3
National Art Education Association Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary Teachers Author(s): Michael F. Andrews Source: Art Education, Vol. 35, No. 3 (May, 1982), pp. 18-19 Published by: National Art Education Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192589 . Accessed: 10/06/2014 22:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . National Art Education Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Education. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.82 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:27:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary Teachers

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary Teachers

National Art Education Association

Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary TeachersAuthor(s): Michael F. AndrewsSource: Art Education, Vol. 35, No. 3 (May, 1982), pp. 18-19Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192589 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 22:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

National Art Education Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ArtEducation.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.82 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:27:16 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary Teachers

Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary Teachers

"Significant experiences are private experiences that result in an increase in human values, an increase in consciousness . . ."

Michael F. Andrews

As we approach the subject of arts education, let it be clearly

understood that there is no such estab- lished entity in our educational system or, for most of us, in our consciousness. What we usually call arts education is merely an amalgama- tion of music, art, dance, drama, and poetry, often under the guise of the "humanities," or a department or a College of Fine Arts. Unfortunately their objectives are unfounded, their efforts fragmented, and the exist- ence of a symbiotic intent denied. These basic facts provide our founda- tion for curriculum development.

One cannot help but presume that any proposed course for elementary teachers be primarily determined by a concern for the benefactors, i.e., the children that our elementary teachers will eventually be teaching. It is, therefore, proposed that our

primary objective be to augment in teachers, and they in turn in their pupils, a sense of self, so that students may learn to live in the world on their own terms, to foster the capacity to participate in the creation of emergent values that will enrich the quality of their experiences. The quality of experience will depend on the intent of creating order and discovering meaning and direction. Thus any proposed arts education course should supplement an education by and for mediocrity with an education by and for individuality, one that prepares teachers who are capable of thinking their own thoughts, establishing their own standards, and governing their own conscience.

We cannot afford to define ele- mentary teachers, who now are to be concerned with the arts as an added responsibility to their other teaching duties, in terms of things they ought to know and of skills they ought to possess. We can define them only in terms of the life they ought to live. We must not think of arts education as something to get but as a process of personal commitment. Only through their own commitment can teachers enable others to trust their own perceptions, to realize their own propensities, and become self- fulfilling persons. The creative learner wants to be known in terms of one's real self. One finds expression and fulfillment of one's unique and personal potentials. The objective of such an arts course need not be one that necessarily implies the creation of aesthetic products or performance, although the process may evaluate in aesthetic forms, but one that deals with the process of individual experience. The course

should, among other things, attempt to foster individual exploration, encourage personal insight and self- discovery, promote initiative and the desire and power to make choices of one's own, enhance one's personal self, and permit the expression of individual values and ideals.

The content of instruction must then be relevant to the learner. If, for example, an individual is obsessed with cats, the content becomes cats, cats of a particular nature determined by the individual's concerns, feelings, and experiences. If at the moment the teacher is conducting an art class, permitting and encouraging the student to draw cats would facilitate the linkage of extrinsic curricula to basic intrinsic concerns and feelings. In this respect the content is indirectly determined by the student. The result is greater impact on the realiza- tion of the student's human potentials. When drawing a cat and using a mechanistic approach, the student merely depicts its shape, proportions, color, and the breed of cat-Persian, Manx, Siamese, or Russian Blue. The drawing is not modified in any way to relate to the quality of the student's existential experiences. There is no interrelation of subject matter, medium, and person, nor is a new wholeness created. However, by using a developmental approach, the student is more likely to reveal his concept of a particular cat, i.e., its character, personality, or physical condition. What he draws is a symbol of his conceptual relationship imbued with understanding, mean- ings, and feelings. Reflected is the student's nature of existence rather than any abstraction of factual evidence. After all, the act of perceiving is one- in-a-process of relating. There is no

Art Education May 1982 18

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.82 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:27:16 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Designing an Arts Education Course for Elementary Teachers

bifurcation but rather an immediacy of reality in which the child becomes what he is perceiving. On the other hand, if the child is taught what a cat is to be, his mind is preoccupied with certain preconceived ideas. He perceives things only through these abstract prejudices which assuredly distort his own perceptions. The chance that the child might logically perceive cat as the teacher or another child might perceive it to be is a slim chance to take. The demand for attention to proposed information eliminates the milieu of possible per- sonal perceptions, most likely the ones that the child specifically needs.

