Critical and Creative Thinking as a Form of Making in Art Education

In this action research study, we investigated how art teachers demonstrate critical and creative thinking when engaging in collaborative reasoning exchanges about the meaning of contemporary Chinese artworks. The study was conducted in a professional learning program for art teachers in conjunction with a privately owned gallery housing a collection of contemporary Chinese art. The findings reveal that critical and creative thinking is a form of making and manifests in the reasoning processes critics use to formulate judgments of artwork meaning. This is dependent on how critics exploit practical and theoretical constraints on art understanding. Contributing factors to the study’s outcomes included aligning the role of critical and creative thinking with reasoning, theory building, metacognitive assessment, and pedagogy in art. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of the findings for art education.