Saturday, April 19, 2008

Pedagogy, Art, and the Language Arts

This work was produced in conjunction with Union Institute and University's Masters of Education program at Vermont College. 

The Intersection of Pedagogy in Art and the Language Arts

The aim of art education in the public schools is not to make more professional artists but to teach people to live happier, fuller lives; to extract more out of their experience, whatever that experience may be.

  --Grant Wood, “Art in the Daily Life of the Child” (as cited by Decker, 2001).

            The practice and pedagogy in action in the secondary language arts classroom may become better informed by the examination and utilization of some modern methods and rationale at work in art education. As the value of visual and performing arts curriculum in public schools became contested during the 1980s and 1990s, many new rationale, as well as a trove of methods implementing ‘arts across the curriculum’ were developed. The secondary language arts classroom in the American public school deserves, and is in need of, a similar debate: some forms of communication at work in the world today may be expressive, containing emotion, meaning, and power, and expression can still be an art, and may still help students, in the words of Grant Wood, “extract more out of their experience.”
Drawing from Eliot Eisner’s 2002 Arts and the Creation of Mind, John Dewey’s Art as Experience (2005), and Dennis Atkinson’s Art in Education: Identity and Practice (2003), this paper will review common pedagogies, in theory and in practice, at work in arts curriculum, and will provide suggestions for a new approach for educators in the  language arts classroom.
            Art education pedagogy regards the importance of art education to both the individual and the wider community. This difference in the language arts classroom could manifest in whether or not the student’s writing assignment will be handed in to the teacher for assessment; it is important to note that language arts, and creative writing, can offer students a classroom opportunity to express themselves privately. Art education, especially the facilitation of students’ production of visual art, may offer less privacy, as often students in an arts classroom can view each other’s methods and products as they are created. This distinction of classroom environment is an important one: that a student’s painting, pottery, or sculpture is automatically shared with the class, and that is not a condition of the language arts classroom. 
As well, a student’s participation in a language arts or art education learning environment requires more than simply transmitting and receiving information. In the most effective situation, both of these educational environments may allow for an individual to make an artistic, creative, and unique contribution to a group or community. Dewey (2005) cites poet Samuel Alexander:
The artist’s work proceeds not from a finished imaginative experience to which the work of art corresponds, but from passionate excitement about the subject matter… The poet’s poem is wrung from him by the subject which excites him. (Alexander, as cited by Dewey, 2005, p. 67).
This helps identify an important distinction between art education pedagogy and all others; it is as well an important similarity between the teaching of Language and the teaching of Art: an individual’s “passionate excitement” may, through careful method and practice, help shape a curriculum. To entertain this pedagogical leap in Art, Music, or English class is to allow a student’s educational process to become transformative, an aid to their self-reflection and definition.  
            This paper will first examine a few art education pedagogies that specifically seek to educate and empower the individual, before identifying a few art education pedagogies that seek specifically to educate and empower communities, including new pedagogies rooted in hermenuetics.
            John Dewey (2005) builds upon previous theories of experience and education in Art as Experience, as he discovers new regard for the importance of developing an individual’s aesthetic perception. He provides quaint examples of a tranquil life: a wife watering houseplants, someone stoking a fire, and a baseball player who finds his presence “infects the onlooking crowd” (p. 3). “These people, if questioned as to the reasons for their actions, would doubtless return reasonable answers” (Dewey, 2005, p. 3). The individual’s perception of their environment, and their action and experience within that environment, result in rational, or “reasonable” answers.
            According to Dewey (2005), however, an individual’s perception does not function solely to construct reasonable answers, but to become, in the case of the fire-tender, “fascinated by the colorful drama of change enacted before his eyes” (p. 3), to such an extent that he “imaginatively partakes in it” (p. 3). Dewey asserts that because human perception allows for the discovery of aesthetic quality in our everyday actions and environments, our sense of “art” may be derived directly from our experiences (2005, p. 4).
