Poor fit

I have a blog entry at Americans for the Arts this morning. It talks about failure and looks at failure from a more positive, frankly, rather cheery perspective. You can check it out at AFTA if you are so inclined.

Bernard Fryshman, professor of physics at NY Institute of Technology wrote about failure in the September 16 issue of Education Week. Professor Fryshman reminds us of the very ugly connotation of failure in public school settings. What he suggests is that we reframe our undertanding of children from "failing" to being a "poor fit" for our current education system. He writes -

Poor fit, rather than failure, characterizes much of modern society. Just a few generations ago, people developed positive self-image, a career and worth in the eyes of society by becoming musicians, calligraphers, printers and mechanics. Every one of these opportunities has shrunk, and with rare exceptions such positions now demand more intellectual than manual skills.

Professor Fryshman's article immediately brings to mind the dancers and actors I have known, many of whom struggled with the unforgiving boundaries of public education. As reframed by Professor Fryshman, it was not that they were failures at school. It was that school was a poor fit for them.

When we include the arts for every child in school, we dismiss the negative mantle of "failure", understand the poor fit and open doors to learning. Professor Fryshman reminds us that "we must think about children as individuals, rather than members of an undifferentiated whole." Words by which to build a school and provide an education.

Blog event at Americans for the Arts

Check out the arts education blogging machine that is churning away this week at AFTA. Lots of food for thought!

www.AmericansForTheArts.org/ArtsEducation.

Hard Work

Jordan Levin wrote a passionate piece in Sunday’s Miami Herald about the importance of the arts in troubled economic times. Levin writes,

“I would argue that thinking culture is a frill, a disposable ornament for a comfortable life, has helped get us into the mess we’re in.”

Levin argues that there are many reasons the devaluing of art has happened and it got me thinking.

There are two references in the piece to American Idol and to be honest American Idol pushes a button for me. I see American Idol as part of a growing glorification of the amateur in pop culture. More and more, popular culture is highlighting the amateur who through innate talent or good luck finds themselves celebrated. The issue for me is the absence of hard work. In our great country many of us have become intoxicated with a fantasy that success is possible without hard work or preparation. That is completely antithetical to the arts. The arts are all about hard work. It is about risk and failure. It is sometimes about success and clarity. For a few it is lucrative. But mostly it is about hard work.

As an arts educator, I believe I have a responsibility to my students to cultivate their understanding that the arts are worth doing. And things that are worth doing take hard work. A couple of years ago a student wrote on the end of semester evaluation, “Dr Saraniero takes theatre too seriously. She thinks this is the most important course we take. I had to work harder in this course than in any other.” It was meant to be a complaint but I took it as a compliment.

The devaluing of the arts that Levin wrote about goes hand in hand with the devaluing of hard work. So in our ethical responsibilities to our students, we must encourage them to work hard, learn from failure and try again. Not very glamorous but qualities that literally built this country. Making art requires quintessential American attributes – so why are the arts struggling to survive?

Creativity

It’s been ridiculously long since my last post. Back in the saddle!

There was a great piece in The Nation in May by Jeff Chang called “The Creativity Stimulus”. He writes about the arts and culture in the economic recovery. I wasn’t going to write about this now since it came out in May but this morning I saw that Americans are discouraged about the state of the economic recovery. So I thought this might still be timely. Here is a piece of Chang’s article that hit home for me.

Creativity can be a powerful form of organizing communities from the bottom up. The economic crisis gives us a change to rethink the role of creativity in making a vibrant economy and civil society. Artists as well as community organizers cultivate new forms of knowledge and consciousness. One of the unsung stories of the past twenty-five years is how both have used creativity to inspire community development and renewal. Creativity has become the glue of social cohesion in times of turmoil.

I love that last line. “Creativity has become the glue of social cohesion in times of turmoil.” This is such an important reminder for those of us who work in schools. These are indeed times of turmoil and children are not exempt. Try as we might as adults, we have a very difficult time shielding children from our stress. And as many schools will continue to be woefully underfunded this fall, children will be impacted directly by our adult stressors.

