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Arts Integration Defining learning in arts education partnerships ———————————————————————————————————————————————
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To Get To The Other Side: Curricular Integration, Dangerous Ignorance, and the Drama of Learning March 10, 2005 Keynote Address Steve Seidel Director, Project Zero and Arts in Education Program, Harvard Graduate School of Education •I've never given a dinner keynote before, but I've heard a few and so I know that it is traditional to start with a joke. I asked a friend about this and, being a true friend who knows me pretty well, he suggested that sometimes it is fine to break with traditions. But I really wanted to try to be traditionally correct. So I decided to write a joke for the occasion. That might not have been wise. Anyway, here goes-in fact, two jokes I've made up. Here's the first: Hey, did you hear they had to close the post-modern wing at the new MoMA? Yeah, it's under deconstruction. Okay, here's another: Why did the arts educators and the other teachers in the school integrate their curricula? To get to the other side. Okay, that's not really a joke. It's actually serious and it's the title of this talk... To Get To The Other Side: Arts Integration, Dangerous Ignorance, and the Drama of Learning I thought of using Power Point tonight, but then thought it wasn't all that appropriate to a dinner talk. And, besides, as they say...Power corrupts. And power point corrupts pointlessly. I actually think Power Point is a really amazing program, but you know, maybe sometimes it's okay just to talk. The question that hangs over this talk, then, is what is on that "other side" that we're trying to get to when we work to integrate the arts into the broader curriculum? What is our purpose in taking this integration on, because, as anyone knows who tries to integrate curricula across disciplines, as Ringo Starr once sang, "you know it ain't easy." Right off, I'd like to try to name what is on the "other side:" I'd say that on the "other side" are the knowledge, skills, and understanding that we need in order to create a world and live lives that we consider decent and morally acceptable. That's a mouthful, so I'll say it again. On the "other side" are the knowledge, skills, and understanding that we need in order to create a world and live lives that we consider decent and morally acceptable. What I'd like to do this evening is talk a bit about this notion of getting to the "other side." Also, what's on this side that we're trying to move away from, and some ways the arts may function as a powerful vehicle for this journey. Along the way, I'd like to talk about the drama of learning and dangerous ignorance. So first, I'd like to start with what has been for me a profound lesson from the arts and one that may explain the particular sense of urgency that will emerge in my remarks this evening. This is a lesson about the drama of learning and the nature of tragedy. Since I've long loved tragedies-I'm talking drama, not real life-and since I've long been trying to understand both drama and learning, this "lesson" from the arts has been a particularly important one in my life, though unsettling. •The late William Alfred, playwright, poet, and, for many years, a professor of literature at Harvard, once gave a series of lectures on several of the Greek tragedies. At the end of a remarkable analysis of these plays, he concluded that perhaps the most important message the plays deliver to us as human beings, across the centuries, is what we need to grapple with the fact that, as he said, "we are slow to learn." The drama of a tragedy, he suggested, is whether we will learn what we need to know in time to save our lives. The playwright can see what the central character needs to learn. So does the audience. So do the other characters in the play. We can all see what will happen if these lessons are not learned, but we are powerless to affect the situation. So we watch, in fascination and horror, as Othello or Lear or Medea refuse to see what has become obvious to the rest of us...and then it is too late. At least, this is one interpretation of what happens in a tragedy. I believe we are living in a time of many tragedies and a period with the potential for far more tragedy...if we are too slow to learn what we need to learn in order to save our lives. In a drama, the failure to learn is most often an individual's failure, though that failure may cost many lives. On the international stage, it is often a failure to learn on the part of both individuals and entire populations that leads to war and other tragedies. In the United States, I believe we are struggling to learn from our recent experiences as a nation. The lessons are hard. I believe we are frightened and confused people and fear is a particularly powerful inhibitor of learning. The costs of our failure to learn are serious and this is not a play. My fear is that, although I know perfectly well that I am not watching a play, I may still be behaving more as a member of an audience than as a part of the action with a role and responsibilities. So, when I talk about the place of the arts in education and integrating the arts with other curricula, when I talk about