Learning Life Through the Arts

| Week 1 |

Responding to a post from Adesola's blog this week, regarding learning life skills through the arts...

After watching John Green's "The Test" video, Adesola reminds us that Education is about (or at least, should be about) application, not being told what to do. I have always valued this in my learning experience, appreciating when my teachers (of any subject, especially maths and sciences) would teach the material with real life application, the why am I learning this. So I take this appreciation and apply it to my own teaching, making sure anything I teach has a practical relationship to my students' lives.

I am currently teaching a 9th grade Conditioning for Dancers course this year, the first time I have been tasked with this subject. As a part of the curriculum, there is a lot of anatomy terminology and kinesiology concepts I need to teach them and assess for understanding. It would be easiest to have them make a bunch of flashcards and purely work on memorizing these facts (vomiting facts, as I like to put it), and while flashcards are a helpful tool in learning, I work toward personal application. We do exercises with Therabands and body weight to isolate and feel muscles that we are learning about, discuss injury prevention when it comes to body alignment and mechanics, and identifying bones and planes of motion on our own bodies. While there is a high degree of "you have to know this material" in this course, I make the effort of reminding them the importance of why they are learning this material to begin with.

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Then, Adesola posed us with this prompt: Think about what your learning is. What does it mean to have learnt about life through being an artist or being in the Arts? What value do you put on creative skills to imagine, wonder, working out the capacity to make connections. These are skills we ask you to use as core to what learning means -- Art's Critical Value.

This instantly reminded me of my Arts in K-12 Education course I took as an undergraduate student, where we reflected on this very topic. There are many things that most artists can agree on, which are well said by the resource below:

The Kennedy Center's ARTSEDGE website says the arts teach students life skills necessary for the 21st century workforce:

Learning and Innovation Skills

• Creativity and innovation

• Critical thinking and problem solving

• Communication and collaboration

Information, Media and Technology Skills

• Information media literacy

• Media literacy

• Technology

Life and Career Skills

• Flexibility and adaptability

• Initiative and self-direction

• Social and cross-cultural skills

• Productivity and accountability

• Leadership and responsibility

"Problem solving is at the top of the list for good reason. Art rarely goes according to plan."

Dance, and any performing art, is fleeting. Merce Cunninham has famously been quoted of saying:

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

But along with the beauty of the fleeting moment, you have to constantly make count-to-count, moment-to-moment decisions when performing live. There are numerous variables that can go awry: costume or technical malfunction, ensemble error, staging or blocking issue, memory loss, etc. Dancers are constant problem solvers.

"Adaptability is part and parcel with arts learning. Learning how to adjust goes with the territory."

I am a company dancer with Re:borN Dance Interactive, a contemporary modern dance company that specializes in immersive/interactive installation performances. Performing in these works is constantly about adapting to the environment, the audience, the feedback. Every time I perform the same work, it is performed differently due to the necessity for adaptation. 

"Working well with others is an important component of 21st century readiness."

In any creative project with other professional dancers, or setting choreography on students, there is an inherent understanding that you have responsibilities that affect the rest of the ensemble. Where to be in space, what movements to execute, when to have the choreography memorized, etc. There is leadership, self-direction/ownership and accountability in the process. 

On another note, learning dance forms from cultures other than yours teaches appreciation of and ability to have another degree of understanding of others.

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Lastly, I watched Cindy Foley's TED Talk about Teaching Art versus Teaching to Think Like an Artist. In summary, she states that there is a problem in art education today: it is impacted by the standards and testing culture like all other disciplines, focusing on things and ideas that are concrete and able to test and assess. She says it needs to work on developing learners that think like artists: creative, curious, seek questions, develop ideas, and play. To teach for creativity, it should focus on embodying habits that artists employ:

• Comfort with Ambiguity (discomfort, not knowing)
• Idea Generation (play is essential here, to discover)
• Transdisciplinary Research (research that serves curiosity, across multiple disciplines)

Stella commented on this topic, challenging the idea of how comfortable artists really are with ambiguity. Are we comfortable with ambiguity in every situation, even non-creative environments? Or have we created a secure framework, one that allows for play with ambiguity because we are secure in the process, given secure tolls to navigate the insecure?

I had not thought about ambiguity revolving around the Process versus the Subject itself. When I teach the Choreography and Composition course for my 11th grade students, I teach them multiple possible processes for creating, traditions that have been carried down through generations from important dance pioneers. I stress to them that these are tools, not rules. Yes, I want them to explore how to create in these different processes, but it is important that these are not the way to make dances. That would kill creativity. That would kill potentially new innovative ways to create.

Sir Ken Robinson claims that the traditional schooling system is causing kids to grow out of creativity. Perhaps this is why. There is a framework being built that tells them this is how to be creative, how to be an artist, when in "real life," it is not. Children shy away from creativity because they are taught there is a right and wrong way, what good art looks like and what is wrong. However, infants and toddlers do not shy away from creativity because they are not yet taught the idea of framework to be creative.

Stella compared this to her early interest in maths, because of the clear, distinct "wrong versus right" that you achieve when arriving to a solution. This made me think of my students when progress report grades come out every few weeks. They get upset when they don't get an "A" on a movement assessment, because of course in their minds an "A" is correct and anything else means it is wrong. If everyone got 100% perfect A grades, what is there to strive and work for? Does a 100% perfect dancer exist out there? Is it even attainable? Sure, with an explicitly clear rubric it may be more achievable, but is there really ever a performance in which you could have done nothing to make it better?

Isn't training to be a dancer training to constantly become a better you?