This essay explores “context-rich learning” in the arts, cases of its practice, and the virtues and limits thereof. Nevertheless, much of the essay is dedicated to articulating the contexts themselves in which art as a whole and knowledge of the human kind are rooted. The essay explores five examples of context-rich learning that may be applied to different goals under the umbrella of arts education: the Suzuki Method, a musical training method focused on craft skills and learner engagement; the Montessori method, a general education program particularly applicable to the intersection of goal-based learning and individuated student learning styles; the Critical Response Process, a technique of artist-directed critique applicable across artforms and dialogic classrooms; Multiliteracies pedagogies, an academic framework developed by the New London Group and focused on differentiated student (co-learner) experiences; and 1-Week Critique, a nonprofit organization focused on open-access literary education utilizing diversified strategies for writers across circumstances and skillsets.
Let us consider the attitude of the teacher in the light of another example. Picture to yourself one of our botanists or zoologists experienced in the technique of observation and experimentation; one who has travelled in order to study “certain fungi” in their native environment. This scientist has made his observations in open country and, then, by the aid of his microscope and of all his laboratory appliances, has carried on the later research work in the most minute way possible. He is, in fact, a scientist who understands what it is to study nature, and who is conversant with all the means which modern experimental science offers for this study.
Now let us imagine such a man appointed, by reason of the original work he has done, to a chair of science in some university, with the task before him of doing further original research work with hymenoptera. Let us suppose that, arrived at his post, he is shown a glass-covered case containing a number of beautiful butterflies, mounted by means of pins, their outspread wings motionless. The student will say that this is some child's play, not material for scientific study, that these specimens in the box are more fitly a part of the game which the little boys play, chasing butterflies and catching them in a net. With such material as this the experimental scientist can do nothing.
The situation would be very much the same if we should place a teacher who, according to our conception of the term, is scientifically prepared, in one of the public schools where the children are repressed in the spontaneous expression of their personality till they are almost like dead beings. In such a school the children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk, spreading the useless wings of barren and meaningless knowledge which they have acquired.
It is not enough, then, to prepare in our Masters the scientific spirit. We must also make ready the school for their observation. The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. This is the essential reform (Montessori, 2012, pp. 26-27).
None of this suggests that Montessori method learning is purely wandering about or that it is without goals and objectives. On the contrary, Montessori educators, commonly called directresses, directors, or guides, facilitate exploration in a structured environment meant to be easily interacted with and navigated through at most children’s proportions.
These environs typically include limited but significant materials, called works: blocks to be arranged in numerical order, color-differentiated sound cylinders children must shake in order to identify matching tones, metal inserts that assist in the training of pencil grip and present connections to shapes that will eventually be utilized in writing, etc. Crucial to the Montessori approach, each work is simple and has a specified learning objective. Each objective is presented to a child by a guide, and the objectives generally utilize “isolation of difficulty,” offering children opportunities to master skills that compound and coordinate. Still, the works are to be chosen by the child and explored with curiosity, so that the child can, though by their own development, discover the processes of a work’s architecture and purpose.
With guides overseeing these interactions, children are encouraged to expand their curiosity and approaches to the works available to them. In Montessori, as in art, the individual mind guides basic learning, but a common and interactive language develops from the works and the spaces of common relationship.
The “natural” world is critical to this conception, being the space out of which and upon all conceptions of artifice and their manifest creations become. Montessori education thus actively encourages students to “work”—the methodological term for children’s activities in this realm—outside and to recognize connections between the natural environment and the environment within.
The virtue of this approach is manyfold, not least of which is that it encourages pedagogues to witness children in their uniquenesses. Even where work is uniform and demands the accomplishment of essentially uniform goals, Montessori guides thus, at their best, circumnavigate the educational—engagement—attrition common to schools and employment institutions that insist work be done as prescribed rather than done well—to say nothing of with joy, commitment, ingenuity, or élan.