years.
So…they have worked. They own their own design consultancy. One of the guys I interviewed, Jeff Keaty, is a typeface designer. His Keaty Sans typeface is in Microsoft Word. These are the sorts of people I interviewed.
The students go to an MFA program—like CalArts, where I went, or the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I went—students go to these programs because they want to graduate and be successful professional artists. That apprenticeship model, I think you’re right—you don’t necessarily see that in high school, right? In a high school art program, maybe the students—these 17-year-olds—maybe they don’t have the ambition to be creative painters for their career. Maybe the teacher isn’t a successful professional artist either.
What do you think about that?
Desiree Sharpe:
I mean, we did have some curiosity about what that would look like in elementary, middle, high school – to work alongside.
And you're right, Keith, the training…it's more of this training model, technique model. You really make such a beautiful story and case and evidence-based proclamation that the ‘learning to see’ is what really comes through…I felt like it seemed that would apply in any kind of teacher-learner situation, you know? The working alongside or doing something as you're talking about it with students does seem to occur primarily in the non-core parts of learning. How beautiful could it possibly be to do it when you're learning math skills? I feel like, yeah, there's probably some very clever ways to apply it.
Keith Sawyer:
Yeah, I think you can absolutely do this in high school. I think these lessons that are in the book could absolutely be used by high school or even elementary school art teachers.
I think the process of seeing and thinking and generating art through this creative process—you don’t have to be college age to be able to do it. So yeah, absolutely.
I think teaching as artistic behavior is something… I talked to Ellen Winter and Lois Hetland about this model of high school art education, TAB, which is very similar to what I saw these art and design professors doing. I hope that a lot of K-12 teachers will get something out of my book. I guess one message is that it’s not just for college.
A second message is…you asked about other subjects, and I think you’re right, as a learning scientist, I’m also familiar with research on how science and math – and engineering in particular—ways that students learn those subjects in deeper ways.
One professor I interviewed, who’s a chemistry professor in England, he used the same language. He said, “I’m teaching my students how to think. How to think like a chemist.”
He said the graduate students entering his program in chemistry (and they’ve got the highest scores on the chemistry exam in England), they come in and they don’t know how to think. It’s like, “Well, they got the highest scores, and they’re in graduate school in chemistry, and they still don’t know how to think?” But it's the same language.
I think that this pedagogical model—I call it the ‘studio model’—it’s somewhat related to apprenticeship as a model for teaching in cognitive subjects. Some learning scientists call it ‘cognitive apprenticeship’.
The term ‘apprenticeship’ doesn’t mean you’re learning how to weld, right? Or how to work in carpentry or electricity. It may be a similar pedagogical style, where the teacher is a partner with the learner and they’re working together as equals. Of course, not completely equal, because the teacher is more experienced and knows a lot more and is responsible for guiding the process, but imagine if you’re in an auto mechanic workshop, and you’ve got one person with ten years of experience, and then you’ve got a new person with two months of experience. They have to work together to get the car repaired and clearly, the ten-year-experienced person contributes a lot more, and then the two-month person learns by working together with the more experienced individual.
That’s what I see happening in art and design school. I call it the ‘studio model’ because I think it’s a little bit—or a lot—different, because what you’re teaching is how to make something.
Desiree Sharpe:
Right, right. That is a good distinction. If that is not necessarily the learning objective for your students, to make something, then it might look a little different across a different domain or content area, of course. That is an interesting distinction there. That is important.
You know, in the snippets from the interviews, it sparked me to wonder, “Okay, so I know the basic methodology about how you interviewed folks and developed the questionnaire, but I would love to hear more detail about that process.”
Methodology is always really interesting and I think yours was unique, especially for the field.
Keith Sawyer:
Absolutely. Yes, I'll talk about what I did, but first, I'll say this isn’t in the book because I didn't want to bore too much. I wanted to write the book for people who are artists and designers, and who are educators, as well. I'm very proud to say my book has zero citations. It's the first time I've ever written a book that doesn't have citations.
I started out to write a book that was much more academic because what these professors are doing is 100% grounded in creativity research, and it is grounded in the science of how people learn. I have a chapter, two chapters, about how the professors design their project assignments for the students.
The project assignments are very highly structured, so it is closely related to research on scaffolding and scaffolding a learning trajectory.
When I submitted the book proposal, I thought I was going to have a bunch of stuff in that chapter about research on scaffolding and how so-and-so did scaffolding in science education in 1995. You know, the usual academic thing where I would talk about what the professors told me and then I would turn around and situate it in a long theoretical framework of scholarship, and then explain what the professor is doing when they design their project assignment. I was going to explain exactly how you could use that in your physics class because of so-and-so in 2015 said this.
