Art in Learning Design

The other day I posted about an interview with Dr. Jeong-Hee Kim. During that inteview Brooke, my colleague, noticed a focus on art and design as a part of the learning process. 

I really like that Brooke picked up on that aspect of art-based research. I posted about art in my organization last year when I wrote this (here and here). 

As I mentioned in those posts, I was hired to improve the quality of our training course at my organization. When analyzing our product, I see that art and design has not been a focus point for our training. Not only has this been limiting our own design processes, but we might have actually been underserving our learners. 

Since writing that post, we have changed things in our department. Where before we simply reprocessed information we were given by our clients and applied some best practice adult learning methodologies and some expertise on drilling out redundancy and incorrect information. Based on what Sousa states, "In recent years, neuroscientists have been developing theories about ways in which art develops cognition. One common element of the current theories is that each art form involves different brain networks" (p. 247).

We have since brought on a design team whose sole focus is to push these artistic boundaries. Already, with very little investment in our training platform, they are doing things and creating courses that are vastly different, more rich, and more engaging than what we had before. Are they doing things that I couldn't have done? Nope. Are they doing things that Julie hasn't thought about and dreamed up herself? Nope. But these folks have the capabilities and the background to think of things as artists and that's what they are developing. Are they good products by themselves? Nope. By themselves they would be shallow and hollow, but when they are applied with Julie's team's help, when the artistic creativity is combined with the expertise, and adult learning theory that the rest of the team provides, then you have a product that is far more rich, vibrant, engaging and effective. By focusing on art and design we have vastly improved our product. 

References

Sousa, D.A. (2016). How the brain learns, (5th Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.