LEARNINGa n d t h e A r t s :

C r o s s i n gB o u n d a r i e s

Proceedings from an invitational meeting

for education, arts and youth funders held

January 12–14, 2000, Los Angeles

O R G A N I Z E D B Y

GERALDINE R. DODGE FOUNDATION,J . P A U L G E T T Y T R U S T , A N D

T H E J O H N D. A N D C AT H E R I N E T. M A C A R T H U R F O U N D A T I O N

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Table of Contents

31

415

Compiled, edited and designed by Amdur Spitz & Associates, Inc., Chicago, IL. Individual authors retain the copyright to their work. For further information, contact: artsedinfo@grdodge.org

Introduction Alexandra Christy, Nick Rabkin, Janet Rodriguez, Vicki Rosenberg

Small Group Discussions: Reflections and Next Steps

Closing RemarksKen Robinson

Seeing Our Way into LearningShirley Brice Heath

Reframing Arts in EducationRudy Crew

Arts Education’s Place in a Knowledge-Based Global EconomyKen Robinson

Ten Lessons the Arts TeachElliot Eisner

Arts Learning Experiences

Practitioners on Effective PartnershipsBonnie Pittman, Russ Chapman, Elisa Crystal, Mary Sue Sweeney Price

Researchers’ Perspectives on Emerging Best PracticesDick Deasy, James Catterall, Sandy Rieder, Steve Seidel

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Every now and again funders have the privilege of attending a meeting thatredirects thinking and compels action. Such a meeting took place on January 12-14, 2000 in Los Angeles, when 120 people

assembled for Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries. Representing some 50 founda-tions, the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education, theseprogram officers, CEOs and trustees came together to look at the arts’ potential for improv-ing the lives of America’s children. The group included leading arts, education and youthfunders eager to think, talk and plan across traditional programmatic boundaries.

The impetus for the meeting was the extraordinary moment of opportunity that didnot exist even a few years ago. Worldwide, every post-industrialized nation is consideringmajor reforms in education, and with these changes are opening real opportunities for thearts to make distinctive contributions to learning and development. Qualitative new prac-tice in arts education is trickling into our schools—practice that not only opens the world ofthe arts to children, but also opens the world to children through the arts. And it does so ata time when research is showing substantial cognitive, social and emotional benefits tokids who participate deeply in the arts, regardless of socioeconomic status.

These are the proceedings of that meeting, requested by those who attended, by thoseinvited who could not attend and by many others who have heardabout the meeting and want to know more about it.

Why has Learning and the Arts sparked such interest? Why did theGund, Packard, Rhode Island and Surdna Foundations so eagerlycontribute funds to publish these proceedings? Why, since January,has the Rhode Island Foundation refocused the guidelines of a newinitiative in arts education? Why has the Skillman Foundationresolved to place a much higher priority on participation in the arts,rather than simply on exposure to the arts for youth?

Those of us who planned the meeting over a two-year period sus-pect a few reasons.

First, despite growing evidence that the arts can make significant contributions tochildren’s learning and development, arts education too often falls through the cracksbetween education and arts funding in foundations. Arts education is often consideredperipheral in education policy and is reduced to education about the arts in culturalorganizations. Learning and the Arts faced these problems head-on, and in these editedtranscriptions are found promising ideas for possible solutions.

1

Learning and the Arts:Crossing Boundaries

Introduction

”“New practice in arts

education not only

opens the world of

the arts to children,

it opens the world to

children through the

arts. —Nick Rabkin

2

Second, people resonate with the effort the meeting, whose subtitle was CrossingBoundaries, made to break out of traditional funding patterns. Many foundations senttwo or more program officers to insure a cross-fertilization of ideas when back at theirorganizations, and presentations were planned with the blended perspectives of arts,education and youth funders in mind.

Third, people understand that a record of new thinking, produced by innovativeminds in education, youth development and the arts, could have a lasting impact onwork we need to do within our foundations and nationally.

So we invite you in, either to revisit those three days or experience them for the firsttime. Join keynote speaker Ken Robinson, Professor of Arts andEducation at the University of Warwick in England, as he lays outhow the habits of mind cultivated effectively by the arts — creativi-ty, innovation, critical, synthetic and systemic thinking—hold thekey to meeting the needs of the 21st century’s new economy.

Reflect with Elliot Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education &Professor of Art at Stanford University’s School of Education, as heunveils ten competencies that the arts develop.

Venture with linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath,Professor of Linguistics and English at Stanford, into the complicated world of neuro-biological research—research that strongly suggests that deep engagement in the artshas significant consequences for brain development. And along with this challengingresearch, Heath sets forth compelling arguments for how effective arts education pro-grams in after-school settings can result in important gains in students’ cognitive, socialand emotional development.

Then shift, as the group did, from the left side of your brain to the right, and imag-ine what it was like for those 120 funders to spend the next two hours making art. TheArts Learning Experiences, led by master teaching artists and art educators in the per-forming, visual and literary arts, made clear that if we are truly to understand thepower and significance of the arts in education, then there is no lecture, research studyor university professor that can replace what one experiences while making art.

In a group debriefing and discussion, Robinson, Eisner, Heath and the teachingartists discussed the kinds of learning that took place in these sessions—authentic learn-ing that found the participants full of pride and a sense of accomplishment by sessions’end. And what most of us took away from that discussion, as we hope you will fromthe summary, is the responsibility funders have toward making sure that it is thesekinds of arts experiences that we support in and outside of schools.

We hope you will continue on to read about the session entitled Case Studies:Practitioners on Effective Partnerships. In this session, an elementary school principal anddirectors of a museum and a community cultural center discuss elements of effectivepartnerships, ones that offer ideas for moving authentic, arts-rich learning forward. Thesession ends with several strong suggestions for funders to pursue.

For a sobering view, struggle, as Rudy Crew did in his role as New York City SchoolChancellor, with getting the arts back into schools. He reflects Eisner and Robinsonwhen he urges that education be about developing the whole child—academic, social

”“Too often teachers are

employed to teach the

curriculum, not to

teach children.

—Ken Robinson

3

and personal. Crew argues that growth on all three fronts should be the goals of educa-tion, and the arts are at the crossroads of these three goals.

And finally, delve with three of the nation’s leading education researchers into cur-rent data demonstrating the rich cognitive and affective benefits that the arts provide toour students.

It is our hope that these proceedings will stoke the fires lit at the meeting and helpfulfill the promise of Learning and the Arts—the promise that funders, working togetherand across the boundaries of program areas and institutions, will find new ways to helpour nation’s children have the best educational and developmental opportunities possi-ble, opportunities that include the arts.

The work goes on. A smaller group of funders spent an additional day together inMay 2000 to consider how Learning and the Arts might take shape as a multifunder, multidisciplinary initiative. From that meeting, an expanded leadership team emergedthat includes leading funders in education and youth development, as well as the arts.

This team is currently considering opportunities for action, particularly in the areasof research, advocacy and field building. We work hoping that this promising roadmight lead us to the kind of grantmaking that ultimately redefines how children learn.

Alexandra Christy, Geraldine R. Dodge FoundationNick Rabkin, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur FoundationJanet Rodriguez, Geraldine R. Dodge FoundationVicki Rosenberg, J. Paul Getty Trust

Planning Committee, Learning and the Arts: Crossing BoundariesDecember 2000

ThanksWe are grateful to the George Gund Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard

Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation and the Surdna Foundation for their

support of the preparation and publication of these proceedings.

The planning committee would also like to thank Julie Abel of the Getty Trust,

Elaine Rastocky, Ulcca Joshi and RoseAnn DeBois of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

and Carlene Williams of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for their

cheerful, dedicated and reliable hard work carrying out the hundreds of details surround-

ing Learning and the Arts. An additional thanks to Jennifer Amdur Spitz for her fine work

editing and designing the Proceedings, to Susan Pilshaw of the Dodge Foundation for her

contribution to the final document, and to David Dik of the Metropolitan Opera Guild for

his gracious hospitality during our many planning meetings.

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Idon’t know who your heroes are, butPaul McCartney is one of mine. About a

year ago I got to meet him over lunch totalk about the future of the LiverpoolInstitute for Performing Arts. Paul is itspatron, and I’m its chief examiner. It’s hisold school. I told him I was fromLiverpool too, and he asked me whatschool I went to. I said I went to theCollegiate, because I did, which was aselective grammar. And he said, “Oh, Iwanted to go there.” And I said, “Whydidn’t you?” and he said, “I wasn’t goodenough.” I said, “Well, come on Paul, itworked out. Let it go, forget the school.”

The point is that people don’t. Itamazes me how many successful adultscarry with them some idea that they’re notreally very clever. What is it that we’re

doing to kids at schoolwhich makes so manypeople leave believingthey’re not very good?Or being demoralizedby the whole experi-ence? And, is this jus-tifiable? This is theseat of my interest inthe arts.

In most educationsystems throughout the world, the arts areat the margins. They’re optional, low sta-tus and not in the center of education pro-vision. That’s been the case now for thelast 150 years. It’s true in your system, it’strue throughout Europe and in Asia.

Now, education worldwide is under-going a revolution. That’s not too strong aword; it’s a complete revolution. The arts

need to be at the center of the new formsof education that are emerging. Privatefoundations have absolutely pivotal rolesin achieving the shift that’s required inrealigning the arts to the center of educa-tion. They can leverage the kind of inno-vation that’s needed. But to do that youhave to tackle three questions.

The first is, What are the arts? You canhave very interesting and amicable con-versations with people about the arts allday, providing you don’t say what you’retalking about.

The second is, What are the arts for ineducation? The phrase the creative arts is amisconception. The arts are not alwayscreative, and they don’t need to be, andother areas of education can be equallycreative if properly taught. These concep-tions separate the arts from other parts ofthe curriculum where they should be nat-urally joined up. That’s why crossingboundaries is such a good theme for thismeeting.

The third issue is provision. What kindof experiences do people need to benefit fromthe arts properly? One of the problems inmost of our school systems is that childrendo not have the kind of arts experiencesthey need to feel the positive benefits fromthem. So definition, function and provi-sion are key questions.

For the last year I have been leading anational inquiry for the government of theUnited Kingdom, the National AdvisoryCommittee on Creative and CulturalEducation (NACCCE). When Tony Blairwas elected prime minister in 1997, hesaid he had three priorities, “education,

Arts Education’s Place in aKnowledge-Based Global Economy

Ken RobinsonProfessor of Arts Education

University of Warwick

”“We cannot fulfill our

current economic

objective by just

doing better what we

used to do; we have

to educate differently.

