EDUCATIONAL researchers have paid little attention to critique--an activity young artists routinely use to assess and advance their creative projects. It is an activity from which we have a lot to learn, particularly in the context of community-based arts collaboratives. Why should we be interested in this process in which young people jointly judge their own imaginative work and that of their peers? In school classrooms where teachers emphasize group projects and performances, surely students assess their own developing work. But in arts-based settings in the community, critique happens spontaneously, and participating young artists devise their own strategies for making it effective. New research points to the urgent need for better understandings of the links between young people's own emergent assessment practices and their final performances and learning outcomes, as well as the accountability measures they face in schools. In a recent study of young people involved in group work assignments, Elizabeth Cohen and her colleagues found that the more students evaluate their own work as it develops, the more motivated and task-focused is their disclosure, resulting in higher-quality products as well as more sophisticated written reflections. (1) In his research on youth media arts, David Buckingham emphasized students' own evaluations of their work as a key indicator of strengths and weaknesses in curriculum design. (2) Frequent and meaningful self-assessment opportunities embedded within the production process enrich students' creative products and their learning experiences. By taking seriously the methods young people use for critique, educators have the opportunity to learn from their students what will serve them best. Youth critique is an area in which art and assessment, two practices normally seen to be mutually inhospitable, actually come together under very specific conditions. I highlight here moments of critique within a single youth arts project, Youth Radio, in Berkeley, California, where I have conducted participatory action research over five years. In my work at Youth Radio I have documented learning through youth media production, while also collaborating with young people to create radio stories on education and other topics for broadcast on local and national outlets. I focus here on a property of assessment that is often overlooked--its own potential for artfulness. I conclude with implications of critique for teaching and learning in the arts and beyond, including concrete strategies for bridging the gap between youth arts collaboratives and school classrooms. In critique, artists form judgments about their own creative projects. Take, for example, two teenagers and an adult who gather inside a recording studio to listen to a rough mix of an audio documentary they are producing. They debate whether adding music to a certain passage will intensify the emotional impact of the story or just distract from the message. This moment contains both assessment and art. The media makers in this sound studio use assessment to move forward with their creative work, to see and articulate their project in new ways, and to discover possibilities for transforming it. Assessment is often considered a heavily bureaucratized, tightly controlled procedure that, at best, measures intellectual performance and often concludes, or even terminates, a learning experience by assigning judgments of success or failure. (3) Yet when young people make assessments as they make art, assessment itself often bears aesthetic and performative qualities and operates as an intellectual exercise. ART MEETS ASSESSMENT Art is eccentric, emotional, touchy-feely. Assessment is mainstream, scientific, rigorous. Admittedly, there might be some truth to these stereotypical characterizations, but art and assessment actually have much in common. Both take something intangible and make it concrete by giving form to meanings, emotions, ideas, understandings, and values. …
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Aug 5, 2015
Julie Jay + 1
Open Access