Arts As Education: Embracing Aesthetic Teaching And Learning
Arts in education, arts-based learning, arts integration, STEAM, whatever you want to call it, has decades of evidence-based research and thousands of years of lived experience to show how teaching and learning in, with, and through the arts is a uniquely potent method of education.
Originally published in Kentucky Teacher (January 2nd, 2024)
By Alex Chadwell, Learning & Partnership Programs Manager
Arts in education, arts-based learning, arts integration, STEAM, whatever you want to call it, has decades of evidence-based research and thousands of years of lived experience to show how teaching and learning in, with, and through the arts is a uniquely potent method of education. The inclusion and promotion of arts in education is so powerful because all education exists in a sociocultural context. More specifically, education is a sociocultural practice. Merryl Goldberg, sums it up in her book, Arts Integration: Teaching Subject Matter through the Arts in Multicultural Settings, “The arts are fundamental to education because they are fundamental to human knowledge and culture, expression, and communication” (2021).
While the notion of arts as an essential aspect of the human condition is generally supported by society at large, the arts in American schooling have been relegated to the fringes. Often, the arts in schools are isolated both in terms of curriculum and their physical location within the school building. This sequestration has also led to the false dichotomy of “arts for art’s sake” or “arts for academics’ sake.”[1] One of the reasons for this separation is the belief that aesthetic ways of knowing are not as useful or “cognitive” because they are too emotional and abstract. Yet, it is within this emotional-cognitive binary that aesthetic ways of knowing excel and transcend.[2] Over the past few decades, as the understanding of the human brain has deepened, there has been a paradigmatic shift from understanding humans as thinking bodies that feel to feeling bodies that think.[3] While there has certainly been more emphasis on socio-emotional learning over the last two decades, much of the education in America is still predicated on the belief that learning is unemotional, disembodied, and individual. Viewing art as an epistemology offers an alternative.
First grade teacher, Karen Gallas, writes of this perspective, “What we understood from our experiences with the arts as subject matter and as inspiration was that knowing wasn’t just telling something back as we had received it. Knowing meant transformation and change, and a gradual awareness of what we had learned. For both children and teacher, the arts offer opportunities for reflection upon content and the process of learning, and they foster a deeper level of communication about what knowledge is and who is truly in control of the learning process” (Gallas, 1991).
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1. One reframing of this “dilemma” that I find particularly helpful can be found in The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An expanded view of the purposes and possibilities for arts learning.
2. Maggs and Robinson suggest that one way to look at this is, “Instead of trying to prove that art is just as good a way of knowing as science, it may be more helpful to point out that science is just as problematic a way of knowing as art, and—crucially— to notice that we are okay with that.” (Maggs & Robinson, 2020).
3. I read about this shift in neuroscience and psychology in Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.
LexPhil MusicLab at KET Super Saturday, August 2023
Photo Credit: Michaela Bowman
To further explore this idea of arts as epistemology, I’d like to present an activity that I developed for the Lexington Philharmonic (LexPhil). It’s called the MusicLab. One of the crowd-favorites of the MusicLab is a synthesizer of sorts. Using a Makey Makey, one can turn an arrangement of any conductive objects into a keyboard. I first encountered this technology in a video of the composer and teaching artist, Angélica Negrón, composing music with plants and electronics. I realized right away that I could integrate something like this into the programs I was developing at LexPhil. One of my primary goals is to create and facilitate spaces and activities where people of all ages and abilities can immediately and meaningfully engage in the creative process. The pervasive myth that prior to any meaningful art being created, one must endure years of advanced technical study is a harmful one, and one that has sanctified “creativity” as a characteristic only few possess.[4]
There is an element of wonder and curiosity that engaging with a potato/lemon/lime/banana keyboard engenders that pushes students to know beyond their existing cognitive schemas. Through a tactile and aesthetic experience, the concepts of "conductivity" and "circuitry" are embodied as electricity travels through the body. Simultaneously, this knowledge is transformed and communicated through the creative act of making music. Engaging aesthetically is a distinctive way of knowing. My colleague and fellow teaching artist, Katie Rainey, writes, “I think about how much arts education has allowed me to identify how I know things, while making space for how others know things. And how important it is to see that pathway of thinking” (2023).
