Strategic shifts: How studio teachers use direction and support to build learner agency in the figured world of visual art

ABSTRACT

Background

In studio art, students are expected to be highly agentive—to engage in creative processes to form personalized representations of ideas, yet we lack knowledge on how teachers support their agency. Approaching agency as co-constructed practices across temporal dimensions, we examine how teachers shift between autonomy-supportive and directive approaches, building students’ artistic agency.

Methods

Secondary qualitative analysis of video-recordings (49 hours) of four teachers’ studio art classes in two arts-intensive high schools used observational frameworks on autonomy-support, theoretical constructs of spaces of authoring and temporal orientations to agency, and functional linguistic agency markers.

Findings

Studio teaching is primarily autonomy-supportive, but teachers strategically shift their enacted and linguistic practices to directive approaches, such as commands and constraints, taking control over parts of the creative process to build students’ artistic agency.

Contribution

Our work on teachers co-constructing artistic agency with students adds nuance to accounts of how teachers support agency, particularly forms of direction on open-ended problems. Our theoretical lens of the temporal process of agency and methodological approach of attending to enacted and linguistic practices and to when teachers shift to and away from directiveness, could be used in other learning settings to examine how agency is co-constructed.

Acknowledgments

We thank Drs. Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner and videographer Shirley Veenema for use of the video-recordings used in this study and the reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Disclosure statement

The opinions and assertions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Department of Defense, or the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) under Grant 1844329-38-C-18. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NEA.