Learning Styles & Tools According to Kolb

Assignment Art Initiation & Creative Work Assignment, evaluated by Ilse Van den Bogaert

For our Creative Work and Art Initiation classes, we were asked to design a learning tool that aligns with our personal learning style according to David Kolb. Kolb is an American educational psychologist who focuses on experiential learning. Students often have a preference for a certain learning style, which influences how they approach learning and can be adapted for more effective teaching and better long-term outcomes.

Kolb distinguishes four learning styles: daring, doing, thinking, and dreaming. My test indicated that my preference is “doing” — I am a doer. I definitely recognize myself in this; I need to engage actively and intuitively to gain experience and knowledge in a subject. This way, it sticks better to my brain.

With this in mind, I created an assignment where students actively engage with art movements from the 19th and 20th centuries. You can read more about this in the following article, Art Galleries. I based this on an “art cracker” activity we developed during the Creative Work class, in which I explored The Stone Breakers by Gustave Courbet. You can also find this “art cracker” attached.

What is an “art cracker“? You probably ask yourself. It is a collection of information about a specific art piece or artist, based on the Rose of Arts, as presented on the bad quality picture next to this paragraph. If you fill in all the parts of the Rose with the information you’re collecting, you get a pretty solid overview of an art piece or artist!