Often, the language arts classroom seeks to achieve a similar goal: the development of an individual’s aesthetic perception, and, to whatever extent able, the expression of that perception through language. While many students relish their success in the language arts classroom upon mastering grammar, mechanics and typing, the acquisition of these skills might equate to a painter learning different brush strokes, or a sculptor learning how to use a hammer and chisel. These different media—visual art, tactile art, and the language arts—may not necessarily be viewed as equitable.
Writing and reading does directly challenge students to develop their ability to percieve in an aesthetic way; the written description of a campfire, watering houseplants, and a baseball player are all likely assignments in the language arts classroom. The teaching of writing, no matter the subject matter, shares with the teaching of creating visual art the challenge to an individual’s perceptive abilities, beyond seeking merely “reasonable answers” (Dewey, 2005, p. 3).
Alongside the improvement of students’ perceptive abilities, many art education pedagogies seek to develop an individual’s critical thinking skills. Eisner, in Arts and the Creation of Mind, asserts that “one lesson the arts teach is that there can be more than answer to a question and more than one solution to a problem; variability of outcome is okay” (2002, p. 196).
The previous distinction regarding privacy and the creative environment in the art and language arts classrooms again becomes relevant here, as Eisner’s (2002) “variability of outcome” (p. 196) among student work is, often in the visual arts classroom, immediate public knowledge—‘my painting looks different than yours.’ This condition does not often exist as often in the language arts classroom.
Though some pedagogical goals at work in the teaching of writing, reading, and communication skills may be have “more than one answer” (Eisner, 2002, p. 196), a great deal of learning must take place before students achieve a reasonable skill level in grammar and mechanics, and assimilate a vocabulary that supports sensible written expression.
            In Arts and the Creation of Mind, Eisner (2002) presents a number of pedagogical modes for art education (p. 26). A summary of each of these pedagogical approaches will inform this discussion, as each approach may inform the methods and curricula in use in the language arts classroom.
In one approach, Eisner (2002) uses twentieth-century psychology and philosophy to give support to the pedagogical notion that “perception itself is a cognitive activity” (p. 36). Eisner (2002) asserts that art education programs could empower students in a new way “if they emphasized the cognitive consequences of work in the arts and wanted to exploit such work for educational purposes” (p. 37).
This pedagogical approach calls for stronger recognition of the students’ actions, of perception and subsequent cognitive development, in the art classroom—actions of analysis, comparison and contrast, description, and more. According to Eisner (2002), students’ skills of cognitive development and perception are often shaped by their ability and tendency to “decode values and ideas embedded in pop culture” (p. 28).  
            In both visual art and modern American poetry, readers are often challenged in this regard. In the language arts classroom, students’ perceptive skills and cognitive development are developed to the extent that they may understand Keats’ axiom “truth is beauty, and beauty, truth.” However, students’ understanding of the concepts like “beauty” may have been derived from their interpretation of pop culture itself. Can we assume that a high school graduate has been exposed, in either the arts or language arts classroom, to a discussion discounting a Barbie ™ doll’s anatomic proportions?
            While Eisner’s (2002) first pedagogical approach to art education presented here sought to emphasize students’ cognitive development through understanding their own perception at work in pop culture, a different approach seeks to establish more broadly our cultural and societal understanding of the arts: “the arts are often thought to have very little to do with complex forms of thought. They are regarded as concrete rather than abstract, emotional rather than mental… imaginary rather than practical or useful” (p. 35).
            Perhaps the teaching of visual art suffers more from misnomers in its common societal and cultural conception; language arts differs from art education in that the skills acquired are immediately practical and useful, as communication. While Eisner (2002) regards the popular conception of the visual arts as “easy not tough, soft not hard, simple not complex,” (p. 35), only specific elements of the language arts—perhaps most dominantly, poetry—suffer from this inaccurate conception. 
            Eisner (2002) identifies another pedagogical approach to art education in citing
the esteemed research of V. Lowenfeld and H. Read (p. 32). Lowenfeld and Read were educational researchers who tried to validate the necessity of art through examining art education in Germany, prior to World War II. According to Eisner (2002), “both Read and Lowenfeld believed the arts to be a process that emancipated the spirit and provided an outlet for the creative impulse” (p. 32); thus, the world saw the disastrous consequences of an education system that suppressed an individual’s normal creative urges.
