Creativity, education, and the future

This morning I’ve found myself surrounded by books and spring sunlight, nurturing myself and learning more on the fascinating topic of “creativity.” I took the time to watch a TED talk this morning that’s been on my list to watch for quite a while now, and it was absolutley worth it.

The TED talk is entitled, “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity,” and this is exactly what it’s about – on how students are educated out of their creativity by the school system. Robinson asks, “So why is this?” Through a series of stories, anecdotes, research and evidence, and hilarious jokes, Robinson discusses the absolute importance for creativity – the way it impacts our world, the way our world impacts it, and the way our education systems are changing with and without it. He shares in his talk three things we know about our intelligence, and how he believes “we need to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

This talk is, without a doubt, one that I feel any and all teachers would benefit from watching. Not only is it inspiring and rejuvenating, but it is also sprinkled with real research, findings and truths about our education system. Even if you don’t completely agree with it, I can at least promise you that it will make you think. However, since I’m well aware that finding 20 min. to sit down and watch a presentation can be rather difficult (it took me weeks to finally get around to watching this talk), below I’ve highlighted some of what I feel are the most important parts of the talk:

“I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue — despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days — what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

… So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this?

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn’t matter where you go. You’d think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we?… Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented — around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you won’t be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.

In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about — technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true?… But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things... And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’m doing a new book at the moment called “Epiphany,” which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.“

To learn more about Ken Robinson and creativity, Robinson has written a book called “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative,” that asks questions such as “Why is it essential to promote creativity? Why is this so important? What’s the problem? Why do so many adults think they’re not very creative (and not very intelligent)? How do we lose the confidence to be creative?What should be done? Is everyone creative or just a select few? Can creativity be developed? If so, how?” I haven’t read it yet, but it is officially in my cart on Amazon and should be a wonderful read for this summer.

In 1998, Robinson also “led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government bringing together leading business people, scientists, artists and educators. His report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (The Robinson Report) was published to huge acclaim.” This report can be found for free on his website, along with descriptions of the other books and articles that Robinson has written, live interviews and presentations of/with Robinson that have been recorded over the years, links and so much more. His website is quite fun, interactive, bright and helpful. Check it out!

Storytelling supports learning, imagination, and creativity

“One lesson we can learn from pre-industrial peoples is the power of storytelling. I am struck by how important storytelling is among tribal peoples; it forms the basis of their educational systems. The Celtic peoples, for example, insisted that only the poets could be teachers. Why? I think it is because knowledge that is not passed through the heart is dangerous: it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip; it may squelch life out of the learners. What if our educational systems were to insist that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists? What transformations would follow?” – Mathew Fox

Tonight I saw Maya Angelou speak – and in that hour that she sat before a black curtain wearing a beautiful black dress, she sang and read and laughed and smiled. But mostly, she talked about three things (at least, these are the three things I heard most) – in that hour she talked a great deal about teaching, poetry, and storytelling.  She talked about the importance of the first two, and talked about them through stories of her own life. I’ve been working on this particular blog for several days now, never finding the time to finish it, but I came home tonight inspired and thankful that I hadn’t finished  it, because there was so much more that I wanted to say.  Tonight was yet another learning experience that reminded how much the learning process is never over, and how much there actually is out there  to learn. And while that thought is mostly overwhelming, it’s also really exciting.

“The Storyteller’s Creed I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge, That myth is more potent than history, That dreams are more powerful than facts, That hope always triumphs over experience, That laughter is the only cure for grief, And I believe that love is stronger than death.” – Robert Fulghum

This spring, creativity and imagination have been everywhere around me: in novels and movies, and on the stage. Spring break, my experiences ranged from reading Mister Pip, a novel by Lloyd Jones for an adolescent literature education class, to watching The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and Finding Neverland, (both of which have Johnny Depp in) to seeing performances of both Les Miserables and A Chorus Line on stage.

In his article, A Better Way to Education through Storytelling!, Indiana Bones writes: “Storytelling can be an incredible teaching tool. In the classroom, the role of storytelling can go far beyond the acquisition of literature. I believe this is due to the additional emotional content that can be delivered through a story. Information that is then even more thoroughly retained, because the input of facts is received on an emotional as well as an intellectual level, this allows for the new information to be stored in a much deeper part of the memory within the human brain. Because of this often overlooked fact, I feel that oral storytelling should be considered one of the better ways to educate and teach information. It can be used in all aspects of learning if applied properly.

