Anthony Cody has been running a series of articles about the importance of art in school on his blog “Living in Dialogue.”
I will post each of the series.
It contains a beautiful statement by Susan Dufresne, kindergarten teacher and artist:
Art is healing and meditative for children and teachers. It is inspiring and allows a different kind of space for free and creative expression. Art builds self-confidence in a way that children need. It develops listening skills and an ability to work from part-to-whole. It develops trust in one’s teacher.
Art develops executive functioning skills, impulse control, delayed gratification skills, planning and organizing skills, fine motor skills, and visual spatial skills. Art develops meta-cognition skills, problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Art increases experiences of joy in all children and during the process of a shared joyful Art experience, our immune systems get the same kind of boost as a hug provides. Shared Art experience creates a strong sense of community. Art creates a sense of peace and satisfaction. Art creates children who think outside the box and can help students stand up for themselves and others. Art develops empathy. Art helps us learn about our world sometimes in a way nothing else could replace. Art can be full-on play! Art can create wonder and Art can answer wonderings. Art can be fiction or non-fiction. Art can come from within or from a power outside of oneself. #Art can incite emotion. Art can be visual music with rhythm and a melody of pattern. Art can engage all of our senses. Art can be science. Art is math. Art is visual poetry. Art can be social studies. Art can incite social justice! Art can be dangerous to the elite! Art can disrupt and disturb oppression. Art can heal depression and trauma. Art is worth doing for the sake of Art alone, but Art does all these things!
Can you VAM an art teacher? No! Can a multiple-choice test grade children’s imagination and creativity? No! Why do we measure and care about the wrong things?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My personal odyssey reflects the overall shift which thankfully is beginning to happen, at least in our part of California’s Central Coast. Our local school District committed almost all of the new Local Area Funding to full-time art teachers for the elementary schools. I’m working in one of those positions now, as a long-term substitute, teaching string games as performance art! I abandoned by identity as a technologist about three years ago, because I saw the harm that was being done with technology through the testing regimes. Finally as a Teaching Artist I feel proud of almost every minute I get to spend working with kids.
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Yay!
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I have been teaching art for over 25 years, mostly high school, and lately have been doing many teaching tasks that have nothing to do with creativity and self expression, and everything to do with school-wide testing goals. I am fiercely committed to the positive aspects that art offers students, and am weary of the time I spend on putting myself and my students through the one- size- fits- all types of teaching strategies. My wish is that we recognize the benefits that art brings to the table that cannot be duplicated in other classes. I do not mind learning strategies I can incorporate, but let arts do what they do best.
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“Can you VAM an art teacher? No! Can a multiple-choice test grade children’s imagination and creativity?”
Strangely, I am envious of art teachers: at least their subject is named properly.
Math, on the other hand, has been tested for so long that people don’t realize how much math got distorted as a result.
The subject called math in K-12 is not real math; it’s real math’s distorted version to fit testing better.
Real math, similarly to art, cannot be tested.
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Good point. And we’re working very hard to do the same to reading. Eventually we’ll figure out how to do it to art too.
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Mate,
Excellent comment.
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Thank you for this comment as I console my 6-year-old over number bonds.
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I feel lucky in the same sense, as a for-Lang teacher. Since I teach ages 2.5-6, stdzn issues do not arise much. But occasionally I’ve taught for daycares w/ low-SES students receiving state tuition subsidies, & have been reqd to align my curriculum w/state stds.
Thank goodness our state continues to borrow its for-lang stds from ACTFL. Those stds sensibly begin w/conversational goals (listening & speaking, rather than jumping prematurely to reading & writing). And they measure progress grade-span-wise– more accurately, w/o ref to grade– against language-acquisition level (e.g., novice-lo/ med/ adv.
Early-language-learning receives short shrift in U.S. schools (& among US parents), so I don’t get enough work. But at least I have max flexibility to use best current practices even in PreK/K’s micromanaged by the state.
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Love the last comment “Can you VAM an art teacher? Well apparently “you can” according to current top down directives for student learning objectives. Art teachers are forced to plan lessons for data collection purposes to “prove” student growth in art. This data-rich “proof” contributes to the art teacher’s VAM score! What a load of “f”ing nonsense which effects true art that should be taking place in a classroom. Apologies for the “f” bomb but it makes me HOSTILE what is being done in the name of data obsessed “assessment! Creative process is under threat no matter how a district proposes to increase the arts if increasing the arts is linked to VAM.
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You are correct about the SLO process having the same function as VAM. That snake oil was sold to Denver in 1999 as part of a Broad-funded pay for performance scheme. USDE marketed the SLO as the alternative of choice for “teachers of untested subjects.” I have written extensively about this farce. The sales pitches continue. The State of Maryland has mandated SLOs for all teachers.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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“Why do we measure and care about the wrong things?”
We aren’t “measuring” those “wrong things”. We aren’t “measuring” anything in the teaching and learning process. We are assessing and evaluating many things on a daily, hourly, per minute basis but those judgements are not measures. There may be “counts” of things but counting is not measuring. Measurement by definition needs the Standard-the definition/specification of what it is we are to measure, what the measuring device is and what the acceptable margin of error in using that device is. There are no such “Standards” in the teaching and learning process.
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“The Moaning Lisa”
The Mona Lisa’s moaning
Da Vinci just got VAMmed
At mouth, she’s really foaming
Cuz artist just got canned
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Art is anything you can get away with.” – Marshall McLuhan.
After you read the “Art is…”, “Art can be…”, and “Art develops…” in this post, try some thought experiments.
Some are already suggested, here are a few more.
Remove the word general term Art and replace it with specifics: music, dance, theater, poetry, the visual arts, the media arts. Or substitute, architecture, sculpture, painting, ceramics. Or substitute ballet, square dancing, or tap dancing. Or substitute vocal music, instrumental music, and/or parse those categories into whatever subtypes may be in your memory, recent or past. What about the “borderless arts” of ceremony and celebration?
