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Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS):
The VTS program offers a way to introduce students to the world of art, and at the same time exercise their critical thinking and communication skills. VTS is intended to provide beginning viewers with opportunities to use their perception, experience, and intelligence to find meaning, and in doing so lays the foundation for visual literacy. To make meaning from art, our minds work in ways that combine perceptions with feelings; logic and reason with memory and imagination; information with common sense. The VTS program is enriching and the discussions of the artworks lively. SITE Santa Fe offers the VTS program in Santa Fe elementary and middle schools, in Spanish and in English.
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VTS facilitator in the classroom
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VTS facilitator at SITE Santa Fe
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Students who participate in the VTS program practice skills of observation, interpretation, and analysis. They develop fundamental critical thinking skills by answering structured questions and draw on their store of experience and knowledge to help understand something unfamiliar. They learn to provide evidence to backup opinions, and develop basic reasoning skills. They are given opportunities to reconsider their viewpoints in light of others, reflect, revise or change their minds. Students are encouraged to remain open to the fact that art and other subjects in school have many possible meanings, not all of them clear or immediately apparent. Students develop communication skills, including listening to others. The VTS facilitator helps shape the discussion by linking the student’s ideas together, and ensures that every child participates and feels seen and heard. The VTS program scaffolds on students learning from week to week, semester to semester and year to year. Students strengthen their abilities to examine, articulate, listen and reflect.
For further information about VTS, please visit www.vue.org.
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