To the Reader •• The Thinking Child •• The Neuroconstructivist classroom: A dynamic system •• A Neuroconstructivist curriculum: The child as thinker •• Training to transfer: The theoretical bases •• A position on language •• Two general curricular categories: visual studies and verbal studies •• Visual searches of interest •• DRAWING/WRITING and the Fine Arts •• Guidelines •• STUDIO ARTS •• ART HISTORY: THE DRAWING/WRITING WAY •• THE DRAWING/WRITING JOURNAL •• LECTURE AS DISCUSSION •• OVERHEAD PROJECTION

I am an artist and a writer. It is logical for me to design a translation exchange between drawing and writing. The deliberate exchange of information between two modes of representation defines a cross-modal teaching strategy. In this case, the exchange reflects the basic left brain/right brain, verbal/visual capabilities of the mind. Thus, this exchange makes general neurobiological sense. As a teacher, you will devise your own cross-modal exercises. I am simply providing the guidelines, a sample method, and several sample curricula to illustrate Neuroconstructivist teaching and learning in the context of the two disciplines with which I am most familiar.

The first part of this book is a persuasive essay designed to demonstrate that the activities of drawing and writing are related and should be connected. The second part of the book shows how to implement the program called Drawing/Writing, providing evidence of its success through illustrations. The third part of the book offers information on brain structure and process and provides specific teaching tips and suggestions for brain-based education.

The fourth part of this book is a curriculum guide to a drawing-based approach to writing across the curriculum. In terms of the evolution of the human brain, and in terms of everyday life, writing remains a spatial activity, as does reading. Making decisions about the layout or the format or the pattern of words on the page is one of the first steps in the mental organization in writing and reading. In general, we organize the marks we call writing—as we organize the marks we call arithmetic or geometric proofs or calculus or figure drawing—in certain ways. A glance at the layout of the marks on a page will not tell us whether the marks are fiction or non-fiction, narrative or biography or an essay, but a glance will tell us that the marks are writing, not drawing or mathematics, and that the writing is probably meant to be poetry, even a specific verse form.

Writing and reading are multi-level tasks; a preliminary task is spatial pattern recognition, like recognizing a face. Successive analyses move toward linguistic analysis. Not only did written language develop out of a spatial location system by adding the “what is it?” to the “where is it?” questions asked by the brain, but written language endures as an act of spatial recognition. After that
first decision—from this layout of words on the page, this is probably poetry or prose—reading progresses to content and meaning. Unless the writer sits down deliberately to write, say, a sestina, there is often a simultaneity to layout and meaning. Form and content are mutually generative.

Training in drawing teaches students to be alert and attentive to the spatial implications and requirements of text. The spatial implications of words on a page are powerful. Font, size of type, length of sentence, inclusion or absence of punctuation, inclusion or absence of images engage the brain through the eyes. The charmed eye reads on.

The following Neuroconstructivist guidelines for teaching do more than demonstrate how to combine drawing with writing in your field. A Neuroconstructivist teacher in any field, including English, realizes that how material presents itself to the brain through the eyes, or through appealing to the brain’s ability to visualize, is of primary importance to introducing the material, to studying it, to understanding it, to learning it, and to using it.

The relationship between spatial and linguistic information processing is so embedded that the exact moment or the exact brain location where spatial understanding gives way to language—where visual meets verbal—is difficult to pinpoint, anecdotally or scientifically. It makes the most sense educationally to emphasize the continuities rather than the discontinuities, teaching writing and reading in the context of training in drawing.

Guidelines for teaching and learning are provided by studying the brain. Specific tips for WholeBrain teaching and learning are located in Part 3, “Hitchhikers’ Guide.” By combining these tips and the following guidelines, the Neuroconstructivist student or teacher can devise effective teaching and learning strategies.

The general Neuroconstructivist guidelines are these:

• use a spatial or visual approach to information, first
• use a linguistic or verbal approach, second
• then, deliberately connect the spatial and the linguistic tasks in a translation exchange exercise.

