My creative mind meanders and free associates thinking on Arts Education
“An intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Albert Einstein
There was recently an op-ed blog post in the NY Times that argued that creative science courses in education will achieve the same results in young learners that exposure to the performing and visual arts will help them to achieve (http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/american-creativity-in-decline/). I say, of course they will! Creative problem solving is creative problem solving, no matter the framework for teaching it. But why are we making a vehement argument against the integration of arts into our educational system? It’s not as though the arts are directly responsible for a suffering state of science affairs in our country’s public schools (though perhaps the arts and science are duking it out in the race for funding). Anyhow, I wonder, is it useful for everyone in a society to be a scientist? Or for everyone to be an artist? No, in my opinion, these single-minded solutions will only turn out to be as useful as valuing the pursuit of money above all else and churning out a culture of corporate assholes. I think the fundamental issue being expressed on the Times blog, is a desire to address an educational system that is not geared to nurture creative thinkers (innovators, inventors, even dissenters, etc), and beyond this, to question a society and culture that does not value creative thinking. The fear of the arts that comes across in the maelstrom though, to me, is frightening.
I expect this probably has to do with discomfort and fear of things that aren’t concrete and cannot be controlled. Scientific experiments are typically dreamed up in a controlled environment and are ultimately bound by the laws of nature (though of course human ingenuity and technological evolution have stretched these boundaries far beyond our wildest imaginations). Art, by definition (if it has one), belongs to an abstract plane. It doesn’t have to be graspable or tangible. It sometimes cannot be defined by just one characterization; it is open to multiple interpretations and therefore, can never truly be pinned down. It’s also difficult to determine arts’ monetary value since it’s not, by nature, a commodity (see Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift,” for more on this train of thought). Art (including dance) belongs to the people; those who create it, the ones who dance it, the public who sees it, and of course, those individuals who inspire it. Art enriches the community that brings it forth and helps set a tone for the times. It gives a public voice to its creators and those they are representing. Art is powerful.
With all this said, I’m thinking, what can I do to demystify the merits of exposing students to the arts? Well, I can relay the very specific gains I observed in young learners (ages 12-23), following their participation in Dancing to Connect 2010 (DTC). DTC is a cultural exchange project (7 intensive days long) that engages international youth in creativity and team-building through the American art form of modern dance. I am one of the teaching artists who lead annual DTC workshops in Germany. Following are some clear, non-emotional, DTC deliverables reported by DTC teaching artists (from Aviva Geismar’s Drastic Action and the Battery Dance Company), participating German students and their school teachers who observed (and sometimes partook) in the activities.
- A spike in confidence
- Heightened imaginative activity and abstract reasoning skills
- Improved ability to work comfortably and cooperate with peers
- Growth in appreciation and respect for the ideas of others and the unfamiliar
- A recognition that there is no single “right” way to do things
- Increased ability to brainstorm
- MUSKELKATER: muscle soreness 🙂
- Improved ability to concentrate and to work on one’s own
- Increased interest in viewing or participating in creative projects in school and in the future
- Improved audience behavior and listening skills
Teachers have told us that for students, the experience of working through a medium of non-verbal expression (even just for a week), has often boosted underachieving students’ classroom participation, sometimes improved their level of academic accomplishment, and most impactfully, extended to them a renewed invitation into an academic process that they may have felt detached from or not smart enough to bother participating in. What’s more, many school teachers have relayed (often emotionally) that the experience of watching their students realize themselves (physically, creatively, imaginatively) has inspired them to see potential where they may have dismissed it.
These kinds of deliverables are easily transferred to other areas in school and/or life. For example, an ability to envision multiple ways forward increases the chance that a student will have an optimistic outlook regarding his/her future. That student then has a better chance of imagining different possibilities for him/herself and is therefore less likely to get stuck in a personal or professional rut. That’s just one oversimplified example from my humble perspective, and of course I must state, it is not scientifically proven.
