teach me to think

I've discovered that most of my students share my disdain for being 'told' by an authority what is good, and what isn't - what's good art, what's not. Mine is not the voice of approval for style, or legitimacy of an image as art in the classroom. Excellent! We begin with a victory, a grand neo-post-modern victory.
Now, to get the fourteen-year-olds to say what's what, and back it up.While teaching people to make and support a judgement, often younger ones will want to take the lazy way out; "I just like it more than the other one, I don't know why." I adore using Visual Thinking Strategies to assist in creating narratives and risk-taking without judgement. A few good rounds of VTS will usually break the ice in beginning to recover imaginative thinking skills and evidence gathering. Now, to take that and bring it to the next level of creating an argument and backing it up.
I'm hoping that my new strategy of collaborative blogging will help inspire the students to really drum up some good discussions and thoughts about how we value what we see, and experience.