ASSUMPTIONS

What is the role of the arts in education?

In 1993, the Goals 2000 Arts Education Partnership issued the document The Power of the Arts to Transform Education: An Agenda for Action, which identifies the arts as a key part of education reform. In this paper, four basic premises are outlined:

1. The arts are forms of understanding and ways of knowing that are fundamentally important to education;
2. The arts are important to excellent education and to effective school reform;
3. The most significant contribution of the arts to education reform is the transformation of teaching and learning; and
4. This transformation is best realized in the context of comprehensive, systemic education reform.

What are the characteristics of a successful arts education program?

The Power... paper goes on to define and justify arts education and to define the characteristics of a successful arts program:

• "Arts education is the process of teaching and learning how to create and produce the visual and performing arts and how to understand and evaluate art forms created by others. Together with language, mathematics, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, the arts constitute a fundamental curriculum."
• "A successful arts education program engages students intellectually, emotionally, and physically with the arts as one of the essential elements of life for the individual, the community, and the nation."

SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPLEMENTATION

Given these assumptions, what suggestions might help implement and integrate the arts into the K-12 curriculum and encourage the transformation of teaching and learning?

An important element in education reform is the move away from compartmentalized and isolated learning divided into discrete subject areas toward an integrated approach that makes connections between all areas of learning. If the arts are integral to education, it is at least in part because the content and activities involved in a successful and substantive arts program contribute to such a synthesis of learning in all subject areas. The arts are therefore a very powerful tool for integration in the classroom.

Other subjects are often given spice by engaging students in arts activities, such as drawing covers for reports, or singing songs about a topic studied. However, to truly take advantage of the integrative possibilities in the arts, some more substantive awareness of the arts themselves also needs to be considered. While this task may seem overwhelming, especially when classroom teachers are often required to cover ALL the arts (art, music, dance, and drama), many concepts and activities are common to all the arts, and are concepts with which teachers are very familiar in other subject areas.

The following framework is one way of looking at the arts that may be of use in planning programs and making connections among the arts and all other subject areas.

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR PLANNING ART ACTIVITIES AND CONTENT

Activity Types

Experiencing the arts involves two basic types of activities:

1. creating and performing artworks; and
2. perceiving and responding to artworks.

By creating their own artworks, students express their experience and understanding of the world. In the process of responding to art, students learn to trust their own feelings and perceptions, and then to build on them as they learn more about when, where, why, or how a work was created. Students need opportunities both to create artwork AND to respond to artworks, both their own and the artworks of others. The creative and responding processes are an important part of learning in all subject areas.

Content Areas

The arts can be analyzed as having four essential content areas which can be labeled as Context, Elements & Principles, Materials & Processes, and Form & Design.

None of these content areas exists in isolation from the others. It is virtually impossible to engage in any creation or communication activity without using all of these content areas to some extent. Artwork is always created within a context, using elements and principles, manipulating a set of materials with some more or less conscious design. The key to integration is to help students become aware as many connections as possible in ways that are natural and meaningful to them and illustrative of the topics being studied. The more thoroughly each of the content areas is included in arts experiences, the richer these experiences are likely to be.

Context

Here, "context" refers to the meaning of an artwork, as opposed to the physical elements that constitute it. Meaning is derived from an understanding of the time and place in which the work was created, and the significance of the work to the artist(s) and the audience. This aspect of the arts content is vast and relates strongly to all the humanities, including social studies, culture, history, politics, economics, psychology, and communications.

Elements and Principles

The elements and principles of art refer to components of visual, aural, kinesthetic, or dramatic information and the methods the art disciplines use to work with them. People analyze and label the elements of visual (art), aural (music), kinesthetic (dance), or dramatic (drama) information differently. However, analyzing how we perceive a piece of visual artwork, a piece of music, a dance, or a dramatic work is useful in understanding its effect and improving it. The "elements" of an art form generally refer to the bits of information that we perceive, and the "principles" generally refer to how the elements can be arranged to create an effect. Examples of elements and principles in each of the arts include:

ART

Elements: shape, color, form, space, texture, size

Principles: positive/negative, repetition, variety, contrast

MUSIC

Elements: rhythm, pitch, sound quality (timbre), dynamics

Principles: repetition, contrast, pattern

DANCE

Elements: body, space, time, energy, relationship

Principles: pattern, repetition, contrast, narrative

DRAMA

Elements: character, focus, setting, plot, tension

Principles: repetition, contrast, narrative

The above list represent only a few examples. There is not complete agreement on what are precisely the elements and principles of each of the arts. What is important is for students to develop a basic vocabulary for discussing the elements of the arts, and engage in some analysis of how they are manipulated to create an effect. Only by practicing such analysis can they "learn to make sound judgments about the arts and understand the bases upon which those judgments rest" (as quoted in The Power of the Arts to Transform Education: An Agenda for Action).

Study and work in this area of the arts relates closely to the sciences and mathematics. In perceiving and responding to the elements and principles of art, students describe and analyze the sights, sounds, and events they observe. They also experience and analyze the very the nature of perception. When students create and communicate with an awareness of the elements and principles of the art, they can isolate variables and observe the effects of changing them (e.g., changing a color in an art work, the dynamics of a song). They look for and create patterns and relationships that reflect very complex mathematical concepts, including scale, space, time, rhythm, and energy.

Materials and Processes

The "materials and processes" are the "how to's" of the arts. The arts require hands-on knowledge of how to mix paints, make pleasing sounds on an instrument, execute a do-si-do with a partner, or work with a group to act out a story. They also require an awareness of the unique ways in which various individual media are used to convey and manipulate meaning. This awareness begins the development of media literacy.

The materials and processes aspect of the arts relates to problem-solving and to the practical arts subject areas, like physical education, the industrial arts, home economics, engineering, and media literacy. By creating and communicating with the materials and processes of the arts, students solve real-world, practical problems, like "How can I make a clay giraffe without the neck sagging?" or "How can I act out ‘Goldilocks and the 3 Bears’ with only three actors?"

In perceiving and responding to the materials and processes used in artworks, students become aware of how various media are used to create and manipulate effects and meaning. They also begin to learn how profoundly the development of a new means of expression (such as paper, the printing press, photography, television, and computer technology) can affect and change the world.

Form and Design

"Form and design" refers to the synthesis of all of the above knowledge in creating an artwork for a purpose. The form and design aspect of the arts develops students' planning skills, contributes to students’ ability to synthesize the knowledge acquired from all their learnings and experiences, and provides students with ways of internalizing and applying this acquired knowledge in creative ways, sometimes with no conscious awareness that they are doing so. For example, when students create a dance using a repeated sequence of steps, they design their movements and expressions, using the skills they acquired through previous dance exercises, and even reinforcing their skills in multiplication in the process.

In creating and communicating with an awareness of form and design, students learn to plan and present their work in ways that convey the intended meaning or suit the function for which they were created. For example, in drama, students come to realize that a production involving a large number of people requires much planning and long practices with satisfactions that are different from the fun and freshness of a quick improv.

In perceiving and responding to artwork with an awareness of form and design, students become conscious of how humankind has shaped and changed the world, how we perceive it, and how our understanding of the world is reflected in the artwork we create.