Are We Still with It?

National Art Education Association

Are We Still with It?Author(s): Thelma R. NewmanSource: Art Education, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Apr., 1970), pp. 14-18Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191452 .

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r _as BYTHELMA R. NEWMAN. Our life style is so different today from what it was 20 years ago. Our sensibilities are responding differently. Natural forces are basically the same (even though through pollution we threaten our own existence), but our way of looking at our world is different. We cannot view history today the way historians of even 20 years ago saw our environment and our interaction with it. Yet little has changed in the past 50 years in our schools. We still compart- mentalize curriculum; educators still spout the same old ideas that literacy means reading, writing, and arithmetic. In a recent report to the City of Newark, N.J., Research for Better Schools, Inc. advised New- ark's educators to revert to reading, writing, and arithmetic and concentrate on these disciplines in their "inner city" schools. Yet, McLuhan tells us that sights and signs are with us. We cannot be governed yet another day by those old "literacy" concepts, no matter how economical and test-proving! There is no time. Our new United States Commissioner of Education, Dr. James E. Allen, in an address to the Performing Arts Convocation at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, said: In our schools many other effective forms of communication-languages other than those of the tongue-are being explored, mastered and used. The Education Department [New York State] now sees the arts, which are among the most effective of these forms, as fundamentals of the curriculum and a necessary and long overdue extension of literacy.

Possibly what is needed is a new word or a new connotation for literacy, itself: one that embodies the arts with the fundamental skills, since both are essen- tial for the fully developed person.

Should not we all know this? Research has revealed a great body of "professional" information: we know that 70% of a child's learning occurs during the first four years of his life; that positively motivated children learn faster and more indelibly than the unmotivated; that learning experiences involving as many of the child's senses as possible, send more information to the brain; that creative thinking requires exposure to many different kinds of experiences (that it does not occur in a vacuum); that a child cannot create and express according to the ringing of a bell (who can?); that the hand sends sensory impulses to the cortex thereby feeding one third of the cortex with record- ings, more than any other part of the body; that an infant's early diet will determine brain development, inasmuch as protein deficiency in the first few years of a child's life will cause retardation; that children who are not exposed to conversation usually have difficulty speaking; that children who have suffered interrupted stages of development, such as not being permitted to crawl, have setbacks in other sensing patterns that may be exhibited in not being able to read.

This is but a sampling of knowledge that has been with us for many years. Diet factors were known to Dr. Montessori in the '20's. Yet we still feed children the stale stuff from refrigerators of information found in too many classrooms. Some children get by on that diet; a few appear to thrive; but too many young people are lost along the way. What kind of Pavlovian conditioning is required in a classroom where children are told to create, to express only when the bell



rings, and to stop when another bell rings? Often we begin teaching mother and child only when remedial means are necessary, but we fail to prepare the mother, the child's first teacher. How do we motivate? By grad- ing, hence teaching the value that numbers, like money, are rewards; that the child who best repeats on Friday what was fed to him during the past four days is the best student, gets the best grades, and ends up with the highest image of himself-academically. How do we develop sensory skills? By giving children more reading, writing, and arithmetic so that myopic vision and two finger muscles find their only sensory involvement through book, pen, and words. Sometimes we reinforce what is said in books by overhead projectors, films, and slides-we extend the range of vision. But what of the rest of the hand, the senses of touch, movement, taste, smell, and perception in both the specific and broad senses?

How do children learn to use and respect freedom when discipline is imposed by the teacher if the child moves out of his appointed space in the classroom? And where do we find value training, the broad judg- ments that children need to learn about the kind, the honest, the good, the beautiful, the ugly, the evil, the different-preparation for active involvement in a de- mocracy-humanistic insights? These discoveries should evolve from and through broad experiences-not from tightly sealed black boxes with time-space limits called subject matter. This does not mean that learning does not need to have structure. How else can we give order to 2000 years of information collecting? A teacher must organize materials to make them meaningful, but should he impose organized bits of information? Rather, should he not establish a spirit of inquiry and encourage aes- thetic interest in every area, crossing subject matter boundaries?

If programs are child-interest centered, then do we need to concern ourselves with artificial motivation? There are ways a child learns naturally. He is born curious, and he learns rapidly during the first few years of his life. If schools do not kill a child's curi- osity, the teacher can capitalize on "natural" learning.

Teachers need to set the stage for learning by build- ing exciting environments and supporting as much as possible the needs and inquiries that arise on an individual level with respect and love of all children.

