Can the Art Studio Model Save Higher Ed?
arts education as a surprisingly resilient path forward
Hi folks! While I largely treat this Substack as a place to work out my thoughts on various topics, I thought I’d also include a very brief update about my life, or at least some bullet points.
I still write and record music here and there when I have time. It helps to keep me grounded. My band July For Kings will perform Friday August 7th in Cincinnati, OH at the On Point Music Festival.
I remain in Pullman, WA where I teach painting at WSU. My partner/wife/spouse/advisor/friend/etc. Mei is kicking ass. If you don’t have her children’s books consider picking them up: The Rock in My Throat and Goodnight Zodiac Animals. Our son Linus is getting bigger, smarter and delightfully weirder every day. February is dark and cold here and I am excited that the days are growing longer.
During the summer I took on a new role at my university as Associate Director of the Center for Arts & Humanities. I’ve really enjoyed this work. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the arts in broad terms, and the future of education. Here’s a piece I wrote that touches on that.
Thanks for reading and keep in touch!
Yours,
Joe
Let’s face it. The problems for universities have never been so great and so numerous. AI is transforming learning. At the same time, traditional models of university education are under attack politically, and we are facing an enrollment cliff. As professors are locked in an arms race with students using AI, the value of university education itself is in question. To stay relevant and retain enrollment, universities are going to need more than tweaks to syllabi language or minor curriculum changes. Universities need radical solutions that fundamentally restructure how education is conceived. Here’s a solution that most would have seen as laughable just a decade ago: learn from art departments. Let me explain.
I was recently in a workshop for educators attempting to bring transformative change to their pedagogy. Over and over, I realized that the innovations being suggested were precisely what arts educators have always done: rather than regurgitating course materials from texts for tests, students became active collaborators with the material and with each other, developing creative projects that made ideas come to life.
I spoke with a history professor who had students working in groups to develop mock advertising campaigns for historical causes or businesses. A math professor told me they saw their discipline as an art, since students work through proofs in iterative and creative ways. Why stop there? A biology professor could have groups illustrating biological processes for children’s books based on what they’ve learned through texts, dissections, or even conversations with AI. Anthropology students creating visual representations of social systems.
Essentially, the studio model involves harnessing the power of collaboration, creativity, and representation early in the student experience to help students synthesize complex ideas. Most educators already know how this works — professors themselves learn their material by developing and organizing PowerPoints, lectures, writing books, and doing other creative work representing complex subjects. It is creative work that brings learning alive. The studio simply makes this process visible and more communal, and absolutely resistant to automation and outsourcing to AI.
Since the release of ChatGPT, enrollment in my upper-division painting courses has continued to increase. My students tell me they are there to paint. Not to “generate” images but to paint paintings. In a strange twist, while many STEM skills such as coding once touted as durable are increasingly automated, the creation of original works of art has proven among the most AI-resistant disciplines. Now computers code easily and churn out images. This makes human artistry even more sacred culturally, as the backlash to “AI-slop” has demonstrated.
The most valuable product in the age of generative AI is one that contains evidence of human processes. I am lucky to be in a discipline where process is as important as product. My students work and rework their paintings, always emphasizing learning rather than production (or “generation”). These days, production is easier than ever: content creation, generative AI across media, automated systems. Students know this. There’s less value in a product. There’s more and more value in a human process, particularly a creative process. In art studio courses, when students finish their work they are beaming. They’ve used their hands. They did it themselves.
The art studio is a place of active learning and engagement. The art studio elements are precisely what AI cannot replace. Let me list some ways:
Art studio courses are inherently collaborative and conversational. Through working alongside their peers and gaining direct face-to-face feedback from their instructors, students learn in a highly social, supportive environment that is absolutely unlike the isolating atomized worlds we inhabit on our phones. My students come to my classes to escape their phones. I do too.
Art studio courses are physical. We learned from the forced online courses during the Covid pandemic how special being together really is. Call it embodied learning. Yes, you can learn online (even oil painting). But during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us professors were dismayed by the experience of being forced to learn exclusively through screens. Students were too. There was always something missing. The difference between the embodied experience of education and the disembodied Zoom experience was stark and few want to go back! We need education that is temporal, physical. That operates on human time and on a human scale. My students want to feel the brush in their hands, hear the scratch of the pencil on the paper, use their peripheral vision.