The funding in public education is pretty bleak at the moment. Which is all the more reason why we have a responsibility to promote creativity in schools. To paraphrase an old saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get creative.” In our ethical responsibilities to students, we can’t a little thing like underfunding get in our way. It is unlikely arts education will be well funded anytime soon but, as Chang suggests, we can be rich in what we cultivate in our schools and communities.

News Flash (Part 2)

I would like to go back to the ethical ramifications of cutting arts from schools. There is a fairness and justice issue as well here. There are two groups of children that come up when we talk about the (lack of) fairness when cutting the arts. First are children from low-income communities and second are children who are gifted in an art form.

John Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice which explores his idea of justice and fairness. Rawls acknowledges the imbalance of wealth in our society and he posits that this inequality is actually just provided that everyone in society benefits, particularly those who are “least advantaged”. According to Rawls, it is ok when some have more (even a lot more) but there has to be benefit for all.

The reality for children from low-income communities is that they don’t have access to many if any arts experiences or education outside the school day. School is their best shot at getting this. By denying poor children exposure to and education in the arts during the school day we immediately begin to limit their future options. We limit their creative and artistic literacy. We literally deprive them of a way to communicate with and understand the world. In addition, we limit the knowledge they have about the world. In not learning about and understanding great artists and great works of art we limit what they know and what they can imagine. Without meeting William Shakespeare, Pablo Picasso, Martha Graham, or Wynton Marsalis in their classrooms, the doors of possibility and opportunity close a little bit more tightly. The arts are part of the escape route from poverty. They allow students to imagine other possibilities, to understand the complexities and nuances of the world and of life, and to communicate their thoughts, beliefs and ideas.

The second group of children we overlook when we cut the arts from schools is the artistically gifted. This is a group of kids that is rarely if ever taken seriously by public schools. Rare is the district that properly identifies and nurtures artistic giftedness. The myths around academic giftedness extend to the artistic domain as well. There is the misconception that gifted children will somehow develop and maintain their giftedness without support and appropriate education (research tells us they won’t). Like a muscle, giftedness will languish if not developed. I for one do not relish living in a world where artistic giftedness borders on extinction.

In public education we do not get to pick and choose which children we serve and how. Rawls, when he wrote about the imbalance of wealth, could have easily been writing about other resources such as education. Some schools are going to provide a better education for lots of reasons – good principal, good teachers, low-crime in the neighborhood, parents who know how to navigate the educational systems, parents who are able to support school financially. But for those schools that do not have some of these benefits, we are required by tenets of justice and fairness to ensure these poorest schools can benefit. Striking the arts from the curriculum is promoting injustice and this is a terrible misstep for public education.

How Bernie Madoff makes a case for arts education

There’s a great article in this week’s New Yorker about Bernie Madoff and the original schemer, Charles Ponzi, from which Madoff’s new nomenclature is taken. Writer Ron Chernow says this about Charles Ponzi:

Ponzi was convinced that he was a wizard who had stumbled upon a form of financial alchemy that had eluded others. Incapable of moral clarity, he could never quite admit to himself that he was a charlatan and that his scheme was an impossible fiasco.

The idea of being “incapable of moral clarity” struck me as I read this article. Ponzi’s inability to understand his actions and their consequences resonates throughout the article. He appeared to have no understanding of the impact of his immoral actions on others. This reminded me of a great book called Moral Imagination by Mark Johnson. Johnson says that the moral imagination is “an ability to imaginatively discern various possibilities for acting in a given situation and to envision the potential help and harm that are likely to result from a given action." In other words, the moral imagination is to imagine what effects we might cause with our actions. How do our actions affect others and what might their experience of our actions be? This moral role-taking, if you will, is a sophisticated ability. It obviously isn’t innate (see various felons listed above) but is a learned behavior. So where can it be learned?

