Toward a Creative Culture: Lifelong Learning through the Arts

Abstract

Dancing Tango us neurobiological rehabilitation. Old age is full of death and full of life. It is a tolerable achievement and it is a disaster. It transcends desire and it taunts it. It is long enough and far from long enough. -Ronald Blythe What are essential ingredients for a livable old age? Is meaning of life clearer in second half of life? And do people perhaps need to learn how to be old, to act aged? The creative arts offer older adults not only opportunities for learning, but also a vehicle to explore possibilities in later years. The arts can play an integrative role, helping elders to discover and build new skills and to make meaning of experience. Unfortunately, there is a lack of literature addressing lifelong learning, arts, and older adults together. Separate work can be found on older-adult learning and on arts education, but very little joins two topics. Gene Cohen's work on creativity and aging and his recent study on impact of professionally controlled cultural programs on older adults, as he describes elsewhere in these pages (see Cohen, this issue), certainly adds to our knowledge base. Recently, Society for Neuroscience released an article (Coleman, 2005) on how studies with dancing and computer training show ways to maintain a healthy brain in old age. Just as die aging of a bottle of wine is a function of grape and vine that wine came from and how it is treated during its life, so is aging of human body and brain, says Paul Coleman, a professor of neurobiology. Studies have found that three important factors predict how well healthy adults maintain cognitive function as they age: mental activity, physical activity, and social engagement. In a McGill University (Kotzia and Lee, 2005) study that examines preventive age-related cognitive decline, researchers found that sultry moves of Argentine tango dancing can help aging brain. The findings of study suggest that tango dancing may be better than walking for improving die execution of complex tasks and ability to move within a restricted area without losing one's footing. 'Tango dancing is beneficial to elderly, say authors, because it incorporates elements found in standard neurobiological rehabilitation programs: forward, backward, and side-to-side weight shift; one-legged stance; walking on a straight line both backward and forward; increasing step length in all directions; and turning within a narrow space. THE LANGUAGE OF THE ARTS Another aspect to consider is that arts enhance learning by using defined by Howard Gardner (2004), as the ability to solve problems or create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings (p.6). According to this notion, all people possess to varying degrees seven intelligences: logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Many programs for older adults throughout country stimulate one or more of these intelligences. Justification for these kinds of programs is clearly evident when one of these intelligences is impaired by chronic disease, decline, or dementia. A prime example is musical intelligence, which may be stimulated in a person with Alzhcimers disease who is unable to speak, but can respond to and with music. This type of learning through melody, rhythm, and other aspects of music can compensate to some extent for decline in other ways of learning and communicating. Coupled with multiple intelligences are individual differences in perception (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and differences in world view (perceiving whole picture first or perceiving details first). The arts provide opportunities to learn in different modalities and to understand one's own unique characteristics. The arts can make an important contribution in that they involve symbolic expression. …