We Need To Talk About Art: The Arguments for Art in the Language Classroom
By: William Tiley
An Afternoon at the Tate
The seven-year-old stood transfixed by the brightly coloured artwork that towered over him. The work in question—Henri Matisse’s The Snail (1953)—had the child rooted to the spot, gazing in silent wonder and confusion at the playfully arranged blocks of colour.
This autobiographical episode from a trip to the Tate Modern in London has stuck with me for a long time—something about the work really resonated with my seven-year-old self. This is in no small part down to my interest in the gastropods in question, as I had adopted several garden snails as pets around that time. However, this was more than just an image of an animal. The colourful, almost childlike blocks of paper jauntily arranged like a primary-school collage, in conjunction with the overwhelming size of the work left me glued to the spot in wonder and puzzlement. I felt such a resonance with the work, yet had so many questions.
2025 marks the centenary of the completion of a doctoral dissertation on this very phenomenon by a young Russian psychologist named Lev Vygotsky. Of course, Vygotsky is now almost a household name, and his later work forms the basis of numerous language teaching approaches including Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Project Based Learning (PBL). However, a lot of his influential work on sociocultural theory and zones of proximal development (ZPDs) seemingly stems from this first fascination with the psychology of art.
Vygotsky and Art
In his dissertation, Vygotsky argued that engaging with art is a profound experience where disparate cognitive and emotional responses are united. Through this, art can mediate between individual consciousness and the collective cultural environment. Essentially, the emotional response elicited by art is derived from myriad individual sources, instigating higher psychological functions and creating a sense of community around those who have shared the same experience. Vygotsky also posited that an artwork in effect mediates between the viewer and the artist, both posing and answering questions that in turn inform the viewer’s understanding of the work and its creator.
Vygotsky’s focus on interaction with art was the catalyst for many of his later ideas regarding cultural artefacts, mediation and perezhivanie (simply put, the relationship between an individual and their environment, creating a sense of lived experience). This appears to be what my seven-year-old self was experiencing—The Snail tapped into my perezhivanie, specifically my tendency to adopt snails from the garden and my experiences of collage in primary school art classes—yet also posed numerous questions regarding scale and colour choice. The work aligned with my interests but was not immediately gratifying, leaving me rooted to the spot trying to puzzle it out.
Revisiting The Snail now, I can appreciate the steps Matisse took to really distill the essence of what makes a snail a snail in this abstracted work. Through further research, I have also unearthed more information—the representation of laboured movement, a creative process limited by the artist’s deteriorating health yet also linked to his upbringing in a family of textile workers, the positioning of colours to create an almost spiritual space… The further I dive into the work, the more questions and avenues of inquiry seem to emerge.
All of this was lost on my seven-year-old self, but that didn’t make the work any less compelling. It almost feels like the work itself transforms as the viewer’s understanding deepens, gradually revealing its secrets in differing ways to everyone from awestruck children to the most seasoned Matisse scholars. Of course, the internal monologues unfolding within the minds of the child and the scholar would be vastly different, but the emotional experience of interacting with the work is likely to be very similar.
This gradual unfolding of meaning really highlights the value of art as a cultural artefact within a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The concept of a ZPD has become popular in many forms of education, both language based and otherwise, and essentially describes a pedagogical sweet spot where content is new and unfamiliar to learners, but not beyond their comprehension. Topics that are already familiar to students are likely to be uninteresting, whereas topics that are too advanced or abstract may be demotivating. This deliberate selection and sequencing of content is visible in good curriculum design, where content follows a logical sequence that builds on what learners already know. The ZPD exists between these two extremes. An additional aspect of this is the need for mediation, where students interact with new information with guidance from a more knowledgeable individual, in most cases a teacher. In this way, Vygotsky viewed education as an inherently communicative and social process, where a teacher guides students through a logical progression of concepts.
As Vygotsky no doubt realised, this applies very clearly to interaction with art. Through inquiry and mediation, a student can slowly unpick a work, gradually exposing deeper meaning as they go. In effect, an artwork inherently forms a ZPD based on the viewer’s perezhivanie that inspires a response while also exposing various questions that require mediation and discussion to solve. However, through this answering of questions, it is highly likely that further questions will appear.
