How the Arts Can Save Education

• In Event: Rethinking Arts Education for Social and Emotional Learning

Abstract

When we think about using the arts to “improve education,” we usually assume that the beginning and the end are fixed. We start by assuming that poor kids and kids of color come into a classroom lacking key skills and habits - we take a deficit rather than a funds of knowledge perspective on how kids enter a learning environment (Moll et al., 1992). We also assume that the outcomes for schooling are fixed, that what and how much kids learn in schools is measured by their scores on reading and math tests. We consider a school “good” if the kids have good test scores and if kids are struggling, we like to use what I call the “slowly and more loudly” approach to remediation. In this model, there can be a little space for the arts inside the traditional curricular box. There is talk about how the arts can be integrated to support the outcomes that we care about -- reading and math scores on standardized assessments. But it turns out, you know how you improve kids' math scores? Teach more math! Specifically, teach more of the math that’s on the test.
Instead of working inside the curricular box, I use the arts to remake the whole teaching and learning process. The set of disciplines we call “the arts” — theatre, music, visual arts, dance, and digital media — can transform a currently stagnant education system that is strangled by its own definitions of “what counts” as knowing, as learning, and as achievement. The arts are teaching, they are learning, and they are a model for how we should design effective learning environments. The art of improvisation, for example, provides a model for what good teaching is (Barker & Borko, 2011; Graue, Whyte, & Karabon, 2015; Sawyer, 2011). Creating art is a better way to document learning than any longitudinal examination of test scores (Halverson, 2012, 2013). Designing learning environments is a set of arts practices. Learning environments from classrooms to afterschool programs, museums, libraries, and online learning spaces can be redesigned to afford making, performance, and improvisation (Halverson & Peppler, 2018; Halverson & Sheridan, 2014). The core features of an arts space — audience, critique, and process — turn out to be the core features we need for an effective learning environment.
In this presentation, I will go beyond the mild argument that the arts can improve teaching and learning and make the more radical argument that the arts are teaching and learning. Throughout, I will use examples from my 20-year career as an artist and a researcher; sometimes the examples will highlight a big theoretical idea while other examples are failures that I have had as an artist educator; reclaiming the concept of failure is one of the ways that the arts is a better model for learning than school! And, as an example, I will describe Whoopensocker, the “something extraordinary of its kind” artist-in-residence program I have created that takes advantage of how the arts can transform education.

Author

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison