Ellen Winner Research Articles

Ellen Winner, An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse: Art Education from Colonial Times to a Promising Future

Ellen Winner, An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse: Art Education from Colonial Times to a Promising Future

David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019)

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education ed. by David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman and Gary E. McPherson Cara Faith Bernard David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019) Three leading voices in music education, David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, consistently work to reconceive how music educators create and challenge the discourses of music learning and the ways in which people engage with music. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education furthers their contributions and serves as a break from the familiar and common “default philosophy of assessment” of tests, standards, regimens, and rankings to invite new ways of approaching music assessment.1 They, along with their coauthors, apply their theoretical, research, and teaching experience to examine music assessment through social praxis and how individuals and communities “deepen their growth as knowing and compassionate human beings.”2 In short, this Handbook is an invitation for music educators of all levels to reengage with their values and name them in their current and future practices. Using the current neoliberal state of education as a backdrop, Elliott, Silverman, and McPherson portray schools as spaces that yield corporate types of learning practices and assessments which “place little value on arts education.”3 Countering these realities, the diverse cadre of authors examines assessment [End Page 123] from different settings, roles, policies, and practices, organized around four themes. The first theme examines assessment through theoretical ideas including critical pedagogy, pragmatism, and Deleuzean frameworks. Next, in methodological practices, new ideas for assessment are considered through teacher evaluation, working with students with disabilities, and incorporating habits of mind. Creativity explores assessment through technological possibilities, popular music, and drawing, among others. Closing with international perspectives, the authors explore assessment through German and Scandinavian bildung/bildning, care as a driving force of assessment in South Africa, and an Iranian non-regulated perspective of assessment. Alexandra Kertz-Welzel asks: “Who decides what is assessed? How it is assessed? By whom is it assessed?”4 These questions are embraced and challenged throughout the Handbook. Instead of conceiving of assessment as something diagnostic—reaching musical benchmarks and aptitudes deemed by outside authorities—the authors welcome an epistemological shift of assessment. What might happen when music educators replace written self-assessments, quizzes, and playing tests in favor of, say, habits of mind (as Jillian Hogan and Ellen Winner describe in their chapter5) such as listening, noticing, being part of a community, persisting, expressing oneself, imagining, and making decisions? These changes might transform a community, one where students and teachers embrace music making beyond mere replication.6 The authors suggest ways of engaging in acts of subversion, resistance, care, and pragmatism to push past the product-driven view of assessment dictated by neoliberal and for-profit discourses. Historically, assessment has been contextualized, discussed, and critiqued through its practices; its purpose has been to gain information which aids in making decisions about teaching. In many contexts, particularly in the U.S., assessment practices stem from current educational policies, namely those noted in teacher evaluation systems.7 Such practices are intended to show student growth and drive instruction, to better label teaching quality and student success.8 In my own research on teacher evaluation, I found that music educators struggle with definitions and strategies of assessment; as a result, they defer to assessments based on hierarchies of musical skill and technique.9 Yet, Charlotte Danielson, a creator of many U.S. teacher evaluation frameworks, reminds that teaching “is not simply a matter of following a script of carrying out other people’s instructional designs.”10 Having to uphold the demands of assessment and evaluation forced many of the participants in my research to become compliant, even when they knew their teaching strategies were ancillary to who the students were and what they needed. They fabricated their assessments— often in the form of exit slips and inauthentic writing and musical compositional activities—to comply with policies. As a result, teachers’ values for music [End Page 124] teaching and learning were omitted from...

OECD and Theatre Education

Written interview in May 2020 with Andreas Schleicher, director of education at the OECD – Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, focusing on educational issues that directly or indirectly concern theatre education. The interview was also addressed to Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Ellen Winner and Thalia Goldstein, authors of an OECD book dedicated to teaching arts in schools. The approached topics comprehended the importance of artistic education, connections of artistic education with competencies, public policies in education and the global economic agenda. The interview is preceded by a preamble authored by the interviewer.

Two Ships Passing in the Night—But Shooting Up Flairs From Time to Time!

