Beyond Arts Integration
Defining learning in arts education partnerships

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Closing Remarks

March 11, 2005
Closing Remarks
Carol Morgan
Deputy Director for Education, ArtsConnection


In case you don't yet understand the title we chose for this symposium, we intended to call into question the assumptions that are made when we use the term "arts integration." As schools make hard choices in the face of ubiquitous testing in math and literacy, the term "arts integration" is often used to mean the arts as illustration of another content area. It isn't that this way of thinking about the arts is a bad thing; in fact, we see it as an important step in an on-going process where schools explore the value of the arts for their students' education.

Our concern about the overuse of the term "arts integration" is that the arts learning experience runs the risk of being simplified and watered down. When elements of the arts are used with the intention to illustrate another subject area, is it still art? When pieces of the arts are used with the intention not to "lay bare the questions," as James Baldwin said, but only to seek answers to challenges in other subject areas, we run the risk of losing our focus on what makes it arts education.

Perhaps we should have called the symposium "beyond arts as illustration" because while that is often a starting point, teachers' understanding of what the arts offer their students usually doesn't stay there for long. The question is, what comes next?

A year ago, we conducted focus groups with teachers in three of our inquiry-based partnership schools to ask them how they define the arts and literacy connection. In preparing for this symposium and for the publication based upon it that will be published by the Dana Foundation later this year, we met with a dozen of those teacher and asked how they would talk about the arts and literacy connection in their classrooms. Not one of them said that working in the arts helped raise test scores. Rather, they talked about broader values, values such as building community. They talked about the importance of the arts in creating a safe space for students to take risks, learn discipline and task persistence which helps build self-efficacy. The teachers said that the arts experience taught students respect for the art form, respect for learning and how to take ownership of their learning. Their arts experiences helped students focus on detail, to start with what in the Balanced Literacy curriculum used in nearly all New York City Public Schools is called a "small moment" and to build on it; the arts helped students express themselves verbally and in writing, and to develop a voice based on their individual experience. Through their work with artists, the teachers said, students experienced the awakening of a passion in which building stamina is not in questions because their arts experience was so compelling.

The recent RAND Corporation study stated, "Arts benefits are grounded in compelling arts experience."1 What makes an arts education experience compelling? The cognitive, personal and social aspects of the learning that Rob is helping us to understand are part of it. There is also the aesthetic - that part of the arts experience that engages the child's body, mind, emotions and imagination, that transports the child to another world and brings him back again somehow changed or, at the very least, having expanded his sense of what is possible. As John Katzman said in his introduction of Rob, "How do we measure curiosity?" How do we measure imagination and the ability to "willingly suspend disbelief" that is essential to becoming a literate person in the arts and in verbal literacy?

The poet and educator Ann McCrary Sullivan put it this way: "As a society, we have not been taught how to attend to art, how to 'read' it, how to process its content or its potential for generating useful questions. We are relatively illiterate in the arts, even those of us who are otherwise deeply and well educated, unless we have specifically sought those kinds of reading lessons."2

A month ago, one of the Program Managers at ArtsConnection said this about her work as a facilitator of our planning and reflection process with artists and teachers: "This year," she said "we're not so focused on the literacy connection at PS 39 and we can focus on the aesthetic qualities of dance." Her statement echoes Jessica Nicoll's question on the panel this morning about what is lost as we in the arts have shifted the balance to focus on the educational realm. One thing that may be lost is a focus on the artistic context. What is lost when we focus on the "instrumental benefits" of the arts discussed in the RAND study, and ignore what is intrinsic to the arts? One answer is that we lose our ability to articulate what is essential in the arts and we begin to lose our "artistic literacy." What happens when artists and teachers who have been working together for several years to explore the arts and literacy connections are no longer mandated to do so? One answer is: they talk about what and how students are learning in the art form.

Last night, Steve Seidel spoke of many important issues and ideas. He asked essential questions: Why do we teach the arts? Why do we think it is useful and important to integrate the arts with other subject matters? What does it mean to be an educator in a time of war? What is worth learning? What might learning in and through the arts have to contribute to our ideas about how we learn those things we think are worth learning?