Telling stories, reading and writing all work together to better communicate the lesson. By weaving storytelling into the curriculum, Educators can tap into a deep need in the human spirit, to receive information through stories and emotion… Due to this neurological emotional imprinting, storytelling can be a powerful classroom addition. It supports speaking and listening skills, motivates reading and writing, stimulates the imagination and develops and enhances students’ response to literature, history, social studies and many other components of the curriculum.

Storytelling in the educational setting is arguably one of the most effective teaching tool we have. Stories can teach, reinforce and introduce curriculum in the most logical and creative fashion imaginable. Almost any subject matter can be presented or introduced in story form.

Storytelling can also entice students to strive for greater academic achievement. As a storyteller I have been hired on numerous occasions as an incentive to encourage students to read in state wide completion such as the “Battle of the Books” and as a reward for those who have succeeded in reaching academic excellence, reading goals or other successful educational hallmarks.

Storytelling strengthens the imagination. To imagine is to envision and to see beyond what is readily apparent. The ability to imagine and envision is the proven basis of all creativity and creativity creates the power of problem solving in many different occupations, learning modalities and life situations.”

From: A Better Way to Education through Storytelling! by Indiana Bones

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Only once have I ever had a teacher, a professor, who I could describe as a storyteller.  He seldom came to class with even a bag much less a notebook, and if he ever had an actual agenda, I wouldn’t know; but just as we always came to class, so did he with a desire to discuss the books we were reading and a thousand stories about those books, and their authors  and their author’s wives and the cities he’s lived in and the cities the authors had lived in and the food they did or did not eat and the things their wives said. And while there was not even one exam for this class – only a journal we were required to write in each week and a final paper on a book of our choice for  a final grade – I remember more from that class than I do any other English or literature course I’ve ever taken in college. This professor taught me a great deal through storytelling and about the power and importance of storytelling. Maya Angelou reminded me of this power tonight.

In an article written by Wendy Haight, featured in School Talk, entitled Stories as Tools for Teaching: Lessons from Sunday School at an African American Church, Haight sites ways in which storytelling supports learning: “Storytelling helps to accomplish educational goals. When asked how they accomplish their educational goals in Sunday school, adults at First Baptist Church discussed stories as an important activity. Pastor Daniels explained: “We are convinced that it is out of life that the best applications of any kind of principles can be found. And, certainly, if you’re going to make sense of it, you have to relate it to life. When we tell our own personal stories, there’s almost an immediate connection with the youngsters” (Haight 2002, pp. 82-83).

Storytelling is relating a tale to one or more listeners through voice and gesture. It is not the same as reading a story aloud or reciting a piece from memory or acting out a drama-though it shares common characteristics with these arts. The storyteller looks into the eyes of the audience and together they compose the tale.  The storyteller begins to see and re-create, through voice and gesture, a series of mental images; the audience, from the first moment of listening, squints, stares, smiles, leans forward or falls asleep, letting the teller know whether to slow down, speed up, elaborate, or just finish.  Each listener, as well as each teller, actually composes a unique set of story images derived from meanings associated with words, gestures, and sounds. The experience can be profound, exercising the thinking and touching emotions of both teller and listener. -The National Council of Teachers of English in support of storytelling in the academic classroom

One wonderful resource I found is Storyteller.net. This website offers hundreds of free articles on the benefits of storytelling, along with wonderful storytelling stories and examples. It also has a Find Tellers tab which allows you to find storytellers in your area (in Pennsylvania there are seven registered storytellers), and an “Amphitheater” tab which features podcasts on storytelling! ” In the most recent Amphitheater podcast, Sean Buvala is doing “one of his favorite things to do, and that is to talk to people who are working storytellers, exploring the art form in their own places.” Awesome, right? He interviews Tim Ereneta, a storyteller from California – and if you get a chance to listen to all four parts of the podcast, part two, on theater, is my favorite.

Through some link surfing on Poetry Foundation, I also found this event/link, CelebrateStory: New York City’s Storytelling Festival. Each month, CelebrateStory features a story through YouTube. This month’s story is “Who Knows What the Future Will Bring?” and is told by the Artistic Director, Diane Wolkstein. Here’s to inspiring:

Lastly, as a future English teacher, I love this quote by Maya Angelou: “I know you very well, and I know you need a good English teacher.”