The translation exchange exercise in Drawing/Writing, for instance, is achieved by the sentence, “My Contour drawing tells me that my object is....because....” The implication is that the drawing contains accessible, identifiable information which can be described with words. A sample Neuroconstructivist English curriculum follows. Sample Fine Arts Neuroconstructivist curricula are provided, as well. A WholeBrain guide to Drawing/Writing in Spanish is in progress, as is an elementary school language arts and mathematics curriculum called “Rainbow Noodles and Zebra Trees.”

The Neuroconstructivist classroom: A dynamic system

To see clearly, to draw accurately and powerfully, to write responsively and abundantly, to work independently with full attention, to work cooperatively with others, to have confidence in decisions, to communicate with increasing clarity, to be brave enough to try to restructure the world through language, the mind requires an education tailored to its nature and its needs. A Neuroconstructivist, or WholeBrain, approach provides an education geared to comprehensive meaning-making. Like the brain’s connections, the Neuroconstructivist classroom is dynamic, responsive and complex.

Phylogenetically and ontogenetically the human brain begins its meaning-making adventure with visual information. In a similar fashion, this Neuroconstruc-tivist literacy curriculum initiates meaning-making through a visual approach, drawing. In each of the following writing exercises, drawing provides the first level of information; then, writing extracts that information. Far too powerful to be relegated to “pre-writing,” the act of drawing connects the thinker directly with experience, memory and emotion. Drawing acts as an aide memoire, as well as an in-the-present activity for recording current information, illuminating writers—sometimes in startling ways.

A Neuroconstructivist curriculum: The child as thinker

This curriculum focuses on students as thinkers. More definitive than age, gender, race, culture or socio-economic class, the act of thinking characterizes students. The richer the learning environment, the denser the neural connections; the more powerful the thinking skills, and the broader the range of mental strategies. Students learn to think. The Neuroconstruc-tivist approach aligns with popular classroom practices honoring student learning and adds another dimension; students not only learn how to think; they construct their brains in the process.

Intelligence: inter means “between” or “among,” and legere means “to gather, pick or choose.” Thinking involves choosing and gathering.

Training to transfer: The theoretical bases

The theoretical foundation for “The Thinking Child” is provided by six conclusions distilled from educational and neurobiological research (Sheridan, 1991). These conclusions place curricular focus on the thinking child as a dynamic, delicate system designed for receiving, exchanging, transferring and transforming information:

1. Intelligence is dynamic and modifiable; it is developable or retardable.
2. Information stored in more than one way is remembered more strongly and is more broadly accessible than information stored in just one way. Connected information bases are more flexible and versatile than bases without connections.
3. Effective abstract thought is based on a graphic and concrete (highly tactile, visual, multi-sensory) understanding of things.
4. The role of the involved observer is critical for students as thinkers. The act of observation not only determines what is learned (or according to physics, what actually happens), but the quality of the act of observation determines the accuracy, completeness and comprehensiveness of what is learned.
5. Intelligent thought accepts as givens these two premises: every symbol system is approximate; several symbol systems, linked in parallel mode, provide a more complete—if still approximate—explanation.
6. Intelligence tests should do several things: they should measure spatial as well as linguistic intelligence; they should be administered promptly after a training program which has been designed to promote the kinds of intelligence being tested for. In addition, they should be administered by the test-takers themselves, allowing students to evaluate their own skills, hereby growing in meta-cognition—or the ability to think about thinking—which in and of itself encourages richer thought. Finally, intelligence tests should be given in the spirit of providing temporary benchmarks in a lifetime of broadening and deepening mental skills.

A position on language

The Neuroconstructivist position on language is that the quality of language training determines not only what mental objects students’ minds construct but the ways in which their minds will go about constructing mental objects thereafter. The relationship of mental objects to modes of thought is like the relationship of the chicken to the egg: the mutuality poses a conundrum. Still, education must start somewhere. This program starts with visual language instruction, using that training to establish the preconditions for how the mind will view and manipulate mental objects framed with language. Students benefit by learning how to adjust and negotiate meaning, appreciating the fact that their own use of language will grow and change, and can become increasingly rich and precise.

