Sally's Performing Arts Lab is a blog and podcast for people who want to produce original work for the stage.
My husband found an interesting blog post on the idea of the teacher-led school model. The idea of a greater presence in the classroom for decision-makers is one which piques my interest. I am fortunate to work in an educational community where everybody’s involved in student life. It’s a bit like living in a small town. Mrs. Crabtree tells your Sunday School teacher what she saw and the milkman noticed something too and we’re all talking to your mom. But I digress… Enjoy the post:
I first learned of Ernie Kovacs on a random stop in 1984 when I stumbled into the New York Radio and Television Museum. I was dumbfounded when I learned I could view old Kinescopes of shows I had never even heard of. A docent recommended an Ernie Kovacs kinescope and I was hooked. I spent a couple of hours looking at rare footage and falling in love with his childlike spirit and risk-taking comedy. As an arts teacher I am constantly in search of ways to show my students what artistic expression can be. Ernie Kovacs used the medium of television the way Picasso used brush and canvas or Julie Taymor uses the stage. Unfortunately, for Kovacs, his legacy is only just now being heralded with a release of a retrospective by Shout! Factory. He was a clear creative genius at a time when his talent found a voice in a brand new medium of expression. His ideas and the medium were new. Everything about his art was difficult to assess as there was no precedent for what he was doing. This lack of a grade or measuring stick made it possible for Kovacs to play as a child would play. It was a gift to television and comedy in general that he create fearlessly. Some ideas failed, others were before their time and still others kept his fans tuning in and his fan base growing. To this day there are numerous iterations and flat-out copies of his work. His comedy is as fresh and funny as it was when he was competing with Uncle Milty, Jack Benny, Steve Allen and Danny Thomas for laughs. Television comedy is an art form that doesn’t garner a great deal of respect. But if you are interested in seeing the work of a true artist regardless of the art form, consider giving Ernie Kovacs your attention.
Educational innovator, Dr. Jim Taylor, Huffington Post blogger and author of twelve books on parenting, education, and sports psychology, asserts that it’s time we trade in the S.T.E.M. educational model “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics”and, as he puts it, “Broaden our focus into S.T.A.M.P.E.R… which stands for Science, Technology, Arts, Mathematics, Physical (activity), Emotions, and Reason.”
Everyone admits the current system is inadequate to the future we envision, but changing anything often means spending money. Right now, with districts cutting everything from teacher salaries and jobs to closing entire schools, folks cannot imagine affording any kind of sweeping change. It causes many reform-minded administrators to lose heart. Taylor argues for the inclusion of the arts in the new model because, “Inventive thinking cannot be “taught” in the traditional sense of the word, but it can be experienced and nurtured through the various forms of artistic expression.” Experience, free play, and the freedom to fail and recreate a project is not unique to the arts but arts teachers understand better than most the value of these concepts. Without ‘failure freedom’ actors would hesitate to get on stage. Without the experience of playing with a particular medium, an artist might not consider combining it with another medium to create a new form. Recreation is essential in dance where an artist must return to a piece again and again to perfect her physical communication.
Dr. Taylor is recently fond of pointing out that success in education begins before school starts. In addition to supportive families and a loving home environment, he supports free play and recess for the development of children’s imaginations and he is definitely interested in encouraging kids to push themselves hard enough to fail.
Our most famous innovators would certainly agree that free play and social creativity, ‘freedom failure’, and experience make for success in nearly every field.. Henry Ford was interested in social creativity. He once said, “I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” Thomas Edison was known for monetizing his failures. He famously noted, “I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them.” And Pablo Picasso remarked, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
Perhaps Taylor is not saying anything particularly new and fresh, but if enough educators such as Taylor speak out about these common sense strategies we may finally begin to reconceptualize education for the 21st century. We may indeed learn to honor the current generation’s needs more than we honor education’s poorly performing past.
I am sharing some insights by a few profound thinkers on the subject of arts education. I hope you will find these ideas though-provoking. Please let me know what you think. If you have a quote that should be included, share it in your comment.
