The job of leading a research office in a federal cultural agency is akin to running a small newsroom. But then I would say that. Before joining the NEA in 2006, I worked with teams of reporters covering health policy, biomedical research, and the medical device industry. As the managing editor of trade newsletters, my favorite bit was when junior reporters came back from scientific conferences, congressional hearings, industry analyst meetings, or NIH or FDA review panels, and “debriefed” with me. Watching each other across a desk, the reporter and I would piece together a narrative—and co-construct a “lede.”

I see parallels with my work today. NEA research staff and contractors often present to me the hard-won fruits of their analysis, typically involving complex relationships among multiple variables. Together, we try to make sense of these relationships, to put them in context. In short, we hunt for a story. As the manager of personnel with far greater technical expertise than I can hope to muster, my part is to nudge them onto the trail, so they can exercise their curiosity where it will lead to a compelling crossroad for research and policy. The trick is knowing how much direction to give.

A new paper by Kim Sheridan, and her colleagues at George Mason University, casts that tension in different terms, describing how it is resolved by visual art teachers in their own practices. There are implications for learning in other domains. In studio art, Sheridan and her team find, instructors often toggle between two approaches: either giving specific “direction” or supporting greater “autonomy,” in fostering learners’ sense of themselves as artists.

About 15 years ago, Sheridan was a co-author—with Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, and Shirley Veneema—of Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Art Education. This influential text characterized eight “studio habits of mind” that visual arts instruction can cultivate. The habits were documented in studies by Harvard University’s Project Zero, which closely tracked teaching artists in two Boston-area arts-centered high schools.

For the new article, published in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Sheridan et al. revisited a treasure-trove of video recordings from the original study, covering monthly sessions taught by four teaching artists in the two arts-oriented high schools. (One site was an urban public magnet school with Black and Hispanic students forming a majority, and the other was a private school with mostly white and international Asian students.)

As Sheridan put it, the original study “did not explicitly focus on how teachers—in beginning classes, often with students with little prior arts instruction”—promote the artistic agency that is celebrated in Studio Thinking. The archival video data gave Sheridan’s team the chance to try to answer two research questions: 1) “How do studio art teachers use instructional strategies considered autonomy-supportive,” or, alternatively, “controlling?”; and 2) “How do studio art teachers’ enacted practices and language build students’ artistic agency?”

The motivation for this two-fold query was to understand two competing strains of pedagogy that may be exemplified in the same studio art teacher. The authors wrote: “The open-endedness of art is both an affordance and a challenge as teachers work to support agency; it may be relatively easier for teachers to develop—and students accept—a symmetrical relationship as there are few firm rules—students’ own goals shape the kinds of constraints they encounter.”

“At the same time,” Sheridan et al. continued, “this openness of possibilities in art can overwhelm the learners into either relying too heavily on habitual actions or feeling stuck by too many choices.” Sometimes, in other words, giving outright direction—and not relying on the student to improvise—is at least as important as temporarily letting go.

Indeed, timing is everything in studio art learning; so, the researchers claim, is vocabulary. The teachers studied appear mainly to use “frameworks” supportive of greater autonomy in their students, “but they periodically shift to controlling approaches, particularly controlling language,” Sheridan noted. Relinquishing control was a gradual process.

“In both teachers’ first day’s exercises,” she wrote, “they were highly directive: telling and showing students precisely what to do, what materials to get, where to sit, how long to take. Later in the year, agency over decisions about tools and materials becomes more open.” By observing all the footage, however, the researchers determined that the “teachers dynamically find a balance between structure and open-endedness in the art studio to build students’ artistic agency.”

The study, conducted as part of the NEA Research Lab at GMU (or “MasonARC”), involved coding and analysis of rich qualitative data from the video recordings. The article features tasty quotes from the students and teachers, illustrating how actions, behavior, and even grammar can facilitate “strategic shifts” to “build learner agency in the figured world of visual art,” as the article’s title has it.

The authors noted that the “autonomy supportive frameworks” used by studio art teachers “align with practices associated with the support of learner autonomy in other domains.” As a reader, I would have liked to know more about the potential transfer of those skills—the ability to make “strategic shifts” between keeping tight control and letting go—to other settings such as personnel management, scientific inquiry, and even other educational contexts. But that’s clearly for another study.

Sunil Iyengar is the NEA director of the Office of Research and Analysis.