I know how to do that, and I've done that a lot, but I realized that the stories of these professors were so compelling that when I turned to the academic stuff, it just dragged it down.
I do have in Chapter One, like, one page about my methodology and I can maybe say more here. I did interviews, and I was going to do semi-structured interviews, but very quickly, I realized these professors are so articulate and they go in many different directions. I only had an hour to interview them, so I let the interview flow. I had completely unstructured interviews, I would say. That is, maybe you could say, not such a rigorous methodology.
Now, if I talk about sampling, how did I choose which professors to interview? Well, I started at Savannah College of Art and Design at SCAD, and I interviewed, I think it was about 30, 25 or 30 professors.
I started from the beginning thinking, “I do not want to study only painting, and I do not want to study only graphic design because I am a creativity researcher, so I want to get at the underlying essence of creativity.” I did not want get at just the underlying essence of painting creativity. I wanted something that was, we would say, domain-general. I made an early commitment to go across disciplines.
I chose to do that broad scan because I wanted to see how to converge all these disciplines on one underlying domain-general understanding of the creative process or the use of failure, all these things in the book. I guess I should say everything in the book applies to all 22 disciplines, which is interesting all by itself, right? You might think that people who are teaching painting do something really different from people who are teaching architecture… and actually, some of the people I interviewed said, “Oh, this is what we do, it is very different from, you know, the other side, so you are not gonna find anything similar”, but then later I showed them - oh, here is the stuff I identified that is similar, and they looked at it and said, “Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that is what architects would do, even though I am a painter.”
So that was one decision, sampling to get a range of disciplines, and then the second one was to get a range of institutions. I came from SCAD and maybe what professors are doing at SCAD is very unique to SCAD, but I wanted to identify what all artists and designers do when they are teaching at the college level, so I decided to go to other universities.
I started this in 2010, and the book came out in April. I really did spend fifteen years going all over the country. I went to California Institute of the Arts. I went to School of Visual Arts in New York. I went to a bunch of other places.
Again, my goal was to get at the underlying shared essence of creativity across different types of institutions and across these 22 different disciplines. I think that is one of the powerful things about the book, that it really is the universal shared characteristics of professional art and design education.
Desiree Sharpe:
I was struck by reading that if you observed something only at one university and not the others [you] did not put it in this book. If [you] only observed this in one field or one professor, it was not included.
Being of a curious mind, I thought, “Well, what didn’t he include?”
Keith Sawyer:
That's right.
Desiree Sharpe:
Was there something that you saw that was unique and you chose not to include it just because it was not ubiquitous? Anything you saw or witnessed or discussed that you were like, “Well, that is very interesting, just not for this particular project”?
Keith Sawyer:
That could be another book where I would have a different chapter for other creativity research; we have the domain-specific creativity and the domain-general creativity. In terms of that divide, I think what I have in the book is domain-general across the visual arts, but I don't make any claims about whether what's in the book is also true of scientific creativity or engineering creativity. I don't have that in the book, so that might the next book. I actually was thinking about doing the same study in professional schools of music or MFA writing programs.
Desiree Sharpe:
It’d be amazing.
Keith Sawyer:
What's in my book is only domain-specific to the visual arts, but still across them. What would be specific? I could say, like painting, for example, how is that different from graphic design?
In a very early draft of the book in the conclusion, I was going to put a section in the conclusion about qualifications, like we always do as researchers (I just want to qualify my claims). I said, “Everything's the same, but here are some things that are different”… I decided to cut that from the book because it was sort of a distraction. I didn't focus on that. So that's the methodology, what I asked about in my interviews. So no, I never asked anyone, “What do you do specifically in painting? Or what do you do specifically in architecture?”
For example, if you're an architecture student, you need to learn things about elevators and zoning codes and different types of soil, the grade down the slope of the hill…you don’t need to learn [those things] if you're a painter. There’s all sorts of things that I would associate with the medium, let's say. If you're learning painting as opposed to typeface design, you have to learn in typeface design all this terminology about the width of the strokes and different kinds of serifs, and serif fonts, italics versus roman. You wouldn't have to learn [that] if you're in a painting class.
I don't know what we'd call it, the ‘content’ maybe, or the ‘medium’… but what's shared is why my book ends up being called Learning to See. It's really about seeing and thinking. I might have called it Learning to See and Learning to Think. That's what's shared across the visual arts disciplines. Learning to see and learning to think is what emerged from my research methodology, and that's the underlying essence.