“In America, we do not reserve arts education for privileged students or the elite. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds, students who are English language learners, and students with disabilities often do not get the enrichment experiences of affluent students anywhere except at school. President Obama recalls that when he was a child ‘you always had an art teacher and a music teacher. Even in the poorest school districts everyone had access to music and other arts.’
Today, sadly, that is no longer the case.”
– U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, April 9, 2010
“The arts in the schools do not, cannot, and should not exist in isolation. They necessarily must operate in the framework of general education. When they are part of the curriculum of American schools – and this cannot be taken for granted – inevitably they are there because they give students an indispensable educational dimension… The arts are affiliated with the schools’ important responsibility to pass on civilization.”
-from Strong Arts, Strong Schools by Charles Fowler
1996 Oxford University Press
“Education minus art? Such an equation equals schooling that fails to value ingenuity and innovation. The word art, derived from an ancient Indo-European root that means “to fit together,” suggests as much. Art is about fitting things together: words, images, objects, processes, thoughts, historical epochs.
It is both a form of serious play governed by rules and techniques that can be acquired through rigorous study, and a realm of freedom where the mind and body are mobilized to address complex questions — questions that, sometimes, only art itself can answer: What is meaningful or beautiful? Why does something move us? How can I get you to see what I see? Why does symmetry provide a sense of pleasure?”
-Jeffrey T. Schnapp is director of the Stanford Humanities Lab at Stanford University, a prominent cultural historian of the 20th century, and a frequent curator of art exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
“All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them pretty ruthlessly… We (educators) stigmatize mistakes… We are educating people out of their creative capacities… We don’t grow into creativity, we are educated out of it.”
-Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources.
“Learning to think within the affordances and constraints of the material is one of the things that the arts teach… we can look at the arts as tasks which develop the mind because of the kinds of thinking that they evoke, practice and develop… What we need in American education is not for the arts to look more like the academics… but for the academics to look more like the arts.”
-Elliot W. Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education and professor of art at Stanford University, speaking in September 2006 on “What Do the Arts Teach?”
There are many reasons for a child to receive a compulsory education. In ancient Greek and Roman cultures it meant training young men for military service. During the post Civil War era it provided leaders for the industrial age. Many modern students focus on career-preparedness. Before we can address “education reform” we have to have an objective. Any teacher knows that lessons plans begin with a goal. What is the goal of a transformation in how we teach? A new term that has cropped up in many blogs is world-readiness. The information age, a period of development that may prove more potent than the European Renaissance, provides for global networking that could barely be imagined in the fast-moving 1970’s and 80’s and even 90’s when many teachers were having their own student experience. Our students can now see children in remote villages all over the world in real-time. American kids can see videos of their Japanese counterparts’ decimated homes shot with cell phones on the day the tsunami struck.
Instead of identifying these fast times as too fast and fighting to hold this technology at arm’s length, we have an opportunity to engage students in a conversation to help them identify what information is useful, entertaining or meaningful. By learning to categorize the information that comes in at what we old farts qualify as “too fast”, young people will begin to make valuable fast-paced decisions that insure world-readiness.
The hit-and-miss style of education we’ve been pursuing probably looks to kids like a grand game of Whac-a-Mole. Take a whack at the math mole, then swing for the science mole before an arts mole pops his head up for a split second. While this compartmentalization of subjects has served a purpose, a change is long overdue. We have to address the need for world-readiness by teaching and mentoring students in the decision-making process rather than in the traditional “reading, writing and arithmetic” model. In his own style, Stephen Nachmanovitch promotes this type of learning as does James Gee. Nachmanovitch says, “The important thing is to start someplace, anyplace.” While Gee points out “We can put you [the student] into a goal-directed world in which you’re directed to solving problems.” They both agree that holistic learning can have value far beyond the surface subject area. Study after study shows that when kids are allowed to research, try out different scenarios, problem-solve with their peers and fail without the consequences of poor grades and low scores, their learning has legs. Digging to the deepest part of a problem garners answers even teachers miss. This kind of learning is invigorating but scary. If educators don’t have the answers, we become students as well. The possibility of creating a learning environment where students can choose a medium and pursue the ancillary subjects while learning the basics makes curriculum choice a real option. Learners can choose what interests them and identify the information trail they want to follow. This is closer to the real world than anything we are currently doing in education today.