Shades of John Dewey? Let us see what an environment of a child-interest

centered school would be like: Going out into the playground, the visitor finds a

group of children, with their teacher, clustered around a large square box full of earth. The excitement is all about an earthworm, which none of the children had ever seen before. Their classroom door opens on to the playground and inside are the rest of the class, seated at tables disposed informally about the room, some reading books that they have themselves chosen from the copious shelves along the side of the room and some measuring the quantities of water that different vessels will hold. Soon the teacher and worm watchers return except for two children who have gone to the library to find a book on worms and the class begins to tidy up in prepartion for lunch. The visitor's attention is attracted by the paintings on the wall and, as he

looks at them, he is soon joined by a number of children who volunteer information about them. In a mo- ment the preparations for lunch are interrupted as the children press forward with things they have painted, or written, or constructed to show them to the visitor. The teacher allows this for a minute or two then tells the children that they must really now get ready for lunch "and perhaps Mr. X will come back afterwards and see what you have to show him." This is immedi- ately accepted and a promise made. On the way out two of the children invite the visitor to join them at lunch and he finds that there is no difficulty about this. The head teacher and staff invariably lunch with the children and an extra adult is easily accommodated.

Later in the day, the visitor finds a small group of six and seven year olds who are writing about the music they have enjoyed with the headmistress. He picks up a home-made book entitled "My book of sounds" and reads the following, written on plain unlined paper:-

"The mandolin is made with lovely soft smooth wood and it has a pattern like tortoise shell on it. It has pearl on it and it is called mother of pearl. It has eight strings and they are all together in twos and all the pairs make a different noise. The ones with the thickest strings make the lowest notes and the ones that have the thinnest strings make the highest notes. When I put the mandolin in my lap and I pulled the thickest string it kept on for a long time and I pulled the thinnest wire and it did not last so long and I stroked them all and they didn't go away for a long time."

Quite a number of these children write with equal fluency and expressiveness and with concentration. The sound of music from the hall attracts the visitor and there he finds a class who are making up and performing a dance drama in which the forces of good are over- coming the forces of evil to the accompaniment of drums and tambourines.

As he leaves the school and turns from the playground into the grubby and unlovely street on which it abuts, the visitor passes a class who, seated on boxes in a quiet, sunny corner, are listening to their teacher telling them the story of Rumpelstiltskin.*

This is happening throughout Leicestershire, Eng- land, and in other areas of England. Some schools have been successfully operating in depressed and middle class areas in England for the past 15 years. With this happy approach children do as well and at times even better in academic pursuits, but in the unmeasurables, in the affective and creative realm, they far outstrip our children, particularly in their ability to express themselves in nonverbal terms, in perceiving, in problem solving, and in social attitudes and human values.

Can this happen in the United States? Why not? Eng- lish educators cannot understand why education has gone further forward there, because, they said, "You had John Dewey!" But that is a discussion for another article. What is important now is that it is beginning to happen in the United States, with the help of spe- cialists imported from Leicestershire, England.

Let me describe a school I observed near Montpelier, Vermont, inspired by the work of Mrs. Marian Stroud, formerly of Leicestershire, England, and now director of the Vermont Region Three Action Center in Mont- pelier.

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It is a two-classroom, modern, rambling elementary school complete with kitchen and meeting room. The classroom I observed held grades 1, 2 and 3. It was a bright room filled with all kinds of materials to inspire and excite, everywhere-on bulletins, walls, cabinets, and floor. Pictures, charts, and work by children were pleasantly hung and labeled. Several kinds of small live animals lived in cages on the floor. Collections of such things as stones, fossils, and leaves lined the cabinets.

Children were intensely working at their individual projects or in small groups. One boy was reading in the rocking chair; another was reading, sprawled on a rug. Two children, crouched behind a low divider-bookcase, were dramatizing a story with their own brand of hand puppets. Two little girls were recording, in chart form, the movement of guppies which was to become a sum and average problem. I overheard one partner admon- ish "You wrote your '5' backward again."

Three children were involved in measuring the room and then transferring the floor plan to scale onto a large piece of kraft paper. Another girl was drawing a picture to commemorate Veteran's Day. Outside, four boys were putting the finishing touches on a float they were constructing of wood. Another child was outside photographing a bird that had just alighted from the bird house some of the students had built. One boy, rather annoyed with our investigations around the room, muttered half to himself, "I'll never get anything done!"

The teacher was a pretty, comfortably dressed, smil- ing young woman who helpfully moved from child to child, group to group, suggesting, approving, asking questions - sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, sometimes kneeling on the floor. In the time I was there the teacher had interacted in some way with nearly all of the children. She helped the children work on scaling the size of the room so that it could fit on the kraft paper (her technique was to ask questions). She listened to one boy read and wrote down words in his own private dictionary for him to look up.

Here the children's experiences were continuous, involved, interacting, and constructive. They knew exactly what they wanted to do; if they didn't, the teacher told us that as a last resort she did make suggestions. Older children often helped younger ones. Since the children were at different academic levels, it was natural for them to help one another. There was tremendous motivation, creativity, and willingness to experiment.

Exhibits on the tables, properly labeled by children and teacher, described their accomplishment-but the process was most important. In one reported instance, one child wanted to dissect a mouse. He came to ask the teacher if he could do this. After a discussion and the setting up of goals, just as the teacher was about to ap- prove the plan, one interested classmate said, "Ask him if it is dead yet." The answer that the mouse was very much alive. A heated discussion ensued with the an- swers to these questions evolving. Would our need to learn, justify killing? Is it right to kill because some- thing, or someone, is suffering? Is the sentence of death for killing a person also murder? In the end, the boys did not kill the mouse, but found a dead bird in a field the next day, and the provivisectionist carried out his project.