But then, yes, you would apply those deep, profound abilities to the characteristics of your unique medium.
Anna Abraham
I just love hearing about the methodology, primarily because I think it really kind of showed how unique this field of pedagogy is. It's sort of an emergent pedagogy that is very bottom-up. What you bring through is that these instructors somehow came to the same principles and focuses in their learning objectives without really talking to each other. There seems to be a lot of consistency in terms of how they develop their curriculum, despite being such widely varying artists across so many fields of visual art and design.
Part Two of your book, which focuses on constraints and ambiguities, really brought this across. How in general, a lot [of curriculum] focused on helping students learn to see is made possible by thinking really, really clearly about how constraints can push them to see beyond the path of least resistance, the most expected way.
But then it gives a particular challenge to students, which is dealing with ambiguity. Students seem really ill-equipped to respond to this ambiguity. It's not like gimmicks, but just ways in which things are structured really take them out of their comfort zone, and then you have this added problem of navigating them, helping them through this ambiguity. I would love for you to talk about that a little bit, perhaps give some examples that would be relevant for the wider educational context.
Keith Sawyer:
Absolutely. You mentioned Part One of the book, which is five chapters that characterize, describe what students are learning, which is a certain way of working, a certain type of process of working. And then Part Two is about the project assignments that these professors give to their students.
First of all, it might be surprising to many listeners that there are heavy constraints. There's a very high degree of constraints to these project assignments. Even in a painting class. I went in with my stereotypes about what would go on in art school. I thought you'd come in the first day of the fall semester and your professor would say, “The theme for this semester is fire and I'd like you to paint fire, and then we'll talk about your fire” or whatever. So, I really did think it would be completely unstructured.
I was surprised to see a very high degree of structure, certainly in the first and the second years of a four-year undergraduate program, but even to some extent in the higher levels.
One of the classes I observed was textile arts and this professor was Beth Grabowski. She's here at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I describe a little bit about [her assignment] in the introduction chapter of the book. The students have two weeks to do this project assignment…there's the syllabus, and the semester is fifteen weeks long.
These are very experienced professors (they don't necessarily do this in their first or second year of teaching), but they've learned that a highly constrained assignment actually helps their students learn more quickly this way of seeing and thinking than if they are not constrained at all. The professors talk very articulately about this. They can explain exactly why the constraints and the parameters of the project assignment need to be the way they are.
So, Beth Grabowski's class with the two-week textile design assignment, it is three pages single-spaced. It's the handout she gives them on the first day. Here's the project and at the end of these two weeks, you're going to have gone through the three pages. A big part of the three pages single-spaced are the steps of the process. The process itself that the students are going to go through is fairly highly-structured; I don't know if you really should call it “Constraints”, but that's the name of my chapter.
It's heavily-guided, let's say, and the students all go through the same process that is in this three-page handout. That's a textile design professor. Well, I already said I went to 22 different disciplines, and it turns out that in every discipline, the professors give these-highly structured project assignments.
Even in a painting class, I would ask the professors to share with me their handouts; you know, it was 2010, they didn't have a learning management system, yet. So yeah, they really would hand out this document, and many of them still do.
In painting class, the students would have a two- or three-week project and there would be maybe six different interim deliverables. It's three weeks long and they start out the students on Monday and say on Thursday, everybody comes in and here's what [they] have to bring in on Thursday, which is a step towards what they're going to turn in at the end of the three weeks.
Then on Thursday, everyone comes in and what happens in the studio is they talk about the students' interim work – “Where have you gotten to up to this point?” and then “What do you plan to do next?” They're always talking about the process, and the intention, and what happened to get you to this point, and what you're going to do next.
It's a way of teaching the students how to reflect on themselves, on their own process.
Then the following Monday, the students come in with the second deliverable, and they do it again. They share everything they've done, and they talk about it, and they revise what they had turned in the previous Thursday based on the feedback they got then.
It's a highly iterative pedagogy, iterative process. What it ends up doing is it teaches the students indirectly in a very savvy way. It teaches the students how to engage in an iterative process as opposed to a linear process. An iterative process where you reconsider all along the way at every step, and then you take a new direction based on what you've done up to that point. What it ends up doing is it teaches the students indirectly in a very savvy way.
It teaches the students how to engage in an iterative process as opposed to a linear process. An iterative process where you reconsider all along the way at every step, and then you take a new direction based on what you've done up to that point.
That's one of the things that students learn from these highly-structured assignments is that structure forces them out of taking a direct linear path that they might do if they didn't have the structure of the assignment.
