Speaker
Description
This presentation examines visual arts instructional strategies designed to enhance students’ creative conceptual thinking. Developing and visualizing creative ideas within a contemporary art context is called creative conceptual thinking. Art's meaning is determined by contextual information, which is revealed through the visibility of the process in the final product. I reviewed the literature regarding conceptual and creative processes in contemporary visual arts and education. To investigate further the learning strategies of developing art's cognitive/conceptual components, I designed a unit for an undergraduate studio art education course. I focus on simple yet effective strategies such as visual metaphors and visual analogies. To generate creative ideas, these strategies rely on associative and transformative thinking. Based on the results of my undergraduate studio art course as well as my own artistic research, I discuss the process by which creative thinking develops.
CV
The visual artist Maria Letsiou is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Education in the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Thessaly. During his tenure (from 2011 to 2023) at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, he taught undergraduate and postgraduate classes in Visual Arts Education. After earning his doctorate from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2010), he completed postdoctoral research in Visual Arts Education in the United States (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015). She has been recognized twice in biennials (9th Biennale of Young European Artists, Rome, 1999, Luleå Art Biennial, Sweden, 2011). Her articles have appeared in Greek and international journals and conference proceedings.
