Drama Tuesday - The fibs we tell about arts education
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In my childhood, a fib with the little lie. It’s not an out and out dishonesty, not a deliberate untruth. It was a minor, bending of truth, sometimes to protect someone’s feelings, avoid embarrassment, or plaster over difficult situations.
In teacher education, we are often fibbing to our students that we provide sufficient arts teacher education. We perpetrate this mistruth with the best of intentions: we are making the best of a bad situation with the time we have available, we say. Or, we blame someone else – the managerialist system, the usual Neo-liberal, whipping boys! But deep down, we know that we are glossing over the truth.
There is the temptation to throw up our hands in exasperation, and to just give up.
But maybe we need some truth and reconciliation!
No one likes truth tellers. We as a society have a bad habit of punishing them. Or dismissing them as dissidents. But if we truly care about Arts education and its place in the education of all students, we have to call out the fibbers, the masters of misdirection, the sleight of mind, the liars and cheats.
There is a deeper issue: a deeper state of denial. If there are fibbers that are also these deniers. And deniers (such as climate change deniers!) are maybe worse. They cling to their articles of faith blindly. With bombast there’s a rather senior education department principals who maintains the faith and claims to me without even a twitch of irony that “the state of Arts education in schools is healthy”, adding for emphasis, “Teachers are well prepared for teaching the arts in their classrooms”. Later, ironically, over dinner, he’s outlined that his drama training consisted of a lecturer dictating drama games to write down.
If you are in a state of denial of course all in the garden is roses and there’s no manure.
The reality of arts education, and contemporary teacher education is that it is not healthy. Think about the courses where the arts are included in units about integrating curriculum. Without any sense of shame there are units that cover HASS/HPE/The Arts in one semester. There are teacher education courses that have 20 contact hours early in a four year degree course. This sort of practice reinforces the current pragmatics of schools that argues that all students need is integrated curriculum which is the panacea for time-poor teachers Or there is a focus on “doing things” in the name of arts learning ignoring the underlying purpose of arts curriculum.
At one level, fibs are inevitable. If we face too much truth telling, we might go mad. But maybe it’s time to stop shrugging our shoulders. Time to face up to a reality check.
