Theater Arts for the Win

It’s both terrifying and exciting to be studying as a pre-service arts education teacher for the state of Illinois. Since I am studying (and hope to one day work) in Chicago, news of the CPS layoffs and potential arts cuts concerns me on a daily basis…

Nevertheless, one method that could ensure arts’ inclusion in the classroom is to create more “project-based” learning opportunities. Edutopia breaks down project-based learning as a combination of:

• Designing and/or creating a tangible product, performance or event
• Solving a real-world problem (may be simulated or fully authentic)
• Investigating a topic or issue to develop an answer to an open-ended question

This description compliments the America Society for Engineering Education’s recent study identified several characteristics of quality STEM programs:

1. The context is motivating, engaging, and real-world.

2. Students integrate and apply meaningful and important mathematics and science content.

3. Teaching methods are inquiry-based and student-centered.

4. Students engage in solving engineering challenges using an engineering design process.

5. Teamwork and communications are a major focus. Throughout the program, students have the freedom to think critically, creatively, and innovatively, as well as opportunities to fail and try again in safe environments.

If American education is truly concerned about creating real-world, participatory, and collaborative group projects, I truly believe incorporating more theater into the curriculum would help solve the issues of educational inclusivity combined with independent thinking. An inherently collaborative art, theater incorporates technology, memorization, communication skills, and personal responsibility into every single production. Even an article published yesterday heralds the ways that theater arts can turn abstract subjects like math into more concrete, understandable and measurable topics for students of all ages -- which suggests great things for the future of transdisciplinary arts education.

If students are learning to adapt to the changing demands of the workplace, arts educators should also work to ensure art's place in national curriculum.

Full STEAM ahead!

The article “Kids Unite Art and Science and Create a World of Wonder” brings up a fantastic, often overlooked point that many of those who have contributed the most to “scientific” endeavors are skilled artists, as well. And really, why should this come as a surprise? Creativity simply means one has the freedom to think abstractly, boldly imagine, and act on ideas. That sounds like the description we’ve grown up with when learning about stereotypical scientists and artists, alike!

When did the subjects of art and science become separated and placed in vacuums, anyway? As this article points out, they were “once inextricably linked, both dedicated to finding truth and beauty”! It’s this kind of so-called “distinction” between subjects that prevents creativity from flowing interdisciplinarily. Personally, projects like “Global Cardboard Challenge” sound like ideal settings for growth and understanding, wherein - as “Kids Unite…” explains - students created bowling lanes relative to their smaller size and that of the classroom. Yet, it’s harder to “quantify,” “assess,” and “standardize” the learning that takes place experientially, so without STEAM as a framework for American education to embrace, lessons like these will remain few and far between.

I think STEAM has been mostly promoted through the avenue of  technology. Titles like “developer” or “maker” invite students to “create” in the supposedly non-artistic field of science. Really, these are just 21st Century terms for an age-old title: inventor. Successful schools that have integrated STEAM structures into their curriculum, and treat students like inventors/investigators, are held up as special beacons, which can be emulated but are harder to replicate. Ideally it seems STEAM should just become part of the everyday curriculum, yet bringing imagination to life through the arts and sciences still requires special student titles, global student “Challenges,” and awestruck wonder when considering how unique it would be to truly integrate art into education. This leaves me to wonder, what does the nation think “art education” means?

Messing About with Computers: Making Transdisciplinary Learning Personal

“What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available.” – Seymour Papert

I still fondly remember receiving rolly-polly bugs as pets in an elementary science class, even though I can’t recall why we were examining them in the first place. I also remember creating home movies in middle school (on film!) about tectonic plate shifts. But, by the time I reached high school, the subject I had actually enjoyed transformed into segmented periods to which I could no longer relate. While biology was still a point of interest, I really struggled to comprehend chemistry and physics. Since these memories clearly remain pretty fresh and negative, reading about Seymour Papert’s goal to make scientific inquiry personal read like a breath of positive, fresh air.

That his inspiring article, “Computer as Material: Messing About with Time,” was written in 1988, however, proves disconcerting. In the reading, he describes a series of sessions where junior high students with different interests and skill strengths came together to experiment with programming clocks. While some naturally took to the computer programming language, LOGO, he brought into the classroom, others built the ramps where motorized cars would run on, or contributed ideas as to how to make the clocks’ timing more efficient. In essence, it seems like the ideal setting for discovery and performing learned math/science terms (such as variables) in a practical, tangible way.  Furthermore, the assignment required a multitude of talents to achieve the group’s collective goal.

Would more classes in other disciplines prove this fruitful if students were allowed to experiment freely? I believe so, and this hypothesis is in part supported by MIT’s Scratch software. The LOGO programming language was expanded into Scratch by Seymour Papert’s student Mitchel Resnick, and having just put it to use myself by animating my name, I can say that it turns programming into a fairly painless act. (As evidenced by my animation, I am by no means an expert.) That this application is located on a website even allows people of all ages around the world to create animated 2-D stories, and I think if this were around when I was a kid it would have been something I could relate to as a more language arts-minded student.  

