Teaching Through The Arts

Sir Ken Robinson says that Creativity is as important in education as literacy and should be treated with the same status on Ted.com. You really need to watch this and see what you think. Here's some information on him from Ted.com. Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. It's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this." A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultur...

I came across this on Ms. Molina's Class Page in a post titled "Brainy Language Arts"and thought I'd share it with you. You can read the entire post, and it's well worth the time, by clicking on the title of this post. "Why teach with the arts and the brain in mind? Eric Jensen, another pioneer in brain research states, " I support constructivism over mindless factual accumulation, and I favor depth over breadth of knowledge. I favor variety in education over one-size-fits-all." These statements leave little doubt in the reader's mind that Eric Jensen believes in the arts-not test scores alone...He makes it very clear that educators should appeal to the Multiple Intelligences, and that those intelligences lend themselves most efficiently to the arts. From his point of view, he is more concerned with developing thinking, balanced human beings, than developing automated computer-like individuals. His philosophies indicate a belief in the uniquenes...

Why teach the arts in our schools? Why is it essential that school systems as well as individual classroom teachers make the arts an integral part of the curriculum for students at all grade levels? In short, an important outcome of education is for students to be aware of, to be enriched by, and to appreciate the shared human experience within the diversity of a multi-cultural world. That is, the desired outcomes of education must go beyond simple recall and identification. Rather, students must be trained to be independent, critical thinkers and problem solvers who can tap their creative and imaginative potential. Such outcomes cannot be realized if the arts modalities are not used in teaching. After all, the visual and performing arts, music, and literature teach us most profoundly about the human condition. Using the arts to teach children of all ages makes sense because the arts appeal to the multiple intelligences, the arts are a universal tool for communicating, the arts encoura...

Another reason for integrating the arts is that they appeal to all of the multiple intelligences. They are a method of getting away from the one size fits all teaching mentality of simply focusing on the linguistic intelligence and branching out to reach all students. Teachers must reach “beyond the text and the blackboard to awaken student’s minds” (Armstrong, 2000, p. 39). This idea connects to the earlier argument regarding teaching to the whole child. It is not difficult to find out which intelligences are stronger in each child in a classroom. This can be done through simple questioning, or trying varied activities. It can also be discovered through watching how students “misbehave in class. The strongly linguistic student will be talking out of turn, the highly spatial student will be doodling and daydreaming, the interpersonally inclined student will be socializing, the bodily-kinesthetic student will be fidgeting…” (Armstrong, 2000, p. 21) and the list goes on. The point is tha...

It is clear that our schools need to do a better job of educating the whole child. In that vein, there is real need to move away from a content-based approach and focus on a student-based approach. We, as teachers, need to get to know our students from all sides so that we can tailor our teaching directly to them. As a young student named Noel says in Cohen and Gainer’s 1987 book Art: Another Language for Learning “Art lets you see inside of somebody” (as cited in Edwards & Nabors, 1993, p. 80). This is a statement that really lingers for me and colors my teaching methods. Through integrating the arts, we get the chance to really see our students, and they get the chance to really see themselves and others in the class as well as us. We need to get away from overloading our students with content; the day has long passed when one person could know everything there was to know in the world. As Eric Jensen says in his book Arts With the Brain in Mind , “Filling the brain with knowle...