VTS vs. Guided Inquiry

Today in my Museum Education and Interpretation class, we watched a video clip of the Guggenheim Museum's Learning Through Art program in action. In the clip, an artist in residence visited a third-grade classroom in Queens, New York and showed the students how to use guided inquiry questions to view and interpret Franz Marc's Yellow Cow painting. Last week, I visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts and participated in a Visual Thinking Strategies exercise, where a facilitator asked questions to help visitors view and interpret a Magdalena Abakanowicz sculpture. Both the guided inquiry exercise and the VTS exercise used similar questions to achieve comparable goals, but the outcomes were slightly different. Why do some museum programs choose to implement VTS, while others employ guided inquiry exercises?

In VTS, a facilitator asks the group three questions: What do you see? What makes you think that? What more can you find? The facilitator rephrases each participant's response, but does not provide any information. The process continues as the facilitator repeatedly asks the same questions, giving all willing participants the chance to share their ideas. The exercise concludes when the group either runs out of time or ideas. The goal is not to achieve a result or "find the right answer", but rather to encourage the development of critical thinking skills through looking at a work of art.

Guided inquiry exercises involve a similar facilitator-participant dialogue, and many of the questions asked sound awfully like the questions asked in VTS. The first question is almost always What do you notice? Subsequent questions, however, are shaped based on participant responses and on the subject matter of the lesson, since guided inquiry is often used in conjunction with another subject, like Social Studies or Language Arts. The moderator does not correct misguided ideas, but does provide correct information about the piece and its artist.

Which exercise is more effective? VTS has as its goal the development of critical thinking skills and critical looking skills. The moderator does not validate correct answers or penalize incorrect answers, because the philosophy behind VTS is not focused on what is "right" or "wrong". Many art historians, who spend so much of their time learning and interpreting facts, frequently see VTS as doing an injustice to the students, depriving them of useful knowledge. Guided inquiry, on the other hand, works in a similar way to improve critical thinking skills, but its questions are not always as open-ended. Facilitators don't lecture about the work of art, but they do integrate facts into the discussion. So which one is better? I think the answer will depend on the unique needs of the participants, depending on their age, education level, and interests.