5

education, education.” All countries arehaving to reposition themselves economi-cally, culturally and socially, and educa-tion is the key to that process. There isn’t acountry in the world that isn’t reformingits education system and talking aboutraising standards. Tony Blair also talksabout raising standards. The problem isthat he, like most political leaders, meansacademic standards in particular. Theyconfuse academic work in particular witheducation in general. Their more specificinterest is in literacy and numeracy. Theseare important but not enough.

Our education systems have beenbuilt on the economic model of industri-alism. The industrial economy required aworkforce that was 80% manual and 20%professional. Most of our education sys-tems were designed to pick out this 20%of kids and give them privileged accessto certain sorts of occupations. Thatmodel is changing irrevocably. We nolonger live essentially in an industrialeconomy, and the work force we neednow has a new pattern. We cannot fulfillour current economic objective by justdoing better what we used to do; wehave to educate differently.

Academic standards are very impor-tant but they’re very particular.Academic ability is not the whole ofyour intelligence. If the human mindwas restricted to academic intelligence,most of human culture would neverhave happened. There would be nopaintings, there would be no music, nolove, no intuition; there would be nodance, no feelings, no architecture, nodesign, nothing. I think these are ratherlarge factors to leave out of a model ofhuman intelligence.

The arts have been at the margins ofeducation because they have not beenseen as useful in getting jobs. This is part-ly because the practice of the arts does notconform to the dominant idea of academicintelligence. There’s a very interesting con-trast in this respect in universities, which

are the apotheosis of the academic system.If you’re a chemist in a university sciencedepartment doing research, you do chem-istry. If you’re in an art department at auniversity, you don’t paint; you writeabout painting. The reason is that ourdominant model of education doesn’t rec-ognize that the arts are essentially ways ofknowing. Research is defined as a system-atic inquiry for new knowledge. Yet, really,music, poetry, dance and painting areways of knowing things that we couldn’tknow in any other way. There are ideas,feelings and sensationsthat can only be under-stood in these ways.The arts are ways ofunderstanding.

The NACCCE com-mittee brings togetherartists, scientists, busi-ness people and educa-tors. One member ofmy committee is Professor Harry Kroto.He won the Nobel Prize for chemistrythree years ago. Harry is a professionaldesigner as well as a distinguished scien-tist. I asked him, “What is differentbetween the creative process of the artsand the sciences?” He said there was nodifference; that in both cases, it’s a dia-logue between speculation and tradition.He said, “The outcome is different but theprocess is the same.”

Another NACCCE member is SirSimon Rattle, director of the BerlinPhilharmonic. Sir Simon and I were dis-cussing the similarities between mathe-matics and music, both forms of represen-tation. If you don’t read music well andcome across a new musical score, you seea puzzle rather than hear the symphony.People who don’t speak mathematics canfind it an equally perplexing puzzle; theysee numbers rather than elegant solutions.

We owe it to children to give themaccess to all of these different modes ofunderstanding. Without them they neverengage with the real heart of themselves.

”“Education has to

say to [children],

“what can you do?”

rather than, “can

you do this?”

6

We’re creating a world of such immensecomplexity now that children need manyways of engaging in order to experience itfully. Education has to say to them, “whatcan you do?” rather than, “can you do this?”

In order to movearts to the center ofeducation, we need toaddress three issues.The first is the curricu-lum. I know of noargument that can besustained that mathe-matics is more impor-tant than music or thatscience is more impor-tant than arts andhumanities. These are

equally important. But all of our systemsperpetuate a hierarchy of ability in whichthe arts are at the bottom.

The second is the training of profession-al teachers and others. Teaching the arts isan expert job. It is not easy. A great disserv-ice has been done to the arts over the yearswith the general idea of free expression, thatall we have to do with children to get themto benefit from the arts is let them loose. Itisn’t true. To benefit from the arts childrenneed to be immersed in the disciplines andpractices of the arts. There’s a delicate bal-ance between learning skills and having thefreedom to innovate and speculate. Most ofour teachers and most of our artists are nottrained to do this.

The third is partnerships. Schoolsshould no longer be sole traders in educa-tion. There are thousands of organiza-tions—businesses, cultural organizations ofevery sort—that want to be and should bepartners in education.

These three, curriculum, trainingand partnership, are pivotal to movingforward this agenda of getting arts fromthe margins to the center. We have torecognize synergies, not separateness,between science and art, mathematics

and music. We have to recognize syner-gies between what goes on in schoolsand what goes on outside of schools. This is a job of melding different areasof children’s experiences.

Private foundations can do a hugeamount by setting up pilot projects,which provide evidence of success, bygenerating new models of practice andby advocacy. There is a genuine revo-lution happening out there. It isn’t thatwe need to consolidate the old system;we need to renew and reconstruct it.That’s a job for innovation, adventureand creativity, and your organizationscould be at the very heart of thatadventure.

Education is the key to the future.The arts are part of the combination.But a key can turn two ways. Our lead-ers keep talking about human resourcesand the need to unleash them.Education will do that but if you turnthis key the wrong way, you lock peoplein. I think we’ve done that systemati-cally for years.

The real trick is to turn the key a dif-ferent way so that we unlock people’spotential. That means developing a sys-tem of education which is mapped ontoa conception of human capacity ratherthan on some traditional model of aca-demic and nonacademic substitutes.That’s where we should start. Too oftenteachers are employed to teach the cur-riculum, not to teach children. To teachchildren we need to start with a view ofwhat their natural capacities are. Thatisn’t just a question for the arts; it’s forthe arts in combination with science andhumanities and physical education andthe rest.

Turning that key is the real challengewe face. It’s a challenge that can only bemet collaboratively and can only be metessentially as this conference has done —by crossing boundaries. Thank you.

”“These three,

curriculum, training

and partnership, are

pivotal to moving

forward this agenda of

getting arts from the

margins to the center.

27

1

The organizers of this meeting haveassigned me a particular topic. I have

been asked to “discuss the intellectual, cre-ative and developmental skills studentscan gain from learning in and through thearts, the arts in general education and thecurrent reform movement.”

First, work in the arts teaches chil-dren to pay attention to qualitative rela-tionships; attention to such relationshipsis critical for creating a coherent andsatisfying piece of work. How qualitiesinteract, whether in sight or sound,whether through prose or poetry,whether in the choreographed move-ment we call dance or in an actor’s linesand gestures-these relationships matter.They cannot be neglected, they are themeans through which the workbecomes expressive.

One of the most interesting and edu-cationally important features aboutworking with qualitative relationshipsis that deciding how they should becomposed depends upon somatic expe-rience, that sense, as Nelson Goodman(1978) called it, “of rightness of fit.” Isthis the right word to use here? Doesthis passage in the painting work? Doesthis section need a smoother transition?Is this color too raw? Questions likethese, which are crucial in the arts, can-not be answered by appealing to formu-la; their answers must be found byappealing to what can be felt.

Now reliance on somatic experienceto know that something fits is not limit-ed to the arts. To the extent to whichthe actual practice of doing science is anart, it too requires that judgments aboutthe rightness of an idea or theory be

determined, at least in part, by somaticexperience. In the arts—and whenfields of study and practices are treatedas arts-the somatic experience of rela-tionships is a central basis for makingjudgments.

What is striking is that so little in theschool curriculum affords children theopportunity to make such judgments.The school curriculum is heavilyweighted towards subject matter thatgives students the illusion that rightnessmeans correctness and that gettingthings right always depends upon fealtyto rule; spelling, arithmetic, writing asthey are usually taught are largelymimetic or rule abiding. Not so thearts. The arts aremost conspicuousin their insistencethat relationshipsare central and thatgood relationshipsare achieved whenthe mind works inthe service of feel-ing. As IsraelScheffler (1977)says, what we have in the arts is a cog-nitive use of the emotions. In thisdomain it is judgment rather than rulethat prevails.

Second, the arts teach children thatproblems can have more than one solu-tion and that questions can have morethan one answer. If they do anything,the arts embrace diversity of outcome.Standardization of solution and unifor-mity of response is no virtue in the arts.While the teacher of spelling is not par-ticularly interested in promoting the

”“What we have in the

arts is a cognitive use

of the emotions. In

this domain it is

judgment rather than

rule that prevails.

Ten Lessons the Arts TeachElliot Eisner

Lee Jacks Professor of EducationStanford University

4

3student’s ingenuity, the arts teacherseeks it.

Third, the arts celebrate multipleperspectives. One of their large lessonsis that there are many ways to see andinterpret the world. This too is a lessonthat is seldom taught in our schools.The multiple-choice objective test is anencomium to the single correct answer.That’s what makes the test “objective.”It is not objective because of the way thetest items were selected; it is objectivebecause of the way they are scored. Itmakes no allowance in scoring for thescorer to exercise judgment, that’s whymachines can do it. Reflect for amoment on the covert lessons such teststeach students.

When there are multiple ways ofaddressing a problem, a child’s individ-ual signature can be affixed to the work.It also enables the child to say, “Here Iam. This is how I see it.”

It is ironic that at a time when educa-tional reform pushes more and moretowards standardized assessment, uni-formity of program and homogeneity of

aims, a field that pro-vides balance to suchpriorities should beregarded as marginal.

From my per-spective the greaterthe pressure onschools to standard-ize, the greater the

need for the arts, those places whereindividuality and productive surpriseare celebrated.

Fourth, the arts teach children thatpurposes in complex forms of problemsolving are seldom fixed, but changewith circumstance and opportunity. Inso-called rational approaches to prob-lem-solving, the standard paradigmholds that goals and objectives must beclear and that once clear, means can bedesigned to attain those goals. Oncemeans are implemented, evaluation pro-

cedures can be used to determine if thegoals and objectives have been reached.If they have not, new and more effectivemeans can be used to recycle theprocess. It’s all very tidy. It’s all veryspic and span. Action is thought to fol-low purpose, andwhile means mayvary, objectives donot.

The problemwith this model isthat this is not theway life works; andit’s certainly not theway work in the artsproceeds. Purposes,as James March(1972) reminds us, evolve, they growout of action, action does not alwaysfollow purpose. Learning in the artsrequires the ability and willingness tosurrender to the unanticipated possibil-ities of the work as it unfolds. At itsbest, work in the arts is not a mono-logue delivered by the artist to thework, but a dialogue. It is a conversa-tion with materials, a conversationpunctuated with all of the surprisesand uncertainty that really stimulatingconversation makes possible. In thearts one looks for surprise, surprise thatredefines goals; purposes are held flexi-bly. The aim is more than impressinginto a material what you already know,but discovering what you don’t.

