"That in-between place, between what you know and what you don't know, is an overlooked but crucial area in arts learning. It is sometimes called the liminal zone (Latin for 'threshold'). It can be the threshold of discovering, surprise, learning, and delight. Our creative selves come out to play in the liminal zone. Most people are a little wary of this zone, even anxious within it; humans naturally resist change and feel a little cautious of the new. It is a habit of mind to be able to adjust that tendency. We must be more skillful in slowing down passage through the liminal zone." --Eric Booth
"Institutional thinkers see themselves as debtors [who] have been freely given a world charged with meaning and calls to commitment. The institutionalist admires the excellences of what has been delivered to him. The contrast between thinking institutionally and current intellectual fashion is stark. The postmodern stance rejects inherited values as cultural oppressions. As a result, the anti-institutionalist has no capacity for genuine admiration. [An institutionalist] is moved by a central fact--that there is something estimable and decisive beyond me. What is it, larger than myself, into which I am drawn? To think institutionally is to be attentive to precedent. It is to see yourself as 'at once receiver and legacy' [in an] implicated life with others beyond the Self." --Hugh Heclo
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Art, Reflection, and Belief
Just a few provocative quotes about education:
"An artist actively expands people's sense of the world, taking them into the verbs of art while avoiding the tripwires of the nouns. Entertainment happens within what we already know; art happens outside of that. Becoming a teacher puts you in a synergistic relationship with art; it is, in fact, one of the only sustainable ways to keep genuine curiosity alive. Art is learning, and learning is art." --Eric Booth
"Reflection is essential to learning--to life. Unfortunately, we live in a belligerently anti-reflection society. The etymology of the word 'reflection' is to 'bend back toward.' We must help students bend an artistic experience back towards themselves." --Eric Booth
"In the believing game, the first rule is to refrain from doubting. We return to Tertullian's original formulation, credo ut intelligam: I believe in order to understand. The monopoly of the doubting game makes people think the doubting muscle is the only muscle in their heads, and that belief is nothing but the absence of doubt. But the believing muscle. . .puts the self into something. By believing an assertion we can get farther and farther into it, see more and more things in terms of it or 'through' it, use it as a hypothesis to climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood--and finally get to the point where we can be sure it is true." --Peter Elbow
"An artist actively expands people's sense of the world, taking them into the verbs of art while avoiding the tripwires of the nouns. Entertainment happens within what we already know; art happens outside of that. Becoming a teacher puts you in a synergistic relationship with art; it is, in fact, one of the only sustainable ways to keep genuine curiosity alive. Art is learning, and learning is art." --Eric Booth
"Reflection is essential to learning--to life. Unfortunately, we live in a belligerently anti-reflection society. The etymology of the word 'reflection' is to 'bend back toward.' We must help students bend an artistic experience back towards themselves." --Eric Booth
"In the believing game, the first rule is to refrain from doubting. We return to Tertullian's original formulation, credo ut intelligam: I believe in order to understand. The monopoly of the doubting game makes people think the doubting muscle is the only muscle in their heads, and that belief is nothing but the absence of doubt. But the believing muscle. . .puts the self into something. By believing an assertion we can get farther and farther into it, see more and more things in terms of it or 'through' it, use it as a hypothesis to climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood--and finally get to the point where we can be sure it is true." --Peter Elbow
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Artistic Legitimacy in the Field of Education
If meaningful
learning is an art (which I believe it is), then teaching is the art
of fostering artistic exploration, and arts education is the art of
fostering an artistic exploration of art itself. The two terms
(“art” and “education”) are intrinsically matched. Is it any
wonder, then, that formative artistic experiences are deeply and
uniquely educational or that moments of profound understanding are
often facilitated by teaching artistry?
According to my mom, I began singing before I could speak. By humming a few bars of my favorite lullaby, I could indicate that I was ready for a nap. When I was hungry, I would imitate the sound of a microwave, and Mom would catch the cue and start preparing my formula. Singing was a simple and effective form of communication. Its function was utilitarian.
At age six, I started piano lessons, and two years later, I joined a children's choir and became involved in musical theatre. I remember attending symphonies with my parents, cycling through my ever-growing collection of Broadway CDs, and reading about Mozart's prodigious talent with a sense of awe. In my mind, Mozart was an artist; I was just an everyday person who happened to sing and play the piano. (Doctors have diplomas; teachers have certificates; Mozart had the patronage of a royal family and an illustrious childhood career. What did I have to prove my legitimacy?)