Desiree Sharpe:
It seems like the structure of the assignment combined with those check-in points, which you really develop in the third part of your book, refers to the studio critique tradition. The students are presenting their works in progress and receiving feedback, not just from their instructors, but from their classmates, often.
I have had the chance to be in a couple studio courses where that was part of the process. I've seen two different types of this, one in which the person is under the spotlight and was able to respond to the critique, to the feedback. Then the other model that professors use is where [the students] just absorb the feedback.
I was wondering if anyone spoke to that and would also like to just to hear more about the studio critique process that you discussed with the interviewees and how that develops that iterative and reflective nature on their work.
Keith Sawyer:
You can read a lot that's very critical about the studio critiques. A lot of people who've been in art school or in one art class, they've had a horrible experience where the professor was mean, or they couldn't figure out what the professor wanted them to do, or why they were getting negative feedback. The students that you're in class with don't always know how to… they don't know how to see either, so they don't know how to give you good feedback.
Some of our listeners right now might be thinking, “I had a horrible teacher in my studio class who just said critical things all the time!”
What I saw was not that. I saw a very effective formative assessment. Words like that do not appear in my book, so the word ‘formative assessment’ isn't in there, the word ‘scaffolding’ isn't in there, but that's absolutely what these professors are doing.
I should also add that these are exceptionally skilled professors or teachers. Not all art school professors are going to teach this well. One reason is that these are people with twenty years of teaching experience – oh, I didn't mention this yet – the way I found the professors I interviewed was by asking the department chairs and the deans of the art school, who would they recommend that I interview. Of course, they recommend the people that are known as the best professors.
If there's anybody listening who had a horrible experience in a studio class, I didn't observe bad studio classes. Maybe I got lucky. What I saw was very constructive, formative feedback.
Anna Abraham:
I thought you really articulated well how the pedagogy is aimed at getting students to be really comfortable in an intuitive space where things are very hard to for them to be able to see, but then to hone and develop their intuition…and then comes this think-out-loud process, which further abets the discovery process, right? It's almost like when asked to explain [their] choices, the students now have to articulate it well and then there's a second unlocking of the process, which I think was wonderfully captured in your book. I think it's something that can be really used outside of the art context in schools. We rarely ask students ‘why and what’ they're going through, and to think about their choices. I think it allows for a wonderful sense of engagement.
The other thing I thought was really interesting was something that I've never really come across – dialogue with the work. The students, even if they do end up being able to see well… there's another set of procedures involved in getting them to articulate their work and speak about their work. I wondered if you could speak a little bit to that; I don't know of any other discipline where you’ve created a work and now the work has a life and intentionality of its own that is separate from when you were part of that process.
I'd love to know what that was like to discover.
Keith Sawyer:
It's so compelling that I saved it for the last chapter, which is called “Dialogue", and it's about exactly that.
Before I published this book or even wrote the book, I had a series of academic journal articles, eight different academic journal articles going back to 2016. If anybody wants to read the theory or the methodology, you can go find my article in the journal called Cognition and Instruction called "The Dialogue of Creativity".
This chapter, "Dialogue", Chapter Nine of my new book, is inspired by (I guess I should say based on) this journal article. I call it "The Dialogue of Creativity". What's going on is my analysis of a studio class encounter between a professor and a student, and it's one of these interim studio classes where it's an intermediate deliverable. The student has done, let’s say, half of the work they need to do along the process, and the professor's role in the studio is to help the student figure out what to do next in the process. It goes back to Part One of the book, which is, ‘What are we trying to teach the students how to do?’
I mentioned some time ago that Chapter Two is about materials and teaching students how to engage with materials as a way of generating ideas. Then Chapter Four is called "Emergence" because it's about how ideas emerge from engaging with materials.
The dialogue is that engagement - what goes on between the creator and the work that is underway. If you're engaging in the type of process that is being taught here in art and design schools, it's not a linear process where you have the idea, and then you just, you know, spend the next three weeks painting it. What they're teaching is an iterative, improvisational process where there are going to be starts and stops and dead ends, and you might take a completely different direction after a week and a half. Even though the project was three weeks long, that week and a half might be, quote-unquote, “wasted”. But the professors don't see it that way… I mean, the students might, which is one reason the professor has to be very supportive.
So in Chapter Nine, where I talk about dialogues and the dialogue of creativity, what I do is analyze what this one incredibly skilled professor does. Her name is Heather Corcoran, and she's a communication designer.