Fifth, the arts teach children thatdespite the cultural bias that assigns toliteral language and number a virtualmonopoly on how understanding isadvanced, the arts make vivid the factthat neither words in their literal formnor number exhaust what we can know.Put simply, the limits of our languagedo not define the limits of our cogni-tion. As Michael Polanyi (1966) says,we know more than we can tell.

The reduction of knowing to thequantifiable and the literal is, in my

8

”“Learning in the arts

requires the ability

and willingness to

surrender to the

unanticipated

possibilities of the

work as it unfolds.

”“The greater the

pressure on schools

to standardize, the

greater the need for

the arts. . .

5

69

view, too high a price to pay for defin-ing the conditions of knowledge. Whatwe come to know through literature,poetry and the arts is not reducible tothe literal. Why else would we readCharles Dickens, Elie Weisel, ArthurMiller, Tennyson or Emily Dickinson?Their work helps us walk in someoneelse’s shoes.

But empathic participation in thelives of others is not the only way thearts enlarge understanding. The artshelp us share the distinctive qualities ofexperience that a work of art itselfmakes possible.

The delicate contours of a Tangdynasty vessel, the power of a Colimaeffigy, the complex harmonies of a lateBeethoven quartet can be experiencedwhether you live in London, Beijing or

Los Angeles, as longas you know how toinquire into them.Learning how to con-duct such inquiries ispart of what it meansto have an arts edu-cation. I would go sofar as to say that ifthe arts are thoughtof as carriers of

meaning, and if the concept of literacyis extended to mean the ability toexpress and recover meaning within thecultural forms in which meaning canappear, then an education in the arts isone way to expand our literacy.

Sixth, the arts teach students thatsmall differences can have large effects.The arts traffic in subtleties. Payingattention to subtleties is not typically adominant mode of perception in theordinary course of our lives. We typical-ly see in order to recognize rather than toexplore the nuances of a visual field;how many of us here have really seenthe façade of our own house? I suspectfew. One test is to try to draw it. Wetend to look at our house or for our

house in order to know if we havearrived home, or to decide if it needs tobe painted, or to determine if anyone’sthere. Seeing its visual qualities andtheir relationships is much less common.

Yet learning to see and hear is pre-cisely what the arts teach; they teachchildren the art, not only of looking, butalso of seeing, not only of listening, butalso of hearing. They invite students toexplore the auditory contours of a musi-cal performance, the movements of amodern dance, the proportions of anarchitectural form so that they can beexperienced as art forms. Seeing insuch situations is slowed down and putin the service of feeling.

But if you think my interests are lim-ited to the fine arts, let me assure youthat I have no appetite to limit the scopeof aesthetic experience to the fine arts.Reflections on the wet pavement of citystreets, cloud formations, billboardposters ripped from the walls of abuilding and displaying the luscioussurface of a collage are also candidatesfor the kind of seeing I am talkingabout. There is, however, a differencebetween such forms and what we thinkof as works of art. Works of art partici-pate in a tradition, they are investedwith intention by their creators, they area part of a social context, and they havebeen influencedby their history.Understandingsuch conditionsmatter. After all,anything seen canbe seen from apurely formal per-spective, fromgarbage cans tosnowflakes. Theperception ofworks of art, and Iinclude the arts ofpopular culture as well, require more.

Seventh, the arts teach students to”“The arts traffic in

subtleties. . . . They

teach children the

art, not only of

looking, but also of

seeing, not only of

listening, but also of

hearing.

”“The arts make vivid

the fact that neither

words in their literal

form nor number

exhaust what we can

know.

7

10

think through and within a material.All art forms employ some meansthrough which images become real. Inmusic it is patterned sound; in dance itis the expressive movement of a dancerin motion; in the visual arts it is visualform on a canvas, a block of granite, asheet of steel or aluminum; in theaterit’s a complex of speech, movement andset. Each of these art forms uses materi-als that impose upon those using them acertain set of constraints. They makecertain demands. They also provide anarray of affordances.

Materials offer distinctive opportu-nities. To realize such opportunities,the child must be able to convert amaterial into a medium. For this tooccur, the child must learn to thinkwithin the affordances and constraintsof a material and to employ techniquesto make the conversion of a materialinto a medium possible. A material isnot the same as a medium or viceversa. Material is the stuff you workwith. A medium is something thatmediates. What does something medi-ate? It mediates the choices, decisions,

ideas and imagesthat the individualhas. The problem forthe child is to takesome material—drawings, paintings,sculptures—andthink within the con-straints and affor-dances of that mate-rial the shape thatthat image needs totake. For example, ifyou give a youngster

a ball of plasticine clay and ask him tosculpt a tree, you’ll get one kind of animage. If you ask him to draw a tree,you’ll get another kind of image. Whatthe youngster is doing is working withthe structural equivalents of the idea oftree within the constraints and the

affordances of the material-a sophisti-cated form of thinking.

This conversion process occurs notonly within the material; it also occurswithin the child for it is through thework of art that we make ourselves.The “work of art” is what one doeswhen engaged in an activity in whichthe end view is something aesthetic.Thus the phrase “work of art” refers toboth the task of making art and theresult of such work. It is both a nounand a verb. It is activity whose conse-quences live notonly in the objectbut also in themaker. The workof art is both aproduct and ameans throughwhich we makeourselves.

The arts areabout recreation,the emphasis on “re-creation.” What isbeing re-created? Oneself. One of thegreat aims of education is to make itpossible for people to be engaged in theprocess of creating themselves. Artistsand scientists are alike in this respect.The inventive ones are troublemakers.The trouble that they make is for them-selves because what they do is generateproblems. The generation of thoseproblems creates disequilibrium in theirhomeostatic system, which is a motivat-ing force in trying to resolve that prob-lem. In that process of resolution, theindividual gets redefined by the quali-ties, ideas and skills that he or shedevelops in trying to cope with thoseproblems. With the arts, we have a setof activities that deal with the problemof trying to create qualitative relation-ships that satisfy some image of aesthet-ic virtue as the youngster sees it.

How does the remaking of ourselvesoccur? First, works of art often de-familiarize aspects of the world by

”“Each of the art forms

uses materials that

impose upon those

using them a certain

set of constraints.

They make certain

demands.

”“One of the great aims

of education is to

make it possible for

people to be engaged

in the process of

creating themselves.

811

recontextualization. Marcel Duchamp’surinal entitled The Fountain and placedin a museum, represents an invitation tosee, in a new way and, in the process,calls attention not only to the work itselfbut to what counts as art.

A second source of remaking is thatworks of art focus attention on whatwould normally go unseen. When thearts are well taught they can reframe thestudent’s perception of the world.

This reframing can take place fromthe “lessons” that the works of othersteach, as well as through the students’efforts to reframe them on their own.The arts provide permission for suchreframing. Although new theories inscience also represent a reframing, inscience we usually expect some corre-spondence between a scientific repre-sentation and what we refer to as reali-ty. In the arts the scope for a “no holdsbarred” imaginative reframing is notconstrained by such expectations.

An eighth lesson the arts teach hasto do with the nature of discourse aboutart. Talk about the arts makes somespecial demands on those who speakabout them. Think, for a moment,about what is required to describe thequalities of a jazz saxophone solo byJohn Coltrane, the surface of a paintingby Helen Frankenthaler or the expres-sive character of a bronze sculpture byBarbara Hepworth. The task is not toreplicate in language the qualities theseworks possess because clearly no suchreplication is possible. It is rather toimply through language qualities thatare themselves ineffable, hence the trickis to say what cannot be said. It is herethat innuendo and connotation areamong our strongest allies. It is herethat that most powerful of linguisticcapacities, metaphor, comes to the res-cue. Using metaphor, Suzanne Langer(1952) reminds us, is a way of sayingsomething one way and expecting to beunderstood in another. Metaphor

adumbrates, it does not translate.When children are given the oppor-

tunity to describe, discuss and interpretwhat they see, when they are invited todisclose what a work helps them feel,they must reach into their poetic capaci-ties to find the words that will do thejob. This is a job that is well known tothem for it emerges in the neologisms oftoddler talk and it appears in the ver-nacular poetry we call slang. Criticismin the arts is not only a way to describewhat you have seen, it is also a road tosight. The critical act, the task of tryingto articulate what is before us, is also away of discovering what is there.

Ninth, the arts enable us to haveexperience we can have from no othersources and through such experience todiscover the range and variety of whatwe are capable of feeling.

Consider theexperience weundergo in the pres-ence of a truly greatpiece of architecture,Frank LloydWright’s FallingWater, for example,or music such asBeethoven’s“Hallelujah Chorus”from Christ on theMount of Olives.Some works of arthave the capacity toput us into anotherworld. So stirring isthe journey that wesurrender to wherethe work takes us.

I am fully aware that such experi-ences are not the common stock-in-tradeof the average eight-year-old. As one ofmy former painting teachers once toldme, great works of art require greataudiences. Eight-year-olds typically arenot yet great audiences, but we wish tohelp them be. We wish to help them

”

“Criticism in the arts

is not only a way to

describe what you

have seen, it is also

a road to sight. The

critical act, the task

of trying to articulate

what is before us,

is also a way of

discovering what is

there.

9

12

learn how to read—and create—suchimages. In short, we want to help themacquire the forms of literacy that willgive them access to such work and tothe joy, delight and insight they makepossible. If this is elitism then weshould try to expand the elite.

I have been describing what the artsteach by identifying some of the cogni-tive processes they require, but I havebeen describing these processes as if theyfunctioned independently. They do not.They interact. What this means, forexample, is that attention to nuance mustbe addressed at the same time one isattending to matters of composition, thatpurposes must be treated flexibly whileone is attending to matters of technique,that thought in language and thought inimage function simultaneously. Far frombeing simple, the creation of an image,whether visual, musical, choreographicor dramatic, is a complex form of humanachievement in which everything affectseverything else.

Such educational achievements havedeep importance and they take time.We are all too eager to attain education-al ends that might not really matter.The national preoccupation with“world-classness” in this or that subject“by the year 2000” typically pushes ustoward short-term goals, not lasting

effects. We are tooeager to settle forattention to symp-toms and to problem-atic proxies for quali-ty education.