Why, look! We’re back to the arts. The arts in general and I will argue the theatre in particular is all about this role- or perspective-taking. Through theatre we explore experiences outside our own – experiences we have no access to in our own lives. But through learning in theatre our ability to use our imaginations “to discern various possibilities” is front and center. Ideally, we put ourselves aside and imagine what is to be someone else.

The moral imagination is not limited to perspective-taking. When children learn in theatre, it is also an opportunity to develop an understanding of actions and outcomes. How many of us wish that our children had a better understanding of the consequences of their actions (all parents with teenagers can raise their hands)? When we read a play or "do" a play or see a play, we reflect on both the actions and the outcomes. We are forced to consider the consequences. Think of how Lear rages at his daughters with disasterous consequences.

By educating our children in the theatre in particular and the arts in general, we offer them these extraordinary skills – to understand another person’s point of view and to reflect on possible consequences. Imagine what today’s headlines might be if we had taken these skills more seriously. For one, Madoff might have run a legitimate business rather than bilking thousands of investors. For another, the implosion of the credit market might have been averted with more ethical lending practices to homeowners who clearly could not afford the debt they were accumulating.

We want to prepare our kids for the world they will live in. We don’t know what that will entail but we can probably assume that fraud will be part of it. Charles Ponzi began his scheming in 1919. Ninety years later Bernie Madoff nearly perfected the scheme. Perhaps we can offer our children something better than a nearly perfect Ponzi scheme. Perhaps, through thoughtful education that includes the arts, we can prepare our children for their world with a robust moral imagination. I’m all for that.

News Flash: Arts cut from schools

The San Diego school board has issued a Plan A of budgets cuts and has a Plan B in place, which includes eliminating the visual and performing arts across the second largest school district in the state of California. The arts are currently the only curricular area to be cut under Plan B. There is a discussion amongst my circle of colleagues about the ethical nature of cutting the arts. So, here are some thoughts on ethics and the elimination of arts education from public schools.

In both ethics and the law, we create sets of rules (at least in western ethics and since this is the United States, western ethics rule, if you will excuse the pun). I quoted Frank Griswold earlier about ethics being the sets of rules we agree to live by once we decide to live together. Once we set up those rules, we don’t get to break them because it is more convenient to do so. Convenience is not a reason to compromise on our core beliefs.

This extends, of course, to how we educate our kids. We have created essentially a set of rules (in the form of No Child Left Behind) that we have agreed will guide the education of our children. This is part of our ethical obligation to our children. We – America the country, not just American parents - have an ethical responsibility to educate children. In meeting that ethical responsibility we created NCLB (I have no doubt this could be argued about how successfully we met that responsibility through this piece of legislation).

As those of us in the trenches know, the arts are mandated in No Child Left Behind as the part of the curriculum. So in deciding to exclude the arts from the curriculum is in violation of our original agreement about what a child in a public school should expect to receive.

I realize that NCLB is not perfect and I also realize that it is not equitably applied due to high-stakes testing. If we agree as a society that NCLB is not meeting the needs of our children we have an ethical obligation to rewrite it, rework it or throw it out and start again. Nonetheless, we are currently violating our ethical duties by allowing American children to receive less than what we agreed they needed.

Our second ethical failing in considering the arts education cuts is that we are allowing public education to promote a form of illiteracy. By failing to teach our children the arts from the time they enter school through the completion of their high school diploma, we fail to prepare them appropriately for the world they are about to enter. We are promoting a form of illiteracy. This illiteracy translates into fewer skills and less knowledge to solve more complicated problems than previous generations.

How can we rationalize this? We cannot and we should not. One of the great philosophical thinkers, Immanuel Kant, recognized the danger in rationalization and the driving need of humans to do so. Rationalization allows us to excuse ourselves from our ethical responsibilities and we must be careful in this regard. Our rationalization of the elimination of school curriculum teaches our children a number of things – and none of them are good.