Eisner (2002) advocates for the theraputic use of the arts in the classroom: “the child who has developed freedom and flexibility in his expression will be able to face new situations without difficulties” (p. 32). In recognizing the psychological and fluid nature of this pedagogical approach to art education, Eisner (2002) describes Lowenfeld and Read’s notions of creativity and expression as “psychodynamic” (p. 32); art can provide a way to facilitiate students’ personal, emotive expression into real objects.
            Through creating an art education environment that embraces this “freedom and flexibility in expression,” (Eisner, 2002, p. 32), the production of art objects becomes a byproduct of the personal realization—“for Read,” surmised Eisner (2002), “art was not so much taught as caught” (p. 33). In this pedagogical approach, an arts educator is charged with, not an action that seeks exclusively to “teach,” but the more difficult action of ‘catching’ students’ interests, being aware of students’ moments of earnest expression, and to provide opportunities for these expressions to manifest in art.
            While Eisner (2002) formalizes a theraputic art education pedagogy, a similar theraputic approach applies the language arts classroom: with “freedom and flexibility” (p. 32), students are challenged to express themselves, through poetry or prose, the real or the imagined.
It is interesting to distinguish between the degree of “freedom and flexibility” available to students in the theraputically-aligned language arts classroom, against the degree that exists in a theraputic arts classroom. Students may be offered a variety of forms in each educational environment: short or long poems, large or small pottery, short stories, small sketches, massive canvases, novels, found poetry, junk art, sonnets—each of these can provide a venue for students to share some emotional, spiritual, or psychological element, or elements, of themselves.
While classroom method, curriculic choices, and educational goals may weigh against the degree of “freedom and flexibility” in both classrooms, it is important to note the variety of unique products available for use in both environments. Though the language arts classroom relies on students’ construction using words alone, a strong variety of forms are available to create a theraputic writing assignment.
Derived another pedagogical approach to art education from the Bauhaus movement, Eisner (2002) describes this approach as the completion of a task, and production of a useful artifact, assessing both its aesthetic design as well as its function (p. 31). Suggesting an arts educator “problematize” a creative product in the arts classroom, Eisner provides an example of designing new compact disc cases—a product whose creation challenges both a student’s aesthetic and functional design abilities.
            In the curriculum of the secondary Language Arts classroom, this approach is especially significant, as students’ expository writing may be framed by the supposition of a ‘problem,’ the solution to which exists in the pending product. A writing task similar to Eisner’s compact disc cases may be an essay that challenges students to, with brevity and aesthetic value, introduce the members of their immediate family.The development of students’ persuasive and argumentative essays may also serve as an example of this pedagogy at work in the language arts classroom.
Eisner (2002) using a pedagogical statement by a corporate executive to frame his next pedagogical approach to art education:
Today there are two sets of basics. The first—reading, writing, and math—is simply the prerequisite for a second, more complex, equally vital collection of higher-level skills required to function well in today’s world… the ability to allocate resources; to work successfully with others; to find, analyze, and communicate information; to operate increasingly complex systems of seemingly unrelated parts. (p. 34).
            Interestingly, the CEO asks for education to prepare individuals by embracing a skill set that extends beyond rudimentary literacy and math skills: the “higher-level” (Eisner, 2002, p. 34) skills the executive described are analytical, organizational, interpersonal. New emphasis of the development of these elements in students, through art education pedagogy may serve the educational goals of the corporate world.
            In both the art education classroom and the language arts classroom, educators may follow models that exist in the corporate workplace, and have students develop a portfolio of their own work for presentation. Or, students may work in teams on unique, and multi-faceted projects—not simply the design and production of a CD case, but perhaps an entire CD, of spoken word poetry or music.
While it may not be frugal to allow the pedagogy of the art education classroom be dictated by corporate America, or any one realm, the value of utilizing with students a sense of designing, executing, and completing large-scale “projects,” in both visual and language arts, may not be overestimated. Students may be more likely to gain an “ability allocate resources” (Eisner, 2002, p. 34), and gain a sense of aesthetic connection, if they are charged with the task of assembling a collection of their revised, polished poems. Asking students to draw connections between their own unique works of artistic, creative expression may help educators more directly fulfill the aims in this pedagogical approach.