getting to the "other side," I am speaking from the perspective that I am an educator in a time of war What I make of this and how it informs my choices and decisions is, for me, inseparable from why I am an educator and why I would work to integrate the arts into and across the curriculum. In truth, I don't think I am alone. I think we are all educators in a time of war. I don't know if others share the same sense of choices and decisions this suggests, but that's okay. We all see these things in our own ways. I'm simply sharing mine because it is an essential part of the context of my comments tonight. When I say I am an educator in a time of war, of course, I'm thinking about the conflict in Iraq. But I'm thinking of war in broader terms as well. I'm thinking about any form of systematic violence against a group of people. In those terms, there are many wars being waged today. I tried to write a list of current instances of systematic violence against groups of people, whether with the use of armies, police, prisons, economic weapons, vigilantes or any other forms of sustained effort to neutralize or disempower other human beings, notable because they are part of a group identified by race, ethnicity, gender, age, geography or other identifiers, or because an individual holds certain beliefs. The list simply kept growing. Now, here tonight, our common work is in public education and so we share a concern for children. Children are members of many of these groups and of course, they are a group themselves, by virtue of their age. And they are, certainly, without political power. So they are dependent on adults to understand their needs and interests, to protect them while they are young, and prepare them to enter this world that is simultaneously horrifying and extraordinarily beautiful. Okay, let me check...am I being too dramatic? Am I overstating the case here? Is this just my depression and fear and unhappiness taking over and blowing things out of proportion? I'm afraid I don't think so. I certainly found that I couldn't really address the issue of arts integration without considering what it means to teach children in a time of war. I offered this definition of what's on the other side-what we might be trying to "get to" through our work-because I fear that more modest or intermediary goals, while potentially of tremendous importance and significant value to teachers and students, may not provide for us the kind of powerful compass we need to find our way as educators in this complex and confusing time. I think we need a powerful compass in thinking about the role of the arts in education and arts integration. Why do we teach the arts? Why do we think that it is useful and important to integrate the arts with other subject matter? As you can perhaps see, I travel-indeed, bounce on a daily basis-between pessimism and optimism. In all honesty, I sometimes feel that my pessimism is far more grounded in actual evidence than my optimism. But I am an educator. That simple statement is, in itself, an expression of optimism. I believe in the human capacity to learn. The idea of a pessimistic educator seems to me oxymoronic. Education is a fundamentally hopeful enterprise...or it should be. And this is a crucial way in which the arts offer an essential gift to teachers and students, because the arts-even, for example, when they address the horror of war-are one of the strongest ways of affirming life and possibility that human beings have yet evolved. Another crucial reason to integrate the arts into our study of other subjects is that the arts help us to look at things that can be very hard to look at. War and Peace at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona...the films of Guernica. This is very important. Remember I said that the arts may be one of our most important vehicles when we are trying to get to the "other side." As artists develop their craft, they practice making objects of fascination and beauty, even if they are non traditionally beautiful. Artists work very hard and become very accomplished in making things that draw our attention. When they get really good, some of them use all of that skill to draw our attention and help us focus on things that we might prefer not to look at. William Carlos Williams...for lack of what is found there. In helping us to look at that which we might prefer to ignore, artists can and often do perform a very important educational role. After all, if our goal is to achieve the kind of knowledge, skills, and understanding that will get us to the "other side," we have to move beyond our ignorance-students and teachers alike. Ignorance is a difficult concept. Though I don't pretend to have thought very deeply about the nature of ignorance, I do think there are at least two kinds, both essential to address in our schools. The first is innocent ignorance-ignorance of things one simply knows little or nothing about. There's a lot to know out there and no one can know it all. And learning is difficult and requires sustained effort and practice, so each of us makes decisions about what we feel it is most important to learn. The other kind of ignorance is different. I don't know about other languages, but in English, "to ignore" is understood as a willful act of not noticing, of "turning a blind eye" on that which one does not want to acknowledge or interact with. So, when we avert our gaze on the street because we see someone we really don't want to talk to...we ignore them. Some might say we're acting ignorant. I know there are many quite serious issues and aspects of the world around me that I essentially choose to ignore. I think of this as "willful blindness" and "willful blindness" is not an innocent form of ignorance. Two kinds of ignorance-one innocent and one willful. Both, to some degree, understandable, but both a serious problem. I think that artists and the arts can and do play an important role here in two ways-they help us to look at things we'd rather ignore and they provide a way for us to talk about these things with each other. If works of art have this capability, arts educators have the responsibility of facilitating that conversation. So, what's worth learning? What, in William Alfred's terms, might save our lives if we could learn it in time? I'd like to quickly suggest a number of possible topics that seem to me might be of critical value in "getting to the other side." I imagine that any of these topics could be approached at just about any level of K-12 education, if approached with imagination and knowledge of and a deep feeling for the particular children in the classroom. 1. Human rights. Are there some things people should be assured simply by virtue of being a human being? Is there anything you could do to lose those rights? How are those things named in the U.S. Constitution? The Bill of Rights? How are they named by the United Nations? How do you name them in your community or your school or your family? And so on... 2. Languages. What a language is, how languages work, what different languages allow you to express, how materials provide us with new ways of communicating. What are the values of advanced literacy-the ability to read and communicate on high levels in diverse languages. Nelson Goodman, the founder of Project Zero, where I work, wrote a book called Languages of Art. Does the theater have a syntax? Does dance have a grammar? Is there a visual vocabulary? 3. Globalization. Many people talk about ways the world is getting smaller. What does this mean? I always wonder what sense children make of that when they hear adults say it. What are the opportunities and dangers of dramatic shifts in the interaction and interrelationship of people, ecologies, economies, cultures, political systems, etc. What will globalization mean in ten years when our second graders graduate high school? Or should graduate high school? What will globalization mean for those who don't graduate high school? 4. Taking a place-based curricular approach, I'd like to suggest the study of monuments: What are the monuments in our city or town? Somebody went to considerable trouble to erect them. What do they commemorate? Why did they feel so important at the time? What do they make us think and feel now? Many monuments are for the dead. How, why, and for what did these people die? 5. Sadness. Why do people feel sad? How do they deal with it? This has to take us back to the arts, of course. The blues, for example, provide us with a beautiful opportunity to explore the relationship between sadness and other feelings, like joy. What do people do when sadness gets unbearable and won't go away? Again, I'm thinking about topics that might have significance in relation to learning that could help us save or dramatically improve the quality of our lives. Here's one from the sciences...at first glance, it may not seem to be a life-saver: 6. Density. This is a fascinating topic and one we're supposed to learn about in science. So, a big question here is: why do some things float when others don't? Many children theorize that it is a result of the size of the object. That makes sense, yet some very large and heavy things float and some very small things sink. Interestingly, when confronted with evidence that clearly contradicts their theories, most children find ways to explain away confounding evidence and hold on to their original theories. Let's not blame this on childish ignorance, this behavior is not all that different from what most of us do most of the time as adults. On the surface (no pun intended), I'm not sure it is critical for everyone to really understand why some things float when others don't. Most of us don't understand it all that well. Most children don't understand it at all. And we don't feel a terrible lack in our lives. So, why should we teach it? Isn't it okay if just some people understand it? Well, one reason to understand it is that, in order to understand it, one has to work through a complex set of steps regarding how you deal with evidence. If you do figure out how to work with contradictory evidence, eventually you may get to the idea of complex causality-that reactions of effects aren't always the result of simple linear causes, but rather of multiple factors and forces acting in relation to each other. And this might be a very critical understanding if we are ever to understand the deep nature of our environmental crises, the dynamics of the spread of infectious diseases, or the causes of war, for example. Understanding complex causality may be essential to developing our