Not only how language is acquired but what specific language is acquired influences the shape and quality of thought. A mother tongue may encourage and allow certain kinds of thinking. A language like mathematics encourages logical operations, speculations and intuitions in universal ways, as do the languages of the arts. Like other brain processes, the capacity for language in connection with a mother tongue is given—an accident of birth—and yet constructed, word by word. Each new word extends the scope of thought.

Not only do we learn to speak, and thus to think, in French or Spanish, Khmer or Chinese, we learn to speak the language of the arts, sciences, histories or mathematics. Whatever our accident of birth in terms of a mother tongue, we can share the eye and tongue of the artist or the geologist. Additional “eyes” bring us closer together as linguists. Harvard professor David Layzer writes, “We learn to see in certain ways. A landscape painter doesn’t see the same scene as a non-painter, even though the patterns of light impinging on their retinas may be nearly identical” (Layzer, 256). Similarly, Amherst College physics professor Arthur Zajonc writes about the relationship of language use to an appreciation of rocks in Catching the Light (1993): “Standing with a geologist before an outcropping of rock, he sees more than I who stand next to him. I make a few distinctions, he a hundred, and each one tells a story to him of which I know nothing: glaciation, a lake bed, or volcanic lava flow; he finds the fossil under my foot. I feel not only illiterate but blind. Not only does the geologist interpret phenomena more fully, he sees things I miss utterly” (204). The more languages we know—the language of the geologist, the language of the artist—the more we will see and the more we can share. If we learn to draw, write, and read and if we are raised in the habit of learning, we can acquire as many languages for seeing and knowing as time and energy allow.

Two general curricular categories: visual studies and verbal studies

In a Neuroconstructivist curriculum, two broad categories subsume content areas: Visual Studies and Verbal Studies. No content area is taught without reference to the relevant thinking skills in both broad categories. A student might major in painting, or Visual Studies, but he would also study art history texts and literacy criticism about painting, as well as the physics of color theory, the chemistry of pigments, and the lives of individual painters who particularly interest or influence him. Similarly, a student might major in Medieval literature, or Verbal Studies, but also study the art, music, and dance of the times.

In this book, the words “visual” and “verbal” are used in the broadest sense, aligning visual information processing with spatial intelligence and verbal information processing with linguistic intelligence. The categorization of a content area is quite arbitrary. Mathematics, for instance, might fall under the general category of language; still, geometry, one of its subsystems, requires spatial understanding, and, in fact, spatial skills are currently recognized as fundamental to mathematical understanding and are posited as one of the reasons why boys do better than girls with mathematics. Similarly, the applied and performing arts might be classified as visual studies, although dance is one of the body’s languages, as drawing is one of the eye’s languages. The advantage to cross-modal or spatial/linguistic curricular design is that it is not necessary to fight to the death over classifications; specific content areas, as well as visual intelligence, verbal intelligence, logico-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, personal and social intelligences34 are subsumed under these two categories. By making sure students attend to the visual and verbal aspects of any subject they study, a range of spatial and linguistic intelligences are exercised in an evenhanded manner, training the whole brain to conduct comprehensive explorations in any discipline or content area. Brain science supports the meta-classification of content areas and mental skills.