We need to learnhow to take a longer-

term view and to be held accountablefor more than the merely measurable.The lessons that the arts teach requiretime, attention and skilled teachers whoknow what they are after.

We are after much more than whatcan be displayed on the refrigeratordoor. When that image dominates the

public’s conception of what the arts arefor, the arts will remain marginal, andwhen that image dominates the teachingof the arts, they should remain marginal.

A tenth lesson the arts teach, and thelast one I will describe, pertains to mat-ters of value. The position of the arts inthe school curriculum symbolizes to theyoung what adults believe is important.The values the young internalize are sel-dom internalized by admonition; theypermeate the environment and seep inslowly like water through the sand.Values are conveyed through the formsof life in which theyparticipate. For chil-dren these forms oflife are made palpa-ble by the valuechoices that theadults around themmake. Among themost important ofthese choices is whatschools shouldteach. The curriculum of the schoolshapes children’s thinking. It is a mind-altering device; it symbolizes whatadults believe is important for the youngto know, what is important to be good at.It tells the young which human aptitudesare important to possess. It gives ordenies children opportunities to learnhow to think in certain ways.

Since children are compelled by lawto spend the major portion of their child-hood in school, the modus vivendi of theschool, and especially the course theymust run and the criteria used to deter-mine who among them is the swiftest,matters a great deal. Curriculum deci-sions, therefore, about content inclusion,content exclusion and content marginal-ization help shape the forms of life thatconstitute school. The school socializes insuch powerful and ubiquitous ways thathow it does so is hardly noticed.

The value of a subject of study is notonly a function of its presence in the

”“The position of the

arts in the school

curriculum

symbolizes to the

young what adults

believe is important.

”“The lessons that the

arts teach require

time, attention and

skilled teachers . . .

10

13

curriculum; it is also a function of theamount of time the school devotes to it.Indeed, the most telling index of theimportance of a field of study is notfound in school district testimonies, butin the amount of time it receives andwhen it is taught in the school day andweek. Add to these considerations therelationship between what is tested andwhat is regarded as important and youhave a recipe for defining what countsin school.

I want to make it clear that in point-ing out the virtual absence of testing inthe arts, I am not advocating that stu-dents be tested in the arts. I do, ofcourse, advocate that teachers evaluatethe student’s work, their curriculumand their own teaching so that the pro-grams they provide can be strength-ened, but that is another matter.

The point here is that as a result of acollection of decisions, the general mes-sage conveyed to students regarding thearts is that they are marginal to theschool’s central purposes. That is amessage that needs to be changed.Bringing about that change will requireboth educational and political initia-tives. Educational initiatives enablethose who shape curriculum decisionsto secure a deeper understanding ofwhat the arts teach, and political onesbring to bear on those same individualsa collective pressure to provide theyoung with opportunities to havemeaningful access to the arts.

In my comments to you I describedten lessons the arts teach. These lessonspertained to the kind of thinking thearts promote. Far from the ornamentalfunctions usually assigned to them, thearts practice and develop modes ofthought that are most complex and sub-tle. The ability to make choices aboutrelationships in the absence of rule,attention to nuance, the ability toexploit the unexpected, learning how to

deal effectively with tasks that havemultiple solutions, finding words thatsay what words cannot say — these aresome of the lessons I have described.

If I were to summarize these contri-butions in three simple terms, I wouldsay that the arts contribute to thegrowth of mind, meaning and experi-ence. They contribute to the growth ofmind for all the reasons I described.They afford the young opportunities tolearn how to think in particular ways,ways that may be closer to the tasks ofthe life they will lead than what theynormally encounter in school.

The arts contribute to the growth ofmeaning because they teach the younghow to access meanings that elude theimpress of the literal. The arts areappealed to at marriages, courtships,religious rites and funerals. We usethem in our most tender moments toexpress what transcends ordinary lan-guage. We also use them to walk insomeone else’s shoes. They help usunderstand whattheory cannotexplain.

The arts con-tribute to thegrowth of experi-ence because theyremind us of howit feels to be alive,to be moved bywhat others or we have made. The arts,for all of their instrumental value, are,in the end, about learning how to betouched. They are about the enrich-ment of life.

Happily our nation is seeing a grow-ing interest in the arts and what theycan do for the young. Happily you arehere to help that interest grow and tohelp make our children its beneficiaries.As someone who has been working atthis task for over three decades, I’mvery glad to have you aboard.

”“To summarize . . .

the arts contribute to

the growth of mind,

meaning and

experience.

14 109

87

65

43

21

Ten Lessons the Arts TeachElliot Eisner

The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, itis judgment rather than rules that prevail.

The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solutionand that questions can have more than one answer.

The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are manyways to see and interpret the world.

The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solvingpurposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and oppor-tunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness tosurrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust whatwe can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.The arts traffic in subtleties.

The arts teach students to think through and within a material.All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.When children are invited to disclose what a work of arthelps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacitiesto find the words that will do the job.

The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Crossing boundaries becomes anordinary part of the process of

inquiry when scholars of human devel-opment attempt to explain learning—especially if they attempt to tie particu-lar kinds of learning with specific con-texts. What follows here is a brief storyof my crossing over from my usual dis-ciplines—linguistics and anthropology—into neurobiology and cognitive sci-ence in order to understand just howlinguistic development might be influ-enced by intensive work in the arts.

By now the story of my search forlearning environments of the nonschoolhours that attract young people oftenunreached by academic opportunities isfamiliar to members of the arts world.Notable about this research is the factthat of the kinds of organizations Ifound, those that centered in the arts,particularly theatre, visual arts anddance, were particular draws for thoseyoung people whose lives were markedby critical high risk factors such as vio-lent schools and unstable economic sup-port for their families. In youth organi-zations that pull them into heavy partic-ipation both as artists and as real play-ers in the organization’s life and struc-ture, these young people reflect certainpositive cognitive, social and linguisticfeatures at significant levels in compari-son with youth in a national sample ofstudents. [These findings are summa-rized in the 1998 Monograph of Americansfor the Arts and in ArtShow: Youth andCommunity Development, 1999, availablefrom Partners for Livable Communities,www.livable.com.]

These young people, in planning,creating and critiquing their joint work,gain extensive practice in hearing andproducing the highly complex languageof planning they need for scientific rea-soning and strategy building. Gainingthis kind of language in later develop-ment takes considerable practice asspeaker and opportunity as listener. Forexample, in the exemplary youth organ-izations where young people participateat least ten hours per week, they quick-ly pick up on the importance of think-ing hypothetically (“what if...?” “howabout...?” or “if a, b or c, then d andq...”). They also gain extensive practicein producing extended pieces of text,oral and written, in large part throughcarrying out the numerous roles theyplay within their organizations—asmembers of budget, building, fundrais-ing and management committees.Specific arts performances or exhibi-tions involve them in further roles, asthey plan advertising and marketing,order food and beverages and developdetailed lists of props and equipmentneeded for shows that travel. The ini-tiative and incentive to carry out thesetasks come from group pressure thatstresses the highest level of achievementpossible. Motivation and emotionalengagement intensify learning.

Intensive ongoing work in the artsprovides extensive modeling and prac-ticing the same kind of language andstrategy-building as the highest levels ofacademic achievement. Because com-munity organizations involve youngpeople of different age groupings, mod-

15

Seeing Our Way into LearningShirley Brice Heath

Professor of Linguistics and EnglishStanford University

2

31

els of this kind of talking and thinkingcome not only from adults, but alsofrom older youth.

A sizable proportion of hypotheti-cal language comes in the context ofseeing and looking closely, focusingon visual details—that color, that line,that movement in dance, that gesturein a dramatic scene. To talk aboutthese details requires pinpointing,focusing quite literally, holding atten-tion and drawing on metaphor. All ofthese are in the service of explainingwhat is held in close focused atten-tion, while identifying a problem andposing possible solutions.

The simultaneity of visual focus andverbal explication has in the pastdecade become an area of study forneurobiologists using positron emissiontomography, better known as PET scan-ning, to study brain activity duringthese co-occurrences. Such work doesnot, by any means, provide a cause-and-effect answer to any questions we mayhave about learning, but this researchhas raised four points of keen interest tolinguists who study learning in the con-text of specific actions, such as sus-tained eye focus for attention to detail.

1) Selective attention to an objectfeature, such as color, results inincreased activity in regions that medi-ate perception—or interpretation—ofthat feature. Naming of these featuresfurther engages brain regions that medi-ate perception, particularly with respectto those regions associated withretrieval of previously acquired infor-mation about that feature. Research ofneurobiologists and neurophysicistsindicates how focused attention onvisual details and features—so critical totalk about the arts—draws in parallelways on higher-level functions such asmemory, retrieved information andmeaning generation.

2) The talk that is generated withinarts work then depends on correlations

in different domains (form, depth, color)and grouping or linking multiple fea-tures into unitary clusters that derive inlarge part from perception or meaningmaking. Thus when features are dis-cerned and centered on through visualfocus, what happens amounts to map-ping in which the image schematastructure calls on perceptual interac-tions, bodily experiences and cognitiveoperations in parallel. In brain research,this is often called the “binding prob-lem” — how do we put the sensetogether with the naming with relevantmemory? Coming to be conscious of artdepends on reciprocity of connectionswhereby peripheral topographic areasof the sensory brain act as an internalsketchpad in a cyclic process of control-ling and observing that amount toreflecting. This is a creative loop inwhich we are constantly bootstrappingwhat is called for by a focus on the sen-sory onto our memory of images,knowledge of symbols and links tosymbolic transactions.

3) The third feature of what happensin the focusing of attention and talk andgesturing in the arts is demand for ana-logical reasoning. We now know muchmore than we did even five years agoabout what it is that constitutes suchreasoning. Three critical componentshave been isolated:

a) identifying important attributesand ignoring irrelevant information

b) inferring relationships amongcomponents and using a description ofthe new problem to retrieve from mem-ory an earlier problem it resembles

c) then deciding how well the solu-tion to the old problem applies to thecurrent problem.

To accomplish such reasoning, cog-nitive strategies of all types are calledon. Handling these for abstract con-cepts depends on having experience invisual attention. Both measures of sus-tained visual attention and demonstra-

16

4tion of abilities to remember a prioriexperience and link components of thisexperience to the one at hand are nowamong the first “measures” or indica-tors of intelligence prediction in veryyoung infants.