             According to Eisner (2002), discipline-based education—the most widely-used of his seven pedagogical modes—aims to teach students the aesthetic quality of visual art, as “seeing from an aesthetic perspective is a learned form of human performance” (p. 26). Through gaining an understanding of how a work of visual art is created, and being provided with examples, students are challenged to see, ask, evaluate, and think about the world like Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe, and Pablo Picasso.
            The emulation of, and learning from, others’ work as a method for improving students’ aesthetic knowledge may be a useful classroom method for the language arts environment. At many levels—both the mechanical replication of grammatically-correct sentences, as well as in the emulation of a specific poet’s style in an original work—students gain some degree of aesthetic understanding regarding their use of language as communication and expression.
Eisner (2002) establishes four goals for discipline-based arts education: to establish imaginative skills that promote “high quality art performance” (p. 26),  to gain aesthetic perspective for use within and beyond the understanding of art, to comprehend a work’s historical contexts, and to evaluate the importance and value a work provides (p. 26).
Support exists in the language arts classroom for these aims: “high quality… performance” (Eisner, 2002, p. 26) might translate into promoting students’ mastery of grammar and mechanics—the raw techniques of effective written expression might be the equivelent of a painter finding a comfortable way to hold a paintbrush. The acquisition of an aesthetic perspective could translate in the language arts classroom into understanding of what qualities in a poem a reader/student does or dos not like. Improving students’ comprehension of a written work through providing supplemental historical context information is common. New methods of self-evaluation and assessment help educators allow students to understand their own work in a new way: do they think it is good, or not? 
            Eisner’s (2002) final approach to arts education is an integrated vision, seeking to utilize art concepts throughout any school environment (p. 39). Perhaps as schools assess and evaluate the value of arts curriculum, and budgetary constraints greatly reduce some areas of a learner’s educational experience, an integrated arts curriculum may help maintain a level of aesthetic and artistic awareness in public schools.
            Eisner (2002) promotes four methods of arts curriculum integration (p. 39). First, the arts may be utilized to help learners understand a historical period of culture: alongside a history unit on the Civil War, for example, Eisner (2002) suggests the curriculum include music of the time, or a series of Matthew Brady’s famous battlefield photographs. Second, elements of artistic design may be included in more than one realm of curriculum: the teaching of ‘rhythm’ across visual design, music, and poetry, all at once (p. 40). Thirdly, Eisner advocates for the identification and teaching of major themes or concepts across different forms of expression: to convey the notion of ‘metamorphosis,’ an educator may use a Mozart symphony, information on changing population demographics in urban development, and Kafka’s short story. Last, and perhaps most useful, Eisner proposes that a curriculum utilizing a ‘problem solving’ approach may relate readily to the arts: challenging high school students to design a playground for preschool and kindergarten students, for example, would require students employ skills learned in almost every realm, including the arts.          
In sum, Eisner (2002) presents seven new approaches to art education pedagogy, and each is rooted in debunking the false societal perception that regards art and art education as less than useful: “the arts have long been perceived as being “affective” rather than cognitive, easy not tough, soft not hard, simple not complex” (2002, p. 35). Eisner (2002) promotes new methods for the art education classroom that promote an individual’s cognitive development.
Beyond its importance to the individual, Detels (1999) recognizes art education as important to any community, for it “does not lead to monetary gain or other clearly quantifiable values; rather, it serves a broader and deeper purpose of helping us to understand ourselves and others” (p. 14). While Eisner (2002) promotes art education for its theraputic, cognitive, and developmental abilities, Detels (1999) evaluates the connections between individuals that are forged through art education pedagogy.
Art may allow for an individual’s self-discovery, which, when shared with other individuals, creates a community, and shared knowledge and experience. This pedagogical approach to art education is new, and, in the work of Detels (1999) and Atkinson (2003), targets to reform discipline-based art education pedagogy.
