Core Values for Arts Education in the 21st Century

I came across this YouTube video of Senator Barack Obama speaking in Wallingford, Pennsylvania on the importance of the arts in education. What other presidential candidate has devoted this much time to speaking this insightfully on the arts? Subtract the arts from education and we are raising up a generation without any in-depth training in practices of innovation.

Parents, teachers, and educational policy-makers need to reconsider our continuing and persistent devaluation of the arts in education. As the new Chair of Art Education at Syracuse University, I am exploring possibilities and feeling out directions as if I were marking out a figure drawing on newsprint with a piece of charcoal blackening my fingertips. I would like to sketch out some new ideas on what the core values for arts education in the 21st century might otherwise be...especially since what many of us are adhering to right now hasn't exactly made the impression we need!

Arts practices ought to be:

• Informational
Studio arts based methods for organizing data about the human experience are systems of information pressed into handmade artifacts, manufactured forms, cultural symbolism, and critical lenses. The visual arts inform human beings of who we are, where we come from, what our purpose is, and where we are going.

• Educational
Because the arts are informative, they are also inherently instructional, aiding overall academic achievement; basic to higher thinking skills, social skills, multiple literacies, and the motivation to learn; and a natural arena for the integration of knowledge, the inclusion of all learners, and the comprehensive asset-development of school and community.

• Transformational
Because the arts are educational, they are also inherently transformative, developing imaginative and practice-based habits of innovation, a capacity suggested by educational philosopher John Dewey, one that enables a student to learn from experience in the process of “trying and discovering, modifying and adapting” (Cuffaro, 1995, p. 19).

James Haywood Rolling, Jr., Ed.D.

Starting From Sketch

It is important to periodically rethink the philosophical relevance of art education. At the mention of my job title alone in a typical conversation, laypersons and teachers in other disciplines screw up their brows as I characterize myself as an art educator. Their momentary befuddlement and tentative queries for clarification translate roughly to the unspoken question, “What the heck does art and education have to do with one another?”

Art education’s irrelevancy in general public school curriculum practices is a product of an entrenched paradigm and a popular perception that is reinforced every time a famous painting is auctioned off at Christie’s or Sotheby’s for a new record multimillion dollar amount, every time we tape one of our children’s drawings to the refrigerator and tell them how pretty it is, every time we are reminded by a museum guard to maintain a safe distance lest we brush against an original work of art, every time we go as a tourist to buy a piece of the local flavor as a souvenir. The general perception of visual art is that it is a commodity, a precious or sentimental object to be collected and accessioned, displayed and auctioned, manufactured and bartered for in the marketplace. Works of visual art are recognized as nothing more than merchandise, eye-catching products, and cultural heritage—static articles that need only to be preserved. And yet we live in the wake of an Information Age that prioritizes data streams, download speed, hyperlinks, and Internet portals. With all this movement of data and manipulation of information demanding a proficiency in reading, writing, math instruction, science, and digital technology, what does art do besides sit on the wall?

I would argue that the arts are much more than a museum-bound collection of images, artifacts, designs and special events. The arts are a practical means to better inform ourselves about the things that matter the most to us as a network of societies. The arts enhance human information, refining the cargoes of meaning our collected data carries in tow. Arts-based methodologies effectively inform not because they are beautiful, but are beautiful because they carry a berth for our emotions and enthrall our attention, making them altogether effective at delivering their special cargoes. Beauty, wherever it is attributed, lies in the re-cognition of the data that most directly informs and validates the story of one’s life. The arts are intrinsically memorable, ever renewing our mindfulness of what we hope for, need, feed upon and desire.

Together, the arts work to tell the human story. We have always understood this: it is why we paint ourselves in visual narratives, sing ourselves in lyric and verse, dramatize ourselves in the round, glorify ourselves in marble and clay, write ourselves into histories and her-stories, dance ourselves into states of oblivion, and dream ourselves in abstracts through the night.

I grew up in the house at 1260 Lincoln Place between Troy and Schenectady Avenues in the grand old borough of Brooklyn, New York. My neighborhood, Crown Heights, was layered with misshapen rooftops, slamming doorways, balls bouncing against stone stoops, bent television and car antennae, sparkling shards of broken bottles, and older kids doing improper things where no one could watch. Navigating the currents of my visual and literary arts practices, the arts have transported me from the obscurity of the ghetto to scholarship in multiple forums. The arts have long been a fulminating catalyst for my most innovative thinking. Generally speaking, the arts are renderings of ever-changing ideas and that makes the meanings we live by anything but static.

James Haywood Rolling, Jr.