Think out Loud: A Visual Thinking Strategies experience for Students in Museums

VTSItalia is the Italian association that experiments and develops the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) educational method in Italy: an inquiry-based group discussion about an artwork or a musealized object, that leads the participants in the process of complete and in-depth understanding of the observed object. In 2021 VTSItalia started a one-year project involving three high schools and two national museums in the province of Rome. The project is called “Pensa a voce alta” (“think out loud”): the aim was to create a learning environment that could encourage reasoning and confrontation in museums. This way, students might have felt part of a community with a strong interest in museums and that will continue to visit them once they finish their studies. To achieve its aim, “Pensa a voce alta” had two classroom meetings in schedule, to introduce the activities and the VTS method to the participants. The purpose of these meetings was to prepare the students for the incoming museum visit, letting them start feeling familiar with observation, discussion and learning methodology in a friendly environment such as the school one. During the following museum visits, students had the chance to observe the artworks they previously studied in the classroom and to confront themselves with brand new ones using the VTS method. At the end of the project participants made captions of the artworks based on their observations, that would have been made available for the museums’ visitors and online, on the website of the project. Results achieved have been very surprising, both for the high quality of the captions, both for the active participation of the students, who expressed their enthusiasm for the project and showed to have completely understood the aims of it.