The project is that students have to design a pair of posters that are like, two by three feet each, and their posters are going to be side-by-side, and the assignment is that the two posters have to function as ‘interesting companions’. You know, what is that? Well, the students are going to learn what that is…all the students have come into class with their pair of posters, not finished, but they're not supposed to be finished. It's an interim step, and all the students have put up their pairs of posters. In these studio classes, the walls are covered with corkboard, specifically because students are always going to be tacking things up in every studio class.
All the students have posted up their two posters and Heather Corcoran is doing a critique of one of the students. The two posters are there on the wall; the student is sitting about ten feet back, and the professor, Heather Corcoran, is also about ten feet back. But she goes back and forth walking toward the two posters and pointing at them and gesturing and then looking back at the student.
What she's doing is she is modeling a dialogue between her and the posters, and she speaks in ways that imply that the posters themselves have agency and that the posters have needs or specific elements of the poster.
She actually will go to the poster and point at a line of text at the top and she'll say, "That line of text needs something." She doesn't say what it needs, but she says it needs something… "I think that line of text is saying that it has this problem", and she's talking about a visual problem or a compositional problem with the poster.
"This line of text has a problem…we need to figure out a solution for this problem."
She looks back at the student expectantly, right? The student doesn't see it yet because the student doesn't know how to see. The student doesn't see that the line of text has this need. But the professor, Heather Corcoran – through her dialogue – is modeling the way that a successful designer would interact with the work during the process.
That's one thing these professors never do. They never turn to the students and say, "Here's what's wrong with this line of text, and here's what you need to do with it.” They never do that. They never tell the student what's wrong.
Well, they maybe a little bit…they will guide them to understand and see what's wrong. Or they won't say "wrong" so much as they'll say why it's not working. That word "working" is just used all the time.
Then the student, who's going to go back after this class and be working on these two posters again, the student now has to resolve the needs of the poster. To do that, you have to engage in a dialogue with the poster, as if the poster has its own needs and its own want.
In the academic world, we'd say [the poster has] its own ‘agency’. I don't use that word in my book…trying to avoid complicated theories. But, yeah, we have a lot of research in cognitive sciences and in the learning sciences – we call it ‘embodied learning’ or ‘extended learning’ or ‘extended cognition’—where you think about the cognitive process of something that happens between you and some external or material artifact.
You'll see a lot of this in science and engineering education, the importance of generating some sort of physical or material artifact so that it gets it out of your head and presents you with an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with that artifact that you have created. There's just a ton of research in cognitive science about how valuable that is for learning in science and engineering.
I could have put all those citations in Chapter Nine, but I'm hoping that if you are an academically inclined person and if you really are interested in extended cognition, then you'll read my Chapter Nine and you'll see that it's there. But what I want you to see, if you're someone who studies extended cognition in physics class, is that what's going on here in a communication design class…it’s related to what you know. It's also different in an interesting and compelling way…I think a physics educator or an engineering educator could absolutely read Chapter Nine and say, “Oh yeah, I could see myself doing that in my engineering class”, and then I hope that the reader will get something out of it and get some new ideas.
I hope that people in a broad audience will realize that what goes on in art and design school is an incredibly powerful type of pedagogy; maybe even that the way of thinking associated with being a successful artist is different. It's different from the way most professionals work.
It's a particular kind of iterative and deliberative and wandering creative process.
But I also believe that this way of thinking and this process…it’s applicable to all creative fields so that anyone could get a new perspective on creativity, whether you're a writer or whether you're a musician. To see this type of seeing and thinking associated with successful visual arts at a professional level…anyone could apply this.
I hope that people who are artists and designers who are teaching in a BFA or MFA program for the first time and they're feeling like, “I have no idea what I'm doing”, I hope that they will get my book right away. If you are asked to teach in a BFA or MFA program, my book is really going help you.
And students… everyone who's 18 years old and starting art school or 25 years old and starting an architecture master's degree program, I think every one of those students should buy my book and read it before the beginning of the fall semester. It will show you what's going to happen.
Anna Abraham:
It makes them better prepared for sure.
Well, it was my wonderful weekend read. I think it is really exceptional for the whole field to have something like [this book]. I absolutely agree with you that there’s a lot for anyone in any creative endeavor to learn from it, particularly as you articulate about how seeing is intricate to the process, and the making, and all of it. How they're intricately tied together, both from the perspective of the person making it and from the onlooker who's expecting something to come out of it.
So, I thank you for your wonderful work, Keith, and I can't wait for it to come out, in the flesh, so to speak, and to see it in bookstores. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us today!
Keith Sawyer:
Thank you for those wonderful questions. I really enjoyed the conversation.
For more information about Keith Sawyer, visit his Website and Substack and listen to his Podcast.