Then something happened. Although I had been plunking out original melodies for years
With all the energy of a budding young scientist eager to test an important hypothesis, I grabbed two tape recorders, locked myself in the bathroom, and recorded myself singing the first melody into Tape Recorder 1. Then I played back the recording while singing the second melody and capturing it all with Tape Recorder 2. The result? Successful counterpoint! The ten-year-old me spent the rest of her evening feverishly finishing the piece and signing her name triumphantly beneath the title. For the space of a few, short hours, I had become an artist. The experience had granted me momentary legitimacy.
My unofficial experiences as a teacher began almost as early as my experiences with music. By the time I was five, I was lecturing neighborhood children, feeding my little brother all sorts of well-intended but completely false facts about life, and organizing summer schools at my home (I appointed myself Principal and my mother Cafeteria Lady). At that age, my approach to teaching was anything but artistic: When I felt that older neighborhood children weren't giving all four feet and forty pounds of me adequate respect, I would scowl and storm off. (Somehow, my summer school projects never lasted more than a day.) Mrs. Huish was my first grade teacher, and I adored her. She was a great educator with her imaginative writing assignments, her exotic accent, and her stories about Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Me, though? When I taught, I was just “playing pretend.”
Then, at age twelve, I began teaching private piano lessons. One especially precocious five-year-old found her way to me and displayed a remarkable capacity to synthesize each new idea. She was soon playing more difficult pieces than I usually assigned my eight and nine-year-olds, and she was hungry for more. I realized that I wanted to feed that hunger. I wanted to help her along the same path of discovery that I had traveled myself. In helping her become a legitimate artist, something crucial occurred: I became a legitimate educator. And over time, my teaching became yet another facet of my art.
I wish I could say that, since that time, I have always felt legitimate. But over a decade later, when I was consistently mistaken for a student at the performing arts academy where I worked as a teacher, I didn't feel terribly legitimate. Nor did I feel very legitimate as an undergraduate when I heard my first string quartet performed. (I slid backward in my auditorium seat, in fact, mentally willing all of the poorly-written and badly-executed phrases to disappear off the performers' pages and melt into merciful silence!) Even now, I feel my sense of legitimacy falter when I exercise faulty judgement as a steward of young minds or enter an unfamiliar realm of the musical world. Artistic qualifications on a resume don't always add up to a neat sum total.
Perhaps, then, as educators, our goal isn't to become legitimate “artists” after all; perhaps our goal is to continually increase the quality and frequency of meaningful artistic experiences until we can reliably foster such experiences for others. We master the art of fostering an artistic exploration of art through consistent effort and the process of trial and error. Art evolves into a science which, in turn, fosters further art. The cycle itself becomes a self-sustaining artform which transforms us, moment by moment, from teachers and artisans into educators and artists.
Unfortunately, not
every experience with art is educational, not every teacher considers
him/herself an artist or even an educator, and not every teaching
methodology or artistic process produces something worthy of the
title “art.” What, then, creates a sense of legitimate artistry?
How do we move from merely teaching to becoming educators or from
practicing art to becoming artists? I do not wish to delve too
deeply into semantics; I simply wish to review my own history as a
sometimes-creator of art (both musically and educationally speaking)
and to highlight a few key moments wherein teaching and musical
expression transformed into something greater—something that, for
the sake of this essay, I will label “art.”
According to my mom, I began singing before I could speak. By humming a few bars of my favorite lullaby, I could indicate that I was ready for a nap. When I was hungry, I would imitate the sound of a microwave, and Mom would catch the cue and start preparing my formula. Singing was a simple and effective form of communication. Its function was utilitarian.
At age six, I started piano lessons, and two years later, I joined a children's choir and became involved in musical theatre. I remember attending symphonies with my parents, cycling through my ever-growing collection of Broadway CDs, and reading about Mozart's prodigious talent with a sense of awe. In my mind, Mozart was an artist; I was just an everyday person who happened to sing and play the piano. (Doctors have diplomas; teachers have certificates; Mozart had the patronage of a royal family and an illustrious childhood career. What did I have to prove my legitimacy?)
