ARTISTIC COGNITION

Cognition is the process of awareness, of making sense of experience. There are lots of ways of doing this. Traditional teaching favours only one.

The arts provide us with other views into the world around us. They transform and express what we experience. Artistic cognition, then, is a kind of intelligence, involving perceiving, interpreting and manipulating raw experience. Described like this, it could be math or even chemistry. But artistic cognition requires imagination as reason requires logic. It encompasses emotion. And because of its mysterious connection to beauty, it gives pleasure.

We think that artistic cognition can be developed, that you can learn it, and get better at it, just like algebra. You can learn to see (or hear, or feel, or smell or taste) what is going on by studying the arts and the processes of creation, and by practicing them.

The arts are integrated in every aspect of our curriculum. Our students are exposed to a wide variety of work in the visual arts, music, drama, and dance. They ponder them, and ponder their own responses. They study them: their historical, philosophical contexts, the artist's brushwork techniques, the aesthetic framework, her state of mind.

But art isn't just something that geniuses make for the rest of us to admire. Our students produce and perform too. They put together individual portfolios that record their growing artistic knowledge, and preserve their efforts through all the stages.

And then there are our projects. We invite free-thinking, open-minded, experimental artists to develop productions with our students and their teachers. There can be cross-disciplinary responses (a dance to express a bit of history, a piece of music to demonstrate a geometrical figure). There can be productions of existing work, or the generation of new work, some of it commissioned by The Dragon Academy, for student audiences, or student performers, or both.

We all have a creative imagination. Once you know how it works, it makes sense.