World-readiness is about having the tools and soft skills to make meaningful choices. Too many young people are graduating from college without the ability to make a potentially wrong decision. Our current education model frowns upon risk-taking and yet it is one of the absolutely essential skills for solving world crises.
As teachers we can help students develop their own determinism. If they are learning anything outside of school it is this cause-and-effect model we echo so poorly in the school setting. We have an opportunity while this conversation is gaining momentum, to make certain we know why we want education to change. Get ready world, here comes the next generation.
Art is everywhere. It is in everything we use, see or express. The art we experience is the art created by millions of people who express creativity through design. These are people who move beyond traditional models of art. They have all been practicing artists. Because of their commitment, training and creativity, we are so immersed in the arts we aren’t even aware of it. We respond to the arts as a fish responds to water. We rarely acknowledge its existence. When we do, we speak of music, visual art or theater as if they are things we must create in order for our children to have an “arts experience”. Kids are no more cognitively aware of their arts immersion than the adults. Let me give an example: When I wake up, I often hear music on my radio. This is an obvious arts experience. But when I trudge to my bathroom I am immersed in design. My toilet, mirror, sink, the colors on my bathroom walls, the shape of my toothbrush may be based on utilitarian notions, but there is an artistic design element to everything I use. Even if everything were gray and made of steel, someone would find a way to insert a level of personal expression into a utilitarian product. This ubiquitousness of artistic expression is not limited to design. According to Mr. Webster something is theatrical if it “has the qualities of a staged presentation”. If I attend church or synagogue or mosque or even a Buddhist temple, there is theater just as there are players in a courtroom, classroom or sports arena. We call these events by different names but the term ‘live theater’ applies. Dance is also an area of self expression that shows up everywhere from the traffic circle to the crowded hallways of Grand Central Station. Many of our driving patterns are choreographed as are the flight patterns around an airport. It is our perception or lack of it that makes artistic expression seem scarce. Let’s return to my modern morning ritual. At some point I will dress in clothing designed by an artist. It won’t matter if I bought it at a thrift store or WalMart or Saks Fifth Avenue. Before it could be made, it had to be sketched. The design was then rendered through an artistic process. Trial and error revealed a useful, aesthetically pleasing garment. Fabrics and details were selected which were also designed by artists in those fields. After all this creativity a piece of clothing appeared. The same goes for my coffee and creamer and anything that didn’t come directly from the earth. The coffee maker I use is different in design from my brother’s coffee maker, or my sister’s, or my parents’. If there is no need for art outside the areas designated for expression, why is there a need for differently designed appliances? Business leaders understand the appeal of design. They spend billions of dollars on designers and artists every year to create products that appeal to our cultural and aesthetic sensibilities. If there is no need for art outside of its designated areas, there is no reason for design.
There has never been a time in history when art was not being created. There are numberless examples of profound works of art emerging from dark periods of human history. This includes the great Jewish artists of the Holocaust, Byzantine art following the fall of the Roman Empire, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the photography of the Great Depression and Dustbowl period. Even the balladeers, bards and brilliant thinkers of the dark ages whose work is lost to us set the stage for the European Renaissance that followed. The indispensable and urgent human need to express has been with us since cave paintings and dances ’round the fire. After I finish writing this blog post, I will grab my beautifully composed leather bag and place in it my aesthetically pleasing computer full of music and media files. I will walk outside my house that was designed by an architect who was an artist in the field of building design. I will press a button on the elegantly fashioned car key that opens the door of my goldenrod minivan. There will not be a moment in my day when I do not experience another human being’s artistic expression. This expression is not about talent, it’s about practice. For everyone who believes it is more important to learn the answers on a test than to learn how to artistically express an idea, it’s time to wake up and smell the artisan coffee.
I am guilty of trying to make Shakespeare seem cool. I use the word ‘trying’ here, though I really do avoid it when giving instructions: “Try to memorize” or, “Try to speak clearly” doesn’t sound as though I am giving my students any direction at all. “Do or do not, there is no try.” But I digress.
