Not everyone who receives a strong arts education early in life goes on to become an arts professional. Yet many people who achieve excellence in other fields point to their early education in the arts as a factor in their success. One reason for this, researchers suggest, is that the arts can boost the development of some basic cognitive skills that come in handy in other disciplines, such as spatial reasoning or literacy. But even if this is true, it falls far short of a good explanation: when people talk about the value of their early arts education, they tend to talk in terms of its profound formative influence on their intellect and character. Something deeper is going on.
An interesting perspective on the value of a strong arts education comes from a recent national study "The Qualities of Quality: Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve It." The study was commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and conducted by Project Zero at Harvard University, a research institution at Harvard Graduate School of Education with a long history of investigating cognition and the arts. The purpose of the study was to examine how prominent arts educators and arts programs in diverse contexts and communities across the United States define the characteristics of excellence - the "qualities of quality" - in arts teaching and learning. Not surprisingly, views about excellence in arts education are deeply linked to ideas about the fundamental purposes of arts education - ideas about what students ought to learn through the arts and why these outcomes are important. This was true across settings and programs, whether the students were third graders composing on the keyboard in Atlanta, or teens filming community narratives in West Virginia. A glimpse at some of the purposes that emerged from the study may help explain why alumni of Interlochen and other strong arts institutions find that their early training in the arts contributes, today, to their pursuit of excellence outside the arts.
1. The arts teach you how to think.
When we asked arts educators, parents, administrators and researchers to talk about the value of arts education, the first thing they usually suggested was that the arts teach cognitive capacities with broad reach. Whether termed "thinking skills," "thinking dispositions" or "habits of mind," the basic idea is that the arts teach powerful intellectual capabilities that are useful in the arts and beyond, including the capacity to think critically, to be reflective, to solve problems and to explore alternative points of view. Here are a few words about the two capacities that top most people’s lists: creative thinking and connection-making.
Our informants were quick to point out that creative thinking isn’t simply a matter of having lots of "aha" moments. Rather, it is a prolonged process of experimentation, creation, revision and reflection - a process that takes typically time, skill and a good deal of fortitude. Through high quality experiences in the arts, students learn to push themselves to look for ideas beyond the obvious, to be open to multiple possibilities, to invite critique, to re-envision, revise, re-compose. This extended process of creativity is intrinsic to the arts and crucial in other disciplines as well, especially at the level of high achievement. A look at the autobiographies of highly successful people in any field - for example medicine, business or technology, reveals there are far more stories about prolonged cycles of experimentation and revision than about full-blown insights suddenly popping into existence.
Relatedly, the arts also teach connection-making. In a sense, making connections is at the heart of arts learning. The arts take the world and its contents as their subject, and the work of art is to use metaphor and imagination to envision and express relationships between diverse ideas and experiences. Like creativity, connection-making isn’t always a matter of sudden insight; it is something both young and experienced artists often work hard at. From a child exploring ways to paint sunshine to a musician experimenting with new sounds, fruitful connection-making involves purposefully exploring combinations, trying out new juxtapositions, and creating new and provocative relationships - skills essential to the arts and useful to other areas.
2. The arts teach you how to see.
Musicians talk about training the ear. Visual artists talk about training the eye. Whatever the art form, many arts educators believe that a good arts education develops students’ capacity to perceive and experience the world from an aesthetic perspective. Partly, this involves developing aesthetic discrimination - the capacity to see more clearly the features of things and in more nuance and detail. As just one example, on a site visit for the "Qualities of Quality" project, we observed a language arts class in which two professional opera singers were working with students to explore the difference between "happy" and "elated," through the use of facial expression, body language and voice.
Another side of aesthetic awareness is discernment - the capacity to make judgments of excellence based on aesthetic discrimination. Not just a matter of connoisseurship - aesthetic discernment occurs not only in museums and concert halls, but also in the informal, often mass-produced environment in which we live. Designing a Facebook page, making choices about what clothes to wear and what music to listen to, decoding the persuasive power of an advertisement or film; all these activities have an aesthetic dimension. Learning to perceive aesthetic subtleties and nuances and making judgments about their value helps students go beyond the role of passive consumer to make decisions that can shape and influence culture.