Writing out of the blog rut

With spring break behind us, we (meaning Penn State students) are now nine weeks into the semester, with only six left to go; and this lovely blog of mine has been kicking for 8 weeks and 6 days, or 62  days since I first created it for my Adolescent Literature and teacher preparation course at Penn State. Being almost nine weeks into blogging, so many weeks into the school year and only six weeks from the end, I’ve  felt my own desire and drive to blog dragging over the past several weeks, and I’ve heard these same feelings from many of my classmates. In search of some inspiration and good ole’ blog writing material, The Thinking Stick pulled through for me yet again (I really can’t say enough good things about this blog). This time, the top post on Jeff Utecht’s blog is entitled, Blogging Process – Find Your Flow! (Too perfect, right?)

Of course, please go to Utecht’s blog to read his actual post which includes pictures, more links, and all of his wonderful ideas! Below are the six suggestions Jeff made in his post, to help “Find Your Flow” in the blogging process – they helped drag me out of my blog rut:

1. Blog topics are all around you

You are passionate about something whether teaching, technology, your kids or your car. Be passionate and writing is easy. If your not passionate about the post, or idea, you’ll know cause you just won’t do it. This makes it hard when a teacher (like me) asks you to blog about something you might not be passionate about. That makes blogging an assignment….not real blogging. Real blogging is about you….about your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas…..the blogging you do for classroom, is just classwork.

2. Write down ideas or topics
At least two or three times a day I think to myself “that’s a blog topic” and for a while I would sit down to write a blog post and not be able to remember what it was that spurred that moments thought. So I’ve started writing blog topic ideas down. I use the stickies app on my MacBook and Google Tasks via a Chrome extension that lets me quickly jot down topics. I also have a notebook in my backpack for those times when a computer isn’t near to jot stuff down in. Everything from grocery lists, to blog topics. Lastly, I use my iPhone where I have a page of notes that are blog topics. No, you don’t have to have as many places as I do, but I know those are the spots I look for when I have time. Not all ideas make it to a full blog post, some get crossed out, others get folded into each other. It’s the brainstorm phase of writing….just like we teach kids.

3. Keeping web pages organized
This came up in class yesterday. How do you keep all those sites open, or organize that you want to talk about in a blog post? In Firefox I use an extension called Tabloc that allows me to ‘Lock’ a tab (still looking for a good one for Chrome is anyone has one!). So if my browser closes or I need to restart those tabs that are locked, stay safe and saved. I also have gotten better at tagging web pages in Diigo and using the highlight features as well. Social bookmarking takes time to understand and time to find out how tagging works and how to use it for you. I have a system that works for me and I’m going on 5 years without using bookmarks within my browser…..everything is in Diigo and Delicious (which are connected so when I save to Diigo it auto-saves it to Delicious….a perfect backup system!)

4. Find a blogging interface that works for you.

5. Finding your Flow
In the end….I think it’s about finding your flow. Some people blog at the same time every day. I know Kim Cofino (cause we talk about this kind of stuff in the office) does most of her blogging on the weekend, because that’s what works for her. I found that I need it cool, I blog better, ideas flow when I’m in a cooler temperature. So I either blog in my home office with the A/C on or here on the couch with a fan blowing on me to keep me cool. I didn’t realize this was an issue for a long time here in Bangkok. It’s only been about 6 months that I realize I don’t write because I’m uncomfortable, hot, sticky, and not in a thinking mode.

Find your flow, find which time/day works for you, what place, which application. Take time to try things out. I’m constantly looking for another blogging application to replace ScribeFire and just haven’t found one that I like better…that enhances my flow of ideas and process of writing.

6. Write to your community ~ Know your audience

from: Blogging Process – Finding Your Flow

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Utecht’s post began after a great discussion he had in a course around “how blogging was going for those in the class. All of them just 5 weeks into blogging. It was interesting to hear that many of them say blogging as publishing. That they had a lot of drafts waiting to be published but they wanted them to be “perfect” or “publishable”.” This is also one of my weaknesses when it comes to blogging. Because I also view blogging in a more formal way, as publishing, the creation of my posts is incredibly time consuming and tiring.

