In co-operative learning, it is inevitable that each child will have different opinions and thoughts. In order to complete the task allocated, they would have to learn how to respect one another’s view. This is part of the process of problem-solving while accomplishing a group assignment together.
There is an appetite for collaboration between teachers and arts organisations, and for them to explore and improve their practice and the outcomes for young people. We are particularly interested in supporting such partnerships. Performing can be taken to mean ‘to do’, ‘to show’, ‘to dance’, creating as ‘making’, ‘trying out’, or ‘composing’, while appreciation is the outcome of ‘watching’, ‘viewing’, ‘talking about’ and ‘ drawing about’ dance. The activity could be an expressive dance in a drama played by the students.
I say now more than ever because our lives increasingly require the ability to deal with conflicting messages, to make judgements in the absence of rule, to cope with ambiguity, and to frame imaginative solutions to the problems we face. Our world is not one that submits to single correct answers to questions or clear cut solutions to problems; consider what’s going on in the Middle East. We need to be able not only to envision fresh options, we need to have feel for the situations in which they appear. In a word, the forms of thinking the arts stimulate and develop are far more appropriate for the real world we live in than the tidy right angled boxes we employ in our schools in the name of school improvement. It seems to me that the computer has a particularly promising role to play in providing students with opportunities to learn how to think in new ways.
Certain movement ideas frequently used by in informal situations seem to belong together and can be utilised in dance. Educators on their part, they can facilitate the students by guiding exploring different ideas of movement such as running and leaping, turning and twisting, moving and stopping suddenly. Children will be able to choose the right movement they would want to include into their dance. Educators may also guide children choosing the instrument they would like to use for the movement using different sounds. For example, the sound of the fast ringing bells can be the movement of running. Dancing is tapping on kinaesthetic intelligence where the child could learn through body movements.
Work in the arts cultivates the modes of thinking and feeling that I have described; one cannot succeed in the arts without such cognitive abilities. Such forms of thought integrate feeling and thinking in ways that make them inseparable. One knows one is right because one feels the relationships. The sensibilities come into play and in the process become refined. Another way of putting it is that as we learn in and through the arts we become more qualitatively intelligent. From a social perspective it is understandable why tight controls, accountability in terms of high stakes testing, and the pre-specification of intended outcomes—standards they are called—should have such attractiveness.
- The headlines about an extra GCSE year will die down, but the wider debate about how to achieve both educational breadth and strong outcomes will continue.
- As I said, one relied on art when there was no science to provide guidance.
- They have all faced some challenging decisions about how to allocate staff and resources, but they have often found creative solutions which have enabled them to maintain their focus on the arts without compromising in other areas.
The medium and sensory modality differ but the business of composing relationships remains. To succeed the artist needs to see, that is, to experience the qualitative relationships that emerge in his or her work and to make judgments about them. There is of course virtue in having intentions and the ability to realize them. What is troublesome is the push towards uniformity, uniformity in aims, uniformity in content, uniformity in assessment, uniformity in expectation. Of course for technocrats uniformity is a blessing; it gets rid of complications—or so it is believed.
We situate our most profound religious practices within compositions we have choreographed. What does our need for such practices say to us about the sources of our understanding and what do they mean for how we educate? At a time when we seem to want to package performance into standardized measurable skill sets questions such as these seem to me to be especially important. The more we feel the pressure to standardize, the more we need to remind ourselves of what we should not try to standardize. The pursuit, or at least the exploitation of surprise in an age of accountability is paradoxical. As I indicated earlier, we place a much greater emphasis on prediction and control than on exploration and discovery.
How Secure Is The Evidence?
To aspire for less is to court professional irresponsibility. We like our data hard and our methods stiff—we call it rigor. Previously, she has written for nonprofits as well as marketing agencies. She’s covered environmental issues, women’s rights, world poverty, and animal rights. In Broadcast Journalism from Ithaca College, Lauren enjoys interviewing families about their experiences with online education. Just like collaboration, kids in the arts learn that they are accountable for their contributions to the group.
Investigating, Making And Thinking About Art In Schools
For instance, the children could partner one another and dance to the music. They could even perform a simple skit together during a speech and drama lesson. As the child discovers the love in arts, they would also become self-motivated and freely express themselves in the different forms of arts. The arts play an important role in enriching young people’s learning and educational experiences. Exposure to the arts can unlock potential in young people, helping them to develop skills in communication, collaboration, creativity and problem solving. In addition to the enjoyment and enrichment the arts bring, arts education can increase young people’s engagement in school and learning, and support key educational outcomes.