Although this article’s author and Ellen Winner completed their graduate training at Harvard’s now extinct Department of Psychology and Social Relations in the 1970s, they pursued divergent paths that only intersected on a few critical occasions, especially two discomfiting events during scientific meetings (the first event for her and the second for the author). Yet these distressing events stimulated this author to produce new publications on two crucial issues: artistic talent and creative life cycles. He much later reciprocated by inviting her to contribute a chapter on child prodigies for his handbook on genius. Without ever having collaborated, a productive relationship still emerged, albeit almost entirely at a distance.

A reflective conversation with Ellen Winner: A panoramic retrospective view

A reflective conversation with Ellen Winner: A panoramic retrospective view

Is Being “Gifted” a Blessing or a Curse, or Some of Both?

Gifted children are an extremely precious resource. But what does it mean to be gifted? Ellen Winner has devoted much of her career to addressing this question. In this essay, I argue that our society misdefines giftedness, placing undue emphasis on analytical skills. Moreover, the problem is getting worse. Amplifying factors in society are narrowing rather than broadening our definition of giftedness. I discuss what is happening, why, and what we can do about it.

Youth Neighborhood Maps From Around the World: A Preliminary Look Through a Studio Thinking Lens

This article takes a look at 624 neighborhood maps, drawn by students aged 8 to 18 years from 24 countries, between 2017 and 2018. The maps were made as part of an online cultural exchange program called Out of Eden Learn, developed at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In honor of Dr. Ellen Winner, a preliminary analysis of the maps is offered using The Studio Thinking framework as a lens. Developed by Winner and her colleagues, the Studio Thinking framework identifies eight habits of mind—sometimes called thinking dispositions—that are characteristic of high-quality thinking in the arts and elsewhere. The article focuses on three of these dispositions in particular: Envision, Observe, and Express. With a twist, it also says a few words about a fourth, Understanding Art World.

Beyond the Lab: Influencing Practice and Policy

In this article, the authors describe over 20 years of work with Ellen Winner at Project Zero, a research and development group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This included a cross-arts curriculum and assessment project aimed at practitioners (ArtsPROPEL, 1989–1995), 10 meta-analytic syntheses of the effects of arts learning on nonarts achievement (REAP, 1997–2001), and an observational theory-building study of the dispositions intended to be learned in high school art classes and the structures through which they are taught, meant for audiences of both practice and theory (Studio Thinking, 2001–2013). Ellen’s perspective as an experimental psychologist interacted with ours in fertile ways to make richly rewarding collaborations in our efforts to make sense of art education practices. From how she chooses what she studies, to her eclectic approaches to research, to addressing her work to broad audiences, psychologists have much to gain from Ellen’s methods.

The Development of Creativity

This article discusses the important scholarly contributions to our understandings of creativity, education, and the arts. I describe many important contributions, beginning with Dr. Ellen Winner’s foundational studies of child development and the arts in the 1970s and 1980s. I identify several common themes throughout her career. First, I characterize her work as problem finding in nature—exploring new areas and identifying promising new research questions. Second, I discuss the interdisciplinary nature of her work—describing the broad range of empirical studies she has conducted, not only in the arts but also topics ranging from dyslexia to wisdom later in life. Third, I summarize her important contributions to our empirical understandings of the benefits of arts education. Finally, I describe the deeply collaborative nature of her work, noting students and colleagues that she has published with.

Ellen Winner Festschrift

Not every worthy scholar receives a Festschrift (literally: a celebratory book); circumstances can delay or prevent its appearance. And not every Festschrift lives up to expectation: Such collections can range from clutches of articles that were rejected from journals to sets of articles that mostly rehash the author’s own work, a sort of “mirror,” or “selfie” Festschrift. Happily, this impressive Festschrift lives up to its name and to the occasion. Ellen Winner is a major scholar—arguably, the major scholar—in the experimental psychology and the developmental psychology of the arts. And in these pages, ably edited by her talented proteges Thalia Goldstein and Jennifer Drake, several other leading conceptualizers, experimentalists, and educators (and some writers are all three!) offer both tributes to Ellen and significant contributions in their own right.