How do we devise Neuroconstructivist curricula? We do so by asking two questions: what spatial exercises are relevant to a specific content areas? What linguistic exercises are appropriate to that specific content area? These questions extend beyond academics to athletics or any other course of study, including technical/vocational education. For instance, after asking herself these questions, a basketball coach might decide that the relevant spatial training in her field includes shooting baskets and passing to a teammate. Additional relevant spatial/linguistic training might include the physics of space, time, motion and the dimensions of a basketball. To add these dimensions to her coaching, she might have to do some boning up on physics. The coach can engage players in a linguistic dialogue that relates to the spatial dialogue called basketball. Because reading is a general skill, the coach has the necessary skills to devise her own cross-modal approach to teaching basketball. Her teaching will automatically be Neuroconstructivist if she encourages students to draw and write about the game. An English teacher must discover the spatial/visual dimensions for his field—from how words are arranged on a page to visualizing plot or character. As for the maths and sciences, these fields already make use of graphing calculators and illustrated lab reports. If tactile, exploratory approaches are not already in place, three-dimensional models and direct field exploration can be added to all fields. In technical/vocational curricula, the linguistic element may require greater emphasis, including more mathematics and increased writing and reading. The invaluable element—spatial/visual, hands-on training—is already in place.

A Neuroconstructivist approach simply integrates spatial and linguistic training—on any terms available to the teacher or coach. The athlete trained via a Neuroconstructivist mode will not only dribble, run, shoot and pass, but will be able to express and refine these activities using words, diagrams, and formulae, increasing her awareness of the relationships on the court as well as the relationships between playing basketball and other physical and mental activities. This awareness, in turn, reinforces the principles involved, making them more broadly useful. An awareness of the skills and principles in basketball allows that sport to enrich other areas of study like mathematics, physics, and human physiology. In a Neuroconstructivist athletic program, the sport becomes the study of the applicability and transfer of skills and concepts, besides playing a game. The Neuroconstructivist focus blurs the distinction between academics and athletics, as it does between the arts and academics. The human endeavor of thought takes center stage. Mens sana in corpore sano. Our brains are housed in bodies designed to absorb and express meaning. The health of the body influences the health of the mind, and vice versa. Neurobiological research brings mind and body ever closer.

Visual searches of interest

Before considering content, that is, before deciding whether to teach the legend of Beowulf or the legend of Gilgamesh, two connected issues require attention in curricular design. First, what inherently interests students must be identified. Then, using this activity or content area as a hook, persistent work can be encouraged by teaching students the basic habit of mind necessary to all substantive mental endeavors: sustained attention. Because what is attended to becomes interesting, habits of attention are the preconditions for work with new material. Attention and content constitute a feedback loop.

The activity of drawing is inherently interesting to children. They are born wanting to draw and able to draw. Like a shiny object, the act of drawing attracts children’s bodies and minds. As children grow, training in drawing can be used to encourage them to pay sustained attention. With time, training in drawing can be used to teach minds to visualize and construct mental models in a variety of ways. The complexity and accuracy of the models the mind constructs will depend upon the brain’s training in visualization. The five-step drawing program provided in this book trains the mind to pay attention, to conduct sustained visual searches, and to construct accurate and comprehensive mental models using contour line, several approaches to geometry, optically accurate three-dimensional rendering, and recombinant, balanced, abstract representations. Drawing scores triply as a valuable learning activity.

Visualization enhances mathematical understanding. Graphing calculators have become standard equipment for many students. Drawing is commonly used as a tool for understanding and learning information in the physical and biological sciences. Computer modeling provides enhanced understanding in the maths and the sciences, as well as in the field of design. To understand complex systems, a variety of representations are required; each sheds light on an aspect of the system. Traditionally, drawing has been reserved for academic subjects of considerable rigor—or drawing has been relegated to the non-academic play of very young children. Children’s writing develops into adult writing. By logical extension, the drawings of children develop into adult powers of visualization, extending the possibilities for intellectual exploration inherent in the brain’s design.

Guidelines

It is said that we generally teach as we were taught, and not as innovators. This is one of the reasons why education takes so long to change. If we were taught in a text-based way, we will probably teach this way. If we were taught by imposition, we will probably impose information on students, rather than allowing them to discover and construct it.

