VTS / Learning Milestones and Research (February 2025)

What does learning, or success, look like in a VTS discussion? How do we know if it’s working? Curious about the visual cognition, or Aesthetic Development, research that grounds VTS? Wonder why we ask such specific questions? 

In this workshop we take a closer look at VTS practices, viewer comments, and the connection to foundational research. You’ll leave with tools to enhance your facilitation, better listen for and track progress in VTS discussions, and more fully appreciate and meet the needs of your groups. 

Four decades of research demonstrate that skills acquired in VTS discussions transfer widely to other areas – including math, data visualization, medical diagnoses, observation, the capacity to work in groups, the ability to disagree, language acquisition, writing, reasoning, curiosity, empathy, among others. Talking about art is not typically associated with broader learning: how do we understand what is happening? What are we learning in VTS? 

VTS was built from research done by Dr. Abigail Housen in the 1970s-1990s. She recorded thousands of interviews, from viewers’ who rarely looked at art through those who had spent a lifetime doing so. Comment by comment, Housen mapped out, what she called, aesthetic development, from its beginning. (This is now more often referred to as Visual Cognition.) Her work serves as a field guide to visual learning as it blurts out of our mouths. 

Housen’s research, and the power of VTS to teach transferable skills, suggests that learning may be much broader than we typically recognize. Learning, or development, starts before viewers get answers “right,” and includes how we feel and judge and remember and don’t know in front of artworks. We will practice recognizing milestones of visual thinking in this wider vista. Afterall, when we don’t teach content, how do we know that participants are learning? How do we as educators set goals with open-ended discussions? What makes learning stick? 

In this workshop, we introduce Housen’s research, and important, initial -sometimes surprising- learning milestones. When VTS discussions are well-facilitated, viewers broaden the ways in which they engage with art. That broadening, or learning, comes into focus as we discuss different types of actual comments. We review ways to appreciate the extraordinary array of responses to art, and the unexpected paths people take. As a collective, we’ll do exercises to unravel the complex thought processes behind specific comments and explore aesthetic development. 

This 8-hour workshop is led by VTS Director, veteran VTS Trainer, and Teachers College Drawing Instructor, Tara Geer, and VTS Training Manager, Amy Chase Gulden. Geer is also Dr. Housen’s daughter, and is engaged in current, ongoing research in the Boston Public Schools around the significance of aesthetic development in early academic learning.

This workshop is only offered twice per year, so don’t miss this chance to join us!

Workshop Expectations:

• This workshop is designed for practitioners who have completed a VTS Beginner Practicum or beyond.
• This workshop will not involve practicing facilitation with coaching – though you will have opportunities to practice formulating responses to individual comments in a supportive group process. 
• This is an online workshop and uses the digital platforms Zoom and Google Docs.
• Information for accessing the course materials will be emailed to participants before the start of the course. Participants must be able to attend all meetings to complete this workshop. In addition to class meetings, participants should plan to complete brief assignments/reflections between each class.
• Closed Captioning available.
• This workshop will be conducted in English.
• This course is scheduled in Pacific time zone. Please check your personal time zone alignment before registering. 

*Course must meet the minimum enrollment requirement in order to run.*

Class time: 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. PT

• Tuesday, February 18
• Thursday, February 20
• Tuesday, February 25
• Thursday, February 27

All VTS programs are offered at the price it costs us to offer them. We want to share learning. We additionally offer a sliding scale, inspired by Embracing an Equity Sliding Scale because we want to support learning in a diverse community. Please choose what you can afford.

Tier 1: $400

Tier 2: $425

Tier 3: $450 (The cost to run this program)

Questions? Please contact Amy Chase Gulden, VTS Training Manager at acgulden@vtshome.org.