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Bridging Classrooms and Community: Student and Teacher Development through Arts Based Connected Learning Programmes
A Fledgling Research Proposal
Debra Attenborough
Abstract
Generalist elementary teachers are often at a loss in terms of expertise, experience and confidence when teaching the arts. There are fewer and fewer arts specialists within the schools and teachers repeatedly state how unable and/or uncomfortable they feel when it comes to teaching visual art, music and drama. As a result, students receive less than adequate instruction in the arts.
The integrated arts programs offered by the Royal Conservatory’s Learning through the Arts ä and Niagara Falls Art Gallery Art Based Integrated Learning (ABIL) provide experiences in the arts with a focus on both teacher and student development. Both of these programs provide opportunities for classroom teachers to link the arts with other traditional disciplines as well as allowing students to have one on one experiences with artists. This in turn provides students with not only quality arts experiences but also create confident and creative students and teachers.
The focus of this study is to investigate the benefits to both teachers and students of integrated arts programming provided by outside arts organizations. Specifically, the study will examine whether incorporating an arts based integrated curriculum into teaching practice will enrich teacher’s professional development and teacher confidence in the arts, and if so, how? In addition, I would also like to explore the benefits to students both as a result of teacher development as well as students personal interaction with artists. Both the Learning through the Arts ä and the Niagara Falls Art Gallery ABIL offer integrated arts based programs that occur in the classroom and provide integrated arts experiences for teachers and students.
The Research Question
The questions guiding this research focus on the value of integrated arts programs for both teachers and students. The programs that will be examined are offered by one community organization and one national organization and these programs focus on integrated arts experiences for students and teachers.
The study will explore a number of issues:
Do programs in the arts offered by the two organizations enhance teacher knowledge, and attitudes towards learning in and through the arts?
Is working with an arts organization outside of the school setting and effective way to encourage teacher and student development?
What is the impact of the programs on teacher practice?
Do teachers beliefs and practices, as related to the curriculum; change as a result of these programs?
Do teachers begin to value the arts more as a result of these programs?
Do teachers begin to devote more class time to the arts as a result of these programs?
Do teachers change their attitude towards using the arts as a teaching tool?
How do integrated arts programs affect learning communities?
What is the impact of these programs on student attitudes about themselves as learners? About the arts?
What is the impact on student engagement with the arts?
Background
The Importance of the Arts in Education for Students, Teachers and Schools
There is a growing consensus that education in and through the arts can make valuable contributions to both the teaching experience and the learning experience.
The State of California’s Visual and Performing Arts Framework provides a significant summary of the impact of arts education. (arts in focus, 2000) The most important contribution of the arts to education is their ability to improve the way we teach and learn. Some reasoning behind this lies in the following facts:
The arts inspire self-confidence and help keep kids interested in school
The arts help energize the school environment
The arts help kids develop critical skills for life and work
The arts improve student performance in other areas
The arts expose kids to a range of cultures and point of view
The arts can reach hard to reach students (arts in focus 2000)
The arts can help to understand difficult concepts
The arts can make connections between subjects matters
Those of us, who work with children on a regular basis, as well as many parents, realize that children begin learning through the arts. Drawing their own representations of life around them, acting out and role-play everything from gendered expectations to potential career choices. Children spend hours of their time singing and learning in and through the arts. It is surprising then that art in schools is usually taught in North America as something rather precious, separate from education and from life rather than a natural underpinning of our existence. For example, we often see art as the Friday afternoon activity at a given school, or the reward for good behavior in other subjects. Cohen and Gainer (1976) suggest that rather than being separate, art is an integral part of life and can act as glue, enriching and binding together many aspects of human experience.