Or substitute History, Geography, Science, Mathematics…and then parse those, or just substitute Recess, or Play, especially for Kindergarten.
What is the point?
I think discussions of the arts as if they are (or can be) a panacea are a symptom of the insecure place of the arts in the education…and in the larger culture. People offer many reasons for having art education occur under the auspices of schools. The reasons bear the imprints of time, place, and dominant voices with whispers of other ideas.
But I also see the impulse to speak of the arts as if they are a panacea in another way. I think this impulse is a byproduct “anesthetizing” the process of education, making the whole process very much like being anesthetized, evident in a pervasive blocking of opportunities for students to have multi-sensory experience, a dulling of normal links between perception, thought and feeling, the aggrandizement of stiff-upper-lip rigor and grit.
Test-driven and strictly academic instruction seem to require a studied inattention to the virtues of full spectrum “aesthesia”—-feeling alive, attentive, eager to be in the here-and-now, free to “go with the flow of learning. When this wonder-full condition is present in a classroom, and is halted for some arbitrary reason students are likely to say: “Do we have to stop now?”
The arts are not a panacea for what schools. I think the temptation to think of all of the possible virtues arises from an absence of artistry in so many schools—an absence of loving attention to learning as an invitation, one accepted, acted upon, made indelible in memory…and with deep affection.
There are not many invitations for students to experience learning, and life in school, as intrinsically rewarding. We tend to segregate such “invitations.” We are all too pleased if students have a “chance” to do some art, have a choice among several projects. Some Interests and affinities are acknowledged in “electives” and ”extracurricular” programs. We are excessively proud to have an art teacher in school, a visiting artist there for a gig, a field trip of any kind.
Invitations to learning are now rare in school. They have been replaced by mandates. Our schools have become too driven by standards. They are too addicted to tests and texts. They are too driven by a quest for “best practices” and “continuous improvement” through “perfected alignments” of the standards, tests, and texts. We hope, perhaps long for some improvisation, jazz, pizzazz, romping and stomping, even a moment to hear a poem read well,…not subjected to close reading again and again and again.
Too many of our schools pretend that this perfectly aligned system will produce “measurable outcomes” so reliable and valid that they predict the “success” of our students (and future of the economy).
And the pathetic vision of “success” under this regime has no imaginable horizon other than “going to college” and “getting a job” …with an occasional vague reference to “life.”
Although I admire the inventory of possible and assumed virtues of studies and experiences in the arts, I am always ill at ease with the “case” for art in school is so scattershot that anything seems to go.
What is too easily lost in these broadsides is some thinking that at once honors achievement in the arts but also teaches this generation to be critically cognizant of the power of the arts as instruments of impression management and persuasion, getting attention, and keeping it, and distracting it.
Techniques of aesthetic persuasion are influencing so many aspects of our political, civic, and economic affairs (and policies in education) that we hardly notice the potency. We too rarely see how carefully events are stage-managed, choreographed, orchestrated, designed, modulated, edited, rhetorically styled, literally and metaphorically colored, and carefully crafted in order to bypass reason, circumvent deliberation, suppress reflective thinking—all virtues at the center of school work, home work, and the work of democratic governance (or so we think).
It is easy to forget that workers in the arts have been censored and killed for failing to convey the preferred messages of their patrons.
Scale that threat down. Don’t let students experience or become well-versed in how consequential the arts have been and are. Be cautious about allowing, permitting, tolerating the arts in our schools. Better to uncouple these encounters and studies from school, place them in an after-school program, or just label them a frill, a luxury, a bonus. Reserve them as a possible reward (if you score high on the next test).
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The best part of this long list of “Art is…”, “Art can be…”, and “Art develops…” proposed by a kindergarten art teacher is this. It is an invitation to see that she is also on the front lines of exposing the absurdities of policies that are not limited to marginalizing studies in the arts. Go to her website. Look at her collaboration with Anthony Cody and others. Pay attention to this defiant, loving, living, breathing teacher of art, who has a fertile mind, is fully engaged in thinking about the possible benefits of her work, and is unafraid to do that.
In these times, those are not small accomplishments. May her tribe increase and her students thrive on not being standardized.
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Laura, very good. Is this a better, more precise argument for art education?
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Máté Wierdl
Thank you for reading through the post. I think I have read Lakoff’s key books and certainly appreciate his arguments/rich examples of the central role of the body in cognition orientations in space and time that it enables, what is in and beyond our ability to “grasp,” moving along a path and so on. Like many, I started with Metaphors We Live By, but Philosophy in the Flesh and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things amplified the relevance of his work for arts education, as well as advocacy.
I have not recently returned to The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant, but given the weirdness of today’s political environment that might be a useful mental exercise. In any case, thanks for reading through the post and for your passionate plea to support public education on your website. I cannot fathom what you are doing in mathematics/physics but I wish you well and productive collaborations.
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Thanks, Laura. I think Lakoff’s claim about the arts is more convincing to the “other side” than what we can read in Cody’s cited article. The other side doesn’t care about beauty, for example. .
Lakoff explicitly talks about the relationship between science and the arts—and, amazingly enough, he argues that the arts are at least as important in the pragmatic world, so in the economy. This is at 22m20s in the video, but I link that part here
Lakoff’s observation also has implications to Common Core, by the way. CC is overemphasizing the importance of logical explanations and nonfictional readings, while Lakoff says, those don’t have much utility in 98% of our activities. Logical arguments are not the best, most efficient way to convince or influence people.
Well chosen words, pictures and music will have strong, immediate effects, which are either impossible or very cumbersome to achieve via science and logic.
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