I had an interesting day yesterday in Spotsylvania County that ending delightfully with a walk through the Fredericsburg Battle Ground park with Brenda. She’d ridden the train up in the afternoon. I did two presentations during the day for educators in the county — one on the new story of education in the 21st century, and then an afternoon session with district art and music teachers. I have to admit that I went into that session with only a vague idea of what I wanted to accomplish.
There is a growing sense of the importance of creativity and, by association, music, art, drama, etc. However, I think that it would be a mistake to merely bask in the glow of seeing creativity splashed across the goals of various state and national standards. I think that it is critical that creative arts teachers, and all teachers, come to understand the conditions that have brought about recent interest in creativity as a basic skill, and adapt what they do to address and reflect the conditions — reinventing themselves.
I presented some ideas about how our evolving information landscape has changed what we should consider to be basic literacy skills. I also shared and discussed a list of fundamental qualities of our students’ nearly native information activities. The list was generated by a group of teachers in Texas who have worked in a 1:1 environment since 1997. Interestingly, that list remarkable paralleled a list of leverage points shared with the group during a morning meeting.
The end of the session was spent in general discussion, though I found the group to be somewhat more shy than I would have expected of art and music teachers. It was the afternoon, though, and they’d been in meetings all morning.
One of the most interesting comments that I heard was how student communities tended to casually form around the arts. This was certainly the case with my son’s high school experience with music and band. Related, I think, to this sense of community was the problem of losing so many students from art, music, and drama, when they reached high school. Many of the students who excelled and enjoyed the arts, found, when they reached high school, that all of their school day periods would be required to take the core courses they would need to get into college.
It occurred to the conversation, that community might serve to continue a tie between students and the arts, and the arts and the school, regardless of class courses and class walls. Essentially, how could you make the arts and arts instruction happen outside the walls of the art classroom and the noise-suppressing walls of the band room? How could we covertly cultivate those communities, independent of classes and facilitate creative arts instruction through those communities?
How might we inject the creative arts into the culture of the school and the greater community, infecting them with creative expression?
“What I dream of is an art of balance.” Henri Matisse
Thank you! I am a former band director (changed into Instructional Technology Specialist) and know the power of the creative arts. Thank you for bring this to the table for conversation.
The creative arts is what can make each of us unique and needs to be in every classroom (just like technology). Granted, you will not learn to play trombone in a math classroom or learn how to draw in the English classroom. For a student who “gets” music, but is not understanding fractions, what about teaching fractions using note values? How about letting a person animate their paper with drawings or even create a story with things they’ve created? I believe the possiblities are truly endless.
Just like technology, learning how to use the creative arts in the classroom will get the kids excited about learning and they will produce things beyond our wildest imaginations. The creative arts are another tool in the tool belt. Step into the world of originality… 🙂
David- wonderful presentation this afternoon! Teaching literacy gets at the heart of our mission- encompassing reading, per se, as well as analyzing writing, and synthesizing new information. Audiences go from the student across the classroom to peers across the globe! I’ll see you at NECC!
“…student communities tended to casually form around the arts”. You can include libraries in this reflection. Our art teacher and I were just talking about how her “frequent flyers” regularly alternate between hanging out in the art suite and hanging out in the library. Librarians have a great opportunity to recognize & encourage creativity in their students. So many of our students “dance to a different drummer” and have amazing talents that are often hidden and under-appreciated in traditional academic settings.
One way to infuse a good healthy dose of creative arts is to make their education available away from the K-12 classroom into our communities. At the Dallas School of Music we have been allowing music education to stand alone in our area apart from any school system for the past 16 years. Ours is a healthy, vibrant community of music makers who come in all ages and levels of ability. I wish there were more like minded educational entrepreneurs that would create these kinds of free-market institutions around the country. It would be terrific for communities, students of all ages and teachers to have this kind of option.
I’m all about the creative arts in schools (I’m a Creative Writing/Philosophy/Political Science major who works for an education think tank). However, I’m from Virginia and I would just like to say that it’s Fredericksburg.