Atkinson (2003) describes hermeneutics as maintaining an understanding of “who and what we are and the way in which we percieve others” (p. 194). In the art education and language arts environments, students’ identities are formed, through factors such as classroom activities, instruction, and curriculum. Eisner (2002) notes that “arts teach children… their signature is important” (p. 197). These identities—as ably-equipped creative individuals—are the unique result of art education curriculum.
Assessment in the art education classroom is more difficult than other classrooms; how can we know when a student has learned that “their signature is important?” (Eisner, 2002, p. 197). Atkinson (2003) elaborates on these identities, and seeks to determine how art education assessment methods allow for a “pedagogized other” (p. 5), a term he uses to define those students whose work falls outside of the set of expectations and ‘norms’ during assessment. Because “their signature is important,” (Eisner, 2002, p. 197), how can art education assessment, or, in the language arts, the assessment of students’ creative writing, more fully embrace students whose individual expression doesn’t match up to what the curriculum sought?
Atkinson (2003) asserts that the current art education assessment pedagogy is at risk of maintaining a “particular discourse of levels of attainment and achievement in which specific standards are articulated according to certain norms of practice and understanding” (p. 10). Students’ identities may not become as developed in the art education classroom, if standards of “attainment and achievement” drive classroom assessment procedures.
The language arts classroom may also create this dangerous condition of a “pedagogized other” (Atkinson, 2003, p. 5), though standards of “attainment and acheivement” (p. 10) may be more easily recognized in the teaching of grammar, mechanics, and vocabulary. The language arts classroom is most at risk of developing identities within students that resemeble Atkinson’s (2003) “pedagogized other” (p. 5) when students are challenged and assessed not by the learning of forms, but through the creative and unique choices they make as they express themselves.
Atkinson (2003) examines art education assessment methods, and acknowledges the important aesthetic component (p. 11); an example of this improper type of art education assesment could be telling students, ‘use all five colors on this color wheel for an A on this assignment.’ In the language arts classroom, this could manifest in assessing students’ sonnets, assessing their work solely on the proper execution of the sonnet form.
Hermeneutics at work in the language arts classroom helps educators empower students. Through creating an environment that allows for students’ earnest, creative expression, and an environment that recognizes the importance of self-evaluation, students will be motivated to learn the mechanics, grammar, and vocabular necessary to express themselves more fully. Language arts educators may embrace a hermeneutic pedagogy at work in art education by teaching students that, through writing, they may find a better answer to “who and what we are” (Atkinson, 2003, p. 194), and assessing students’ products on both its aesthetic qualities, its understanding of form, and its qualities of expression.  
Detels (1999) explores hermeneutic art education pedagogy through acknowledging two goals of art in the classroom: the transmission of knowledge, and, built of that knowledge, some amount of understanding, about ourselves and about those around us (p. 12). Detels (1999) notes that since the Renaissance, education has become increasingly specialized, preparing individuals for work in specific trades.
Detels (1999) says individuals are at risk of losing the ability to communicate with society as a whole, having become “so narrowly focused within their disciplines as to lose the ability to communicate their knowledge to others” (p. 12). Technological advancements have not often been accompanied by advancements in the way we communicate; because of an increasing specificity of trade in society, individuals’ unique knowledge and experience becomes harder to communicate to those who work in a different trade.
Writing to summarize a keynote address by Christopher Lasch, delivered at a conference in 1983 on “The Future of Musical Education in America,” Detels (1999) seeks to better frame this problem of specificity and communication, and to offer a new vision of art education pedagogy as its cure: “[Lasch] went on the address the need for music and humanities scholars to challenge the narrow consumeristic approach to education and life in late industrial America, instead of just participating in specialized professional debates” (1999, p. 119). Detels seeks to identify the way students may benefit from art education, or language arts pedagogies that confront this specialization.  
The “narrow consumeristic approach” (Detels, 1999, p. 119) identified here applies to the application of art education pedagogy within a variety of curricula. According to Detels (1999), teaching the arts is viewed by most, educators and students alike, as unique from other curriculum: “none of the arts is seen as having comparable importance with history, English, math, or other subjects, so their representation in K-12 schools often depends on the presence of extra funding” (p. 120). As schools prepare students for work in a specific trade, Detels (1999) proposes a re-evaluation of art education pedagogy at work in all classrooms.