In the past, it was feasible to teach the visual arts apart from literacy. It is no longer feasible for several reasons:

• a technological society requires visual literacy skills
• a student population less interested and practiced in reading and writing require the highly visual, hands-on stimulus of the arts to bolster attention and to sustain interest.

The popularity of some technical/vocational schools is high enough to necessitate entrance requirements. The physical plant, financial resources, curricular latitude, and pupil-teacher ratio are better in many technical/vocational schools than in other high schools. If we sift out the components which distinguish technical/vocational education, characteristics emerge which align with cues from brain science about how the brain learns best. Highly visual, exploratory, practically relevant, hands-on learning is engaging and effective. By adding a strong writing component and exercises in abstract thinking, vocational education becomes as literate as it is technical and practical. Seeing, doing, making things that can be tested against certain standards of form and function: these activities provide bases for writing and reading and computing. Wiring can short-circuit. Plumbing can leak. A joist can weaken. These problems can be experienced, analyzed and fixed. So can drawings and writings. There is no such thing as a wrong drawing, although there are inaccurate or incomplete drawings. There is no such thing as a wrong sentence, although there are inaccurate or incomplete sentences, or sentences trapped in “inner speech” (Faith, 1989). If the habit of crafting objects is established, writing can also be constructed and crafted.

As well as training in trades like plumbing, wiring, carpentry, food preparation, and hairdressing, the studio arts and art history can increase students’ practical and technical skills, too. If art departments include courses on practical design problems, as well as on visual literacy, reframing existing courses with these emphases in mind, art departments will draw larger numbers of general education students as well as a bigger part of the budget.

The Drawing/Writing English curriculum outlined above presents a course of study enriched by drawing. The Drawing/Writing Fine Arts curricula outlined
below present courses enriched by writing. These courses have been taught at the middle, high school and college levels—some once, some twice a semester for five years, some for seventeen years.

STUDIO ARTS

Basic Design and the Drawing/Writing five-step with:

the object
the self-portrait
figure studies
Simple, simpler, simplest
Complex, more complex, most complex

Basic Drawing, Painting, Print-making, Ceramics, Sculpture, and the Drawing/Writing five-step as subject matter for painting

the object
the self portrait
figure studies

Composition:

Drawing/Writing and Right Relationships in connection with drawing, painting, print-making.

Color Theory:

Drawing/Writing and Right Relationships in connection with complementary colors and adjusted hues.

Whether you are teaching basic drawing or design or painting or print-making, start the course with the five-step using the object, then the self-portrait, and then the figure. Once the Drawing/Writing exercises have been done, teach basic painting techniques and then ask students to paint from their object drawings or from the self-portrait drawings or from the figure drawings. Students might choose to paint the “Perfect” whole version of their face, or the Composite Abstraction. Or, as a painting teacher, you might require the “Perfect” whole first, and then the CA.

In the same way, after an introductory session with the five-step, the instructor can move briskly into issues of design. In this way, the basic skills required by artists, writers, and readers, as well as the habits of rigorous thinkers in any field, are established first. Exposure to a specific art form or period in art history follows naturally, receiving a trained and receptive audience.

Drawing/Writing journals as aides to learning

The Drawing/Writing approach to lecture notes, new vocabulary and concepts, quizzes and exams.

Ideally, art history courses are taught in conjunction with studio courses so that students approach art history as practitioners of art. It is easier to appreciate an Impressionist artist after practicing Impressionist brush strokes and approaches to light, atmosphere, color and form. Some colleges have taken this hands-on approach to art history. The Neuroconstructivist approach to the art history lecture gives students a taste of this hands-approach through Drawing/Writing journals. Although the journals are no substitute for actually practicing Impressionism, they create a closer bond with art work than glancing through a text.

