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?

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.