The Sequence We Inherited
Inquiry asks you to begin without knowing where you are going, and situating a work hands the ending to a stranger. The sequence most of us were trained in cannot carry either of those, which is why both are proving so uncomfortable to teach.
When Students Cross a Threshold
When my DP2 students left on Saturday, I didn’t feel sad. I felt something closer to joy because I could see what they had become. Not what they had made. What they had become.
We have been teaching children to perform, not to think.
For thirty years I have watched art education mistake technical skill for creativity, and replication for thinking. This is the confusion that has held the whole field back, and it is one we can no longer afford to leave unaddressed.
Teaching from the Inside Out
On the boy who found his lost friends in a tent, the heart that sank at a flawless exhibition, and thirty years of undoing what my own art education taught me.
You Can’t Skip the Blocks
You can’t stack Lego on air. Artistic inquiry works the same way – and right now, in March, your DP1s are at exactly the moment when the blocks need to be built properly.
The AIP is Not a Mini Process Portfolio
The AIP is not a mini Process Portfolio.
This Musing explores the shift from documenting practice to curating inquiry, and why the AIP belongs at the end of the developmental spiral, not the beginning.
When Images Need Space
When looking at complex contemporary work, students often default to surface readings: “It’s just lots of things.”
What’s missing is not effort or engagement, but language.
Before we can ask students to justify their own responses, we need to help them learn how to look, to recognise repetition, translation, spatial intelligence, material sensitivity, and evidence of time. These are the structures that turn accumulation into inquiry, and inquiry into art-making.
Uncertainty as a Learning Space
Yesterday our staff stepped into uncertainty through experiential learning, and something shifted. This musing reflects on how Creative Intelligence shows up across subjects, why “state before strategy” changes the quality of thinking, and how a shared language can help teachers make small, sustainable shifts without turning it into another initiative.
Teaching in the Triangle: Play, Rigour, and Learning to Trust Inquiry
Exploring how play, observation, and cultivation support rigorous inquiry in the new IB Visual Arts course, and why uncertainty, grading, and curation are central to the AIP rather than problems to fix.
Drawing, Painting, Print: A Non-Linear Journey
This musing reflects on Unit 2 as a lived process of learning to see and of trusting that meaning is found through attention rather than force.