Urban Education with an Attitude

6. Why the Arts Matter in Our Schools

6 Why the Arts Matter in Our Schools Arnold Aprill Arnold Aprill is an award-winning theater director, producer, and playwright, and Executive Director of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), a network of public schools, arts organizations, and community organizations, working to increase the opportunities for integrating the arts into the overall educational program of the Chicago Public Schools. In this chapter, Aprill argues that the arts not only foster academic achievement, but also are central to educating students to be competent and responsible participants in a diverse democratic society. ❦ AS THE BASIS OF OUR ECONOMY SHIFTS from manufacturing to information, we are moving from people working in separate silos of service to people from different segments of the population who are concerned with lifelong learning and who work together holistically to meet the needs of young people. We need this diverse group of people at the education policy table in order to restore the arts to the educational process. Why do the arts need to be brought back into our schools? Because schools need to create a social fabric that is inclusive of all learners, and the primary function of the arts in learning is to pull together learning from different knowledge bases. Unfortunately, the role of the arts in improving education has been limited by the segregation of arts learning from the rest of the culture. In many schools, art and music teachers are marginalized. In Chicago, for example, there is a half-time music or visual arts teacher for every 750 students. By contract, the job of the art or music teacher includes taking care of the students while the rest of the faculty plans curriculum. By contract, art and music teachers are structured not to be part of the pedagogy of the school. Beginning in the fifties, art became a separate subject area, one that sometimes got marginalized and sometimes got included. Before that, the arts were included in a more integrated approach to teaching and learning.They were the glue that held together the educational process—not just music and visual art, but also dance and theater and media arts and literature. Culture is the medium in which all bases of knowledge have their life. Today we have structured our instruction so that art is a separate, often marginalized content area. 71 72 URBAN EDUCATION WITH AN ATTITUDE We need to put the arts back into schools because the arts are part of the way that all of education hangs together. The arts used to be a medium that held cultures together, not an activity just for a few weirdos or talented people. The arts used to be something that people participated in both as doers and as audience. Now we have the idea that the arts are something most people participate in only as audience rather than moving between doing and responding .We know from good teaching practice that learners need to be able to move between different roles: from observer, to inquirer, to creator, to performer, to reflector, roles that embody the five fundamental processes in a program developed at the Research Center for Learning Through Music at New England Conservatory, under the direction of Dr. Larry Scripp. It is the ability of the learner to engage a content area in different ways that gives them the flexibility and intellectual capacity to go deeply into a content area. Chicago Arts Partnership in Education CAPE works to improve education by forging partnerships between schools and arts organizations that make quality education a central part of the daily learning experience. It provides partnerships with funding and professional development opportunities for teachers, artists, and principals, and serves as a resource for curriculum development. CAPE is founded on the belief that collaborative partnerships can transform schools by improving the quality of arts learning through access to a community’s arts resources; creating communitybased arts experiences that recognize students as active citizens in their own neighborhoods; forging bonds between parents, schools, and communities that expand family-based learning opportunities both inside and outside school buildings ; and connecting policy discussions at the local, state, and national level to innovative practice in arts and education . CAPE works to ensure that all students have equitable access to art in their lives and in their schools. 73 WHY THE ARTS MATTER IN OUR SCHOOLS American culture used to be held together by music. John Phillip Souza bands...