In Utecht’s post was a link to a post by Miguel Guhlin entitled, Why Blog. I also found Guhlin’s blog to be helpful and enjoyable to read. His post focuses more on how he goes about developing his posts for his blog: “While I’ve certainly written about WHY I blog, and write, I haven’t reflected on how I go about developing posts for my blog.” His post contains literary references and excerpts, beautiful pictures, and some awesome thoughts and ideas – definitely worth reading! These are the five main bullet points to his post (and my favorite excerpts from them – I couldn’t resist putting them in here)  – seriously, his post is worth reading:

1) Writing flows from a moment captured by the voyager; I am he.

2) I write to transform my experiences.

“Often I sit down at a computer and, unbidden, like a spring flowing, the words begin to come. In fact, that is the mental image I have of writing–a flowing spring, a well in the desert. Sometimes, that well is empty and dry, but the waters of the spring lurk beneath the sand and grit of everyday, endure beneath the searing sun. So beautiful.

I’m doing it now, the writing flowing from a spring. Do I know where? No, only that I derive peace from the act, a way of transforming the worst in me. The act of writing is an action, it is saying that I do not despair, that I do not fear, that I will be true to the Word. I seek to transform my life through my writing. That others read it, it is like a candle burning. I may expire, and if a little light should illuminate another’s path, then wonderful! But the fact is, the candle burns because it has been lit, not to banish the darkness.”

3) Dare to contribute for you are beautiful as well.

“I still encounter that feeling of despondency, of writing in spite of great thinkers. “Yes, I recognize your greatness,” my writing proclaims, “but while your song may be beautiful, so is mine…because it is I who sing it.” So, to be a successful blogger, you have to tap into who you are, and mean or nice, share who you are.” Love.

4) It doesn’t matter what you write about, just tell the truth. I loved this one!

“I recently shared a cartoon that reads, “I have nothing to say…I say it regularly.” But that’s not true . What is true is that I have to share as much of the truth as I can tolerate, and then push it a bit. There are many things happening in the world today, much in our lives to be grateful for. And, there are also many things that try to sap the joy out of life. To deny either life, the priviledge of honesty, of transparency, of truth diminishes us. So, while I am not wise enough to be a soothsayer, I can strive to tell the truth in the hope that I may someday grow wise, or failing that, learn more. Blogging is about relationships, and I cannot imagine being less than truthful as possible. Yet, a million times, I am grateful for your forgiveness.

When I read what others have to write–and I read quite a bit, but shallowly like a rock skipping over the surface–I am compelled to write about my point of view on those experiences. While someone may be particularly erudite (there, you see? That’s the defiance, the thought I can do as well as the erudite author), I know that it does not represent the whole story…because I am a part of that story. It is important to speak truth to the universe, to tell it the truth about itself (if you can identify the title of the sci-fi book that came from, let me know, ok?).

In traditional publishing, it’s expected you be an expert before opening your mouth. Blogging academics…I think that’s just trying to elevate the account of wrestling with truth in our lives. Like “He Who Wrestles with God,” bloggers must wrestle with their ideas, their emotions, the world around them and bring order to it. We need to speak to that struggle, tell when we fail, when we succeed.” Beautiful.

5) Sharing one’s appreciation of neat things found in the world or in one’s heart.

from: Why Blog

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Lastly, I found on Jeff Shaw’s blog Bounded Rationality his post entitled Blog Rut. His post helped me to realize that I’m not alone in my feelings of “bi-polar blogging,” and eased my blogging-mental-breakdown

“For those of you who blog, you know that it is a lot of work. If you are like me you get in these long blogging spurts, and then burn out. Then there’s that stress I feel when I go a couple of days without posting. Then there’s those stupid stats. I shouldn’t even look at them. I often feel bi-polar about blogging – I’m sure it comes off in my writing…”

The Arts in Educa(r)tion

For the past week or so in my life, all roads have led to research on the importance of teaching the arts in education.

There is a wealth of research and information out there that explains why teaching the arts in education is so important, along with free resources and tools for teachers to use to assist them in teaching the arts in education.

The term arts, as defined by national standards includes music, dance, drama and visual art.  An article entitled Learning Through the Arts by Dee Dickinson, for New Horizons for Learning (located in Washington State) features this quote: “The term arts education has had various meanings throughout the years. Following the lead of both the national standards and the Washington State Essential Learnings, the term arts includes music, dance, drama and visual art.” The home page for the New York City Arts Education’s Office of Arts and Special Projects Website features this description of their program and goals: “The mission of the Office of Arts and Special Projects is to provide New York City public school communities – students, teachers, school leaders and parents  – with information and resources that will enable every student to achieve a full education in the arts…Fulfillment of this mission will lead students to discover the lifelong enjoyment and wonder inherent in the visual arts, music, dance and theater, and will connect them to arts institutions and organizations that exhibit and perform the arts, offer advanced study in the arts, and generate the myriad jobs available in New York City’s arts-related industries that are both financially and personally rewarding.”