I say I try to make Shakespeare seem cool, but the only way to really pull that off is to simply commit to the Bard without apology. Just love him as he is. If your students think that’s lame, no worries. If you don’t care what they think, ‘lame’ can become ‘interesting’, and ‘interesting’ to ‘cool’ is not such a stretch.
In a bit of downtime I came up with a little ditty to put Shakespeare’s plays in order for my students. Sadly, there is no definitive timeline for his works. I arranged the rhyme based on performance history rather than the order in which the plays were written as there is slightly less guess-work involved. Here it is, Bard Rap. Please feel free to steal it if you think it would be useful:
Gonna tell you bout a boy who knew how to get a rave on,
Born in Stratford… Upon Avon.
He married girl named… Anne Hathaway:
Eight years older in a family way.
She was 26, he was just 18,
But they had to get married if you know what I mean.
They had a baby named Susannah…. that girl was a cutie.
Then twins came along named Hamnet and Judy.
Will was a bard and he knew he had to write
So he left the kids with Anne and the man took flight.
He moved to London to get his start
Where a poet could make a living at his art.
He wrote some words that got some attention,
But a guy named Greene expressed condescension.
Greene wrote a letter that gives us a clue
About the timing of the writing career of you-know-who
Shakes performed where the royalty stays.
He spent most of his time writing 39 plays.
Funny plays and dramas, romance and mystery.
They were listed as comedy, tragedy and history.
Henry VI, parts one and two were history.
Then Two Verona Dudes and Henry VI, Part 3.
Bill spent some time writing now famous poetry.
The plague meant theaters were all closed locally.
He might have used the time to write some more pages
But soon the doors were open to the London stages.
Richard the Third showed a king’s worst sins.
Then The Comedy of Errors was all about twins.
Loves Labors Lost and Titus Andronicus
Made the Bard look just like he was one of us.
Taming of the Shrew came next, it was comedy.
Then Romeo and Juliet: A masterpiece of tragedy.
The next work had a magical theme;
He called this play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Richard Number Two was followed by King John.
Then The Merchant of Venice turned out to be a con.
Henry IV was another one of Henry’s kinzer.
Then came the silly play, Merry Wives of Windsor.
Another Henry IV (but this one is part two)
Is followed by a play nicknamed Much Ado.
Some land was purchased to build a new space
Nicknamed the Globe. It was a popular place.
Henry V was followed by Julius Caesar.
Guess what’s next, it’s a theater teaser:
While Shakespeare was writing his poetry and plays
His only son Hamnet saw the last of his days.
Most people think that The bard got sad
Cause he wrote a play that started with a guy’s dead dad.
The play was Hamlet; best play ever penned.
But the worst part is they all die in the end.
In Twelfth Night, Viola dresses like a boy.
And Troilus and Cressida is all about Troy.
All’s Well That Ends Well is a problem play
But it still ends well or that’s what they say.
Then in As You Like It Jacque calls the world “a stage”.
He’s a little bitty crazy and a little bit sage.
Othello was a general with problems of his own
And Measure for Measure was followed by Timon.
King Lear might have been about the bard and his daughters.
The play focused on a family’s troubled waters.
Macbeth was greedy, Pericles was scarred,
But the Prince of Tyre was only partly by the Bard.
Coriolanus seeks political glory.
Antony and Cleopatra is a sad love story.
Cymbeline and Winter’s Tale leave loose ends
But both are stories told about friends.
Cardenio‘s a play we never will see.
It was lost so it won’t be on a marquee.
In The Tempest, Miranda’s dad, Prospero is torn.
And in Henry the 8th Queen Elizabeth is born.
Thirty-nine plays we attribute to the Bard.
But the reason we hold him in high regard
Is his wit, his poetry, his style were unique.
But most of all he transformed the English we speak.
His rival Ben Johnson later thought better
Of the Bard and he wrote one great big letter
That his friends included along with their praise
In the first folio containing 36 plays.