Compare Scratch technology with Papert’s explanation of how computers were used in the late 20^th century:

“An examination of computer use in schools today reveals that students' interactions with computers are largely teacher-directed, workbook-oriented, for limited periods of time, and confined to learning about the machines themselves or about programming languages. Further, computers are located in separate labs and are not integrated into the standard curriculum. ‘Doing computer’ in school is thought of as an exciting activity in and of itself.”

We’ve come a long way from the clunky desktop computers Papert describes from the 1980s, with laptops, tablets, mobile technology, and last but not least, the INTERNET making devices and the activities performed on them more transportable and user-friendly. Yet, aren’t computers still often treated as a separate, slightly scary, and serious entity that must be “done” and utilized? Do you feel the use of technology remains teacher-directed and scientific? How can we still improve school computer usage to help coursework become more transdisciplinary, as Scratch aims to achieve?

Week 1 in Review

What values do you want to pass on to your students in their exploration and learning of art?

Art is one of the ideal school settings in which students should feel free to make mistakes. I draw this concept from that old saying often floating in inspirational memes around the Internet:

That making mistakes is essential to learning and an action to be encouraged is barely spoken of in educational environments. Art consists of editing, and sometimes what one artist originally considered an error could become one of their proudest accomplishments.

Art should draw from life, and through the exploration the subjects we learn. As the NMC Horizon report detailed, there is currently a shift in students acting as mere consumers of information to becoming creators. They cite the “Minecraft Edu” game as a digital opportunity for creative development, wherein users must mine minerals to build  their worlds. I believe applications like this can be used in conjunction with artistic actions, such as mixing powder to form clay that can be modeled and developed in the classroom to bring alternate realities to life. Art imitates life, so why shouldn’t lifelong art practices mingle between the digital and physical world?

How does technology and living in a digital society impact your values?

I value honesty in my daily life, but my posts on social media are in a way an untruth because they are pictures and quotes of my “best” self. I don’t post about hot-button topics, like religion or politics; mostly I share news articles or pictures of my dog.

It will be important to help students navigate the realm of digital presence in ways that are both smart and safe. That might sound like an "after-school special" kind of message, but, as a blog writer on the old Xanga website, I learned the hard way in high school that what we put on the Internet is not private. Posts can be shared, and there are people who can get hurt by what we write. The Internet is the ultimate version of a potentially damaging “permanent record.”

Is there anything in these talks that support or alter your view, or are there areas of concern or challenges that are not taken into account for your future teaching?

Cindy Foley’s TEDTalk, Teaching art or teaching to think like an artist?, was for me the most striking “text” we encountered this week. I agree with her mentioning that art education is currently on the defensive, trying to adapt to standards and concrete expectations foreign to the nature of art-making practices, whereas the field should instead be focusing on developing learners that think like artists. By that, Foley explained that art education should be about “embodying artists’ habits:” Finding comfort with ambiguity; Generating ideas; and Transdisciplinary research.

In all honesty, transdisciplinary research is my jam. The idea of one subject inspiring another subject, that leads to another idea, that takes students on a seemingly disjointed path and ends with a well-rounded, multi-dimensional product is how I work, and how I would ideally like to inspire students to work, as well. Last week in class I shared the Brainpickings blog, which is one such tool for other transdisciplinary thinkers to follow the rabbit hole of inquiry. There’s another great Ted Talk, led by Rives – called “the first 2.0 poet” – that expands this concept by reinventing the encyclopedia game where players search Wikipedia, rather than hard copy books. The game involves reading an article until you find something on the page you didn’t know about before, and clicking links that lead to other previously unknown topics. It makes me wonder, will the model of American education ever become self-driven in this vein? What has been stopping us from using this model until now, considering technology makes more information available at our fingertips than ever before? Is it merely the lack of measurable standards? A fear to let students drive their learning environment? Or perhaps educators are torn between a concern that they might know less about the emerging technologies from which to draw information than their students, or the desire to ensure factual accuracy by choosing material with proper citations – which some online sources lack? 

This mode of research-driven inquiry also leads into my history with the study of dramaturgy, which I was introduced to during undergrad. Essentially, dramaturgy is a research field that encourages the cross-examination of art forms to enrich play writing and production. It was my dream job, but unfortunately it’s not a job that many theaters hire for or pay people to practice, and so while I was originally distraught that this dream career was not to be mine, it ultimately inspired me to reconsider my fondness for teaching. What better discipline could there be for drawing connections between various topics that stem from students’ own interests?

What forms do you imagine it will take in your teaching? In your own learning?  

Though I’m in school for a K-12 art certification, I would like to draw from what Sean T. Buffington wrote in his article on collegiate educational systems, Art Teaching for a New Age: “We may have to imagine our curricula, recast the BFA degree as a generalist, not professional degree.” I want to provide a well-rounded curriculum in which students of any grade level can bring other school subjects into, or draw upon personal experience. Art should be transdisciplinary, where artists play with different techniques and information.

I would also LOVE to incorporate The Lego Movie’s “Master Builder” concept, which as Cindy Foley’s explained, was the person who has the courage to be creative and have ideas. Like Foley, it would be incredible to have a classroom full of master builders at play who feel free to have ideas bounce off one another. Not yet having a classroom of my own, however, I worry how it would work to have multiple “leaders” in classroom guiding lesson topics simultaneously?