Learning to look: notes on art education
A conversation with two teachers who regularly bring their classes to Musubu about what changes when children enter an art space.
Laia and Jordi are teachers at a public school a ten-minute walk from Musubu. For a year now, they have been bringing their classes to the space three times a term. Not always when there is an exhibition: sometimes simply to be in the space, to use it as a classroom.
What changes when children enter here?
Laia: The volume, literally. They lower their voices on their own, without anyone telling them anything. I don’t know if it’s the space or what the space communicates to them about how to be here. But it works better than any instruction of mine.
Jordi: For me, the most interesting thing is that they ask things they don’t ask in the classroom. Perhaps because here there is no correct answer and they sense it. When I ask them what they see in a work, no one is afraid of being wrong.
Do you think art education has a bad reputation?
Laia: It has the problem that the results are invisible in the short term. There is no grade, there is no exam. What you learn by looking at art doesn’t appear in any indicator. But that doesn’t mean something important isn’t happening.