Though Willy went bald and he didn’t have a car,
Back in the Renaissance he was a rock star.
Lately, I’ve been studying up on the origins of the American public school system. There is agreement, it seems, that the first modern schools began in the middle of the 16th century in Germany. Soon after, John Calvin set up mandatory schools in Geneva. It should be noted that even the Spartans had compulsory education for students in military settings long before the German model.
The difference between earlier Spartan versions of education for the masses and the evolving Calvinistic model is that after nearly three centuries of compulsory public education, German idealism began to creep in to the Calvinistic model. While I can’t explain German Idealism, I can tell you it was developed by a cadre of well-known philosophers including the lesser known Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte was a German philosopher born a little more than a decade before the start of the American Revolution. He was part of a group of philosophers that included Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who were committed to German Idealism. Of the ideal education Fichte is quoted as saying, “If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.” This thought seems sinister by modern standards. The new and improved model for compulsory education was a response to an age of steam powered printing presses, telegraphic communication, consolidation of postal services, scandalous dancing (the waltz introduced the touching of arms in 1816), the invention of chemical processing for photography, and in France, freedom of the press was introduced in 1819. This was a world on the verge of converging. Nationalism actually became relevant and nations needed their citizens to think alike. For those of us who remember the emergence of the Internet, this may seem familiar.
According to Wikipedia (my new favorite resource), Prussia was an influential European player from the mid 16th century to the end of WWII. Prussia included parts of modern-day Germany, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Denmark, Belgium, Czech Republic, Netherlands and Switzerland. It was really, really big (by European standards). In an attempt to assert its national superiority, Prussia led the charge against Napoleon in the early 19th century. Though their army had really dapper uniforms, the Prussians learned a lesson about regimentation from the French. Despite Prussia’s size, Napoleon’s forces defeated the Prussian army in 1806 in the battle of Jena. It was after this embarrassing defeat that compulsory public education exploded in Prussia. By 1819 the model was in place and would soon be responsible for educating 92% of Prussian children. Another 8% were educated privately.
In 1843, Massachusetts state senator Horace Mann visited Prussian schools and became the most influential spokesperson for compulsory public education in the U.S. In 1844 in his Seventh Annual Report as Secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts, Mann proclaimed, “Among the nations of Europe, Prussia has long enjoyed the most distinguished reputation for the excellence of its schools.” When he returned to the U.S. he campaigned with fervor for a similar education model in his home state. There are many who believe that Massachusetts based their model on Calvinism. Though Horace Mann was raised a strict Calvinist, he rejected it in favor of Unitarianism. A lot of different ideas powered his concept. He believed, “A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.” He called education “the great equalizer” as well as “our only political safety”. In addition to his political motivations, he was also very concerned with teaching compassion, morality and reading.
While the Prussian model may have seemed progressive in the mid 19th century, it is little changed in the 21st century. C.J. Westerberg of The Daily Riff (a popular education blog) says of modern schools, “If you put a doctor of a hundred years ago in an operating room she would get lost, yet if you placed a teacher of a hundred years ago into one of today’s classrooms she wouldn’t skip a beat.” This is not to say we throw the baby out with the bath water. A wildly different education model doesn’t necessarily mean a better education model. After all, students today are no less in need of lessons in good citizenship. But the definition of a good citizen has experienced a transformation in the age of instant access. We’re still citizens of nations but we are fast becoming citizens of the world.
My kids know more about everything than I did at their age except, maybe, how to roller skate. We are fooling ourselves if we think our kids go to school to learn facts. They have facts about anything they care to know at their fingertips. We need to quit complaining about their calculators, laptops and ear buds and start addressing the way they learn. They haven’t stopped wanting human interaction. We just won’t acknowledge how they do it. Rather than whine and bemoan the loss of traditional ways of interacting, it’s time we really look at how kids learn today and prepare to take another quantum leap. We have a plethora of studies and empirical evidence that kids learn faster outside traditional classrooms. Horace Mann and his generation taught a type of groupthink they believed was necessary for a docile citizenry. While we watch as revolution surges in the Middle East, it seems a docile citizenry is not docile so much as it is demoralized. For those who want to make Mann the villain of our current system, I have a newsflash. He’s been dead for over 150 years. And I learned all that while sitting in bed and surfing the Inter-webs.
