DANCE, MUSIC, THEATRE, & VISUAL ART EDUCATION
There is a difference between subject matter (facts and formulas) and discipline (a distinctive way of thinking about the world). There is great value in going deeply into subjects to learn and master content knowledge and skills. But the discipline-based content standards have further segregated learning into isolated silos at a time when we need to be developing integrative thinkers. |
All subjects, including the arts, require more than mere exposure. They need focused time for sequential study, practice, creation, performance, and reflection. |
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Each of the arts disciplines is in itself a vast body of subject matter – an array of skills, knowledge, and techniques offering students a means of communication and modes of thought and action. Each discipline also provides rich and complex points of view on the world and human experience. Each offers analytical and theoretical perspectives, a distinct history, many schools of interpretation, as well as innumerable connections to all human activity. Education in the arts should provide a thorough grounding in a basic body of knowledge about the skills required both to make sense and to make use of each of the arts disciplines, as well as the intellectual tools to make qualitative judgments about artistic products and expressions. National Standards for Arts Education |
Work in the arts means making new things or making things new. The challenge is to deepen students’ learning and enhance their skills by connecting curriculum and performance, thereby balancing process with product. Work about the arts involves exploring the arts in social, cultural, and historical contexts, which subsequently impact the artistic processes of creating, performing, and responding. Work through the arts employs arts content, processes, and skills to deepen learning in other subjects. Meaningfully integrating the arts across the curriculum provides opportunities for students to creatively solve problems and expressively communicate ideas. Dance, music, theatre, and visual art are more likely to become integrated with other curricular areas if classroom teachers become involved in and more knowledgeable about the arts, and thus better equipped to reinforce and extend the instruction. Conversely, arts specialists need to be aware of non-arts curriculum so that they can make connections in arts classes. Working together, faculty members can build effective partnerships. As teachers become more knowledgeable about arts education, they turn more and more to arts specialists and teaching artists for guidance; and as the specialists become more comfortable connecting content outside of the arts with their own, all teachers benefit from the collaboration. Creative scheduling is necessary if specialists are to meet regularly with other teachers to plan instructional materials, team-teach, observe each other’s instruction, and collectively reflect on their practice. |
ARTS AND LITERACY Frequently defined simply as the ability to read and write, literacy incorporates abilities to identify, understand, interpret, compare, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate across a variety of media in addition to text. Cultural, environmental, information, kinesthetic, mathematical, media, musical, scientific, technological, and visual literacies are just a few components of a holistic understanding today’s students need to engage in a global environment. |
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The arts are a medium and model for learning. All art forms share fundamental concepts with other thinking and symbol systems. Language, math, music, dance, theatre, and visual art all employ systems of symbolic representation. By drawing students’ attention to the underlying structures that they share, the study of the systems becomes mutually reinforcing, so students develop a deep and rich understanding of each system and the connections among them. |
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein studied reports by eminent thinkers on how they think in many disciplines. From those reports, they identified a set of thirteen mental operations they call “thinking tools”. These operations are used consistently across divergent fields – science, mathematics, history, philosophy, writing, and the arts. |
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These are the cognitive processes we employ as we make sense of our experience. They are operations of deeply immersed and engaged thinking. Root-Bernstein, Robert, & Root-Bernstein, Michele |
