Response to Laura on arts ed practices

You write: "We, as a field, we need to rethink our practices to prioritize the development of those capacities that create personally relevant experiences in the work of art, exploring and creating works that may or may not be in "artistic" media."

Then Conway wrote:
"Here here! But the question is - How do we do that? How in institutions that by their nature act institutionally do you give people the "artistic" experience in "artistic" media when those experiences themselves may not be conducive to being institutional?"

I would like to add another "...here" to this concept. These "relevant artistic experiences" are the match that lights the candle for an artistic life.

They can occur, as Mr. Sellers points out,as an outcome of the the interaction and tuning of voices(A.K.A, Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow Theory".) However, the student-teacher dynamic which occurs when corrected technique creates an improved representation of the piece (music or otherwise), causes the same "flow" of energy, and also ignites this candle called artistic expression.

Finally, as others have stated, teachers need to focus on each student's personal expression and give it great value. This valuing is inherent in our current educational strands, but I do not think we state it strongly enough. Individual effort and improvement of artistic expression benefits everybody.

I came to art education, through art therapy, and frustration with the turf war has increased to the extent that I feel at odds with each profession. In education, as in therapy, I have observed professionals pursue a path of viability by "learning the language" of the administrator, or institutional model (relating more to business, than education, therapy, or art). I feel strongly that success in this regard has had the effect of diminishing the potential of art in the life of the individual. I think the notion of art as mere object - Mr. Booth's noun - has reduced art education to a syllabus of "how to's", and like the Art Appreciation course that teaches students how to be good consumers of art, the experience of WHY art is important doesn't happen. I've viewed art as an individual pursuit of meaning and my methods have followed. Although my approach to teaching has been praised by students (I call it image based and action oriented), school administrators have seemed to measure their own success by how well I conformed to their intention - something I know not to subject my students to. If methods in art instruction are indiscernible from those in conventional science or math classes, than art is presented as a dead subject, and the view of the world as something thoroughly explored (and discovered in the Columbus sense) gains adherents in young people faced with the false choice of adapting or rebelling.

When pressed myself to adopt methods of instruction I felt ethically opposed to, I declined to return for the following year. Worse than the hardships brought onto myself, was the realization that I'm doomed to making the same decision again. I'm at least heartened by students who have called me years later to tell me what it meant to them.

I like Laura's questions as a way of getting the conversation rolling. I've taken a stab at each:
• What should we expect of public education?
• A great deal more than is currently in place. It is too early in the game to come to any reasonable conclusion about how much more. But there's little danger of us getting "too much" from the public schools before the polar ice caps melt.
• Can community-based arts education programs fill the gaps left by the public schools?
• Community-based arts ed programs are filling some of the gaps. (And the best also demonstrate important principles about the arts and learning that could benefit the schools.) But the gaps are enormous. Since the greatest gaps are likely to be in low-income schools and school systems, there is no good reason to think that community programs could ever fill them all. Community based programs rely on earned income (from fees and such) or on charitable contributions to sustain themselves. (Yes, there is some very modest public sector support for community programs, but these initiatives are not, like schools, tied to a dedicated tax revenue stream, so they are intrinsically unstable.) As long as school attendance is mandatory, schools are will remain the only places that all children can learn the arts.
• Is it reasonable to expect arts specialists and parents to bear the responsibility of making the case for arts instruction in local schools year after year?
• No! Advocacy for arts education needs to be broadened considerably. The business community and education policymakers in government and academia have shaped the debate about school reform for the last three decades. Arts education advocates need to recruit support in those groups particularly. The mounting critique of NCLB, and the development of more sophisticated ideas about the intellectual needs of the future workforce both suggest that movement in both constituencies is more likely now than it has been for generations.
• What will it take to change state education policy so that all public schools offer instruction in music, visual arts, drama, and dance?
• The school day is already badly overcrowded with curricular requirements, and there is not enough time to teach anything particularly well because the curriculum is ten miles wide and a half inch deep. Building a case for four more subjects in the school day will place the arts in direct competition with reading, math, science, social studies, language arts, and foreign language, all of which claim they need more time as well. That is a competition we've been losing and are destined to lose. If we want to win, we need to fundamentally reframe the debate itself. I believe that we can find allies in other curricular areas who would agree that curriculum and pedagogy need to be rethought if we really want all kids to succeed. That means we will need to fundamentally rethink the conventions of arts curriculum and pedagogy as well, a prospect that may dismay some. But Eric Booth makes a cogent case for exactly this in his posts below.
• Should arts policymakers, artists, and other leaders in the artworld forge common cause with arts educators to advocate for change in state education policies?
• There’s no reason to believe that such an alliance likely to succeed. (And skeptics would argue it is not even likely to happen.) The alliance must be far broader.
• Is improving arts education in the schools the best way to address cultural inequity?
• Yes. But I may be defining cultural inequity somewhat differently than it is defined in the RAND study. The great promise of arts education is not that more people will be capable of fully enjoying and appreciating great works of art, as lovely as that may be. Rather, the promise of arts education is awakening and enabling children's own creative and expressive capacities; preparing children to make the culture of their times; establishing the principle that in a democratic society everyone has a “voice” and that everyone’s story is significant. Enjoying and appreciating great works of art is only a small part of that promise.
• If arts education were more widespread, could it offset the pervasive influence of popular culture?
• This is like a Zen koanm, and here's an answer: If arts education were more widespread it would teach popular culture!
• Why not let demand for the nonprofit arts shrink in response to lower demand? Aren't the arts like any other market where consumers decide what they want?
• As long as the arts are fundamentally understood as a high-end consumer item requiring both money and a high end education as well (and I fear that is precisely how they are understood in the RAND report), then they will shrink in response to lower demand. In fact, the RAND report was motivated by a perception that they were already starting to shrink, or that there were signs on the near horizon that they will. Though there are plenty of studies that demonstrate a strong correlation between arts education in childhood and "arts participation" in adulthood, it is not at all clear that the relationship is causal. Nonetheless, it is an argument that may have some traction with recalcitrant cultural organizations that have historically relegated their education programs to dingy basement offices. What Eric Booth argues in his post below is that the arts are so, so much more than a high-end consumer item. They enable us to make sense of our world and communicate the full range of our experiences in ways that are beyond (or different than) science and conventional language. That’s why they belong in schools.

You write: "We, as a field, we need to rethink our practices to prioritize the development of those capacities that create personally relevant experiences in the work of art, exploring and creating works that may or may not be in "artistic" media."

Here here! But the question is - How do we do that? How in institutions that by their nature act institutionally do you give people the "artistic" experience in "artistic" media when those experiences themselves may not be conducive to being institutional?