DECONSTRUCTING VISUAL STATEMENTS TO IMPROVE WRITTEN AND ORAL EXPRESSION

Abstract

Studio art teachers often assert that their students can't speak about what they see and do, and academic teachers complain that art students (among others) can't write. This inarticulateness is probably due to a dichotomous split between the activities of verbal and visual expression; a split that has seemed mystifyingly unbreachable in the past, and assumed to be justified by the popularized research on the differing activities of the two hemispheres of the forebrain This paper presents a description of a college teaching experience in which working with active visual analysis, involving hands‐on deconstruction of visual statements to their constituent elements and principles, was found to have an unblocking effect upon concomitant writing assignments at the college level Suggestions are also made for precollege educators to merge verbal and visual thinking so to be of mutual benefit and edification rather than in conflict. Students can improve articulateness, both verbal and visual, when the modes of p...