Can we improve our structuring of Creative Learning to better develop a breadth of learning?

• Art, Craft and Design, creative visual practice and all forms of designing for making, presenting and visual representation all operate by a set of  ‘creative rules’ or shared fundamental principles. These have been arrived at over time and across cultures to set a standard, a language of visual grammar and to help us share an understanding of how we think, create and what we wish to communicate visually.
• The Artistic (or Formal) Elements form the basis of how we teach basic skills, build technical and creative knowledge, alongside building an understanding of visual literacy and visual communications. These seven elements are elemental in so much as they are the building blocks of line, shape, tone, form and colour etc. But they don’t offer a complete set of elements, for example, we also need to consider ‘mark’, ‘expression’ and other principles of design and visual grammar. Hence, these elements are a list, they don’t define the totality of how we draw a line, how we make it descriptive or expressive. Similarly, they don’t explain what value of tone means and how you might use tonal value to create a representation of light and tone, or the way surfaces can be defined and appear by the way light strikes a form. 
• Achieving a deeper knowledge and understanding of visual literacy and visual grammar, requires context and teaching through a structured sequence of learning and a well-defined curriculum. There are many published examples from the English National Curriculum, or see: A Practical Guide to Teaching Art and Design in the Secondary School. Edited by A Ash and P Carr. Routledge (2024). Equally, we can also reference examples from education history, such as Bauhaus examples from the Preliminary Courses by Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy or Josef Albers. Further evidence can be seen in Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook which explore mark and the expressive qualities of line, or the minutes of his Bauhaus classes on shifting, rotating and mirroring, documented by Lena Bergner (see the Links below). The evidence from this period adds up to a Manifesto for Visual Learning, certainly worthy of consideration.

'In the epistemic context of a fundamental skepticism towards the existing knowledge system, the Bauhaus school was in pursuit of “unlearning”: dismissing conventional learning and promoting pre- linguistic, intuitive approaches- which also led to adoptions of non-academic modes of perception and included an interest in pre-modern knowledge systems.' Regina Bittner

• Bittner confirms the importance of unlearning from ‘existing knowledge systems’ in order to build new epistemological models of creating and design thinking. This is the process of innovation in creative subjects and is continuous. This was how design as we know it now, was created and it is evolving again around Design and to embrace AI.

• To support our understanding of ‘design’ and design processes (phases or stages) when teaching, you might find it helpful to use this graphic which adds typical art and design language to design process stages, common to both art and design and D&T. The use of dotted arrows linking stages, typify the non-linear flexibility and complexity of thinking in art and design. By making our emphasis on design more explicit in our art and design teaching, we can increase understanding, explore the tension between the twin aspects of our discipline, widen the scope of contextual references and boost career focused thinking about the creative industries.

How does the Bauhaus help us understand the evolution of both Art and Design?

• The Bauhaus teachers thought carefully about how to teach the artistic elements, how to make them expressive and communicate meanings. They also considered issues such as tactility and the haptic, as a means of knowledge generation to develop understanding of the sensual properties of materials. They developed our modern-day understanding of art and design as a process of investigation rather than knowing, promoting a transformation of human modes of perception and leading to contemporary concepts of modernism.
• However, these Artistic Elements get you only so far. They require further principles and concepts to help us design, to be creative and control the arrangement of elements to make more complex images, design new paintings, products and communicate complex meanings. For this, we need ways to build student’s understanding of aesthetics and through this, manipulate and implement control. These include, the Principles of Design and the ability to manipulate the ‘grammar’ of visual expression, including an understanding of compositional rules, design and stylistic conventions. 

'Knowledge is power. I condemn this sentence as the most dangerous pedagogical false doctrine, even if many do not want to understand it that way. What is ‘knowledge’? Not being able nor knowing, not seeing nor looking, neither building nor forming. It is possession of so-called facts, which one can buy dearly in schools and books, collect and accumulate, in order to reproduce them first in the examination and afterwards, perhaps, also (re-evaluate) in order to understand something better.[…] Instead of “knowledge is power,” I recommend for education important tasks of our time.'   Josef Albers 

Links:

• Bauhaus Preliminary Course: bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/5176/three-preliminary-courses-itten-moholy-nagy-albers
• Paul Klee Pedagogical Sketchbook: archive.org/details/pedagogical-sketchbook-klee-1953/mode/2up 
• Paul Klee Classes:bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/1489/shifting-rotating-mirroring 
• Moholy-Nagy principles: moholy-nagy.org/biography/