THE DRAWING/WRITING JOURNAL

Large lecture courses preclude teaching the actual five-step Drawing/Writing program. The amount of material that has to be covered by the course, the number of students, the lecture hall set-up make the five-step impracticable. Still, Drawing/Writing journals can be used to heighten attention, and to engage students’ visual and verbal skills. Be forewarned; if you decide to use Drawing/Writing journals, they will create additional work for everyone. TA’s can be trained to respond to Drawing/Writing journals. The professor must continue to work with the TA’s to keep in touch with student work and to provide support for the TA’s. The professor should continue to comment on journals, too, moving to a new set of students for each round of quizzes and journal-grading.

It is of critical importance to reassure students that their drawings will not be graded. If the drawing is done, it receives an “A” as a drawing that has been completed. The same holds true with the writing assignment; if it is done, it receives credit. Over time, the professor may make comments designed to spur the drawer/writer to more substantive efforts. This can only be done if the commentator knows that student’s work. In general, comments in the margins provide praise for strong draw-ers and encouragement and tips for weaker draw-ers. Reassure students that the more they draw, the better their drawing skills will become.

By copying images from their art history text into a journal, students establish a direct, hands-on relationship with a piece of work. By writing about these images, students clarify their relationship to the work and their understanding of it. Sketching an indifferent black and white photograph provides a closer link with a work of art than glancing at an image in a text.

Drawing/Writing journals provide practice not only with drawing—or, with seeing—but with writing, a skill often neglected in art courses except for a paper or two. A common method for grading art survey lectures is by electronically-scanned multiple choice exams. These exams do not encourage students’ writing abilities.

LECTURE AS DISCUSSION

It is possible to turn a large lecture hall into a discussion group if you are willing to make a seating chart. Ask students to continue to sit in the same seats. Because you have asked them to form peer pairs for the sake of sharing their Drawing/Writing journals at the beginning of each lecture, students are usually willing to maintain the seating plan. A seating chart makes students feel known. It also makes them accountable. They can be questioned by name. Their opinions can be solicited. I start a course by giving over one whole lecture to a general discussion called “What is Art?” I bring in a small hooked rug made by my grandmother, a sketch done by Sam Sheridan of a horse’s head after Da Vinci, a sketch Sarah Sheridan did from a magazine photo of a woman’s head, a piece of stained glass, a Coke can, a Native American squash blossom necklace, a patchwork vest made in South America, stiffened with newspaper and appliqued with frogs and ginkos. Students discuss, in pairs, whether each item is art or is not art and if so, why and if not so, why. I insist on conversation between peers in the decision-making process. It takes time to encourage some students to talk and think freely. The question “What is Art?” is a thorny one. There are no absolute answers. We eventually produce some thoughts on the power of the intent of the art-maker, and the judgment of history, and the decisions of museums and galleries.

OVERHEAD PROJECTION

Overhead projection of assignments, terms, styles, concepts, vocabulary and powerful ideas makes these items clear to students. I show slides as I project the terms and concepts. Then, I start the formal slide show, addressing students by name and teaching to the terms. The student must immediately use the appropriate term or concept. If the student has not been listening, this is apparent. If there is a general misunderstanding, this is apparent, too. I have learned that what I think is crystal-clear may not be clear to students. By copying these items in their Drawing/Writing journals, students take ownership of terms in ways handouts can not provide. The actual process of slide-showing and “lecturing” becomes an interactive exchange. This personalized approach keeps a lecture course alert, lively, and well-attended.

The pun connected with “attended” is intended. Teachers are responsible for attendance and attention. Especially at this point in educational history when students are used to the high-level visual and aural stimulation of videos, movies, television and computer programs, teachers are responsible for helping students to be alert, present, and there. To do so, the teacher must be alert, present, and there. One way to “be there”—for professor and students—in a lecture situation is the seating chart. The chart shows students that the teacher knows and cares who they are and that they are there. Naming is one of the single most important acts of recognition a teacher performs. Naming signals a mutually attentive attitude, and typifies Neuroconstructivist teaching. Naming aligns with Robert Kegan’s convictions that it is both the privilege and the responsibility of educators to “attend on the child” (1982).

