I’ll never forget one particular day during my senior year in high school in Sydney Australia, when in English class we had our first lesson on King Lear. Our teacher began to talk about the play. We were not paying much attention and suddenly he stood up, opened the door and asked us to follow him. Someone asked him where we were going, (to the Principal’s office I thought) to the theater he replied…..
Down we went to to the school auditorium, and for the next several English classes that’s where we would meet, on stage, to act out the play. We all took our turns with different parts (Edmund was tons of fun to play), and rather than teaching us the meaning of the lines, our teacher would “direct” us as if we were preparing for a real performance. The drama, the story, the messages became crystal clear as we were learning the play through interaction by being the characters and in the moment. To this day Lear is the Shakespeare play I remember the most lines from, and every time I’m in a storm the line Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!, rage!, blow! always comes to mind without fail! I call this learning with the arts, not about the arts.
All this talk of arts education and it’s benefits makes me think that it will continue to be a dead end and expendable until it’s realized that the focus should be how the arts can improve education, and become relevant by being employed widely in the general curriculum. By separating them out as single subjects, then there is no active application. Connecting the arts through integration into the curriculum, they will then become something active, meaningful, profound and relevant.
The biggest problem I see with most studies that try to prove the benefits of the arts, is that they happen from the outside looking in and usually conclude: the establishment is wrong, the arts are vital for you. Then it’s proposed that the education system needs to be overhauled, with a complete shift in focus along with retraining, reallocation of dollars and oh yes “there is way too much sports” etc…. (I can tell you for our “classes” on King Lear, my heart rate was up!). So because a small group of students did better with “spatial reasoning” or their math scores went up slightly, then that’s enough to convince an establishment to completely tear an education system down and build it up again? Wake up, It’s just not going to happen!!! Besides it seems every program proposed has to cost millions of dollars, which no school district has just lying around!
An article that appeared in The Guardian entitled A kick up the curriculum interviews various artists and arts professionals on whether or not the British government mandating 5 hours of week of arts learning in schools is a good idea or will have any benefit. Some are very critical:
The big problem is that kids just haven’t got the time – what school can sacrifice five hours from its timetable every week? In the 80s, I sat on the Kingman committee, which reported on the teaching of the English language in schools. It was a wonderful experience, but we got ourselves into this exalted state where we were recommending all kinds of things that were not practical. The national curriculum has around 30 hours in the week, and if you want to stick in 10 or 12 hours on the English language, what happens to those children who can’t write, or can’t do maths? High culture is what I care about most in the world, but this government prescription is what I hate. It’s just so very silly. They are proposing making incursions into the time of precisely those children who need education most. It makes me want to vote Conservative – and I never have in my life.
AS Byatt, novelist
The novelist Esther Freud of Hideous Kinky fame has the most absurd quote:
……I think boredom can be a creative state. Even if children sit in these new lessons and are bored for five hours, that’s not so terrible.
I beg to differ. The arts are not fruits,vegetables, exercise, or like anything else that’s quantifiable. As soon as someone is forced to do something that is when the lights usually turn off and the brain shuts down. The arts cannot be as easily defined as learning tables or formulas in Math, until of course you start to learn arts as a career or when instrumental technique is taught. At the earliest stages the arts can open minds, bring out emotions to give a depth perception to learning. That is where the power lies. In the case of acting out a play, it becomes active learning rather than passive listening and reading.
My programs for children’s concerts always include some kind of movement or verbal participation. I use their curriculum and bring it to life through music to try and make what we are doing connect to a relevant part of their education, (sometimes focusing on national or world events) so it’s not just a field trip to learn about the difference between a single reed and a double reed..snore……..ZZZzzzzz……I do believe orchestras are actually making inroads here, and even though MTT’s Keeping Score program costs $23million, at least on the site there are some curriculum integration tools for teachers. We are still on the outside though where we can’t do that much. Instead of education in the arts, how about educating with the arts. I propose a “5 minute plan” that costs next to nothing that tackles arts education from within the establishment:
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If every lesson is 45 minutes no matter what subject, include within that time 5 minutes of an arts relationship to the topic
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Examples: Studying Romeo and Juliet – listen to two different themes (Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, even Bernstein) and discuss
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Learning about the Ming Dynasty, organize someone to bring in an artifact such as a vase to touch and feel
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Civil War – Learn a song from the era from each side
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The point here is arts in context
This is only a point of departure. We are so good at coming up with grand programs and expensive schemes that essentially recommend detonating everything that’s already in place and so the arts are seen as a threat by the powers that be. I am thinking it should start small with integration and the arts as a learning tool. By doing this, it might have more of a chance to become part of the establishment system already in place. Then with a foothold from the inside it will hopefully lead to more specific programming and ultimately change for the better. So many big programs/ideas/theories come across like grandstanding or magic bullets, and those usually backfire, or partisan politics where only one side wins. I have not even touched on creativity which can also be integrated. There is nothing wrong with big ideas, but the all or nothing approach usually leads to nothing!
I ran across the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score program. http://www.keepingscore.org/education.html
It looks like a pretty good way to get music introduced into the core curriculum at schools without spending alot of money….and it appears to have the added benefit of not having to detonate everything in place.
Ron,
Another terrific blog today. Arts integration has become a hot topic, especially among arts non-profits that continually look for ways to increase student participation. The donor dollars for educational activities can be a large honey pot in many communities.
While we all think that sequential arts instruction should always be available in schools, we instinctively understand the need and relationship that the arts play in “core” subjects. Your experience with King Lear is a fine example.
However, arts integration always seems to fall into the laps of the classroom teacher. At a typical teacher in-service day, a facilitator is brought in to help the classroom teacher to understand the ways in which the arts can be used to further academic goals and that the arts teachers are an under utilized resource that can make differences in the way students are taught and how they learn.
While this is most certainly true, we need to see more arts educators integrating core academics into arts classes. Arts teachers need to understand what is being taught and the ways in which they should make lessons plans to reflect the needs of their colleagues and their students.
Elementary schools seem to have some of the best models and tend to have teams of teachers that coordinate many activities. However, as soon as dance, music, theater, and visual arts are introduced by the 5th or 6th grade in sequential education, so much emphasis is placed on the public performance that much of the integration that could be coordinated seems to fall away.
Now any arts teacher will tell you that they don’t have enough time already to teach the basics of what is necessary to succeed let alone integrate other elements into their lesson plans. Every hour away from rehearsal puts their students that further away from the expectations of the holiday concert, play, or arts showing.
Welcome to the world of the classroom teacher. There is never enough time, too much material, and students that are not prepared to learn in or have other difficulties that make learning difficult, forget the pressures of testing and NCLB.
It would seem that the time is right for all of us to understand arts integration into the classroom setting and academic integration into to our arts classrooms.
Ron, what an articulate discussion of providing a meaningful life for our students! If you go to the Springfield Public School website and check our music Major Intructional Goals, you will find a MIG Notebook which not only touches upon the goals for music, but also documents the inter-relatedness of the Fine Arts with each other as well as with content subject areas. You might be interested to know that Jim Twibell, PE teacher at Jeffries Elementary School, has invited me to teach the waltz with him to his 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade PE students the last week in March. His purpose? To teach students character education, positive communication, the transfer of European culture through the immigration of people to America, etc. I promise we will continue to raise the torch!