 Detels acknowledges the difference between the value of using art across curricula in education, and the lesser value of specified music classes, visual art classes, etc. Before defining the relationship between the 1994 National Standards for Arts Education, the product of a group of arts educators, and the Arts Education aims as listed in the Goals 2000 National Education Standards (legislation usurped by the No Child Left Behind Act), Detels (1999) notes that the proper functioning of these ‘arts across the curriculum’ goals assigned “responsibility for teaching the arts to single-disciplinary specialists in the various arts disciplines, as if schools commonly have specialists in all four disciplines” (p. 121). Detels (1999) identifies that the principle of ‘arts across the curriculum’ may not be sound practice, as educators often teach students in more than one area of curriculum.
 While ‘arts across the curriculum’ may appear as a valid mode of pedagogy to help reform education, ‘writing across the curriculum’ may not be as valid. The language arts are useful for their teaching of communication skills; thus, funding for English class in public education is not debated in the same way as Art class.
Detels (1999) might notice, however, that the debate regarding “single-disciplinary specialists” (p. 121) could be applicable to the language arts: as every teacher is required to employ the language arts in their classroom, the English curriculum in the school quickly comes into play.
The “narrow consumeristic approach” (Detels, 1999, p. 119), and dilemma of specialization in education and society that Detels identifies regarding art education pedagogy is important to language arts education. To view the unique components of English class—reading comprehension, grammar, mechanics, and vocabulary, the process of writing and the writing itself—which of these could be emphasized in curricula other than English? Educators might answer this question regarding their own classroom, and invent new methods of reenforcing some component of language arts curriculum through their own teaching. As the move toward specialization of trade continues in society, the implementation of art education and language arts pedagogy across many curricula needs to be carefully considered as well.
            Detels (1999) presents a distinct remedy to the “narrow consumeristic approach” (p. 119) of art education pedagogy when she calls for the re-examination of the method of historical inquiry that results in establishing a literary or visual arts canon (p. 28). The process of how works are selected for inclusion in a canon may not fully represent students’ interests; Detels (1999) questions directly why Elvis, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and John Coltrane are excluded from music history curriculum (p. 28).
            In the language arts classroom, students may achieve some level of ‘cultural literacy’ through creating a specific curriculum or canon of modern works. While art and music education may face difficult questions regarding the inclusion of popular and modern works, language arts curriculum may offer educators more flexibility: using resources as fresh as a daily newspaper, or, better, reliable internet news sources, educators may make use of students’ pop culture interests.
            Through examining art education pedagogy, methods of instruction and curriculum development at work in language arts classroom may be strengthened and improved. Recognizing what Eisner (2002) called “the cognitive character of the arts” (p. 36), a language arts educator may seek, through a number of approaches, to offer students a number of unique venues for their creative expression. An educator in the language arts classroom may be more challenged, in a good way, to embrace Dewey’s (2005) affirmation, that “art is a more universal model of language” (p. 349). Both Dewey (2005) and Atkinson (2003) regard as important the development of a student’s sense of aesthetics, in and out of the art education environment. The practice and pedagogy in action in the secondary language arts classroom can become better informed by the examination and utilization of some modern methods and rationale at work in art education.

Bibliography

Atkinson, D. (2003). Art in education: Identity and practice. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Decker, Judy. (2001). Curriculum planning: Discipline based art education. In J. Paul Getty museum. Retrieved March 10, 2008 from

Detels, C. (1999). Soft boundaries: Re-visioning the arts & aesthetics in American education. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Dewey, J. (2005). Art as experience. New York: Perigree.

Eisner, E. (2002). Arts and the creation of mind. Harrisonburg: R.R. Donnelley.

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Art and Design. In National curriculum in action. Retrieved March 15, 2008 from http://www.ncaction.org.uk/subjects/art/index.htm

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