4) What must happen for one to bean artist is development of the self-dis-cipline necessary to make focus of atten-tion possible. Normal vision does nottake in all details but instead selects andcategorizes those that seem to make acritical difference. Art demands intensefocus to determine just which details domake these differences and the effectsthat might result through changes inshape, alignment, proportion or place-ment of details.

These four preliminary suggestionsfrom brain research begin to indicatewhy crossing disciplinary boundariesfrom the social sciences into brain sci-ences may aid our understanding of justhow intensive participation as artisticcreators works as context for certainkinds of linguistic and cognitive devel-opment. How can we see our way intolearning in the arts?

The approach here may seem dis-tasteful to some who wish to focus onart as aesthetic experience with anopaque basis. Art’s value derives from

the ways in which it arouses, disturbs orpleases us as individuals, and to pro-fane it physiologically seems to simplifythe secrets of imagination and creativity.There is certainly substance to thatargument. But I would hope that thesmall steps we are likely to make inunderstanding the workings of thebrain are never likely to compromiseour appreciation of art any more thanour understanding of the working ofthe human heart spoils our sense oflove. Similarly our understanding ofhow the visual brain works will nevercompromise our appreciation of themiracle of sight. Certainly for me as lin-guist, opening the door to understand-ing the neurobiological foundations oflearning in the arts enhances my appre-ciation for artists through the ages.Moreover, this information helps tobuild a keen sense of anticipation foryoung artists of the future if we canexpand their opportunities to work,teach and learn through the arts.

NOTE: For expansion of the ideasgiven here, see article of the same title(2000) in Cambridge Journal of Education,30, 1 (121-132) and Zeki, S. (1999) Artand the Brain. Journal of ConsciousnessStudies 6/7 (76-96).

17

18

At the heart of Learning and the Arts were extended arts learning workshopsled by leading practitioners from across the nation. Their purpose was to

provide intensive learning experiences reflecting the most current practices and tohelp shake off antiquated notions of what arts education can be and is. Eachworkshop began with discussions about how the particular lesson would be con-ducted with children in elementary, middle or secondary schools; a lengthyimmersion in a learning experience that included art making or performance; anda time for workshop leaders and funders to talk about a range of relevant issues.Each group reported on their experiences. Funders exhibited their still life draw-ings, read poems, sang a key passage in an opera they’d written and read inter-pretive writing to accompany videos they’d produced.

As Ken Robinson noted during the Practitioner’s Panel that followed the work-shops, the rapt expressions on funders’ faces as they emerged from the workshopsand shared their performance or art work reflected the deep level of engagementstudents can reach when learning in and through the arts.

The workshops were:

Arts Learning Experiences

You Gotta Be the Book: Theatre,Videography, Visual Arts

Workshop Leaders:Arnold Aprill, Executive Director, Chicago

Arts Partnership in EducationDeidre Searcy, Director of Arts Education,

Street Level Youth MediaCynthia Weiss, Director of Professional

Development, Chicago ArtsPartnership in Education

This workshop showed how arts literacyand the reading/writing process couldintersect in exciting new ways. A commu-nity of readers and artists was formed asparticipants responded to memoir textsthrough drama, visual arts and video.

Getting into the Central Garden

Workshop Leader: Marilyn Stewart,Professor of Arts Education, KutztownUniversity, Pennsylvania

Participants experienced, reflected uponand discussed the garden as an artform. Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at

the Getty Center was the catalyst forparticipants to think deeply about thecultural and personal significance of art.

Still Life Thinking

Workshop Leader:Ron Yrabedra, Professor of Art

Education, Florida A & M University

Participants viewed 17th century Dutchstill life paintings as emblems of a joy inlife’s pleasures and of life’s temporality.They viewed works in the Getty Museumand were guided through art criticalexplorations, through the actual drawingof a still life and discussion of how theselearning episodes fit within the context ofcritical thinking and school reform.

From Score to Stage

Workshop Leaders:David Dik, Director of Education,

Metropolitan Opera GuildSteve Weinstock, Teaching Artist,

Metropolitan Opera Guild

Participants created a slice of an originalopera, including dialogue, a musicalmoment and a setting. The session culminat-ed in a performance of the work. The “com-pany” comprised the participating funders,each experiencing the various creative, tech-nical and performance skills required to com-plete the task. The emphasis of this work-shop was to create an original work and toexamine and experience the method neces-sary to do so.

The Earl & the Sheriff

Workshop Leader:Ellen Broderick, Manager for Student,

Teacher and Family Audiences, J. Paul Getty Museum

Participants were guided through twoteaching and learning experiences withpaintings in the Getty Museum galleries.Working both in teams and individually,participants practiced a mixture of visu-al, verbal and simple written strategiesto develop a relationship with eachpainting resulting in the pleasure ofauthentic personal interpretation.

Reflections on the ArtsLearning Experiences

Ken Robinson, Elliot Eisner, ShirleyBrice Heath and the leaders of each

of the arts experience sessions gatheredin plenary to reflect on the meaning ofthose sessions with participants. Thisedited version of the transcript startswith a series of comments on the dis-tinct powers of each of the arts disci-plines to leverage learning and develop-ment in different ways.

It moves to consideration of how thepresence of the arts transforms andenriches learning environments andcloses with some suggestions for futurework.

Nick Rabkin: We’re going to move 12chairs up in front for the next conversa-tion. If the artist/teachers who werepart of this and Elliot, Shirley and Kenwill join us, we’ll move ahead. This isthe final arts exercise of the day. It’s ourversion of an early Mel Brooks movie.

It is an opportunity for us to reflecton the experiences we had during theart learning exercises, to connect themto the ideas and themes of the talks byKen, Elliot and Shirley, and to ask anyquestions that you haven’t had a chanceto ask.

Question: We’re trying to identify themost authentic arts in education experi-ences that will move kids closer to thekind of world Elliot, Shirley and Kenhave described to us. Which of the exer-cises that we did have the qualities thatdo that?

Elliot Eisner: I’ll remind you of thequalities. All of the activities were verygenerative. In one case, it was a matterof transforming images into descriptivematerial that characterized the image.Participants had to, first, experience thequality of the image, its affective, itsexpressive character, whether it was theportrait or the landscape. And they hadto transform that qualitative experienceinto some kind of linguistic equivalent.

That’s like the process that mostwriters engage in. The writer starts withvision and ends with words. The readerstarts with the writer’s words and endswith vision. What you’ve got here isthis transformative process. This is anactivity that, as I said, slows down per-ception and engages them in a task thatenables them to come out with a work.

The task in a curriculum is not the sin-gle event; it’s where you go with it. That is,you need to build up this material overtime so it becomes increasingly subtle,complex, incisive—only then will it have allof the virtues that we would like to have.

19

Question: Could you comment on thedistinctions among the different typesof art. Does music have something moreto offer kids than visual arts, dance ortheater?

Elliot Eisner: The differences are impor-tant. Dance and music are diachronicforms, meaning that they exist over

time. In visual arts,the synchronic artform, you see a con-figuration all atonce. Each of theseart forms requiresdifferent kinds oftechnical skills. Andeach of the art formsimpose differentrequirements on theindividual.

What they havein common is thesensuous surface.What they share,

whether you’re dancing, listening tomusic, reading a poem or making apainting, is that the meaning resides inthe ways in which the qualities havebeen organized. In general, the com-monality among the arts is in the shap-ing of expressive form. And thedemands are different because the mate-rials are different and the use of time isdifferent.

Shirley Brice Heath: I can respond interms of the nonschool stuff. Certainly,in terms of the payoff, theater is thething that makes the greatest differencebecause of the fact that it’s able to incor-porate so many of the different arts,everything from dance to music to thetechnical aspects. So you get a broaderrange of experience through theater.And what’s extremely important forthose of us worried about literacy is thatthere is just so much writing and somuch involvement with extended textin theater that I was astounded. And

certainly in terms of the linguistic evi-dence, with theater you get a greaterrange of genres, and all sorts of genresin oral and written language.

David Dik: I think we’d see the samekind of growth in music if we allowedthe students to actually compose works.Very often, music programs are designedso that students learn how to imitate andperform only. If we did more with stu-dents learning to take and use the lan-guage of music, learn how to create it, wewould see the same type of growth.

Nick Rabkin: It’s worth noting thatevery garage band quickly gets to thepoint of writing their own songs, but noschool marching bands do. [Laughter]Ken?

Ken Robinson: All the arts use differ-ent media and different materials. I sawWynton Marsalis the other week, andthe man is himself with a trumpet. Andyou don’t say, Well this is all very well,but he’s hopeless on the violin.[Laughter]

You don’t feel he’s diminished forthat. And a lot of this, the excitement ofthe arts for people is finding their medi-um, finding the material that excitesthem. That’s part of the need, I think,for a balanced arts education. It isn’tenough just to give children experiencewith one form or another.

Elliot’s point this morning was thatthe process of the arts is a kind of dia-logue between meaning and material.And you don’t know at the beginningwhat’s going to come out at the end.But you have to love the material tohave the conversation with it.

I don’t know if I mentioned I hadmet Paul McCartney. Did I mentionthat? [Laughter] It isn’t just the material.It’s also the genre. You know, I mean,what would he have been without rockmusic and the guitar? It’s a seriouspoint. People come alive in a certain

20

”“You need to build up

this material over

time so it becomes

increasingly subtle,

complex, incisive—

only then will it have

all of the virtues that

we would like to

have. —Elliot Eisner

cultural context as well. It’s why it isn’tjust a question of giving people freedomto express themselves; you have toimmerse them in a discipline of somesort. People feed off other people’s stim-ulation. It’s why creativity is linked tosome conception of culture. It’s a dia-logue with others as well as a conversa-tion with the material.

Question: What does the term mediaarts conjure up in terms of thinking aboutwhere art or art education may be going?

Diedre Siercy: My organization is amedia arts organization, and it bringstogether artists of different disciplineswho have found their way using thesetools that we refer to as technology.Using computers not just as these inter-esting magic boxes, but really takingthem and using them and finding waysof speaking and expressing with them,of helping youth find voice—authenticvoice—using these things. There are realopportunities there in terms of their rec-ognizing a whole different way ofexpressing themselves.

Ken Robinson: It’s quite a usefulterm; it’s a bit meaningless, too. I mean,as you said, what it connotes is peopleusing new technologies. But artists havealways used technology. Always. Andyou can get led into all kinds of unhelp-ful debates, you know — can a televi-sion program be a work of art? Showme the program is the answer.