The more complex the problem, he said, the more important to study it from different perspectives, especially the arts. We are faced with complex problems in our world. The children in our schools today will face even more complex problems in the world they inherit from us. Like us, the children in our schools today are going to need the knowledge, skills and understanding in order "to get to the other side," that is, to create a world and live lives that we, and they, consider decent and morally acceptable. Certainly none of us here today can imagine a way to do that without including the arts.

The panel this morning began to articulate other questions we need to ask as a field, and the questions that are hidden when the answers we seek are not intrinsic to the arts. Some themes introduced by Steve Seidel reverberated through their comments:
    1. Community. The panel members talked about communities of students and educators. Jessica Nicoll described herself as a teaching artist being "outside the system, but inside the community." Warren Simmons talked of communities of successful schools. We talked about arts organizations becoming part of a school community, as well as being part of a community of arts organizations.

    In a community, energy does not flow in only one direction; rather, give-and-take is implicit. As a field, we need to share what we learn in ways that help us all to learn. We need to pose questions that help us all rethink our practice as individuals and organizations. Arnie Aprill reminded us that we must move beyond our old constructs of "privatized knowledge;" we must listen to each other and have the will to do the hard work necessary "to get to the other side."
    2. We need to focus not simply on what works, but on how and why it works. We need to explore, document and share processes. "There can't be only one way to know," Terry Baker said. Like cartographers, we need to map our knowledge, describe what we know, who knows it and how we know it. Describing the "how," Janet Eilber said, takes not only time and money, but also conversations amongst partners with different points of view and where there is parity. Such conversations, she said, need to be facilitated.

    There is much knowledge to be gained from observing students and learning from them, said Jessica Nicoll, as well as from and with each other. Rob's research is helping us all to expand our ideas of what and how students learn in the arts: because of our work with him, we have a greater sense of what is possible and a greater range of language with which to describe what we see.
The panelists talked about policy and practice, and again echoed Steve Seidel's comments about pessimism and optimism. In the Breakout sessions, we moved to the level of classrooms where there is no time for pessimism. Themes that seem to have cut across breakout sessions include:
    • Time, and the question of priorities
    • Scale and sustainability
    • Investing in building the capacity of individual students, teachers, artists and organizations
    • Investing in building a community of educators and partners who are willing to take risks
    • Inquiry takes time. Listening is not a theory; it is a practice. Going deep is essential to building knowledge and understanding.
Today, we have looked at aspects of arts education much as we would look at pieces of a mosaic. There is much artistry and information in each piece but, as with a mosaic, it is the totality that is the work of art; in order to be able to see it, one must step back and perceive the whole. That is the work we must all do on a daily basis: it's about perception. We must perceive, describe and document the learning that goes on in all our programs; and, we must engage together in inquiry. It is the work we will all return to on Monday morning. We need to articulate and build the knowledge base from which we each construct our practice as individuals and as organizations. We hope that in the course of the last 24 hours, you have encountered an idea or a new perspective that will inform how you think about your work.

One of our favorite quotes at ArtsConnection these days, and that you may have heard in the breakout sessions is from Frank Smith: "We learn from the company we keep."3 I have learned a lot from the company we have kept in the last 24 hours and in the process of preparing for this symposium. I would like to thank:
    • Steve Seidel and the panelists for their thoughtful and provocative contributions in helping us to uncover and frame questions that have been hidden by our assumptions and the answers demanded of us every day.
    • Rob Horowitz and his group of researchers for helping us to understand our work in new ways.
    • The ArtsConnection staff for their incredible commitment to persevere through any challenge put before them, their intelligence and generosity of spirit. It is a privilege and a pleasure to work with each and every one of them.
    • All of you for joining us in this symposium. Please keep us on your mailing lists and share with us the questions that you uncover along the way.

1McCarthy, et al. Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts. (RAND Corporation, 2004) p. 71. (return to remarks)
2Anne McCrary Sullivan. "Notes from a Marine Biologist's Daughter: On the Arts and Science of Attention." (Harvard Education Review, Vol 70, No 2, Summer 200, pp221-227) (return to remarks)
3Frank Smith. The Book of Learning and Forgetting (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998) (return to remarks)

Return to the main symposium page here