Numerous studies cite the benefits to students of incorporating the arts in education. Brain research (Jensen, 1998) and multiple intelligence theories (Gardner, 1993) provide strong evidence for the integration of the arts through the curriculum. In addition to helping develop brain function, arts education can offer teachers ways to reach all students (Mann, 1998). The evidence suggests that students of the arts outperform their non-art peer on the Scholastic Assessment Test, according to the College Entrance Examination Board. According to Eloquent Evidence: Arts at the core of learning, "in 1995, SAT scores for students who studied the arts more than four years were 59 points higher on the verbal and 44 points higher on the math portion than students with no coursework or experience in the arts." Cortines (1999) summarizes to value of the arts in education. He suggests the arts help develop a young person’s character and values, confidence and empathy, respect and tolerance. There is extensive research on this topic and the conclusions of all of this are outlined by Cortines (1999) and demonstrate that:
That an arts education contributes significantly to improved critical thinking, problem posing, problem solving and decision making;
That, as with language and mathematics, the crux of an arts education involves the communication, manipulation, interpretation and understanding of complex symbols;
That developing fluency in artistic expression and understanding fosters higher- order thinking skills of analysis, syntheses, and evaluation;
The arts are multi-modal, addressing and fostering the multiple intelligences of students (spatial abilities, for example, develop through drawing and sculpture, mathematical-logical abilities through producing and listening to music, kinesthetic or physical abilities through dance, interpersonal skills through drama);
That the arts develop a person’s imagination and judgment.(p. 5)
Many generalist teachers feel that their personal strengths in education do not lay in the arts, and as a result they either ignore art or turn to the experts within their own community. It is in this role that the art gallery/museum can best serve the needs of their local schools. The visual arts can then provide both unconscious, informal, and formal ways of knowing through art. (Attenborough, 2002) The arts are often not included in discussions of "what matters most" and "core knowledge" in education. Educator Maxine Greene (1995) argues, "it is difficult to accept a call for excellent teaching and ‘teaching for America’s future’ that pays no heed to the awakenings the arts make possible. And the arts, of all forms, may awaken teachers-to-be from the ‘anesthetic’" (Cornett, 1999 p. 2).
Throughout her writing in the 1990s, Greene has focused on the relevance of creativity, the arts, and the imagination. She suggests that the imagination is a means through which we can assemble a coherent world, and that through imagination and creativity (arts) we are able to give credence to alternative realities. Through Greene’s assertions, we can see that the arts, in general, can provide a vast range of possibilities, an opening up of options. Using art as the basis for learning allows us, through arts experiences of our own, to broaden our horizons. (Attenborough, 2002) According to Greene (1995) "at the very least, participatory involvement with the many forms of art can enable us to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines have obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed" (p. 123). Elliott Eisner (1972) introduced similar ideas in Educating Artistic Vision, when he suggested that the prime value of the arts in education lies in the unique contribution the arts make to an individual’s experience with and understanding of the world.
In The Power of Arts to Transform Education (1993) the J. Paul Getty Foundation suggests that,
The arts contribute to an overall culture of excellence in a school. They are an effective means of connecting children to each other and helping them gain an understanding of the creators who preceded them. The provide schools with a ready way to formulate relationship across and among traditional disciplines and to connect ideas and notice patterns. Works of art provide effective means for linking information in history and social studies, mathematics, science and geography, opening lines of inquiry, revealing that art, like life, is lived in a complex world not easily defined in discrete subjects. (p. 2)
Few changes take place in human behavior, including those changes that we call learning, purely on a thinking level. Perceptions and emotions set their own conditions for the process of change. In turn, perceptions and emotions are the stuff from which the arts are made, and are basic to creative behavior (Madeja, 1973). In my experience, hands-on, interactive art experiences can help people to see relationships and that all learners are capable of creative activities, not just those born with talent. There is more attention paid in galleries and museums to what Glaser and Zenetou (1994) call "shared cultural knowledge" and it’s role in a pluralistic society. They also suggest that "museums should be further appreciated as repositories for this ‘core knowledge’ at a time when information has become overwhelmingly complex and standards for excellence have become diffuse" (p. 119).
Wilson, (1999) suggests that there are three vital ways that the arts improve schools. Firstly, the arts improve the school climate by creating an organization that looks, sounds and feels different. Secondly, the arts challenge students, in terms of not only artistic skills but also the way in which each small element is connected to the creation of a complex but coherent whole. Finally, the arts turn schools into communities where students, teachers and administrators support each other, increase collaboration, create and perform together. Wilson (1999) ends his analysis be saying that, "the arts transform learning and schools." Examples of these statements can be found in the study by Gourey, Bosseau and Delgado, (1985) which found that students reported significantly improved attitudes relating to self-expression, trust, self acceptance and acceptance of others.