When photography developed in the19th century, there were huge debateswith the painters saying that a photo-graph can’t be a work of art. Of course,you could understand this, because theywere spending three months doing aportrait, and somebody came alongwith a Kodak and just kind of immedi-ately... And so the only way they couldcounter this influence was to say, well,it’s not as good as the work that we do.

But the truth of it is that photogra-

phy redefined art. Photography can pro-duce art in the hands of an artist. It’sabout intention; it’s about the quality ofthe result. A video camera in the handof an artist can produce art. Plasticenecan produce art. Anything can produceart in the hands of an artist. It’s anintention and the result.

What’s exciting about the media artsis that kids respond to them. They’re inthere and they can see possibilities thatpeople who haven’t grown up withthem can’t see.

Elliot was saying earlier that artpractice represents the multiplicity ofour intelligence. We can think in all theways in which we experience. We canthink visually; we can think in terms ofmovement, in terms of touch. We canthink in terms ofsound. And the dif-ferent art forms arethe result of theinteraction betweenour natural capaci-ties, the availabletechnologies and thecultural context inwhich these thingsdevelop. They comeand go. You know,in the Renaissancethe major art formwas the mask.Doesn’t exist any-more as an art form. The major art formof the 20th century is the novel. Didn’texist three centuries ago. They comeand go. But what’s consistent is thisneed for expression and for meaningmaking using the full range of our intel-ligences and the materials that we haveat hand.

I think media arts are at the stagethat photography was in at the end ofthe last century. It’s a new landscape.

Comment: I am fearful that with theproliferation of after-school programs, thearts will be limited to after-school activity.

21

”“We need to find

mechanisms that

support authentic

learning experiences

in school, that connect

the life of kids in

schools with the life

of kids out of schools.

—Arnold Aprill

Arnold Aprill: One of the advantagesof the out-of-school programs is theycan engage kids in a deep, complex,cognitive, reflective process. One of theproblems with the way schooling isstructured is it tends to work againstthis depth and engagement.

However, the job of kids is school.And unless learning that happens inschool becomes more connected to thereal lives and learning of kids, as Kenwas talking about in his openingremarks, our schools are doomed. So,

the schools tend tobe a limiting forceon the positivelearning factors thatarts bring to educa-tion. We need tofind mechanismsthat support authen-tic learning experi-ences in school, thatconnect the life ofkids in schools withthe life of kids out ofschools. And weneed to find notonly exemplaryprojects that do this,but some sort of sys-tems and mecha-

nisms and pressures that help systemsstart to scale this up as policy.

Question: It seems that arts teachershaven’t been very effective advocatesfor their own disciplines in schools.What would you advise us as fundersto do to help build stronger advocacycoming from the arts teachers in theschools?

Cynthia Weiss: An elementary artteacher can be one of the most degrad-ing jobs you could possibly have,because many of the jobs are art-on-a-cart. You have to move from room toroom. You have up to 1000 students.

And most of the other teachers in theschool perceive the art teacher as beingthe person who’s going to allow them togo do their prep work.

But we’ve seen a number of artteachers transformed from that role tobecoming the leaders in the schools.That’s happened through a series ofprojects that have had a real public role.An example: an art teacher in a schoolat the large public housing high risecomplex, Cabrini Green, did an installa-tion for a show called Spiritual Passports.Cabrini is being demolished and its resi-dents are being forced to change theirlives as their homes are eliminated. Hetook the idea of transformations andasked the kids to make artwork aboutthe transformation of their homes andneighborhood.

He had kids ask their parents forstories about the housing project: high-rises were filled with stories. Then theytook memory boxes and filled themwith found objects and text and repre-sentations of the stories from Cabrini.The boxes were then used to “recon-struct” the high rises that were beingdemolished, and the entire constructionwas installed in a gallery at a majorexhibition that was covered by thepress. So all of a sudden, kids’ stories,parents’ stories, what was happening inCabrini became open and accessible forthe rest of the city. Kids from otherschools in the Cabrini area came whohad no idea that the substance of theirlives was a subject that you could usefor an art project.

Now the art teacher is a leader in theschool. We can put art teachers in posi-tions where they’re not isolated, wherethey really become leaders. We’ve seenthat happen again and again whenthey’re working together in teams.

Ken Robinson: Yesterday I was sayingthat the reason the arts don’t get theirdue in education is because they seem to

22

”

“An elementary art

teacher can be one of

the most degrading

jobs you could

possibly have . . .

but we can put art

teachers in positions

where they’re not

isolated, where they

really become leaders.

—Cynthia Weiss

be outside the main agenda. They don’tfit with the economic agenda as per-ceived, and they don’t fit with the domi-nant view of intelligence as perceived.

My answer at this moment is to nottalk about “the arts.” The trouble is,when you say “art,” you engage all theprejudices you’re trying to avoid. Theword engages a set of preconceptionsthat has already derailed the conversa-tion for you.

Our government keeps saying, “weneed to make the most of our humanresources. We need to promote creativi-ty to meet the demands of this century.We need to cope with a rapid culturalchange in a world of global culturaldevelopment.” Creativity and cultureare two big issues for every governmentin the world. And the arts are about

those two things. So it seems to merather than say, Let’s talk about the arts,and then explain what they have to dowith the agenda, let’s just go straight tothe main agenda and say, We’re talkingabout creativity and culture. And thenwe can show how the arts fit into it.

You know, that little snip of film thatShirley showed, I mean, the thing thatreally struck me is what always struckme; it’s the look on those kids’ faces, ofjust concentration. They were rapt. Andthe second time I saw that look was thisafternoon when you were doing yourfeedback from the arts learning experi-ences groups. You’d had the same expe-rience, that intense concentration ofbeing enraptured by something and oftaking it deadly seriously ‘cause itmeant something to you.

23

24

Researchers, including Shirley BriceHeath, cite community centers,

settlement and neighborhood houses,and churches, as having some of thestrongest arts-in-education programs inthe country. Their research also sug-gests that these same after-school,Saturday and summer programs aretypically located in communities whosepublic schools are currently failing.

These programshave helped save thelives of children byproviding effectivearts instruction, andbuilding self-esteemand leadership capa-bilities. They appearto be quite expert atsupporting youngpeople’s learning aswell as their socialand emotionaldevelopment.

These programsare small and fragile,and their futures are

uncertain. They mean a great deal to afairly small number of young people.When partnered with institutions, likeschools, that have serious institutionalheft and reach most children, theseprograms could have far more signifi-cance. Their power could be magni-fied, and they could reach a scale thatis unimaginable as small communityenterprises.

But there are serious difficultiesinvolved in building productive part-nerships between the arts and schools.The school day is parsed out into aschedule and is rigidly time-bound.

The arts are not. School is often aboutgetting the right answers. The arts arenot. Small arts organizations have fluidlines of communication and are non-bureaucratic. Schools are not.

Of all the panels designed by theplanning committee, this one on effec-tive partnerships between culturalorganizations, schools, and communitybased organizations proved to be themost elusive. It is rare indeed forschools to invest the time, money andhuman resources for these partnershipsto work and last.

We assembled a panel of practitioners— from a cultural organization, a com-munity organization, and a school —whohad overcome the odds and built strongand sustained partnerships. And weasked them to be honest about what ittakes to make the partnerships work.The panel had years of practice workingon collaborative programs betweenschools, communities and communityorganizations:

Moderator: Bonnie Pittman, Executive Director,

Bay Area Discovery Museum,Sausalito, California

Panelists:Russ Chapman, Principal,

Shady Brook Elementary, Bedford, Texas

Elisa Crystal, Executive Director, Armory Center for The Arts,Pasadena, California

Mary Sue Sweeney Price, Director, The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

The panel’s charge was two-fold: first,to discuss strategies for forming partner-

Practitioners on EffectivePartnerships

”“The best partnerships

are those that

recognize that

difficulties will arise

and are prepared to

weather the

inevitable conflicts

and confusions for

the sake of realizing

the gains.

”“

25

ships between schools, arts organizations,parents and community groups; and sec-ond, to discuss the role of funders andtheir potential impact on the arts institu-tions involved in successful partnerships.Although each member of the panelshared stories particular to their individ-ual experiences, some common salientthemes emerged during the course of thediscussion.

Everyone agreed that partnerships aredifficult and cannot be successful withoutthe full commitment and involvement ofall constituent parties. While it may betempting to limit the frustration of consoli-dating the different visions, personalities,working styles and goals of numerousconstituent groups by limiting the scope ofgroups involved, the panel agreed thatsome of their best outcomes have beenrealized in instances where the hard workof honing a shared vision and mutual goalswas undertaken successfully.

The hard work of identifying andarticulating shared visions and goals isclosely linked to the development ofleadership within a partnership. Allpanel members stressed the importanceof realizing that successful partnershipsdo not rely upon the energy and influ-ence of one or two highly visionary lead-ers. On the contrary, leadership, likevision, must be shared to be sustainable.In some cases, this may mean allowingnonobvious “partners,” including stu-dents, local government agencies ormembers of opposing groups, to be givensome type of responsibility in moving the

partnership effort forward. As Pittmannoted, expanded leadership serves thejoint purpose of strengthening the base ofsupport for the project, as well asempowering new individuals to becomeinvolved in shaping the perception of thearts in their school or community.

Innovation and risk were cited asoften being the hallmarks of successfulpartnership efforts, allowing the partner-ship to broaden the scope of all members’work. Price noted her experience usingthe mandate of whole school reform inNewark as a beginning point for devel-oping stronger relationships with schoolsin order to help them fulfill their experi-ential learning requirements. However,anything new and expansive requireslong term commitment to the effort, andoften requires individual organizations toexpand their institutional capacity to sus-tain a long term effort, either through theaddition of staff, the alteration of existingstaff responsibilities or the acquisition ofadequate program funding. As is true ofany sustained involvement, deep-seatedchanges are not easy, but successful part-nerships have proven to be worth theeffort. The best partnerships are thosethat recognize that difficulties will ariseand are prepared to weather theinevitable conflicts and confusions for thesake of realizing the gains.