Also, in this post, I’d like to discuss not only the importance of teaching the arts in specialized classrooms for those arts, but also the importance in incorporating certain arts into regular classrooms such as English classrooms.

Why Arts Education Is Crucial

An article published in the Arts Education  issue of Edutopia magazine in February of 2009 and also featured online, by Fran Smit entitled, “Why Arts Education Is Crucial, and Who’s Doing It Best: Art and music are key to student development,” features some incredible discussion and research on the importance of teaching the arts:

The Effect of No Child Left Behind on Arts Education:

“Whatever NCLB [No Child Left Behind] says about the arts, it measures achievement through math and language arts scores, not drawing proficiency or music skills. It’s no surprise, then, that many districts have zeroed in on the tests. A 2006 national survey by the Center on Education Policy, an independent advocacy organization in Washington, DC, found that in the five years after enactment of NCLB, 44 percent of districts had increased instruction time in elementary school English language arts and math while decreasing time spent on other subjects. A follow-up analysis, released in February 2008, showed that 16 percent of districts had reduced elementary school class time for music and art — and had done so by an average of 35 percent, or fifty-seven minutes a week.”

“In California, for example, participation in music courses dropped 46 percent from 1999-2000 through 2000-04, while total school enrollment grew nearly 6 percent, according to a study by the Music for All Foundation. The number of music teachers, meanwhile, declined 26.7 percent. In 2001, the California Board of Education set standards at each grade level for what students should know and be able to do in music, visual arts, theater, and dance, but a statewide study in 2006, by SRI International, found that 89 percent of K-12 schools failed to offer a standards-based course of study in all four disciplines. Sixty-one percent of schools didn’t even have a full-time arts specialist.”

Who’s Doing it Best

“In Dallas, for example, a coalition of arts advocates, philanthropists, educators, and business leaders have worked for years to get arts into all schools, and to get students out into the city’s thriving arts community. Today, for the first time in thirty years, every elementary student in the Dallas Independent School District receives forty-five minutes a week of art and music instruction. In a February 2007 op-ed piece in the Dallas Morning News, Gigi Antoni, president and CEO of Big Thought, the nonprofit partnership working with the district, the Wallace Foundation, and more than sixty local arts and cultural institutions, explained the rationale behind what was then called the Dallas Arts Learning Initiative: “DALI was created on one unabashedly idealistic, yet meticulously researched, premise — that students flourish when creativity drives learning.”

Smith’s article also discusses the New York State requirements and standards for arts learning, guided by New York City‘s Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts, PreK-12: “New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has made arts education a priority in his school reform plans, and the city has launched sweeping initiatives to connect more students with the city’s vast cultural resources.”

The Arts are Key to Student Development

“Involvement in the arts is associated with gains in math, reading, cognitive ability, critical thinking, and verbal skill. Arts learning can also improve motivation, concentration, confidence, and teamwork. A 2005 report by the Rand Corporation about the visual arts argues that the intrinsic pleasures and stimulation of the art experience do more than sweeten an individual’s life — according to the report, they ‘can connect people more deeply to the world and open them to new ways of seeing,’ creating the foundation to forge social bonds and community cohesion.”

“Students taking courses in music performance and music appreciation scored higher in the SAT than students with no arts participation. Music performance students scored 53 points higher on the verbal and 39 points higher on the math. Music appreciation students scored 61 points higher on the verbal and 42 points higher on the math.” (Source: 1999 College-Bound Seniors National Report: Profile of SAT Program Test Takers, The College Entrance Examination Board, Princeton, New Jersey)

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The Arts in an English Classroom

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm‘s book, “You Gotta BE the Book” includes many new and creative ideas on how to incorporate the arts into an English classroom; including drama strategies, visual techniques, the use of illustrated books, collages, picture mapping, and symbolic story representation. In the section, “The Visualization Project: Art in the  Classroom,” Wilhelm discusses his experiences incorporating illustrated books into his classroom, and he writes “I just have to wonder if school conveys a very limited view of literature that does not include picture books and comics, and if this limited view of literature contributes to how bummed out and distanced many of my student readers becomes from literature and the literary experience.”

