An Arts Education: School Reform Strategy

Abstract

WHILE THE U.S. school reform movement has produced some important and innovative alternatives over the past decade, many schools have ignored them. For a variety of reasons, these reform models have not been attractive enough to move many teachers, administrators, school board members, or parents to undertake substantial change. Surprisingly, one powerful approach to learning seems to have been overlooked by reformers and by schools: in and through the arts. Yet the have a favorable track record as a learning strategy. Years of experience among educators and classroom teachers who use the to motivate and instruct students, thousands of successful artist-in-residence programs over the last 25 years, and a growing body of research in all strongly suggest that in and through the can play a significant role in changing the agenda, environment, methods, and effectiveness of ordinary elementary and secondary schools. Curiously, the visual and music are already used successfully in preschool and kindergarten to help young children learn to read and count; they are used less extensively in die primary grades. But art is all too frequently seen as simply kid stuff. By fourth grade, most schools have reduced the art experiences available to their students. By junior high, many schools have isolated the from other learning projects by relegating them to special art periods held in separate art rooms; others have set aside a specified hour with a visual or music teacher who visits the classroom. The classroom arts, as we might call them -- from painting to poetry, from dancing to singing, from computer graphics to drawing, from playing pianos and drums to composing on synthesizers, from writing dialogue to acting in plays, from architecture to sculpture, from photography to pottery -- should not be seen as merely pleasant diversions from the core academic basics of schools. Nor should the simply serve as programmatic add-ons to fill out the shank of the school day Those are the traditional ways of viewing education, and they limit the purpose of the classroom and diminish their potency to develop the thinking and imaginative abilities of students as they explore and learn about their world. What would happen if we took the opposite view? What would happen if we expanded the role of die in the teaching of reading or science m the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades? What if we expanded students' opportunities to explore the just when the famous reading slump begins for many students, who then fail to catch up to their peers, become frustrated, do poorly, and drop out? What would happen if we spread the across die curriculum of the middle school years, when many students so dramatically lose interest in classroom activities? Would students attain new conceptual languages to organize and express their learning? Would their interest and commitment to learning increase by association? Would they feel immediately involved in their own learning activities and find instructional activities they can share with their peers? What would happen if the were a part of every high school class from English to science? Would students become more actively engaged in creative learning? THE ARTS-INTEGRATED SCHOOL The have proved to be a powerful tool for complex and diversified learning for children and teenagers. But what we need is a new arts education model of school reform: the arts-integrated school. The arts-integrated school seeks to inspire and instruct students through the many art forms that appeal so strongly to young people; it encourages students to learn in as many artistic and creative ways as they can imagine. Instead of putting them through an endless and often mindless textbook-driven repetition of isolated drills-to-build-skills and other traditional methods of rote instruction, the arts-integrated school seeks to stimulate young people to investigate many ways of knowing and many kinds of human experience. …