With regard to the evaluation of part-nership outcomes, the panel concurredthat standardized test scores seem fated toremain among the list of assessmentmeasures relied upon by school adminis-

I asked the question that every principal asks first: How much money is this

going to cost me? And she assured me that it would be fairly inexpensive and

painless. And it started the very long journey toward an interdisciplinary,

vertically aligned, comprehensive arts program that has changed the way I

view children, the way I view learning, the way I view my job and the way I

view my life. And it is a powerful, powerful thing. In the last seven or eight

years, I’ve been going around the country trying to convince my colleagues

that it’s the thing to do. —Russ Chapman

43

2

126

trators, parents and politicians. AsChapman indicated, this need not be wor-risome over the long run. With the sup-port of the Getty Trust, his school com-pared baseline student scores with scorestracked for five years. Scores rose 49 per-centage points in math, 63% in readingand 36% in writing. Crystal added thatnew assessment measures include workwith portfolios designed to encourageself-reflection and self-improvement onthe part of students. Increasingly morerecognized by schools and the public,portfolio measures can be coupled withtest scores to help strengthen the case forthe instrumental value of the arts.

Lastly, the panel discussed the poten-tial policy implications for the work ofpartnerships. Members had already beeninvolved in projects which they felt hadinfluenced either public or institutionalpolicies at one level or another rangingfrom Chapman’s inclusion of students indecision-making, to the manner in whichexhibitions were designed in Newark, tothe process of certification for art teachersin Pasadena. Pittman and Crystal notedthat work still needs to be done on thebenefits to be realized for infants and pre-school-aged children, as well as for mid-dle school students during their particu-larly formative years.

The panel was quite excited bythe opportunity to share with

funders potential avenues of strate-gy development. Again, althoughvarious specific examples werecited, some common themesemerged:

There needs to be an evolutionin the grantee-funder relationship.Foundations and organizationsneed to move away from project-based support and move into thedevelopment of partnerships inwhich funders come prepared toshare resources beyond merely dollars. These include helping toconvene potential partners, sharingdata and contacts and providinginput into strategy developmentand execution, including the provi-sion of multiyear funding.

Private funders should be readyto fund projects which are not yetsupported by numerous publicinstitutions. Helping to createendowments and providing stronginitial support helps projects attract

the dollars of more risk-averse pub-lic funders. This entails recognitionof the fact that there are successesand failures over the long term.Partnerships should not be afraid tofail in some endeavors for fear ofrisking funding.

Projects which are fundedshould be funded with an eye tolong term sustainability, includingthe development of a continuityplan which will ensure the ongoingsuccess of the program. Again, thiswill require a longer term commit-ment on the part of the funder.

Leadership should be devel-oped within the funding communi-ty to address some areas of com-mon concern strategically. Toomuch money directed by too manyfunders to one school or one projectwithout thought to the develop-ment of new efforts, for example,fails to produce wide-spreadchange. Funders should directtheir funding in a way thatenhances the broader picture.

Recommendations to Funders from Partnership Panelists

27

My purpose today is not necessarilyto give you an impassioned speech

about the arts, but to ask you to thinkstrategically with me as we redefine thisissue. Many times, people within the K-12world can’t define the problem themselvesbecause they’re viewing it purely as a cri-sis. This conversation shouldn’t be drivenout of a context of crises. It should be driv-en out of an affirmative commitment tohuman development.

The first part of reframing the issues ofthe arts in education is seeing the arts asessential to the natural world of humandevelopment. To reframe the issue, weneed to create strategic networks andalliances that are committed to a vision ofeducation that is responsive to all theessential dimensions of human develop-ment. This network will be about redraw-ing the lines between classroom andteacher, teacher and leader, leader andcommunity, community and country and,ultimately, internationally. In other words,this reframing is far broader than the mat-ter of adding the arts to the curriculum.This is about reframing education overall.And it needs to be done within the fund-ing community, and certainly within theK-12 and the higher education communi-ty, to bring these issues into more of anational focus.

Let me first describe what I foundwhen I came to New York. After severalyears of economic blight in the city andstate, New York City Public Schools werewithout an arts program. There were nomusic programs, instruments or teachersand no art teachers. They all fell to thebudget ax of the mid-1980s. It was in the

aftermath of those cuts that most people inthe city, most educators in the city, and Idare say parents as well, began to see adiminished quality in the city’s publiceducational system. People didn’t knowwhat was missing; they simply knew thatsomething wasn’t there.

The issue here is not, oh, we need thearts. The issue to the K-12 world and theleadership of communities and cities is theperformance of schools, performance ofchildren within those schools and the per-formance of the adults in those schools.This is about academic adequacy. It’sabout academic proficiency. It’s aboutreading, it’s about math, it’s about science,it’s about technology. When you boil allthose disciplines down, they are about thepowers of thinking, the powers of cogni-tion, the power of being able to actuallyknow how to fit within the social and eco-nomic structure of our nation.

In my mind, the second part of refram-ing the issue, has to do with social ade-quacy—the social behavior and the socialacumen to which our children have tomeasure up. The real questions about chil-dren’s social behavior are not just whetherthey cheat or have good attendancerecords. The real questions are do theyunderstand how to make friends? Dothey understand how to avoid conflict?The whole issue of social behavior is a bigthing in America right now as it relates topublic schools.

The third part of reframing the issuehas to do with personal adequacy. Schoolsare committed to a level of human devel-opment that speaks not only to the largermass of people and the aggregate of a

Reframing Arts in EducationRudy Crew

Executive Director, Institute for K-12 Leadership,University of Washington, Seattle

(Former Chancellor, Board of Education of the City of New York)

28

classroom or a school, but also to the indi-vidual. Our schools actually help childrento understand and formulate ways ofbeing good people, good citizens, goodthinkers, good doers, good planners, tohave good self-concept and so on. Andthere’s a way, obviously, of being able toembrace the arts in there.

This information is not known by abrand new teacher sitting at PS101 in theBronx. It’s not known by the incomingnew principal of a school that was recentlydeclared an under-performing school. Butyou know it. What you, as funders, haveavailable is intellectual capital about craftknowledge, building models of how thearts get implemented in schools on a larg-er scale. So the second point about thisprocess is for you to assume a leadershiprole—not only in schools but in the largercommunity as well.

There are powerful partners within therespective communities of lots of schoolsacross this country who leverage the kindof local community force that needs to bein place for new ideas to flow from yourheads to theirs and from theirs to teachers,and from teachers to teachers unions, andfrom teachers unions to principals and soon and so forth. You need fluidity, youneed integration of thought, you need anaggregate thinker and an aggregate powerbase in order for this process to take hold.

There ought to be a set of specificthings that this process ensures. First, isthis effort connected to a core set of aca-demic, social or personal issues in ourschool? Why are you doing this? Whatvalue is going to be added to lives of chil-dren in schools by this work? Second, isthere an open invitation to building thiseffort to scale? You need to think aboutthis as a team, in terms of immediateimplementation, immediate scalability,meaning at least within the next two tothree years, and then give me the five-yearto ten-year outlook on this.

The effort must be visible. The effortcan’t be either so small or so institutionally

unrecognized that it doesn’t have enoughpush to actually get into year two or yearthree. The effort must become very visibleboth within the school community andwithin the larger community. Welcome themedia to this initiative. Bring people in. Ithink part of the planning should give usan opportunity to think about who ourstrategic partners could and should be,whose voices within the larger communitywould carry if we brought them aboard.

Lastly, let me talk for a second aboutthe role of the funding community and ofthe arts overall. I think we have to thinkabout this work and this partnership ashaving some evidence of support and evi-dence of success. Does it create and sus-tain political, financial and academic lever-age? Does this enable a connectionbetween the service that we’re offeringand the needs children have?

The funding community and the artscan reclaim the mar-ket of public educa-tion, to get the chil-dren to come backfrom private schoolsand parochialschools. Yourresources can belinked to real timesolutions that teach-ers and principalsand superintendentsneed.

In the final analysis, be aware thatwhat you really are doing is authorizinghope. You are signatories to children’shope. When kids see that there’s really aconnection between what they learn aca-demically and cognitively and what’sbeing asked of them in their day-to-daylives, they feel the power of your signa-ture. And I would just suggest that youreally understand that this is exactly whatwe need in public education right now.We need your signature. And make it asignature of hope for these children.Thank you very, very much.

”“This reframing is far

broader than the

matter of adding the

arts to the

curriculum. This is

about reframing

education overall.

29

Researchers’ Perspectives on Emerging Best Practices

In her introductory remarks for this session, Susan Lloyd, Director, BuildingCommunity Capacity, MacArthur Foundation, recalled Rudy Crew’s observa-

tion that what is in question is not whether, but rather when and how arts edu-cation will become integrated into the lives of schools. The primary catalyst forintegration appears to be the strength of the case made to school leaders aboutthe arts’ critical importance to all children. The researchers’ panel was intendedto provide participants with an opportunity to share and discuss what is knownabout arts education, what still needs to be learned and what next steps mayhelp to move the process of learning and sharing along.

The panel was moderated by Dick Deasy, Director of the Arts EducationPartnership, a coalition of over 100 organizations that demonstrates and promotesthe essential role of arts education in enabling all students to succeed in school, lifeand work. The three panelists were:

Dr. James Catterall, Professor,UCLA Graduate School of Education &Information Studies; Co-Director of theUCLA Imagination Project; evaluatorfor the Chicago Arts Partnerships inEducation (CAPE);

Steve Seidel, Lecturer, HarvardGraduate School of Education; ResearchAssociate at Harvard Project Zero.

Sandy Rieder, Senior StudyDirector, Westat, Inc.; currently servingas Deputy Project Director of theTransforming Education Through theArts Challenge (TETAC) evaluation.

Dick Deasy began the discussion withan overview of current research relat-

ing to the arts’ role in learning. Thesereports and the work of researchers in thefield are, in his words, helping to “refutethe fundamental reason the arts are mar-ginalized in American education: namely,that they are not thought to be cognitive,that is, embodying and giving access toknowledge and mental skills.”

In discussing their own work, the pan-elists described a spectrum of researchmethodologies used to identify ways inwhich students’ lives are affected through

involvement in the arts. Research meth-ods ranged from measuring the impact ofa single program in one school, to sam-pling student profiles throughout a schooldistrict, to working with large-scale data-bases of student information and simulat-ing experiments through comparisons oflongitudinal data. Although the panelistsdid concede that there have been numer-ous studies conducted which show thearts to have little effect on the academic orsocial growth of students, they agreed thata growing body of research indicates apositive correlation between studentachievement and involvement in the arts.