As Wilhelm began to notice and understand that three of his students were especially more visual than the others, he began to give them assignments like drawing the characters, and drawing, creating or building scenes from the book. These students would then place their characters and props representations in these scenes at the appropriate places, based on where they visualized them to be as they read; and, they would place representations of themselves in those spaces to show their point of view, or from where they felt they were watching this scene take place. Wilhelm wrote about his female, visual learner, “She explained that she usually had a very sketchy iea of what people and places in a story looked like until she drew them.” This same student also replied to Wilhelm later, “If I draw a person I know them. I know their feelings.”

Wilhelm wrote in reflecting on this experience, “The artwork considered in this study helped me as the teacher, and helped the students themselves, to see the various ways in which one text could be evoked and the various possibilities that it held to be read in different and potentially richer ways.” Lastly, Wilhelm wrote that, “The greatest recommendation for including artistic response in the language arts classroom is that it encouraged very different readers to respond in natural ways, to share that response with each other, and to extend and develop it in unforeseen, socially supported, and personally validating and exciting ways.” Wilhelm’s book “You Gotta BE the Book” contains a ton of creative teaching ideas and strategies, unique ways to incorporate the visual arts into the English classroom, the theory behind these ideas, and commentary to each chapter in which Wilhelm reflects on the research and insights he introduces. “You Gotta BE the Book,” is seriously worth reading for any educator, tutor, or teacher of reading or writing.

Similar to Wilhelm’s experiences incorporating illustrated books into his classroom, one form of art that can be applied to an English classroom, and that has always interested me, has been graphic novels. Read, Write, Think features a lesson plan entitled Making It Visual for ELL Students: Teaching History Using Maus (a graphic novel) created by Christian W. Chun and Martha Atwell. I found the theory which influenced Chun and Atwell’s lesson plan to be extremely interesting, and it discusses the importance of art in education:

Chun, C.W. (2009). Critical literacies and graphic novels for ELLs: Teaching Maus. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(2), 144–153.

• Teaching graphic novels can be an alternative to traditional literacy pedagogy, which ignores the dynamic relationships of visual images to the written word.
• The multimodalities of graphic novels such as Maus and Persepolis, along with their engaging content reflecting the diverse identities present in many classrooms, work in tandem to help deepen students’ reading engagement and develop their critical literacies.
• Making connections between these stories and students’ own experiences, and drawing on their outside multiliteracies practices aid literacy development.

Guthrie, J.T. (2004). Teaching for literacy engagement. Journal of Literacy Research, 36(1), 1–30.

• Students’ engaged reading is “often socially interactive” (p. 4). These interactions are clearly evident in the reading club, chat room, blog, and posting activities that have flourished in the wake of recent phenomenally popular books among adolescent and adult readers.
• Students’ increased engagement with particular genres (in this case, graphic novels) can facilitate their entry and apprenticeship into important social networks that amplify opportunities for academic success in mainstream classes.

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Awesome Resources

Thanks to the English Ning, I found through Frank W. Baker’s post an amazing cite through Ovation TV that offers and Arts Ed Toolkit containing “curriculum units [that] have been designed in collaboration with New York City Department of Education and are available for download. The materials are suitable for grades 9 through 12 and include documentaries, films and complementary curriculum units, in alignment with the National Visual Arts Standards, as outlined by the National Art Education Association, as well as other activity guides. They are applicable to various other disciplines including language arts, social studies and beyond.” And all of this is completely FREE! In less than a minute all of the material was at my fingertips!

The Kennedy Center’s ARTSEDGE “empowers educators to teach in, through, and about the arts by providing the tools to develop interdisciplinary curricula that fully integrate the arts with other academic subjects.” The websites “offers free, standards-based teaching materials for use in and out of the classroom, as well as professional development resources, student materials, and guidelines for arts-based instruction and assessment.” It also has a page of awesome arts quotes, and a page entitled Look – Listen – Learn, which features links to created, detailed and developed interactive web sites / pages on topics ranging from Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Check out these links for fun:

City Dionysia: The Ancient Roots of Modern Theater

A Dancer’s Jounal: Martha Graham

Sounds of China PodPage – with awesome podcasts like this on it

African Odyssey Interactive