Drama Tuesday - A Primer For Arts Education

 A quick Primer on teaching the Arts in schools

Sometimes it is useful to restate fundamental principles about teaching and learning the arts. You answer questions about:

1. Being clear about why you are teaching the arts

Teaching the Arts begins with a choice on your part: you choose to teach the arts so your students can know and understand the arts in their own lives and can use the arts to express their ideas and feelings and communicate them with others.

But your teaching always begins with a choice on your part.

While Curriculum Authorities can provide syllabuses and mandates, you need to ultimately see the purpose and value of your students following those curriculum mandates. You begin by answering a fundamental question: why am I including the arts in the priorities I make about what is important for my students to know, do, value and learn.

2. Being clear about what you are teaching your students to know, do and value in the arts

There are often misconceptions about what you teach in the arts.

Let’s start with the BIG IDEA.

You are teaching students to be artists and audiences for the arts in their own lives, cultures and societies. You are teaching students how they find their personal, social and cultural identities through making and responding to the arts.

To achieve that BIG IDEA:

• You provide opportunities for students to experience the arts. They use their senses to see and hear and feel arts experiences. They experience a wide variety of arts immediately, directly and relate them to their own lives.

• In that context, you provide students opportunities to make their own arts - to express and communicate ideas, feelings, experiences directly through the mediums of the art forms. 

What you teach in the arts is therefore something more than singing a song or improvising a dance or drama or making a colour wheel, or recording a video – it might involve those activities but not on their own or in isolation. What is being taught to students is how the arts provide ways of expressing and communicating and why that is an important life value. They are applying their learning about the arts from experiencing the arts, to making the arts. They are being taught to be artists and audiences.

Another way of thinking about what students are learning is that the chosen arts activity for a lesson, is a vehicle for the broader learning, rather than just an activity to complete. For example, how does the song being song in the lesson, add to or develop what students know about the elements of music and the role of music in people’s lives. This is, after all, the question we ask ourselves as teachers about any learning activity in any curriculum area: how does this chosen learning activity contribute to students’ learning? The activity must always be the vehicle for the learning.

3. Being clear about how students learn in the arts

• Learning in the arts is experiential, hands-on and practical.

Students learn the arts by making the arts, by experiencing and responding to the arts, by applying their knowledge and skills – what they have learnt – to their own making and responding in the arts.

Learning the arts is experiential. It is through direct hands on experiences of the arts as audiences, and as makers and artists, that students learn.

That does not mean that there are not times when you are directly teaching students about the arts. It might be that you are demonstrating a specific skill or technique. It might be that you are sharing knowledge about the history and cultural, social and personal contexts of specific arts experiences tracing continuity and change over times, places and cultures. These are the times when you, as a knowledgeable other share your knowledge to provide “zones of proximal development” (Vygotsky) with your students.

• Learning in the arts is also progressive. 

It is developmental, recognising that students learning needs are different according to their ages and their physical, social, emotional development. In choosing arts activities they need to be age and developmentally appropriate for your students.

It is organised and structured. Students learn in the arts through a widening spiral of experiences that provide increasing challenge. A spiral curriculum model that is not haphazard or random. Students have a clear understanding of how what they are learning today builds on what they have already learn – and which also is leading to further future learning.

4. Being clear about your role in  in your students’ learning in the arts

Your role in your students’ learning is clear. 

You guide. You inspire. You model. You share knowledge. You facilitate. These are overlapping not mutually exclusive roles.

You can sum up your role as the co-creator of learning. Your provide contexts, materials, knowledge as required, supportive and safe environments. You provide guidance. But, you are not the director of the show, the invisible hand wielding the brush, the composer of the music. You model your own creativity alongside your students as they create, but you given them voice and agency – while modelling your own. 

Drama Tuesday - The Qualities of Quality Arts Education

2022 Taiwan International Symposium on Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic Education, 12 November 2022

This seminar is a practical outcome of Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic Education, a country-wide educational project sponsored by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan. The project is designed 

“…to develop and incorporate Arts-centric interdisciplinary courses into the curriculum at all K-12 levels within Taiwan’s education system. The main approach undertaken by our program is to  design interdisciplinary courses—which have Arts at its core—for non-Arts subjects, in order to incorporate various elements of Arts within, thereby fostering and elevating students’ aesthetic literacy and creativity”

Today was the culmination of thinking and writing about the markers of quality arts education – a long term research focus I have developed.

We negotiated the challenges of recording the presentation, setting up the links on Google Meet (two screens including presentation and translation  screens on separate devices). But it has been a fruitful and happy collaboration.

(https://www.sunburntfilms.com/) 

What is notable about the program in Taiwan is the links being actively made between arts education and aesthetic education, between arts and wellbeing in the broadest sense of the word. There are important lessons from the arts in schools for the wellbeing and health of our whole society. This is a theme picked up by Larry O’Farrell in a paper at the IDEA 2022  Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he shared the work of the Canadian Network for Arts & Learning (CNAL) (https://www.eduarts.ca)  and the role of Arts Education for personal well-being, themes that I have written about with colleague Peter Wright (2014). Attention must be paid to the research on the links between arts education and health and wellbeing (see, for example, Fancourt and Finn 2019). This will resonate with the themes of the seminar and next phase planning for Arts and Aesthetic Education in  Taiwan.