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4. For a more holistic definition of creativity, I turn to the book, Innovating Emergent Futures. “Creativity is first and foremost the continuous and ongoing quality of reality to produce novelty. It is all around us and in us. It is not something that some of us possess. Nor is it an internal human quality that can be found in a brain region. Rather our creative processes are ones that join and ultimately ‘surf’ realities ongoing creative processes” (Frasca & Kerr, 2023).
LexPhil MusicLab at KET Super Saturday, August 2022
Photo Credit: Michaela Bowman
The conversation around lack of arts in schools is typically seen as an issue of deficiency and this is certainly the case regarding material resources. Public schools and non-profit arts organizations and cultural institutions are chronically and severely underfunded.[5] The arts are almost always the first thing to be cut. However, through an asset-based lens, even in marginalized and under-supported schools, aesthetic means of knowing, communicating, and expressing are present; from the music coming out of students’ earbuds, to the visuals used in presentations, to the movement within every classroom, to the conversations in the hallways. Whether we embrace it or not, arts and culture are one of the primary methods humans use to make sense of and meaning in their lives. Teachers can, through a lens of culturally sustaining pedagogy,[6] promote and strengthen these existing aesthetic means of knowing.
In a world that increasingly requires the development of students’ emotional literacy, social imagination, critical consciousness, and cultural competence, I encourage us as educators to find ways to include aesthetic ways of knowing and being in the classroom. Through multiple modalities, arts-based learning provides students with self-transcendent experiences that foster the ability to see their existing reality in new ways and to imagine new worlds.
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5. Kentucky ranks 45th in per capita ($.059) spending on the arts (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, 2023). Kentucky K-12 schools rank 32nd in public education spending and 34th in public education funding (Hanson, 2023).
6. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy is a more recent iteration of Culturally Relevant/Responsive Pedagogy that seeks to not only build on students’ existing funds of knowledge and cultural assets, but to also sustain them. (Alim, H. S., & Paris, D., 2017).
LexPhil MusicLab at Symphonic Stroll, September 2022
Photo Credit: Michaela Bowman
REFERENCES
Alim, H. S., & Paris, D. (eds.) (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing
World. Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Frasca, J., & Kerr, I. (2023). Innovating Emergent Futures: The Innovation Design Approach for Change and Worldmaking.
Emergent Futures Lab Press.
Gallas, K. (1991). Arts as Epistemology: Enabling Children to Know What They Know. Harvard Educational Review,
61(1), 50.
Goldberg, M. (2021). Arts Integration: Teaching Subject Matter through the Arts in Multicultural Settings (6th ed).
Routledge.
Hanson, M. (2023) U.S. Public Education Spending Statistics. EducationData.org.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
Maggs, D., & Robinson, J. (2020). Sustainability in an Imaginary World: Art and the Question of Agency. Routledge.
Magsamen, S., & Ross, I. (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Random House.
Peppler, K., Dahn, M., & Ito, M. (2023). The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An expanded view of the purposes and
possibilities for arts learning. The Wallace Foundation.
Rainey, K. (2023). VALUING WAYS OF KNOWING: An Artist Goes to Law School. Creative Generation.
https://www.creative-generation.org/blogs/valuing-ways-of-knowing-an-artist-goes-to-law-school
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. (2023) State Arts Agency Revenues Fiscal Year 2023. National Assembly of
State Arts Agencies.
ABOUT ALEX
Alex Chadwell (he/him) is a musician/teaching artist/student/administrator/writer originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and currently based in Lexington, Kentucky. He has designed and facilitated programs, residencies, and workshops for people of all ages from K - 12 students, to undergraduate and graduate students, to lifelong learners. He is the Learning and Partnership Programs Manager at the Lexington Philharmonic. Chadwell has a BM in Composition from Mannes College of Music (The New School) and is currently pursuing an MA in Literacy Education at the University of Kentucky where his focus is in exploring the concepts of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that overlap, intersect, and commingle.
Schools as Places of Possibility
Music, and all arts disciplines, in schools has the remarkable ability to transform schools into places of joy, vibrancy, and possibility.