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What can we abstract from this? Our old concept of art administered according to a time schedule and a preordained teacher's plan, the same for every child in that class or on that grade level ("This is what we will do today") must go. It is not relevant. Our old concept of art in its ivory tower or little black box-not relating to the child's home or school life, must go. It is imposed and artificial. Subject matter needs to relate to skill emerging on an individual level according to need. Lessons should have a structure, and yet they need to be open-ended. Questions should be nonconverging and should lead to divergent ideas that inspire the child to move in still other directions. These new interests in turn could be "problems" structured toward other learning ends according to the child's interests, and so the self-motivating process continues.

This is what I think John Dewey wanted to see happen, but his interpreters wasted precious years on lais- sez-faire experiences for children. Reaction to this "pro- gressiveness" is setting us back too many decades!

Also, why not relate art and social studies, music and math, dance and science, art and dance, drama and everything? "Art is a part of life, not a separate entity." (John Dewey again.) The Balinese say, "We have no art, we do everything as well as we can." How mature that adage!

Is the old way better than a child-oriented approach to individualized instruction? Is the old way better than having internal motivation with learning growing naturally and stemming from child-interest centered projects? Is the old way of "art on a schedule" better than a child creating when he needs to express himself? Is the old way better-in which every child is locked into learning step-by-step at the same time, or is it better for the teacher to inspire the child from one level of conceptualizing to the next through collaborative inter- changes leading him through his interests to a "structured" learning process?

Is the new way possible? Yes. It has happened in England, and it is working here in the states. Class- room Renaissance is helping to develop this approach at present in several school districts in New Jersey.

Here in New Jersey, the process begins with a 15 full day session program for teachers, their administrators, and community leaders. This heterogeneous group is exposed to exciting experts in interdisciplinary areas. Each session is part of a design structured in a se- quence to carry participants through various integrating, involvement experiences in the arts, social studies, education techniques, observations of schools in opera- tion, and group process. Learning to express oneself in nonverbal terms, about how to develop values-in fact, placing man in the center of curriculum-is our strong emphasis. It works! Motivation is internally charged. Everyone emerges, communicating and understanding one another-and they have changed. Participants all say they never could work the same way they did before.

Without the phase I program where everyone experiences these "new" communication tools, phase II would not come about. The same misdirection and misunder- standing would happen as did with the old "core" system. Leaders were transmitting on FM, and teachers and administrators were receiving on AM. Thus, "indoc-

trination" experience is vital. The next step brings experimentation back into the

classroom by these leadership trained people, until confidence is gained. Developing curriculum materials as a group may evolve next, followed by implementing with colleagues this new approach in classrooms and schools. The process may be different in each case; design varies to suit locale, resources, and cultural out- look. And Classroom Renaissance stands by to assist, all along the way. But it not so easy as it sounds-mov- ing from a unilateral to a multidimensional approach is very difficult for most teachers, particularly those who resist change on general principles. With many resource people coming into the school to help demonstrate how to implement child centered programs, the school does gradually change. We cannot leave off support; it has to be available to encourage and bolster the spirits of teachers until they no longer ask for our help.

Parents, too, often are fearful that "freedom" in the classroom means that no learning occurs. We feel community leaders, therefore, should be involved in our program from phase I all the way through to imple- mentation; then parents become our most vociferous supporters.

We also involve colleges and their faculties in our ef- forts. As a result, colleges offer three graduate credits for phase I participation, and three new programs in creative drama, music, and film production have been added to their catalogs. But here, too, there needs to be an entirely new orientation of faculty on the college level. Classroom Renaissance is now working on a pro- posal to involve colleges to a greater extent in a training program for teachers, as well as in continuation of field work.

We must keep in mind that through the child centered approach our little subject matter "kingdoms" will grow into empires of influence. The art teacher, working closely with the classroom teacher, should use movement in art lessons, as well as music, social studies, and science. And the music teacher in a similar way should relate art, movement, drama, and social studies. All teachers need a broader, fuller background. Effec- tive, relevant communication demands it. Where there are blank spots in training, teachers should help one another gain proficiencies in these other areas. Cannot we see how effective TV has been as an integrating force in most households? More time is spent watching TV in the average home than in pursuit of formal training.

Our techniques of teaching art have shown the way in other areas in the past; it would be ironic if the math or music teacher had to tell us that we were inert. Let us cut ourselves out of the second-class trap that our system with its subject-oriented boxes imposes and teach with the vitality which is the essence of the arts, and the way of true education.

Thelma R. Newman is executive director of Class- room Renaissance, Union, New Jersey.

References 1 James E. Allen, Jr. "The Arts and Literacy," N.Y. State

Department of Education, Albany, N.Y. p. 2. 2 Children and Their Primary Schools. A Report of the

Central Advisory Council for Education (England) Vol. 1: Report, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1968.



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Are We Still with It?