James Catteral l identif ied thefollowing:

� Students involved in the arts watchless TV, display more tolerant behav-ior toward different racial groupsand perform better academicallythan students with similar profileswho are not involved in the arts;

� Students from lower socio-economic(SES) backgrounds who are involvedin the arts tend to outscore higherSES students;

30

� Gaps in academic achievementbetween high and low SES studentstend to grow as they progress inschool; however, quality artsinvolvement for low SES studentsappears to help slow the growth ofthis achievement gap;

� Students who are permitted to writeand draw in response to questionstend to demonstrate more knowl-edge than students who do only oneor the other.

Steve Seidel discussed research thathas focused less on whether the arts

are beneficial to students and more onhow they have been beneficial and whatmakes some programs more successfulthan others. This research has led toimportant information about the natureof successful programs:

� The ways in which many artiststeach come directly from their waysof making art, including an appreci-ation of the processes involved increating something complex.Whereas many academic programstry to simplify complex material forstudents to make it easier to learn,successful artists respect complexityand invite students to engage with itcreatively;

� Successful artist teachers create asafe space in which young peoplecan take the risks it is in their natureto want to take: “absolutely terrify-

ing, absolutely thrilling, completelyaddictive and life-changing; yet, safeand constructive at the same time;”

� Quality arts programs are designedto guide cognitive development in aloving way that fuses the intellectualwith the spiritual—“the combustionof human spirit and cognitive disci-pline”—and urges the students for-ward in their search for truth.

Sandy Rieder observed during herTETAC evaluation, that the integra-

tion of arts-based education, and moreimportantly, the values that guide it,requires a radical shift in the way mostschools and communities view educa-tion in general. Although more needsto be done to publicize the value of thearts as an integral part of the education-al process, the reality is that not enoughis known about the nature of changewithin schools to translate publicity intosolid action planning. Until the processof change is better understood, the fun-damental shifts in attitude that will becritical to the development and accept-ance of quality arts-based education willbe difficult to achieve. A large part ofthis shift may lie in the elimination ofhigh-stakes testing which, over the lastdecade, has served to tie educatorsmore and more to the instruction ofcontent, rather than liberating them toengage more with the process of teach-ing and learning creatively that is socentral to arts-based curricula.

31

Six discussion groups considered the practicalimplications of Learning and the Arts and

reported on the issues that emerged from theirconversations. While quite preliminary, theseconversations seemed to have consistent themes,and Nick Rabkin reported on them. They arebeing refined and developed by an expandedleadership group. We anticipate that a conceptpaper/proposal for further collaboration willemerge from these planning meetings in the nearterm. What follows is a summary of Nick’sreport:

Internal work: There are things to do whenwe go home to our own institutions andorganizations. They clump into three basiccategories: First is to evaluate our currentgrant making. Do our existing grants reflectthe kind of quality that we learned about atthis meeting? Second is pursuing a higherlevel of quality in the work we support byraising the bar and demanding more rigor-ous and deeper work. Third is creatingstrategies to institutionalize the understand-ing and commitment that we have starteddeveloping through this meeting. How dowe align our support for education in andthrough the arts with our work in schoolsand education reform, and in child develop-ment? How do we make such alignmentthe policy of our institutions?

Regional and local work: There were anumber of reports that suggested a need formore regional and local collaborationbetween grantmakers. Others indicatedthat our grantmaking strategies should berationalized so that we don’t drive granteesnuts or work at cross-purposes. Others rec-ommended local and regional communica-tions and advocacy strategies to promotethe kind of learning that occurred here backat home. Particular attention ought to bepaid to schools of education. If we want art-

ful classrooms, we need artful teachers. Andso we need to be attentive to both pre-serv-ice and in-service training of teachers.

National work: There were many ideasabout national communications and advo-cacy. Some of them had to do with themechanics of communication and advoca-cy. How do we distribute what we knowas broadly as we possibly can? Ideasinclude websites, clearinghouses and soforth; mapping and evaluating existingresearch so we know what’s useful andwhat’s not; and on the other side of thatmap, creating a map of the stakeholdersand their positions in the field. Other ideashad to do with the development of — onegroup referred to it as a national commis-sion. Perhaps the idea that was bubblingup was really the creation of a US versionof All Our Futures, the report that KenRobinson did in the UK. One of the inter-esting twists on this idea was that therewas a quick and immediate consensusthat it was something that private fundershad to do; that it needed to be done with-out government. If we involved the gov-ernment, it would bring in all the baggageof the old political fights around the artsand arts education. There was broadagreement that Ken’s idea of dropping theword arts was powerful and deservedserious consideration.

Much attention was focused on schoolsin all of the conversations, but there wasconcern not to divorce youth developmentfrom the process. One of the interestingdimensions that surfaced in some of theconversations was a sense that there’s goingto be growing streams of revenue andmoney for non-school programs. There’s anopportunity to build the field that way anda special concern with the professionaliza-tion of the youth development field.

Small Group Discussions:Reflections and Next Steps

32

Closing RemarksKen Robinson

There’s a very interesting book byMichael Polanyi called Personal

Knowledge. In it he observes that in anyform of knowing, any form of under-standing, you’re aware of what you’redoing on at least two levels. He talksabout these as focal and subsidiary aware-ness. If you’re knocking a nail into a pieceof wood with a hammer, focally you’reaware of the head of the nail. But in a sub-sidiary way you’re aware of lots of otherthings, like the weight of a hammer, thearc of your arm and the momentum. Butyou have to be conscious of these in theright relationship. If you suddenly startconcentrating on what your arm’s doing,you lose focus on the nail and miss.

This focal/subsidiary distinction isimportant to us in this way. For a longtime arts advocates have tended tofocus their attention on promoting thearts in themselves. This may seem a rea-sonable thing to do if you’re an artsadvocate. But we’re all concerned aboutsomething much more. We’re concernedwith what the arts can do. By focusing

the attention of pol-icy makers on thearts rather than onthe processes we’retrying to promote,we take their eyeoff the ball.

The arts don’tdo one thing; they

do many. They promote a broad rangeof intellectual development. They areamong a suite of ways of promotingcreative thought and action. They pro-mote an engagement with values; theypromote an engagement in culturalunderstanding. They encourage socialcommunication; they offer a language offeeling. And they provide modes of aes-thetic engagement.

All of those are central in theory toevery education system and the arts areamong the ways in which they can bepromoted. But if the advocacy task isseen as promoting the arts, rather thanwhat the arts do, then the connectionisn’t made. And that’s part of our newtask.

In our cultures, arts practices havebecome institutionalized, and “Art”tends to be hung in frames in galleries.As a result children can feel alienatedby their education from practices theyfeel naturally drawn towards. We needto look at how the arts enhance andexpress capacities that children havenaturally, not to teach them institutionaldefinitions of art.

We have to change the curriculum.In the United States and in the UnitedKingdom, teachers are not routinelytrained to teach the arts properly. It’sanother example of focal and subsidiaryawareness. Teachers see their job asteaching the curriculum rather thanteaching children through the curricu-lum. Nurturing the confidence to teachthe arts, is very sensitive work. It’s notjust about allowing people to give ventto their feelings. It’s about giving themways of doing that. It’s about empower-ing them. That relationship is very deli-cate, and it needs expert training.Providing that training is a potentialrole for you as funders.

If you can train generations of teach-ers, artists and change agents, you’llhave a long-term multiplying effect. Andthat seems to be one of your key criteri-on. Not just looking for projects whichhave some local interest, but ones whichcould, in the long run, have a multiply-ing effect through developing skills andtalents among the people who will takeit forward from your beginning.

”“You might look again

at your core objectives

and think whether

they can be met

through arts processes.

33

Another important area in whichfunders can participate is in facilitatingpartnerships. Schools can no longer dothe job of education on their own. Theyhave to be seen as the center of a net-work of providers rather than as thesole traders. Facilitating those relation-ships again is delicate work.

What can you, as funders, do? I thinkyou have three roles. First, you can pro-vide opportunities for innovation.Systems cannot do that. They’re notdesigned to do it. You can move in on asmall scale, you can set something up, youcan bring in the key players to them, youcan energize them and make it happen.You have a wonderfully privileged posi-tion. Most of the organizations I speak tosay, “We would love to do something, butwe don’t have the money.” You do. This isa wonderfully historic meeting from thatpoint of view. You’re in a position to do it.

Perhaps your way forward would beto stop trying to compare and weighpriorities as to whether you shouldfund the arts instead of other programareas. Instead you might look again atyour core objectives and think whetherthey can be met through arts processes.Do the arts projects being proposed toyou provide ways of achieving yourfoundation’s general objectives—interms of community development,youth development, education and soon? It’s not just looking at arts projects,but looking at ways in which the artscan realize objectives that you’ve setyourselves anyway.

The second major objective you maywant to turn your attention to is promot-ing research and the gathering of evi-dence. A lot of the work we’re concernedwith falls outside the conventional defini-tions of research for some of the fundingagencies. If you can put resources intowell-planned, well-focused and well-thought-out research projects that testthese ideas out, you might do more tochange the national climate than almostanything else.

And the third area is promotion andadvocacy. You can use the platforms ofyour foundations to gain access to opin-ion leaders and policy makers who needto hear these messages. A well-planned,strategic and creative dissemination ofthose messages could have an enor-mous impact in thelonger term.

I’ve worked inthe arts for a longtime now, but I real-ize my interest isn’treally in the arts atall. It’s in the capaci-ties that the arts rep-resent. It’s in whatthe arts illustrateabout our own pow-ers and potential.My concern is that our education systemsystematically ignores and, even destroysa lot of that. I run a lot of courses now forbusinesses on creativity and creativitytraining. Business is brisk because there’sa huge need in the world economy for cre-ativity. But I wonder, why do we have toteach adults to be creative?

As children being creative comes asnaturally as eating or breathing. Adultsstill remember how to do those things.What happened to their creativity? Ithink what happened is education. Theywent through ten years of school, whichstopped their creativity. In school, childrenwere told to stop playing, to sit still andlook at the front.

There is a wonderful quote byArchbishop Temple. It seems to me tosummarize the whole task of educationand what the arts contribute to it. He said,“Our job in education is to teach childrento feel together and to think for them-selves, rather than think together and feelalone.” I think if we can reverse thatequation through our joint efforts throughthe arts, through training, through part-nership and curriculum reform, then wewill have done something worth doingfor all our futures.

”“Our job in education

is to teach children to

feel together and to

think for themselves,

rather than think

together and feel alone.

—Archbishop Temple