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Bruce Taylor
has been an arts professional for more than thirty years
as director, manager, designer, and company labor
negotiator for companies such as Seattle Opera, Opera
Company of Philadelphia, the O'Neill Theatre Center, and
Pacific Northwest Dance. Concurrently, his
avocation is working with teachers and students. He was
the originating source of numerous programs for
Education at the Met, the New York Philharmonic, the
Orchestra of St. Luke's, and the Royal Opera House,
London. He currently runs his own arts in
education company, Arts For Anyone, with schools in New
Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
America Needs
You!
In the economy of the 21st
Century, companies will pay their employees to think and communicate
effectively. Throughout
the United States school administrators are being told,
“Teach your students to think for themselves and
communicate with others.
Anything else they need to know, we will teach
them.” A
close friend of mine, a rear admiral in the Navy, says
the same thing about what the services look for in their
young men and women.
He wants sailors who are not afraid to use
initiative and think on their feet. The military has mastered instruction - such as how to take
apart and put back together the engine for an F-14. They
instruct teenagers to do it and do it well. If you want
to simply deliver curriculum you even can do it
online. But
to teach, to develop skills of imagination and
communication, you need .......... a
teacher.
A teacher who is familiar with both areas - some one
just like you.
The economy of the 21st.
Century rewards innovation and unexpected outcomes, but
present educational policy promotes a system and an
assessment protocol that focuses on predetermined
outcomes. In
the words of Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, “We’ve got it all wrong.” This
country’s educators, children, parents......society
itself, desperately needs what Teaching Artists can do. The previous paradigm of the industrial model of education is
no longer appropriate to what kids and teachers require
.
Why?
In the economy of the 21st Century
first world societies (e.g. in North America, Europe,
Japan, etc.), employers will depend upon those who can imagine,
create and communicate.
Think of almost any well paying field now or in the
future. Law,
medicine, management, computer programming, design
(media or industrial), popular entertainment
(television, film, music), education - the list goes on.
Isn’t it true that in each one of these
categories you are required to imagine (a need, a
product, a goal, an approach), create (a solution, a
product, a method, a technique) and then communicate the
result to others in a way that they can understand and
buy into? Perhaps
even be moved by.
Isn’t this what we do every
day? Isn’t
this what you were trained to do - to create original
(i.e. unexpected) outcomes?
Well, DUH! But
don’t get too excited, because from what I’ve seen
out in the field, we haven’t yet made the most of our
skills in the critical role of preparing kids to be
successful in the economy of the 21st
Century.
It is my belief that we need
to shift our attention from some of the goals that AIE
practitioners have had for the past 30 years.
These goals are admirable, but our focus on them
has hampered our effectiveness.
Since 1973, when I first began work in this
field, we have, collectively, reached millions of kids,
in thousands of schools.
Those kids are today’s parents.
If we had been successful, those parents would be
demanding schools retain the arts, support the arts in
their communities; fill our concert halls, museums, and
theatres. Has
that happened? No. To cite but
two examples of our failure, overall government funding
for the arts in this country has declined 40% over the
past three years and less than 1% of kids who played an
instrument in school ever picked it up again as adults.
Let me point out at the onset
that we can still incorporate previous goals into a new
paradigm. Our past primary goals have been the
following:
-
An emphasis
on the dysfunctional, disabled and disadvantaged, i.e.
“special needs.”
-
Use the arts
as implements in a policy of social rectification
-
Promote
self-esteem through the vehicle of artistic
self-expression
In our idealism we gravitate
towards the marginalized, but in doing so we distance our work
from the core majority of student populations.
“Enrichment” therefore, has become a euphemism for
“non-essential.” Administrators
will tell you that only 5 to 10% of the kids in their schools
will probably grow up to be corrosive elements in our society,
but we imply that the other 90% are also in need of behavior
modification when we tie art activities to social reform.
And, finally, it is ironic that while knowing full well
that making a living as an artist is a never ending journey of
rejection and criticism, we promote the arts as an antidote to
low self-image!
Again, we can incorporate
these good intentions, but within a context more inclusive and
less paternalistic. We can base our work on a couple of very
basic understandings. To
be human is to be artistic. Our capacity to think in the
abstract (i.e. to imagine), along with our proficiency to
communicate in a wide variety of forms, are central to our
very nature. Taken
together, these characteristics have enabled the human race to
dominate the planet. It
is critical to develop these abilities in students because of
what will be required of them in the economy of the 21st
Century. Along
the way we can reintegrate the arts into the body of the core
curriculum beyond “celebratory events” such as the class
play, winter concert, and hallway exhibition.