Maybe this, in and of itself, is exactly what’s so scary about integrating creative thought into our public school curriculum; An educational system that produces thinkers and innovators might also create an abundance of poets, painters, philosophers and scientific tinkerers; a culture prone to reverie with lucid imaginative lives; an uncooperative workforce that is more concerned with process than production; people who want to enjoy their lives rather than squeeze them for every penny they’re worth, toiling in offices 60+ hours a week rather than investing in relationships, and seeking connections through social networks instead of “seeing” each other and the world around them, the way the Navi people do in Avatar. Well this might be the case, but we’d be hard pressed to ignore the clear cut and practical achievements of creative minds: Edison’s light bulb, the Doric columns of the Athenian Parthenon, Gutenberg’s original printing press, and even modern day Dyson vacuum cleaners… a narrow sampling of an epic historical laundry list.
My point: I support an educational system that cultivates innovation, promotes ongoing reflective contemplation, and encourages the process of trial and error. I also firmly believe that as well as other, more scientifically geared avenues, exposure to the arts (visual and performing) is capable of achieving these effects.
To learn more about DTC check out www.batterydance.org and search Dancing to Connect 2010 on youtube.
-Cara
Photo Credit, Ina Debald
Filed under: General | 9 Comments
Tags: arts, arts education, Dancing to Connect, education, innovation, science
Propel-her Dance Blog 
I really enjoyed your blog and wonder what creative science education is all about. I really don’t think that there is a substitute for hands-on experience. Kids (and adults) don’t really learn from those abstractions. I once knew of a music appreciation teacher who thought the best way to make kids appreciate music was by giving them a quiz on piano parts. How does this further love of the music? A better way might be to have kids listen and reproduce their own sounds. That creates love and excitement. In education today, everything must be codified. But learning isn’t about data production. Students are not auto parts in a factory. Before we can teach kids to think creatively, we, as educators, must do so.
Excellent, thought-provoking essay. You’ve made a very convincing argument, though, of course, I don’t need convincing!
I suggest that you extract a short, pithy executive summary and send it to the NYT and Huffington Post, etc. There are a few typos towards the end. Fix these up, substitute another word for ‘assholes’ and attach the fuller piece to your summary if and when you do so. Also, please change the bdc file path to reflect the batterydance.org website address.
Another positive in the arts is their immediacy. Because art is something fundamental in cultures around the world, it is safe to say it is fundamental to each individual person. Even when people don’t understand the meaning of A dance or A piece of art or music, they understand DANCE, ART, MUSIC. Attempting to express it is natural, and being taught how to do that better can release a lot of frustration in people otherwise having a lot of trouble expressing themselves.
However, because these things are so inherent, some aspects of the learning scale are unquantifiable, which schools fear when they look for funding. So perhaps the most effective argument is not to tell them the health and mind benefits to their students (since schools clearly don’t overall care THAT much about that), but to come up with ways that they can see money return to them through their arts programs.
And if that doesn’t work, call the programs “artistic science”.
Good post!
I applaud you for thinking creatively about the issue (haha) when so much of the conversation surrounding arts education is an exercise in ye olde “beating the dead horse” logic.
But therin lies the problem; arts education in America has become a dead horse. At the end of the day, it is incredibly challenging and intimidating for educators to “measure” both individual student progress and societal benefit for such a subjective discipline. There is a reason you taught that workshop IN GERMANY…we Americans seem reluctant (or better still, resistant) to invest our resources in what is essentially an unquantifiable product: CREATIVITY!
While my goal is not to bash the current obsession with the STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math) fields in early and secondary education, I have found myself wondering what we will lose in our single-minded push towards the top.
I could rant all day, but bottom line, I think this is an imporant conversation for those of us young bucks working in the arts to have.
Thanks for kicking it off here.
It is a complicated issue with the call, “American creativity is declining,” which urges people to voice their own biases. Indeed, different kinds of bias exist in the world today. Artists should not think they are the only creative people on earth; scientists, corporate people and all others should be creative. It should not be a choice of one field over another for dominance in education, it should be about how and what is included in the contents and approaches and process of learning and teaching that is important.
There are many human aspects that have been greatly neglected in our educational system. A purpose of the arts, indeed, is to examine these human aspects beyond what scientific research can accomplish. The open-minded dancers should embrace all that the universe has to offer; the open-minded scientists should also embrace all the human race offers. Albert Einstein was a great scientist; he continues to be admired for his scientific accomplishments and intelligent insight. This is his quote: “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” Are there insightful thinkers in science today compared to some of the great scientists from the past?