ability to find ways to do something about these situations in the future. And, it seems to me, that is worth teaching. Perhaps I've gone on too long with these topics, but I think the list is inexhaustible. But I don't think just anything can be put on this list. It takes figuring out just why this topic seems important in this context at this time and then just what it is we think is most important for our students to understand about this topic. But HOW do we teach any of these topics, themes, or ideas?... Now I can't imagine how you teach any of these things without integrating the arts with other disciplines. Economics is no more a fully adequate lens for understanding globalization than the arts and culture, for example. Sadness is probably a study of chemistry, psychology, sociology, and music, at the very least. And so on. With big problems and issues, we are likely to learn significantly more through studying them through the perspectives of various disciplines. Then we need to identify the big challenges we face in these areas and use these perspectives to consider our responses to those challenges. If there is a simple equation to guide us here, it might be that the more complex the problem, the more important to study it from various perspectives. So, if those are some things that might be worth learning, what might learning in and through the arts have to contribute to our ideas about how we learn those things? I'd like to briefly suggest two contributions. First, artistry. Not an easy word to define and the dictionary isn't all that satisfying here, so I'll offer my own, home-made definition, acknowledging right up front that I'm not all that satisfied with it. But here goes... Artistry is the practice of one's work with great care, the highest level of technique, attention to detail, a sense of pride in craft, and a strong aesthetic sensibility. Now, people in all disciplines and fields, especially at the highest levels, work with a kind of artistry. It would be wrong to suggest that the arts have the corner on artistry. Yet it is not for nothing that the name given for this quality, this articulation of what it means to work to a very high standard in any field, is artistry. This suggests, I think, that we may have much to learn from a deeper look at the nature of artistry, how it develops in the arts, and how it can be taught. Certainly, bringing a sense of artistry to our teaching and our expectations of our students should be a powerful element of the mix when the arts and other subjects are integrated. And the second contribution from the arts are artistic processes- I think that there are at least six pretty distinct artistic processes that can also serve as learning processes. These are processes through which artists work to create works of art, but which are also clearly well developed learning processes. That said, I don't take for granted that every time anyone engages in any of these processes, they are necessarily learning. They could be repeating routine acts, in which case, significant learning is unlikely. The processes I'll name are, in no particular order: Improvisation Composition Interpretation Practice Performance Critique Now I want to make the same point here that I made about artistry. These same processes can be found in virtually all of the disciplines and most fields, especially when work is being conducted at a high level of expertise and, dare I say it, artistry. But, again, careful study of how these processes work in the arts may provide powerful insights and clues to ways in which the learning processes in any learning environment can be nurtured, strengthened, and deepened. And going deep is essential if we are going to get to the other side. My final thought here is that there is considerably more work to do around understanding the role of these artistic processes in relation to the work of teaching as well as the work of learning. Run through the list again and think of it in terms of teaching-composition, improvisation, practice, performance, interpretation, critique. My colleague, Joe Walters, in a recent conversation about teaching and improvisation, commented that improvisation in music is heavily dependent on extensive practice. But, he pointed out, teaching is like surgery...there aren't many ways to really practice it...it's all performance and, in a sense, all improvisation. Okay, to close I want to say that, in spite of evidence of the contrary, I am not pessimistic about the world or about the progress of our educational practices. So, I'd like to close with a joke...and I hope I get this right...You'll be relieved to know that I didn't write this one. What's the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist? A Jewish pessimist believes things can't get worse. And a Jewish optimist? A Jewish optimist believes that of course they can. Well, I'm Jewish. And, as I said, I'm an optimist. I know that because I remain an educator in love with my work. So, I'm not sure where that leaves me. But I do resonate with Emily Dickinson who wrote a number of times, in her poems, about hope. I'm sure many of you know this fragment from Poem #32: HOPE is the thing with feathers Thank you very much for your kind attention. |
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