Then something happened. Although I had been plunking out original melodies for years
(“Tromp of the
Estrian [sic] Camels” was a personal favorite!), around age nine or
ten, I began conceptualizing music in a different way. Lines of
music would surface unexpectedly in my mind, complete with lyrics and
basic harmonic underpinnings. One day, as I was humming an original
melody and toying with accompanimental patterns, a second melodic
line overlapped suddenly with the first. I stopped short. Would the
two melodies work together?
With all the energy of a budding young scientist eager to test an important hypothesis, I grabbed two tape recorders, locked myself in the bathroom, and recorded myself singing the first melody into Tape Recorder 1. Then I played back the recording while singing the second melody and capturing it all with Tape Recorder 2. The result? Successful counterpoint! The ten-year-old me spent the rest of her evening feverishly finishing the piece and signing her name triumphantly beneath the title. For the space of a few, short hours, I had become an artist. The experience had granted me momentary legitimacy.
My unofficial experiences as a teacher began almost as early as my experiences with music. By the time I was five, I was lecturing neighborhood children, feeding my little brother all sorts of well-intended but completely false facts about life, and organizing summer schools at my home (I appointed myself Principal and my mother Cafeteria Lady). At that age, my approach to teaching was anything but artistic: When I felt that older neighborhood children weren't giving all four feet and forty pounds of me adequate respect, I would scowl and storm off. (Somehow, my summer school projects never lasted more than a day.) Mrs. Huish was my first grade teacher, and I adored her. She was a great educator with her imaginative writing assignments, her exotic accent, and her stories about Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Me, though? When I taught, I was just “playing pretend.”
Then, at age twelve, I began teaching private piano lessons. One especially precocious five-year-old found her way to me and displayed a remarkable capacity to synthesize each new idea. She was soon playing more difficult pieces than I usually assigned my eight and nine-year-olds, and she was hungry for more. I realized that I wanted to feed that hunger. I wanted to help her along the same path of discovery that I had traveled myself. In helping her become a legitimate artist, something crucial occurred: I became a legitimate educator. And over time, my teaching became yet another facet of my art.
I wish I could say that, since that time, I have always felt legitimate. But over a decade later, when I was consistently mistaken for a student at the performing arts academy where I worked as a teacher, I didn't feel terribly legitimate. Nor did I feel very legitimate as an undergraduate when I heard my first string quartet performed. (I slid backward in my auditorium seat, in fact, mentally willing all of the poorly-written and badly-executed phrases to disappear off the performers' pages and melt into merciful silence!) Even now, I feel my sense of legitimacy falter when I exercise faulty judgement as a steward of young minds or enter an unfamiliar realm of the musical world. Artistic qualifications on a resume don't always add up to a neat sum total.
Perhaps, then, as educators, our goal isn't to become legitimate “artists” after all; perhaps our goal is to continually increase the quality and frequency of meaningful artistic experiences until we can reliably foster such experiences for others. We master the art of fostering an artistic exploration of art through consistent effort and the process of trial and error. Art evolves into a science which, in turn, fosters further art. The cycle itself becomes a self-sustaining artform which transforms us, moment by moment, from teachers and artisans into educators and artists.
Art and Self-Consciousness
For me, the question is not so much "How do we situate arts-based learning within a broader education?" as it is "How do we situate a broader education within arts-based learning?" (I'm advocating a specific practice like arts integration less than I'm advocating the general idea that "education" could be a possible subheading under the title of "art.")
If we consider "art" a term for a deeper form of education, then most other disciplines--science, math, history--become artforms of sorts when participants, through passionate engagement and measured discipline, acheive a certain level of intellectual thought and elegance of expression. All true learning, then, ultimately becomes artistic (read: passionate, creative, and disciplined).
And if learning helps form identity, then we "find" ourselves by losing ourselves in the process of creative exploration. (Instead, however, we often we get in our own way: Teenagers stay silent for fear of "embarassing" themselves; adults become so certain of the qualities that define them as autonomous beings that creative exploration slows or stops altogether.)
According to Madeleine L'Engle, the paradox lies in the ability to "take oneself lightly enough to take oneself seriously." The arts facilitate this process better than almost anything else of which I'm aware:
"When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves." --Madeleine L'Engle (Circle of Quiet)
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