Visual Thinking for Complex Times

“Imagine you are in an aging public school classroom with 30 elementary students. No one is facing forward and everyone is squirming in their seats. You put up an image of a young girl walking with a bear past graffitied doors. There is a sucked-in-breath  moment of surprise. You wait, maybe even count silently to five, and then you ask, ‘What’s going on in this picture?’”

That is how Tara Geer describes starting a Visual Thinking Strategies session. Tara, an artist and the director of Commonweal’s Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) program, says, “What comes next is always a surprise. If I get it right, I have the honor of hearing the unique minds in that room grappling, judging, wondering, looking, listening—and a weaving together of the real diversity of that classroom.”

VTS is a deceptively simple, research-based teaching methodology that depends upon skilled and attentive facilitation. VTS uses the power of art to engage people in an open dialogue—because research shows we may have more to learn from each other than from the person at the front of the room.

The process employs just three questions: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? This strategy, along with a set of additional skills including listening, paraphrasing, and linking ideas, allows the various kinds of intelligence of the group to emerge.

“These discussions have been happening in museums and schools and universities all over the world for decades,” describes Tara. “Talking about art is not most people’s idea of learning, but, it turns out, that is a fundamental misunderstanding about what constitutes real learning. Learning is a lot messier and a lot richer than the correctly worded paragraph teachers are trained to give an ‘A.’”

VTS is based on decades of academic, museum, and classroom research into how we make sense of what we see, how we learn to see more meaningfully, what teachers can do effectively in these areas, and what sticks—but the art of VTS lies with the facilitators. VTS facilitators are trained to be deep, active listeners who must contain a space that encourages expression and open dialogue. Conversations can become heated, powerful, and transformative.

Facilitators learn to hold back their own biases and judgements, resisting the urge to lead or insert their own understanding. The deceptively simple method requires intense attention, restraint, and self-awareness. The effects on participants, which are still being documented in ongoing academic research, can be profound. Children improve their critical thinking skills and their abilities to observe, engage, reason, and communicate. This can translate to meaningful improvements in school which can have profound positive impacts on their lives—not just the personal abilities to think and see and express themselves, but also the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

Why does VTS help so much?

“Thinking and seeing are not distinct,” says Tara. “This is something artists have always known, but maybe others dismissed. We are thinking when we see. The backs of the eyeballs are lined with neurons not only delivering data to the brain proper but massively editing that data, sorting, and selecting. Also, we are seeing when we think—imagining, planning, categorizing, remembering, dreaming. If we can see the world better, we can know the world better. And if we know it better, we see it better. There is no line between thinking and seeing.”

“When we are asked in a VTS discussion ‘what do you see that makes you say that?’ we have to re-look, we have to construct an argument with visible detail. And as we listen to our peers disagree, build on what we saw, we have to reconsider, rework, reconstruct our thinking/seeing a little more soundly. VTS is like push-ups for visual cognition.”

Tara grew up immersed in the power of VTS. Her mother, Abigail Housen, was a Harvard-trained education researcher whose decades-long cataloging of all the things people say in front of artwork defined the landscape of aesthetic development, or what we now call visual cognition. For more than 30 years, Abigail researched not just what experts see in art, but the much wider array of what everyone sees, including beginners.

Tara grew up around VTS trainings in her kitchen, her mother’s research projects, and academic debates. She became an artist and an instructor at Columbia University Teachers College, but it wasn’t until near the end of her mother’s life that Tara came to truly recognize the impact of Abigail Housen’s work.

As she gained experience, Tara realized that VTS has the biggest effect on students who have trouble academically, who are from marginalized cultures, or who are atypical in other ways—for example, those who are just learning English.

She saw the potential of her mother’s work to meet the needs of children who are consistently falling behind. And she saw VTS as a concrete method for teachers to be inclusive, student-centered, and culturally responsive.

And in those public school classrooms, with teachers just trained, Tara could feel—as the hairs stood up along her arms—the power of real diversity when child after child raised their hands for the first time and shared. This led Tara to work on research in the Boston Public Schools about VTS and learning readiness. And when the role of director of the VTS program
at Commonweal opened up, a donor offered to pay half her salary if Tara took the job.

While VTS is now practiced with adults and children alike and in a wide range of settings from museums to medical schools, Tara wants to re-center the work where it can have the biggest potential impact: addressing the achievement gap for school-age children.

“My mom, Abigail Housen, didn’t like being the center of attention. And I think she may have happily felt that if she spent her life chewing over every way non-experts make sense of art, she could do something that mattered a lot to her, but probably not to anyone else. It was her way of finding a side lane. What has become clearer and clearer is that that side lane went right through the center of how we make sense of the world around us,” says Tara.

“VTS is so simple and so powerful. It needs to be brought into schools so all kids can feel how important their perspectives are, how much it matters that they share, and so ultimately we can live in a world where everyone can grow up to be
thinkers and see-ers in their own right.”

Learn more about Tara Geer’s drawings: Tarageer.com

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The VTS program is a part of YEA!, Commonweal’s new youth arts and education initiative, a collaborative of programs grounded in the belief that art can change lives for children.

Visual Thinking Strategies: vtshome.org
Partners for Youth Empowerment: partnersforyouth.org
Power of Hope youth camp: ccc-commonweal.org
Collaborations: Teachers + Artists: cotaprogram.org

Image at top: Kevin Peterson, Coalition II