While we’re at it, we must
show non-arts specialist teachers how to integrate artistic
fundamentals in their everyday teaching so that our work is
not used as an excuse to eliminate
routine participation in artistic activity! You don’t use an
assembly program to teach science, or a residency to teach
math, or after school project to promote social studies.
There aren’t very many “teaching-scientists,” or
“teaching-mathematicians” peripatetically bouncing from
school to school being paid for by the PTA or outside funders,
rather than by a line item in the school board’s budget.
If we believe that the arts are basic to a child’s
education, we have to advocate that they be viewed in the same
light as “academics.” And they must be if children are to
succeed as adults.
Three qualities drive artistic
process: imagination,
self-interest, and discovery.
To create something we first imagine it.
To catalyze self-interest we invest relevance in
content - to include a bit of the student’s identity, world
view, or belief system. To excite a student’s participation we add the thrill of
discovery. These
qualities are inherent in the creation of original art work in
all genres. Any teacher can do it and you are just the person
to show them how. It’s
what we’ve been trained to do.
To accomplish this, I suggest
a heresy. Perhaps, for the time being, we need to divest
ourselves of the Getty Foundation’s Discipline Based Arts
Education (DBAE) model. There is not enough room, time, staff,
or money to meaningfully teach any art form as a separate
discipline in most public school settings, much less all four
major ones - Dance, Theatre, Music, and Visual Art.
Kids are only in the classroom for 14% of any given
year’s time and schools are already overtaxed. The No Child
Left Behind act has made the environment even more toxic to
our ambitions.
We should think more along the
lines of how science is taught.
Through elementary and middle school, kids are taught
the basics of science generally, not isolating out genetics,
geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., but to focus on
the broader concepts of scientific inquiry. The aim is not to make every kid a scientist, but to provide
every student a foundation which could support such an
ambition later, while enabling the child to have an overall
understanding of his or her physical environment. So it can be
with the arts - to better understand their social/human
environment. To teach The Arts, collectively, as a discipline.
This means that as an actor
you are not teaching Acting 101 or fun-time improvisation, but
using your skills as an actor to provide teachers and students
with the ability to empathize with literary and historical
characters, understand the motivations of people’s behavior,
and develop an awareness of the power of language. Or as a
musician, rather than teaching notation or meter, you reveal
the capacity of music to elicit emotional reaction, reveal
elemental characteristics of your own or the composer’s
historical period, create aural images, and express what
cannot be conveyed by words alone.
In any art form, we can demonstrate generative concepts
such as metaphor, theme, and structure that go to the very
essence of how human beings evolve and communicate with one
another.
The artistic process is also
the process of making a living.
Making a living means more than making money.
Drug dealers make money, but how many junkies do you
see over forty five? They’re
either dead or in jail. Whether
we function as parents, spouses, or employees we are
constantly engaged in the creative process of
“solution-creation.”
To reiterate: Isn’t it true that you have to imagine
the essential components of a situation, problem, goal or
objective? Isn’t
it usually required that you have to create (think up) a
solution, product, plan, approach or method to address the
need? Isn’t also a fact that you are going to have to
communicate what you come up with to others in such a way that
they understand and buy into it?
Don’t you have to do the
same as a director, actor, composer, writer, designer,
whatever? Don’t
you have to create possible choices, analyze your resources,
fit within parameters, rework what you do, and effectively
communicate with others (actors, the director, musicians,
editors, scene shop/stage hands, etc.)
We are used to the process of creating original work
because we do it all the time.
Teachers have been trained to manufacture reproductions
of “the model graduate” by putting student A on an
assembly line with curriculum B in school/factory C to produce
satisfactory, efficiently measurable test results D.
However, to prepare students for their roles in the
economy of the 21st Century the educational system
will desperately need what we can provide in a new evolving
paradigm of education.
Participation in artistic
activity must be deeply satisfying and meaningful to teachers
and kids’ self-interest. To do this, we will need to stress
communication more than expression, to integrate the arts
collectively rather than to address each discretely, increase
an emphasis on achievement within specific parameters,
incorporate a reasonable fear of failure so that students can
attain a genuine sense of success, and be willing to criticize
sub-standard work or effort as an important tool for
inculcating in kids the desire to do better.
If anything will do, there is no standard. No standard, no sense of accomplishment.
If kids have no sense of accomplishment, there is no
commitment to what they’re doing.
Participation in the arts has to be more than fun, more
than a conduit for expression.
Expression is easy, communication much more
challenging. Utilizing your imagination is more difficult than
simply doing what you’re told. The economy of the 21st.
Century will demand much in an ever increasingly
competitive global environment. We are uniquely equipped to
prepare children for it.
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