Transferring Habits of Mind From an Aesthetic Context to Everyday Life

This discussion of Habits of Mind is rooted in Ellen Winner and colleagues’ groundbreaking research on the skills and dispositions taught in visual arts, music, and theater classrooms in the United States. The Habits students are learning in these creative contexts have applications to other domains, such as the sciences and everyday life. The philosophical origins of Habits of Mind are discussed in the context of American pragmatism, critical theory, and aesthetic theory in order to expand our understanding of habits and their relationship to creative-thinking and cognition. In contrast with cultural-norms, students’ artistic pursuits may benefit from additional training in expressive imagination.

Art as Civic Inspiration

Today as in the past, artists often produce works of art to foster civic agendas of one sort or another, sometimes affirming and sometimes critiquing contemporary attitudes. To what degree is engaging with civically inflected art likely to have the desired impact? We develop an analogy between the work of Ellen Winner and colleagues questioning the impact of studying art on performance in other academic areas. We suggest that, in many cases of civically inflected art, transfer of the desired message is implausible, recognizing difficulties of changing people’s minds in general, of how art specifically might do so, and how superficially art is often engaged. We urge that civically impactful encounters with art, which certainly occur, require not just a landing pad character—the impact deriving from imbibing the work—but rather a launching pad character—the work functioning as a starting point for discussion, reflection, and exploration.

Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue Honoring Ellen Winner

Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue Honoring Ellen Winner

At the Heart of ExcELLENce: Myth or Reality?

This report is a contribution to Ellen Winner’s Festschrift from a very fond former student and collaborator.

"Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication": Correction to Panero et al. (2016).

Reports an error in "Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication" by Maria Eugenia Panero, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Jessica Black, Thalia R. Goldstein, Jennifer L. Barnes, Hiram Brownell and Ellen Winner (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Sep 19, 2016, np). In the article, due to an error in stimulus construction, four items (three authors, one foil) were omitted from the ART presented to all participants tested by Research Group 1. These omissions do not undermine the results in the primary analyses, which all included ART and ART Condition (as covariates). Any variation across research groups, including this difference in reading exposure measurement, is accounted for in the multilevel analyses. Therefore, the Table 2 title should appear as Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) Scores by Condition and Overall Unadjusted Means for the Current Study and Kidd and Castano (2013), as Well as the Zero-Order Pearson's Correlations Between RMET and ART Scores Overall and by Condition. The ART data columns should be deleted, and the table note should begin as follows: RMET scores were transformed to correct for skew prior to correlational analyses. The section title above the Discussion section should appear as Comparison of Our RMET Scores to Kidd and Castano Data, with the first two sentences appearing as follows: To determine whether the responses in our sample were similar to what Kidd and Castano (2013) found, we compared our mean performance on the RMET to theirs. Our grand mean (26.28) was significantly higher than theirs (25.18), t(1=, 374) = 3.71, p< .001, d = 0.21. All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2016-44825-001.) Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but not popular fiction or nonfiction) immediately and significantly improved performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), an advanced theory-of-mind test. Here we report a replication attempt by 3 independent research groups, with 792 participants randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions (literary fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction, and no reading). In contrast to Kidd and Castano (2013), we found no significant advantage in RMET scores for literary fiction compared to any of the other conditions. However, as in Kidd and Castano and previous research, the Author Recognition Test, a measure of lifetime exposure to fiction, consistently predicted RMET scores across conditions. We conclude that the most plausible link between reading fiction and theory of mind is either that individuals with strong theory of mind are drawn to fiction and/or that a lifetime of reading gradually strengthens theory of mind, but other variables, such as verbal ability, may also be at play. (PsycINFO Database Record

Book Review: Ellen Winner, Thalia R. Goldstein i Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin: Art for Art's Sake? The Impact of Arts Education

