Art teaching + Perception’s Lab
This website is for teachers interested in the topics of perception, creative thinking and critical thinking. Or teachers who are simply looking for ideas for their lessons.
Creative thinking and critical thinking automatically flow into each other. The goal of this platform is to explore this interrelation and to develop working methods that consciously and systematically strengthen and expand this interrelation.
About this Perception’s Lab
The development of this lab began when I was exploring the interrelationship between Bias and Creativity. So I wanted to develop lessons inspired by these themes.
This led me on a quest to better understand how our perception works, what its limits are and how we can expand them with practical exercises in the Art lessons. These three questions have become the guiding threads of this process.
Of course, Art lessons are already a kind of laboratory where we train our perceptual skills. The idea, however, is that students develop perceptual strategies in a more conscious process that allows them to actively think about how different perceptual strategies can help them build knowledge and further develop their creativity. I.e. it is about guiding students through a reflective process that raises questions related to their perception.
Three approaches to explore our Perception
In this blog I want to explore different approaches to process the information we receive from our senses. In this sense, the lessons compiled here are intended to research and share information in the following areas:
- Development of perceptual strategies.
- Multisensory integration/multimodal perception
- Perception as a creative process (Mental flexibility)
Art teaching as collective creation
The lessons gathered here are a work of collecting, mixing and blending concepts. Some are exercises I did as a student, other exercises have been modified by mixing them with concepts I found during my research process. So feel free to use them as a starting point or as inspiration for your own settings. Most of them use the medium of drawing as a tool for exploration. But perhaps you can apply them to other media, such as photography, sculpture, video, etc. The material here presented has no commercial purposes and is strictly for didactic use.
The exercises have a theoretical framework, which is important for those who want to dig deeper into theoretical aspects, however, my intention is not to intellectualize the Art lessons with words. On the contrary, thinking with images instead of words and learning new ways of processing information coming from our senses remains the main focus.
I hope you find it useful and inspiring. Your feedbacks and collaboration are welcome to further develop more lesson Settings. If you have any ideas for perception-based lessons that help us strengthen critical and creativew thinking, please get in contact and share them on this website.