This development of understanding has been explored by cognitive psychologist and art educator Dr. Abigail Housen, and codified in her five stages of aesthetic development—accountive, constructive, classifying, interpretive, and recreative (link). In conjunction with art educator Phillip Yenawine, Housen later developed these ideas to create Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), an approach that has gained traction in various educational contexts. Housen’s stages describe how viewers approach a work of art based on their experience, and how, in time, they move through the different stages. Art, it would seem, creates an ever-evolving puzzle that develops with the viewer’s comprehension, providing answers to questions but always remaining somewhat out of reach. In effect, this would appear to be a Zone of Proximal Development that develops with the viewer, offering both satisfaction and perplexity regardless of knowledge or experience.
Vygotsky suggested that art can mediate an individual emotional experience into a shared cultural one—in this sense, art almost invites the viewer to engage with others in order to make sense of the work. When an artwork really resonates with the viewer, they feel compelled to find out more, be that through asking someone more experienced, discussing it with a peer, or accessing information online. In the case of my seven-year-old self, I did what most children would do in this situation—I asked my parents!
Bringing Art into the Language Classroom
It is for these reasons that art can be beneficially employed as the basis for discussion. Art creates a space where students can probe, explore, and develop. Art also actively encourages discussion, which enables students to support each other in their explorations of a work of art, all the while providing opportunities for students to engage with the work through the lens of their perezhivanie.
In a diverse language classroom, this perezhivanie can include viewpoints pertaining to students’ identities and cultures, further expanding the rich pool of collective knowledge that students are free to draw upon and thus making the experience even more communicatively rich. Art creates opportunities for students to express themselves, both as individuals and as a collective, in a way that is culturally and cognitively engaging.
This creates a unique set of challenges in a language learning perspective. Explaining the emotional, social, and cultural reactions to an artwork can be challenging even in a student’s L1! However, through this challenge come opportunities to develop mediation and interpretation skills, through activities in which students actively support each other in communicating their ideas and, with experience, even develop tools to help their peers. Engaging with artwork in groups gives students opportunities to form meaning collectively and, ultimately, understand each other more deeply.
Classroom Challenges
There are several questions that educators may have regarding the integration of art discussion into language curricula. One of the more pressing questions is the concept of being correct, especially considering the existence of significant academic research into the interpretation of different artworks. However, a Vygotskian approach to art leaves considerable space for freedom that should be embraced—even though a student’s interpretation of a work may not align with established scholarship on the subject, that does not make the interpretation any less emotionally resonant to the student in question. I recall one student in a class a few years ago looking at a Monet painting and talking extensively about plastic pollution in rivers and oceans. While this reading is almost certainly not what Monet had in mind at the time, it is how the work resonated emotionally with that student and should surely be embraced! This variability may in fact explain why the work of artists like Monet, Van Gogh and Kahlo have transcended time and culture to be so universally loved—they provide a framework on which anyone, anywhere, can project their perezhivanie.
Another issue that can arise with art is students “not getting” a work, or even actively disliking something. This, however, can be another opportunity for exploration when guided successfully. Encouraging a student to consider why they don’t understand something calls into question the very nature of art itself, while disliking something can be an equally strong motivator to learn more about a subject as having an interest in a subject. Nothing embodied this more for me than a student becoming almost angry when confronted with Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome (1961). The audacity of the work enraged the student (much like it did with art critics at the time it was first displayed) and drove them to independently read up on the topic, something that could only be considered a desirable outcome from the teacher’s perspective! Ultimately, the student reached a conclusion that while they still didn’t like the work, it helped them to challenge their concepts about what art can and should be. In this way, even confusion and anger at art can be educationally valuable.
To conclude, art discussions can prove to be a valuable and engaging opportunity for students to develop communication skills in the language classroom, even when students’ judgements may be objectively incorrect or enraged. As Vygotsky suggested, art provides an ever-evolving puzzle in which students can voice their culture and identity and form deeper connections with their peers. In fact, the Vygotskian connection between art and language education suggests a synergy with the approaches in curricular design that many of us already employ. In this way, art could very well be the key as we strive to create more culturally, socially, and cognitively engaging learning experiences for our students.
References
Housen, A. (2007) Art viewing and aesthetic development: Designing for the viewer. In P. Villeneuve (Ed.), From periphery to center: Art museum education in the 21st century. National Art Education Association.
Vygotsky, L. (1974). The psychology of art. The MIT Press.
William Tiley is a lecturer at Kyushu Institute of Technology and occasional bass guitarist, originally from Bristol, UK. His research interests include CLIL, creativity in learning, and integration of arts into language curricula.