In my opinion, new research on the brain is a topic artists should take on themselves and embrace. To be aware of intuitions requires functioning of the brain; to understand one’s creativity also requires the brain; even to lift an arm, a leg and to move our bodies requires the brain to tell us what to do. Dance involves science, but it is beyond science, because it is human, and science has not been able to come up with answers for individuals, for human beings and for the body as a whole. Therefore, the existence of arts in education is to fill the holes that other subjects can’t teach, nurture, or train.
Science can find creativity within pre-set, defined perimeters — searching in a tunnel; while the arts can, as I put it: fish in the ocean with wide horizons. It is this ‘wide horizon’ that gives human beings vision leading to future pathways. We don’t need tunnel vision, we need broad, far vision into the future with feet rooted on the ground, especially in order for America to be a part of the world and continue with its leadership.
How can dancers be creative not only in their chosen discipline, but find “creative” solutions, creative directions, to create new situations in order to continue with their passions? To apply creativity to “living” in this changing world. If there’s the will, there will be ways. I continue to wonder about dancers in America: Are there enough dancers ‘think’ beyond ‘me’ — the artist? Are there enough dancers willing to sacrifice in order to give it to dance at large beyond oneself? Since the creation of dance as an academic discipline in the 60’s, we now have so many (maybe too many) dance departments across the US. Are all of them offering holistic, high quality educations? Does the current educational system produce too many Dance majors? Many questions about dance education linger in my mind, even though I don’t teach anymore. I have been thinking and observing the world.
A former student wrote a few days ago: “We were talking, the education in college prepared us for the real world.” What is this real world now after you have left the nest? Yes, it has changed. Vision for Dance can be applied to the surrounding environment; your analytical mind can be used in other ways. You have been trained to ‘see’ what can be seen and what cannot. The reality is full of what we see and what we cannot see. Have courage! — this is what is most needed. The long vision is: not to be a follower but try to be a leader — this is what I think the dance world needs. Not to live within the comfort zone, but to take chances. So much more …… nothing is easy. The ones who persist will find the way. Try to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and light the sparks of this light. Outside of the tunnel will be a world with infinity.
I enjoyed reading your informative, well constructed essay. Unfortunately, it has been very hard to get students to creatively think when they can’t even “Critically” think. In this society, blame is thrown around constantly. No one is ever responsible for their actions…proving that critical thinking is dying. If people would start to think in a critical manner, creative thinking would stem from there. We know the benefits to the arts: there are many, many documented facts and research to defend this argument. But, I think you hit it on the head when you mentioned the funding aspect. And, as long as the baseball team in a school needs uniforms, the arts suffer. After all, the games bring in money. So many actors, renowned performers, musicians, etc. preach that we should give to the arts…give to this…give to that. If these people gave 5% percent of their money to this or that, the this or that would be set for life. Your not only fighting the mindset of regular people, your fighting the mindset of greed, and as the duck says in Bugs Bunny, “Mine, mine, mine…all mine”. Keep sharing your love, passion and talent of dance and music and your energy. You are a remarkable dancer and an intuitive teacher. Seeing students progress, within your own little corner of the world, and knowing the advantages, may have to be enough.
Excellent post Cara! I wholeheartedly agree with you. Diminishing arts programs are an ongoing problem in the educational systems and I wish they would realize how important it is for learning and development in all areas. We need more people like you dedicated to the cause of supporting art and art education.
1) Exquisitely written. Direct. Honest. Thought-provoking.
2) Ironically, as tangible as we believe science is, the more research we conduct, the more our notions of what is “physical” and “real” and “tangible” changes i.e. quantum physics, psychology etc. The atom, time, speed — these things are in constant flux– constant expansion just as dance, music, painting etc are. Science and math are just as “artistic” as poetry and dance.
3) In the future you might want to also add a solutions list i.e. possible ways of encouraging arts or of blending “the arts” and “the sciences”.
4) You should really be writing for a major publication or a least submitting your work to them.
I also love your blog — do you ever come to Stamford?
Jane Landon
crimsondancer91@gmail.com