Prikaz knjige Art for Art's Sake? The Impact of Arts Education bavi se pitanjima umjetnickog odgoja i obrazovanja, njegova trenutacnog položaja u suvremenoj skoli te ucinaka na razvoj vjestina potrebnih u 21. stoljecu. Temeljno pitanje koje raspravljaju autori knjige jest sama svrha umjetnickog odgoja i obrazovanja, pitanje transfera vjestina s podrucja umjetnickog odgoja i obrazovanja na neumjetnicka podrucja. Iscrpnim izvjescem relevantnih te aktualnih istraživanja ove tematike, kritickim promisljanjem problema i stanja umjetnickog odgoja i obrazovanja u kurikulumima suvremenih skola, autori razjasnjavaju zasto umjetnicki odgoj i obrazovanje treba ostati sastavni dio odgoja i obrazovanja svakoga djeteta. Pokazali su kako su umjetnosti jedan od nacina poticanja vjestina za inovativno drustvo, ali i podsjetili na primaran razlog umjetnickog odgoja i obrazovanja: intrinzicnu vrijednost umjetnosti i važnih navika uma koje one razvijaju.

A lost opportunity: a review of Art for Art's Sake? The Impact of Arts Education

In 2013, the report Art for Art's Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, by Ellen Winner, Thalia Goldstein and Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, was published by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and In...

Our superheroes, ourselves

Part I: Our Relationship with Superheroes Introduction Robin Rosenberg Chapter 1. our fascination with superheroes Robin Rosenberg Chapter 2. Superhero comics as Moral Pornography David Pizarro and Roy Baumeister Chapter 3. Are Superhero Stories Good for Us?: Reflections from Clinical Practice Lawrence Rubin Chapter 4. Emotions in Comics: Why the Silver Age of comics made a difference Peter Jordan Chapter 5. The Effects of Superhero Sagas on Our Gendered Selves Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Hillary Pennell Part II: The Humanity of Superheroes Chapter 6. Our Superheroes, Our Supervillains: Are They All That Different? Travis Langley Chapter 7. Are Superheroes Just Supergifted? Robin Rosenberg and Ellen Winner Chapter 8. The Very Real Work Lives of Superheroes: Illustrations of Work Psychology by Gary Burns Chapter 9. How super are superheroes? Robert Sternberg Chapter 10. Seven Roads to Justice for Superheroes and Humans Mikhail Lyubansky

The Test for Creative Thinking: An authentic tool for art education to assess creativity through visual expression

This article introduces a creativity test, an authentic and flexible assessment instrument that invites participants to create a meaningful image out of a set of visual signs. The elements offered for completion, repetition, modification, inclusion and composition are not culturally biased and invite the use of a variety of drawing styles. This test has been successfully used by art educators to identify talented students for enrolment in special courses and also by teachers who want to know more about the creative potentials of students who are verbally less fluent and therefore are not successful at school. In this article, we discuss the general findings of the Test for Creative Thinking/Drawing Production (TCT/DP) that was administered between 2000 and 2010 to 1050 children and young people aged 7-18 years during the course of the national standardization of this instrument. We compare two generally known and often discussed models of visual skills development created by Victor Lowenfeld, Howard Gardner, Ellen Winner and Jessica Davis in relation to the test results obtained from a comparison of Hungarian and German children. We focus on important issues of art education: cognitive growth manifest in visual language use, the issue of the 'drawing gap' in adolescence and the use or uselessness of developmental stages in relation to artistic performance.

Children, irony and philosophy

In her very influential book, The Point of Words (1988), Ellen Winner presents strong evidence that children younger than six can understand and use metaphors, but not irony. Winner, however, fails to consider ‘philosophical story irony’ in her research. This sort of irony is a little like dramatic irony. We have a case of such irony whenever there is some proposition, p, such that (1) according to a story, or some character in a story, it is true that p, even though (2) we, the audience, understand that not p, and (3) we won’t be able to offer a helpful explanation of why anyone would think that p without clarifying some philosophically problematic concept basic to the supposition that p. Even very young children can understand and appreciate examples of philosophical story irony, as the popularity of a certain kind of children’s literature reveals.