3. The arts teach you how to learn.
From educators we often heard that a purpose of arts education is to help students develop the techniques and skills needed to participate in an art form. Students learn the fundamentals of drawing in order to paint, the fundamentals of movement in order to dance and so on. Learning an arts technique usually involves ongoing feedback from the activity itself; you practice something, see if it works, and if it doesn’t you revise your efforts and try again. Such a process teaches the rewards of attentiveness and practice, and it is enhanced by self-awareness. The more you understand yourself as a learner, the more you are able to suit the practice to your ends and needs. Indeed, in our site visits we heard young people speak with a high degree of self-awareness about their arts practice. Whether they were playing in an ensemble or working in the darkroom, they often stressed that arts education made the learning process visible to them.
4. The arts teach you to inquire.
Learning in the arts involves far more than technical training and affords many lessons about learning. For instance, many arts educators we spoke with emphasize the power of the arts to stimulate students’ curiosity and to provide them with investigative tools. From documenting their community through photography to honoring family narratives through dramatic monologue, the arts, when well-taught, provide students with opportunities to investigate human nature, history and culture, often in contexts that are personally meaningful to them. For example, in-school artist residencies were features of several of the sites we visited for the "Qualities of Quality" project. At one site, artists lead students in an investigation of their neighborhood, researching the lives of immigrants who are local shop and restaurant owners. The artists work with students to create a play that incorporates folk dance with contemporary dance to tell the stories of the community and of the students’ own immigrant experiences. Such an experience serves learning in three ways: it stimulates students’ curiosity, provides the tools of investigation and provides a medium in which to present knowledge. Sustained inquiry is important to artistic practice and has its parallels in several other fields.
5. The arts help you understand yourself and others.
Many people told us that one of the core purposes of arts education is to provide young people with opportunities to develop self-knowledge through self-expression. The term "self-expression" can conjure up images of students mindlessly expressing unfiltered emotion. But the educators we spoke with emphasize that self-expression in the arts involves far more than simple emotional release - it can be demanding, exacting and full of surprises. Anyone who has gone through the process of drawing a series of self-portraits understands that self-expression requires honest introspection, a critical spirit and a willingness to form new ideas. Music educator and theorist Bennett Reimer put it nicely. Talking about the role of self-expression in arts education, he told us: "You could say that in the arts you express yourself. Heck no. You’re finding yourself out! What you’re creating is yourself. You can create in one way and realize it’s not right and then do it differently."
On the stage, in the studio or in the practice room, self-expression in the arts often occurs in the presence of others. In the best settings, a sense of interdependence and collegiality is created as students and educators work collaboratively to create, perform, or simply to examine each other’s work. One of the distinctive characteristics of high-quality art programs is the culture of respect and trust they create, and many arts educators see this not just as a goal of arts education specifically, but as a model for learning environments and society more broadly.
The foregoing four purposes of arts education - voiced by many arts educators, scholars and administrators working in the field of arts education - are only a few of the many ideas we heard in our "Qualities of Quality" conversations across the country. But they are beliefs shared by many people working across diverse art forms, contexts and communities, and they may help explain why a strong arts background early in life is valued by people who go on to achieve excellence in other fields.
Perhaps by challenging young people to imagine and produce works of art, strong arts programs teach them to envision creative possibilities and to understand the steps involved in bringing creative possibilities to life. Perhaps by developing aesthetic awareness, they teach young people how to see the world around them in more detail and to make more discerning judgments of value. Perhaps by providing opportunities to explore and master technique, they teach the value of multiple forms of inquiry along with the value of learning through disciplined practice. Perhaps by challenging young people to invent themselves through self-expression, often in collaboration with others, strong arts programs encourage honest introspection, trust and empathy. All of these challenges are intrinsic to the arts but none exclusively so. It is hard to imagine that an individual pursuing excellence in any field would not benefit from mastering them.
Applying Project Zero Concepts at Interlochen
Four decades ago, Nelson Goodman believed that arts learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity but that "zero" had been firmly established about the field. To remedy this situation, he founded the Project Zero research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Today the group is still researching and broadening our understanding of learning processes and the arts.
Through the support of the Edward E. Ford Foundation, nearly 20 of Interlochen’s educators have participated in Project Zero’s summer institute and have brought the concepts back to campus. Under the guidance of Dr. Lois Hetland, an associate professor of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art and a Research Associate at Project Zero, Interlochen’s faculty have learned how to implement the concepts to foster deeper learning in the students.
Already the project has fostered the development of stronger interdisciplinary ties between artistic and academic disciplines. One notable example includes the visit from the Martha Graham Dance Company, which prompted students to explore the works from artistic and historical perspectives (See Page 3). Academy faculty are currently planning other collaborations that will deepen students’ understanding of their art and academic disciplines.
Table of Contents >>
|
