LEAPING INTO 2016

As I start to look across time from inception of the idea of this commentary, we are in an era that began as Web 3.0---an interval when the Internet emerged with social media and the concept of facilitating and networking...moving away from teaching and programmed instruction. This process has led to the evolution of a true environment of on-line learning. Individuals have been growing up in the midst of a media feast, in which the medium is indeed the message. Content is shifting from facts to process.

Performing Arts Educators as Collaborators

In the performing arts, artists collaborate in creating new work. Collaboration is a vital and indispensable process. This suggests that the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole, because the work that emerges has been nurtured by individual artists who have responded to each other as the creative process unfolds.

Artists as educators have a special opportunity to include the entire curriculum of the school since art embraces the sum total of human experience. Therefore history, literature, social studies (cultural, political, geographical), and the sciences provide exciting materials to be explored and expressed through artistic creation.

Though artists can seize this creative, collaborative opportunity, we should remember that most educators have not had the same experiences in collaboration that are a natural part of creating as performing artists. Most teachers have been trained to focus on their discipline and often guard what they may regard as intrusion on their territory. Yet, there is a gathering force on the cultural scene that celebrates sharing as an important, indispensable value. This is at the heart of the Web 2.0 technology which stresses creative response, and making meaning through interaction.

Creating Literacy Through Making Meaning

When Jerome Bruner published his Acts of Meaning in 1990, I thought that arts education might seize this opportunity for a revival of the infusion of the arts into general education. After all, his Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966) completely revolutionized arts education in the '70s and resulted in arts revival in schools and educational institutions.

Mr. Bruner, Harper's reports, has "stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey." His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. (Harvard University Press)

John Dewey established the concept as Art As Experience, and Bruner then brought ideas of cyclical structure to content combined with a dialectal, dynamic experience in which learners participate actively as they construct personal meaning through creative interaction.

The time is ripe to include Bruner's constructivist concepts to the process of appropriating the arts to further the teaching of literacy. This provides a powerful model that has yet to be developed fully and implemented on a large scale. More importantly it requires the collaboration of educators across disciplines to address a crisis in contemporary culture: the need for a cohesive literate community that establishes the basis for cross cultural collaboration.

The future depends on how educators transform the current crisis into a cooperative opportunity.

Literacy and the Performing Arts

The performing arts can provide an exceptional opportunity to partner with other disciplines to develop young students as literate, caring, and sensitive people. In a time of culture wars and ethnic clashes, immersion in the arts can foster sharing and promote mutual understanding and respect.

The arts are a special way of knowing the world. Some would argue that the arts are the most powerful force in the world because they define humanity in the rich context of human activity. The arts transcend time, and the knowledge they create is ageless. Making art brings new knowledge into the world; this knowledge is deeply personal but becomes a part of our endlessly emerging identity. The visual arts have traditionally provided strong integration of its techniques and processes into the curriculum, especially in early childhood and elementary schools. The performing arts have been more isolated, and they can learn from the success of the visual arts and strive to help other educators understand the unique and universal qualities of their arts and their relevance for teaching literacy.

A major issue facing education is the difficulty that so many children have in learning to read and write. One might argue that in one sense, these skills are also universal arts. Perhaps if we teach literacy artistically and less like science, reading and writing will become more vital in the lives of young people. The arts can play a strategic role in developing the literacy of our young people. This has been mandated in some states, so that artists who are teachers are expected to develop techniques and strategies that contribute to the growth of literacy.

Artists who are teachers can find very creative ways to infuse the arts throughout the curriculum. They can collaborate with other teachers to develop effective strategies and models for integrating the arts as central to teaching and learning. The most effecive shift in the paradigm for teaching and learning can be the development of a curriculum in which all educators emerge as dynamic, creative, and effective collaborators.