The notion of the qualities of quality arts education draws on the concepts of a Project Zero publication of the same name (Seidel, Tishman et al. 2008).

A copy of the final paper can be found below:

Bibliography

Fancourt, D. and S. Finn (2019). What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? A Scoping Review. Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report, No. 67. Copenhagen, World Health Organisation.

Seidel, S., S. Tishman, L. Hetland, E. Winner and P. Palmer. (2008). "The Qualities of Quality: Excellence in arts education and how to achieve it." from http://www.espartsed.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pz-qofq-executive-summary.pdf.

Wright, P. and R. Pascoe (2014). "Eudaimonia and creativity: the art of human flourishing." Cambridge Journal of Education.

Drama Tuesday - Australian Curriculum: The Arts Plus ça change? Oui ou non!

  Australia has two versions of The Australian Curriculum. 

• The Australian Curriculum The Arts (Version 8.4)

• Australian Curriculum V9

Curriculum is contested space. There are too many political fingers in the pie - particularly in the so-called culture wars. The suspicious caste who see a shadow conspiracy lurking in every word have focused mostly on their versions of history and English and largely ignore the Arts. Indifference can be a blessing – particularly in expecting an arts curriculum to be implemented. 

Does this revision of the Arts curriculum make a difference?

At one level, there is consistency. At another level there is significant change that should be noted.

What stays the same?

The Curriculum provides a fundamental commitment to an arts education for all young Australians: “The Arts curriculum is written on the basis that all students will study The Arts from Foundation to the end of Year 8”.

But there is the weasel qualification: “State and territory school authorities or individual schools will determine how the curriculum is implemented”.

There is still a commitment to

Getting action beyond pleasant platitudes and meaningful arts education is always a challenge. 

Where should we be awake to changes?

The V.9 Arts Curriculum must not be understood as “business as usual”.

• The Strands of the curriculum have changed.

• There are implicit shifts in what is highlighted and valued throughout the whole document.

Consider the Strands of the two versions:

The naming of parts is more than “silent, eloquent gestures” (as the Henry Reed poem reminds us). What we call things matters. How we organise our thoughts matter. 

Teachers work from familiar patterns – habits of thinking or mind, if you will. For the past few years we have trained ourselves to plan and teach using one paradigm (for better or worse) and now the world of thought is changed. 

This is more than semantics. Nor is it just a re-visiting of the many arguments amongst the advisory community – for those with long memories the responses to Shape of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA 2010) included different structuring organisation. For example, 

“Queensland supports the proposition that there are three processes — generating, realizing and responding — that can organise art form learning and the recursive nature of arts learning and arts processes. This reflects existing practice in Queensland”.  

That three part structure has resonances in Version 9 strands. The Western Australian Curriculum Framework (1998) identified four learning outcomes (which have some overlap with Version 9 strands):

1. Arts Ideas: “Students generate arts works that communicate ideas.” (p. 53)

2. Arts Skills and Processes: “Students use the skills, techniques, processes, conventions and technologies of the arts.” (p. 54)

3. Arts Responses: “Students use their aesthetic understanding to respond to reflect on and evaluate the arts.” (p. 56)

4. Arts in Society: “Students understand the role of the arts in society.” (p. 57)

Version 9 is more than just re-working of the previous version. It is a radical conceptual re-think. More than that, there is the shift in focus on making the arts – exploring/practices and skills/creating and making/presenting and performing – and a downplaying of responding.

In writing this, I am not defending the simplistic making/responding model. For all its catchy two part structure, it was flawed.  But what I am trying to highlight is that when you change the ways that we think about a curriculum structure, we change the curriculum. 

Perhaps, the only saving grace is that the actual implementation of the previous versions of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts have had such limited success that these changes will slip by unnoticed. 

No curriculum is worth anything unless it is implemented. 

What we have had in successive versions of Arts Curriculum in Australia has not been a failure to write good curriculum, but a failure to implement what is developed. 

I urge everyone to read the new version of the Arts Curriculum, with an eye looking back to what was valuable in the past (not forgetting what’s in state/territory documents as well). But also reading Version 9 with criticality and connoisseurship (to invoke Eisner). 

We need to ask ourselves two questions:

1. What changes and what stays the same?

2. Do the changes matter to a successful arts education for every young Australian?

Bibliography

Costa, A. L., & Kallic, B. (2000-2001). Habits of Mind. Retrieved from http://www.habits-of-mind.net/

Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education? John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University. Retrieved from www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_or_education.htm . Last updated: April 17, 2005.

Music Monday - What will we do next? How do you decide the next musical?

The curtain has just descended on your successful production. Your students (and their parents and even the Principal) are clamouring: “what will we do next?" You’ve done a run of successful shows and you want the next one to be as successful. How do you rise to this challenge?

This can be a delicious dilemma.

But there are questions that need answers.

• How do you choose the next musical or play to produce in your school?