The arts teach intuition. Historically, universities have sought their authority from their ability to provide fact-based justifications and rationales for various ways of thinking and working. There are other ways of knowing. Students crave the experience of being “locked-in” — of working in a deep flow state that relies less on facts and more on the power of individual intuition and instinct and mindfulness. Studio practice can unearth facts and justifications but also fosters a different kind of decision making: artists often know what to do with their hands and minds before their thinking brain takes over. Intuition cannot be automated by AI.
Assessment in the art studio is critique based rather than test-based. Tests have become less and less reliable as measures of intelligence or competencies, as studies reveal implicit cultural biases. Now that AI’s are involved in helping students “regurgitate” answers, tests are becoming even less useful for assessment. Critique, however, is different: gathering feedback from other humans who critically evaluate works and respond to those works in real time. While tests often promote black and white, right or wrong thinking, critique is collaborative, contains nuance and reveals new possibilities.
Lectures in a studio setting are limited and brief. While it’s true that some professors are dynamic and effective lecturers (who doesn’t want to go on a ten-minute adventure with Malcolm Gladwell?) there are limits, and let’s face it — the ability to hold students’ attention through lecture is elusive and increasingly so. Whereas the lecture hall is designed to give students the knowledge they need in order to think critically and produce written texts on their own time, in the art studio student work unfolds in real time. Since written essays can now be written by AI’s beyond the watchful eye of professors, increasingly the only way to ensure creation happens honestly and ethically is to include the presence of instructors or guides or fellow classmates in a studio-like environment.
In an art studio, learning is truly embodied and social. In real-time, human minds and hands work in concert, and the results are the evidence of human process, struggle, and ingenuity. I know firsthand that creative activity is a salve for our collective digital suffering. But it turns out it’s more than that. This is the real value that universities can offer: the university is where humans come to learn to be humans and to celebrate their humanity — rather than a place where humans come to compete with robots.
This list could go on and on. And this isn’t just for the arts; we must recognize that even hard-science disciplines rely on creativity, iterative processes and skills that we have traditionally ascribed to the arts. Now is the time to act on that realization.
How might universities afford this kind of model? The truth is that for most universities (with the exception of small liberal arts universities) this would require massive restructuring. Fewer large lecture courses, more instructors in smaller rooms. But consider that universities are already struggling to afford their current model. Perhaps this is the right moment for radical reimagining. Universities are currently paying for a broken model while facing agonizing choices about resource allocation as morale is plummeting. This is about spending in ways that enable universities to truly move toward a futureproof, truly student-focused model of education that will not be further disrupted or displaced with AI.
Right now universities face major challenges with retention. While a lot of students leave higher education because of financial challenges, another part is lacking a sense of belonging. Many students from low-income backgrounds, first generation students, and students from other underserved populations simply do not feel a sense of belonging or meaning in their studies, particularly during that first year. It’s no coincidence to me that the first year is also the year that tends to include more large semi-anonymous experiences in lecture halls with few opportunities to talk with peers or instructors during class. Smaller, studio-like courses with qualified, available instructors that guide students through plenty of real conversations would help to create purpose, meaning and community right from the start, rather than later in the student experience when retention is less of a challenge. In an art studio course, faculty know students names, know about their interests and guide them individually toward a full expression of their selves. The contrast with large-lecture courses could not be more stark.
Finally, moving to a more intimate, studio-based model has a built in appeal for students. Students desire more hands-on and face-to-face experiences. And I know this system can work because art majors already testify to its viability. In a world where AI now generates code, images, and writes books in seconds, art students develope the kind of abilities that AI cannot: the ability to create meaning by harnessing the power of individual human hopes, dreams, and interests. The appeal of this kind of education is growing and will continue to grow. The arts and humanities, after all, are essentially the study of what it means to not be robots.
The question of whether AI will transform education is already answered. These concerns are not hypothetical: already students can hire an AI model that “logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically” (https://companion.ai/einstein). How can we navigate this new reality? The studio model is not just my preference as an artist. It may be the only real life-raft for institutional survival. Rather than asking students to simply avoid using an omnipresent technological innovation, educational institutions must adapt to AI by reimagining the student experience to privilege modes of learning, thinking and research that honor what is unique about our species. Arts educators can lead the way.
Brilliant.