All culture is based on stories both true and fictional. No group’s history is without its perspective. But perspective can be skewed for a variety of reasons. Skewed or not, the telling should be honest. As artists, we are taught that our stories don’t have to be factual to be honest. By honest I mean the moment of creative expression is genuine even if the artist is fictionalizing an event. Children are the best examples of this honest expression. They often tell meandering stories with no obvious point. But they tell their stories with so much passion using the tools available, there is no doubt they are being completely honest in their expression.
Artists have a responsibility to tell stories with childlike honesty. Artists can use this to powerfully influence whole societies. Their stories can have greater influence than anyone else’s including generals, politicians and scientists. That is not to say that those fields do not have their fair share of story tellers. Politicians are especially adept at telling powerful stories that move populations. People in all fields from medicine to garbage collecting have the potential to contribute to cultural stories. But of the artist, it is expected.
Storytelling is the primary role of the artist. Interpreting events and expressing ideas in relation to her environment, exploring other environments, fictional and factual; these are the responsibilities of the artist. But what is the value of story telling? Story telling provides perspective. It organizes our jumbled culture into a cohesive whole. There is an old Norwegian saying (I know because I Googled it), “It is the duty of the present to convey the voices of the past to the ears of the future.” The ears of the future depend on us to be as honest as we are able to be.
Why should teachers need to entertain their students? Because storytelling is the access point for all learning. As Rudyard Kipling said, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” Language, history, science, even math problems all tell narratives. If we can identify these stories for children by teaching in stories and encouraging stories from students, we improve their level of understanding.
From her masters thesis for Simon Fraser University in June 1997, Lindsay M. Brown points out: “Qualitative and quantitative evidence overwhelmingly suggests that narrative – reading, but also and especially oral storytelling -increases IQ, creativity, memory, and concentration.” She states what many believe to be the reason storytelling improves retention: “Neurological research appears to show that reading or listening to narrative produces intense frontal lobe activity in the form of mental visualization, which in turn enhances the development of neural dendrites, particularly in children.”
Mark Turner in his much cited 1996 study The Literary Mind, identifies the narrative or narrative thought as a significant contributor to brain development. Storytelling, according to Turner and other researchers, influences everything from eye-hand coordination to empathy to cultural understanding. Storytelling is a brain function that requires all parts of the brain to communicate with each other. Frontal, parietal, temporal and even occipital lobes come into play when telling a story. This brain communication forms new neural pathways in early childhood and leads to advanced problem solving skills in later years. This engagement of all the parts of the brain develops invaluable brain plasticity and new neural pathways.
A University of Chicago study done with support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Brain Research Foundation released in July 2010 indicates, “there may be limitations to the remarkable flexibility for language functions displayed by children with brain injuries.” The study found, “The children with brain injuries produced shorter, less complex stories than typically developing children.” Although the children in the study showed similar vocabulary and sentence comprehension abilities compared to their normally developing counterparts, they were missing the vital ability to communicate complex ideas in an engaging form. Storytelling promotes higher thinking and communication among all parts of the brain.
It might be enough to say that storytelling is good for us as individuals, but storytelling has a deep cultural value. It is the glue that holds groups together. When we refer to weaving a tale or spinning a story, we are using the metaphors of foundation. Weaving fabric for a garment or a spider spinning a web for a home are indicative of how we perceive the value of the narrative. Telling stories is foundational for any culture. We look to cave paintings to tell us the stories of primitive humans, Homer lays the groundwork for Western culture and Shakespeare provides a quantum leap in the development of the English language. Culture exists only in our stories.
We all love stories and this is especially true for children. From story time at the library to telling stories on stage in the school play, kids love a good yarn. As teachers it’s important to understand how to tell a story and especially how to elicit a story from a student. Telling stories engages the community of learners by promoting the Homeric experience. We bond with our stories. If we are to engage our students in a profound experience, we must become great storytellers and great listeners of stories.
SallyPAL 