Educating through arts education, if such a course is realized, ought not to be by methods, but rather by involvement in significant experiences, experiences that connote an affective dimension in which the individual feels and values. Significant experiences are private experiences that result in an increase in human values, an increase in consciousness, a discovery of new things in the environment, new possibilities in one's self, a development of attitude, a feeling of what is worthwhile in life, and greater awareness and sensitivity. In this respect significant experience is and must be a form of self-education. Such privacy, or self-development, is the commonality among the arts that should be our concern. However, we must be careful not to interpret significant experience merely as a process of "learning to do by doing." The mechanical manipulations are not necessarily related to his essential nature. To know is not necessarily to be educated. One must have the inclination and disposition to use the knowledge and skills required. In order for an experience to be significant and creative, it must be concrete rather than a literal abstraction.

When planning a curriculum for elementary teachers, one of the princi- pal aims to consider is the fostering of aesthetic awareness. The elementary teacher should be exposed at the very outset to a variety of art, music, dance, drama, and poetry, and allowed and encouraged to react emotionally and perceptually to its content. Our responsibility should be to help teachers achieve a way of seeing, hearing, feeling, imaging: a way of responding emotionally, intuitively, individually

to visual values-color, mass, shape, form; to aural values-tonal design and rhythmic pattern; to kinetic values- rhythm and body consciousness. By responding to the mood-value of the encounter, the teacher is actually experiencing, for example, the inner essence of music and, therefore, becoming not so much a musician as musical. When one has this quality, it shows up unmistakably in whatever one does. When a teacher paints, he performs as an artist. When he moves, the motions are rhythmic, when he touches the keyboard, he sounds like a musician. If we are to teach teachers to teach children to dance, we must first teach the teachers to dance, i.e., to become dancers. Perhaps this can best be understood by contrasting it with its antithesis. If the dance is a rhumba, we usually break it down into a number of different basic steps, and teach them one by one rather than attending to the basic rhythm of the rhumba itself, that is, teaching the inner, living essence. Any creative dancer will tell you that once you get the rhythm of the dance, the steps will be easier to learn, because they are there to guide you. What is actually happening is that rhythmic responsiveness and sensitivity are going through a process of growth.

In music, the tonal and rhythmic pattern are the inner essence. To be able to respond emotionally to such patterns is what helps to make a person musical. In art it is the emotional and expressive values that contribute to human growth, and so it is with other art forms. Like music and art, poetry conveys emotional and spiritual meaning rather than literal content. How then can we possibly consider skills and tech- niques as primary? Arts education -music, art, dance, drama, poetry- should be a phase of a broader unified polysensory process similar to synaesthetic education. It should be a process that develops a sensitivity and responsiveness to the intrinsic essence of all that one experiences, one that opens up sensory avenues of fulfillment, shaping personality, and enabling one to evolve into a fully functioning being: A person who learns through the arts does a great deal more than acquire internal and private abilities. He or she is

becoming a certain sort of person, with interests, aspirations, ambitions, feelings, and hopes which can mold the entire pattern of personal and social life.

If we are concerned with the process of individual experience as the objective of the arts in general educa- tion, it is important that the experience be the kind in which phenomena are apprehended in the immediacy of one's sensuousness, and be dis- tinguished from experiences in which phenomena are apprehended con- ceptually, as in the academic subjects as well as in traditional art and music education, dance, and drama. The primary purpose of arts education thus should be to allow for such experiences, experiences that develop one's ability to experience the world at the level of sensuous immediacy, without the mediation of abstract and conceptual thought. What is to be gained by the learner must not be readymade, packaged in concepts waiting to be acquired, but the ability to grasp the world in concrete sensuous meaning. Thus, the learner does not experience himself as a subject apprehending the world as an object separate from himself. The learner actually becomes the embodiment of the world, and the world becomes the embodiment of him. He becomes self-actualized, fulfilled, and self- realized.

Michael F. Andrews is a professor of art and education, Department of Synaesthetic Education, at Syracuse University in New York.

References

Michael F. Andrews, "A Quest for Self- Actualization," Art Education. Reston, Virginia: National Art Education Association, February 1962, pp. 7-9.

Michael F. Andrews, and 0. Charles Giordano, Sensory Learning at Syracuse University, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1980.

David Burton, "Synaesthesia: Sounding Your Own True Colors," Art Teacher, Reston, Virginia: National Art Education Association, Fall 1975, pp. 30-32.

Barbara Hayes, "Synaesthesia and Creativity." Art Teacher, Reston, Virginia: National Art Education Association, Winter 1975, pp. 9-11.

Art Education May 1982 19

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.82 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:27:16 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions