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APRIL 2005

Kate Levin, Commisioner
of Cultural Affairs NYC

Quantifying Creativity: A Recent Symposium Addresses The Importance Of Arts Education

By Gillian Granoff

Recently, Arts Connection, a non profit organization dedicated to promoting and supporting the cultivation of arts in the school system, launched a two day conference entitled Beyond Arts Integration: Defining Learning in Arts Education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education.

The conference brought together over 250 teaching artists, educators, specialists and researchers and policy makers to discuss the challenge of integrating the arts into the mainstream education curriculum. Included in this group of elite educators were Carmen Farina, Deputy Chancellor for the New York City Department of Education, Rob Horowitz, Teachers College, Steven Tennen, Executive Director of Arts Connection, representatives from the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, and members of the Dana Foundation, a major funder of Arts Connection.

Dr. Steve Seidel, the director of Project Zero and Arts In the Education program at Harvard University delivered the keynote address entitled “To Get to the Other Side:” Curricular Integration, Dangerous Ignorance and the Drama of Learning. Seidel defined the “other side” as “the knowledge, skills and understanding that we need in order to create a world and live lives that we consider decent and morally acceptable.” Seidel expressed concern for the dangerous ignorance pervasive in society and the important role that the arts play in overcoming ignorance by helping us “to look at things that we’d rather ignore and to facilitate conversations of these difficult issues.” Seidel credits the arts in helping students to understand concepts such as “human rights, languages, globalization, and other abstract concepts such as density which requires students to grapple with non linear thinking and complex causality.” Bringing a sense of artistry to our teaching and our expectations of our students is a powerful element of integrating the arts with teaching. Seidel cautions that effective teaching requires the integration of multiple disciplines and studying subjects from various perspectives. The arts contribute to understanding how to learn in two ways. The first is artistry: the “practice of one’s work with great care, the highest level of technique, attention to detail, a sense of pride in craft, and a strong aesthetic sensibility.” The second is “artistic processes.” Seidel defined six artistic processes that helped to cultivate learning:  Improvisation, Composition, Interpretation, Practice, Performance and Critique.

Seidel’s comments were met with rousing applause and set the tone for the panel discussions concerning the challenges of documenting the role of the arts in education.

Attendees discussed the challenge of quantifying the beneficial impact of the arts on student performance in today’s “accountability focused” environment. Panel participants such as Warren Symons, the Executive Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, addressed how the “No Child Left Behind” act has excluded the benefits of arts education for children at risk by narrowing the definition of an effective curriculum.

“The pressure to quantify intelligence and the emphasis on test taking as the most significant measure of performance and learning, excludes many of the value and perceptual and social benefits the arts provides to students in urban areas,” stated Dr. Rob Horowitz. “The Arts is the glue that brings children together. In urban schools with many different languages and English as a second language, arts experience develops social skills of working together.”

Carol Morgan, Director of Arts Connections, was pleased with the incredible turnout. “I think the symposium was a great success. We were talking with a national audience. My hope for the symposium was that it would begin to pose some questions that are being obscured in the current environment by really examining the role of the arts in the education of children. Our purpose in doing this was to help people to think about what they do in a new or different way.”

The symposium concluded with the resolution that more tools need to be developed to document the arts learning process, and the need to develop a more compelling language through which Arts education advocates can build their case. Jon Katzman, and the Board of Directors of Arts Connection addressed the crucial question of how to “measure curiosity and imagination.”

Despite the obvious challenge arts educators face in today’s political climate, educators and participants remained optimistic and confident about the invaluable role the arts can play in helping children confront the obvious challenges they will face in the future.#

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