ABSTRACT
Greene (1995) talks about teaching for “openings,” as nding “ways of being dialogical in relation to the texts” (p. 116) engaged together. ese openings then become paths to pursue further learning. Visual arts experiences focusing on making and relating, perceiving and responding, and connecting and understanding through attention to these processes, open learning paths for students to follow and to negotiate. ese paths position students to attend to the creating process from within, always imagining anew. Making and relating, perceiving and responding, and connecting and understanding in visual arts experiences involves manipulating dierent media toward varying expressive ends. e forms that emerge are a reection of the visual, aural, emotional, and kinetic judgments made during the process. Such attention puts one in ongoing dialogue with content, demanding alertness and questioning. Such attention, however, necessitates openness to possibilities by both students and the teacher. It is a dialogic process that is inquiry-guided, and responsive to the features encountered and the relations that transpire. Making and relating, perceiving and responding, and connecting and understanding involve students playing with the parts-to-whole relationship in order to achieve an artistic form. A trust in the process is needed. Students make decisions within the making and relating, perceiving and responding, and connecting and understanding process. Finding ways to value this process of thinking from within enables students to better articulate the meaning making processes. As a result, a heightened cognizance of this process in self and others ensues, with students engaged in analyzing and assessing increasingly complex visual relationships. Participation in these concrete activities creates time for ELLs to dwell and to attend closely to their thinking, negotiating and articulating understandings. us, openings are created to deliberately foster artistic thinking, gaining content knowledge alongside language and social growth in ELLs through their engagement in conversation about a topic that might not otherwise arise among ELL students due to cultural mores or perceived challenges of interactions about abstract concepts. Teachers may draw
upon the generative nature of the topic to dierentiate instruction as well as explore the theme in ways beyond what might develop in the context of a regular school day, and engage students in continued interchange as they draw upon knowledge from diverse cultures, experiences, and understandings to inform the conversation.