Art history provides one of the most effective ways to engage students in the new literacy. The following art history program develops this new visual and verbal literacy by training students to draw and then to write in response to six questions about every work of art they elect to study as part of their weekly Drawing/Writing assignments. After drawing two works of art in their journals, students ask themselves these questions, answering them in writing in their journals:

• what is it? (category: is this a basket, statue, building, piece of jewelry)
• how was it made? (materials, style)
• why was it made? (intent of the artist, requirements of society)
• where was it made? (location or provenance)
• when was it made? (relative or absolute dating)
• who made it? (attribution: name of the artist, group, school)

Much of the preparation for quizzes and finals in Drawing/Writing-based art survey courses is “open-book,” assigned as homework and done ahead of time. A great deal is drawing-based. For instance, to learn the slides, students draw them ahead of time and bring the drawings of the slides into the exam. All they need to do is label them. This allows students to work at their own pace during the exam; they do not have to wait for the slide to appear on a screen. Additionally, they must provide a textbook-based image to go with each vocabulary term and bring that drawing with the term into an exam, providing the written definition by looking at the drawing. Or, they must choose an object and draw it in the style of a Renaissance artist, Impressionist, Expressionist, Cubist, Futurist, Dada, and Abstract Expressionist artist, explaining exactly how their image fulfills the requirements for a particular style of art. The following work illustrates that series, using Nintendo as subject matter.

Part III of every quiz and exam requires drawing three images and describing them using the six categories, then analyzing them through comparing and contrasting all three images across all six categories, and then making inferences about the three works in two fully developed conclusions about sameness and difference using the word “because.” This format recapitulates the triple goal in Drawing/Writing; to teach students to describe information, to analyze information, and to make inferences about information—on their own terms.

The amount of work students will do for assured grades is phenomenal, particularly if that work involves drawing. This ahead-of-time, open-book drawing and writing approach lowers test anxiety, reduces rote memorization, and promotes pride as well as understanding. Students come into the testing situation with most of the work done. In addition, they come into the testing situation equipped with a set of visual, mnemonic devices in the form of drawings to cue definitions of pre-assigned terms. If students draw each assigned slide ahead of time, they can work through names, titles, dates and styles at their own speed, and go on to the next section without waiting for a slide projector. This approach encourages self-regulatory test-taking behavior. In addition, students get extra credit for drawings of slides, offsetting a missed date or two. (Other drawings are required; if students skip them, they lose points.) The extra points earned by drawing slides also offset problems in other sections of the quiz. A student can earn more than 100 points per quiz. One over-achieved quiz compensates for a botched quiz or lets a student skip one section of the final. A hard-working student can earn an “A” in the course in spite of occasional lapses. In this way, students learn to manage their abilities, time and grades intelligently. The level of personal control in a Drawing/Writing lecture course, as well as the hands-on approach to learning, characterizes Neuroconstructivist programs, providing mental and emotional benefits as well as knowledge.

Students report that the observational skills acquired in a Drawing/Writing art survey course are useful in other fields, including criminal justice. In my experience, about one-fifth of the students in each Drawing/Writing art survey course change majors, registering for Fine Arts. It is not unusual for students to flock into the art department as their major after a Drawing/Writing-based lecture course, nor for Criminal Justice majors to sign up for other art courses. The benefits of a personal, drawing-and-writing-based approach to art survey courses are increased levels in student attendance, engagement, output and learning. Drawing/Writing students tend to take additional courses taught in this way. Some start to question other teaching approaches, creating little pockets of inquiry.

It is important to present the study of art history as training in visual literacy. Students who approach art history as draw-ers and writers increase their abilities to decode and encode visual information in general. In a personal, hands-on way, they join the fundamental human enterprise of visual/spatial meaning-making. This Neuroconstructivist approach appeals strongly to special needs students, foreign students, disaffected students and gifted students. Neuroconstructivist guidelines help instructors tailor their delivery of the content area so that it reaches a broad range of student needs, abilities, skills, and backgrounds.