• Who decides?

• What is the process? Is there a process?

• What are the principles on which choices are made?

Is the choice of your school’s next production whim? What’s trending? Debate? Consultation?

Who and how you decide is a measure of your underlying values. 

Who decides makes a difference.

How often are drama teachers portrayed in films as loopy, self aggrandising megalomaniacs (for comic purposes of course)! But can this sort of decision making ever be truly democratic? There is a question that needs to be always asked: whose production is this?

A process establishes clear guiding principles, timelines and is transparent and consultative

Some questions to developing guiding principles

Choosing a production in an education setting

• How does this choice of production meet the learning needs of your students?

• Is the production designed to meet a mandated curriculum or syllabus requirement? 

  For example, if the syllabus requires students to explore examples of historical music theatre using book structures and fully integrated songs and dances then the choices are different if what was required was a jukebox musical.

• what is the overall purpose of the production?

  Is it to satisfy syllabus standards? Or is it to bring together the school as a community working collaboratively on a shared project? Is it about “school spirit”? Or perhaps, what is the balance between these purposes?

• Is this chosen production appropriate for the level of skills development and learning progression of your students?

  – Vocal range?

  – Level of dance? 

  – Specialised dance such as tap?

  – Emotional demands of roles?

  In other words can your students manage the song ranges, dance requirements, acting challenges? It is OK for younger students to work on Junior Versions with adjusted scores.

• Is it age appropriate in terms of content, and acting? 

  There is nothing quite as off-putting as a Year 9 playing (trying to play) Bloody Mary in South Pacific.

• Are the themes and subject appropriate for your school setting?

• Will the community support it?

• Will your Principal and colleagues go on the journey with you?

Practical issues

• Can you get the rights?

• What is the size of the cast?

• What is the gender balance of roles?

• What is the gender balance of your students available for the production?

• What are the staging requirements?

  For example, Does it require Peter Pan flying? Or are there multiple sets? costumes? Props?

• Is the title recognisable and marketable for your community?

• Do you have to have a well-known production?

  Some productions, particularly musicals are known properties. Parents as audiences know the difference between Mama Mia and all the nearly-made it shows in the catalogue. 

There is one final question: do you want to spend countless hours of your life and a river of sweat and tears on a show that you don’t believe in?

It’s not as simple as pulling up the MTI Catalogue and sticking a pin in the title list. 

The Educational Theatre Association’s (EdTA) https://schooltheatre.org/play-survey/ annual play survey for the 2021-2022 year.

Music Monday - How often do I need a music lesson?

This year has marked a significant reduction in singing lessons at the tertiary institution I work for. Driven by budget constraints, the students are now provided with fortnightly lessons, where previously they were weekly. Furthermore, there are a number of non-teaching weeks in each semester (rehearsal, production and performance weeks) when classes are cancelled, so, in fact, the fortnight’s gap between lessons often becomes several weeks. In 2021 there are a total of 12 lessons per year in the 1st and 2nd years of the bachelor degree and 10 lessons in the 3rd year.

At the same time, in my other workplace, a specialist performing arts high school, there continue to be weekly lessons (40 per year). The irony has not been lost on me when sending home an email to the parents of a student who has missed a lesson – “only 8 more lessons this term – don’t miss any more!”

This strange 2021 dichotomy between my two teaching environments has set me thinking about how many lessons we actually need at the various stages of our training.

As a young child with a live-in piano teaching grandmother, I was used to the pupils turning up at their regular weekly lesson time. I guess the weekly lesson meant that each family’s household calendar was straightforward. Certainly in the beginning stages of learning any instrument (including the voice), regular lessons ensure that mistakes are not too practised in before correction by the teacher.

In my role as a high school voice teacher, I wear several hats – simultaneously I am teaching vocal technique, music literacy, interpretation skills, to name a few. The students need the weekly contact to maintain their growth and development.

In the tertiary environment, our 1st year students come from a variety of musical backgrounds. Because they are music theatre students, their individual skill levels vary. Some are strong dancers and inexperienced singers. Occasionally I have had a student with a prior degree in voice. The so-called triple threat encompasses singing, acting and dancing and no one starts the degree with equal skills in all three – I mean, why would they bother to do the course? It is very frustrating to be limited in how much instruction we can offer the beginners, who really need correction and guidance in the studio on a weekly basis.

If a reduction in practical training is to be a thing of the future, how can we fill the gaps?

Students could, of course, seek private teachers outside of the institution. The obvious benefit is the increased number of lessons. The potential downside is differing teacher approaches, which could be confusing in the early stages of training.

Technology offers some solutions. Although I am not a huge fan of the zoom music lesson – mainly because of the time lag involved – I do find that students benefit other uses of technology, such as submitting practice/ performance videos for teacher viewing and feedback. Is technology the way of the future here?

However, one thing that becomes clearer to me with every passing year is this – unless there is an investment in significant practice routines by the student, the number and frequency of lessons is irrelevant. A student who doesn’t practice will make as little progress with weekly, fortnightly, or even monthly lessons. But a student with good practice habits is going to progress faster with more regular instruction. Your thoughts?