By Alex Chadwell, Learning & Partnership Programs Manager
March 2023
My career as a teaching artist has taken me to a lot of different schools over the last seven years and every time, without fail, the first thing that hits me is that faint, sweet, rancid, and moist smell of wasted food and dish soap. As if predetermined, the smell always finds its way to the front door from its origin in the cafetorium (that cleverly designed multipurpose room that combines the cafeteria, auditorium, and gymnasium). Instantly, it activates the part of my brain where some of my earliest memories are saved. It’s an evocative odor. When I was in kindergarten it made me nauseous to the point of vomiting, crying, or wanting to go home, or a combination of all three. The school nurse thought I might be lactose intolerant from the milk cartons that were served every morning. The school counselor eventually correctly identified it as a physical manifestation of anxiety.
Now when that first whiff hits, I am overcome with a sense of possibility. I’m overcome because now I see schools as places of joy, creativity, community, expression, love, and learning. I didn’t always see them as such. It wasn’t until a few years into elementary school that I found my footing and began the lifelong process of constructing my identity. It was during this formative time that my passion for music and my worldview began to fuse together into an artistic identity. I treasured the possibility of creating myself, of being unique, of being an individual, of seeing myself as a knowledge generator, of cultivating an anti-deterministic view of life, of constructing an agentive identity, and of realizing my creativity. By the end of elementary school, I had claimed the identity of “musician.”
I still cherish the possibility of creating myself. I still cherish it because it’s what keeps me going. It’s how I continue making meaning in my life even when it feels like there isn’t any left to be found. When I feel down, helpless, or not good enough, I encourage myself by focusing on a future yet to come that I will be instrumental in making. It’s not a magical remedy. It’s not a panacea. It can, and often does, get buried beneath the heaviness of life, but it is never quelled to the point that it is extinguished.
This worldview, the kaleidoscopic lens through which I see and make sense of the world, is a continuously malleable perspective that is crafted by the core beliefs and values of the society and cultures I exist and participate in, of the communities I was and continue to be part of, and of the convergence of my many identities: cisgender, heterosexual, white, American, Pennsylvanian, culturally Jewish, millennial, middle-class, male, artist, creative.
One of the core beliefs underpinning my particular outlook is that I play an essential role in the ongoing creation of the life I want to experience and the world I want to be part of. It is an acknowledgement that my reality is not predetermined and my reality is not fixed. It is an affirmation that I have agency and ownership over my existence, within the context of a larger, collective responsibility. This belief is what teacher and educational philosopher, Maxine Greene, termed “social imagination.” She defined it as, “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools.” Greene posits engagement in and with the arts as a powerful mechanism to catalyze and strengthen one’s social imagination. I agree that there is a deep interrelation between social imagination and an artistic identity. I believe that my future-focused and creation-centric worldview is shaped considerably by my identity as a creative person. My work in schools is grounded in the conviction that making and experiencing art transforms students’ worldviews. Everybody doesn’t need to identify as an artist in order for this transformation to occur. Frequent aesthetic experiences support all students in seeing their lives as works of art to be made, refined, and celebrated.
I believe in a world where when students walk through the doors of their schools and that whiff of soggy food and dish soap hits their noses, they are overcome with a sense of possibility, not nausea. Music, and all arts disciplines, in schools has the remarkable ability to transform schools into places of joy, vibrancy, and possibility.
bell hooks’ book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, has had a tremendous influence on my work as an educator, facilitator, and artist, as I know it has for so many others.
She concludes the book with an inspiring vision of what could be. “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
Greene, M. (2000). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the Arts, and Social Change. Jossey-Bass Publishers.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
ABOUT ALEX
Alex Chadwell (he/him) is a musician, composer, teaching artist, facilitator, and administrator originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and currently based in Lexington, Kentucky.
As a teaching artist, he has designed and facilitated residencies, workshops, and classes with Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Center for Arts Education, Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra, Highbridge Voices, the New School's College of Performing Arts, the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program, PrimeLife Arts Learning, St. Nicks Alliance, and the Southeastern Theatre Conference. In the summer of 2021, he was selected to participate in the Arts Education Partnership's Arts and Literacy Thinkers Meeting Series and currently participates on their Equity Working Group.
In his current position as the Learning and Partnership Programs Manager at the Lexington Philharmonic, he is developing and implementing programming that is centered around the belief that all people should have opportunities to be invited and supported in individually and collaboratively creating art that examines and/or reflects their experiences, values and perspectives. Prior to joining the Lexington Philharmonic, he worked as an administrator at The New School's College of Performing Arts.