Yo-Yo Ma and Ethical Obligations

In Howard Gardner’s most recent book, Five Minds for the Future, Gardner considers what we will need for the future. He has five minds – the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind. Much of Gardner’s writing on the ethical mind is from a previous book of his, Good Work, which I found to be a fascinating read.
In Five Minds, Gardner reflects on a conversation with Yo-Yo Ma. Ma presents three duties, if you will, for musicians. It suggests a simple yet persuasive personal code of ethics. Here’s what Gardner wrote about Ma.

In June 2005, I asked the cellist Yo-Yo Ma what he considered to be good work in his role as a leading musical performer. Based on much previous reflection, Ma outlined three distinct obligations: (1) to perform the repertoire as excellently as possible; (2) to be able to work together with other musicians, particularly under conditions where one has to proceed rapidly, and develop the necessary common understandings and trust: and (3) to pass on one’s knowledge, skills, understanding and orientation to succeeding generations, so that music he cherishes can endure. (pg 151).

I admire this very much because it is clear and yet encompassing. The first obligation is quite inspirational and encourages one to work at the top of their game and pursue excellence. This has real possibility for us in arts education. What if we all shared a value for ourselves and our students to perform or create as excellently as possible? Our accomplishment of excellence would of course vary greatly but isn’t the effort to reach towards excellence an important ethical attribute?

The second emphasizes the collaborative nature of performance. It does not guide us in how we should specifically behave towards other musicians (i.e. respectfully) but perhaps that is not the point. The third obligation particularly resonates in that it relates not only to future musicians but also to future musical audiences and appreciators.

I also like how these three obligations broaden in scope as you progress through them. The first is quite personal about the relationship between musician and music. The second obligation opens up the lens and considers other musicians, who may vary over the course of a career. The last obligation is very large in its consideration of the future and the larger society. Lovely.

Online Resources for Ethics and Arts Education (#2)

Two more examples today of codes of ethics in arts education.

The first is from Iowa State’s Theatre Dept http://www.theatre.iastate.edu/aboutus.shtml). I like this first one for a couple of reasons. It is short and succinct yet it does elaborate on their core values so we can understand what they mean. It addresses faculty and staff specifically (I think you can be trapped in trying to address a code of ethics to too diverse an audience). What I most appreciate about this code is that (from an outsider’s perspective) it appears to reflect who they are. It is not boiler plate but it appears to be unique unto them. From reading this code, I have a sense of their departmental culture as well as well as their ethical guidelines. I believe that is important. Our code of ethics is a way to tell others - and remind ourselves - who we are and what we believe. Interestingly, my graduate students from last fall were not as positive as I am about this (they thought it was too touchy-feely). There you go. Ethics can be difficult to agree on.

My thanks to Maureen A. Gelchion at the Astoria Dance Centre for this reference. The Dance Educators of America has a code of ethics (available on their website at www.deadance.com under “Membership”). It has some similarity with the Music Educators of America code.

Online Resources for Ethics & Arts Education (1)

To get started with online resources and references, here are two to consider.

A doctoral student, Sho Botham, has created a site about ethics and dance (http://www.ethicsdance.co.uk/). She is currently collecting data for her dissertation from professional dancers. She also has a resource page for those interested in ethical issues specific to dance education. These resources consider a variety of issues including body image and physical health of dance students. Much looks interesting to delve into.

The Music Teachers’ National Association has developed a code of ethics (http://www.mtna.org/AboutMTNA/CodeofEthics/tabid/468/Default.aspx). They have divided their code into three sections – “Commitment to Students”, “Commitment to Colleagues” and “Commitment to Society”. Under each of these are ethical tenets. The code focuses on how to treat others and represent one’s self as a teacher of music. I believe that in our codes we also have a responsibility to include our art form in the code. A section entitled “Commitment to Music” might offer interesting possibilities to consider our ethical responsibility to our art form.

What could our “Commitment to Music” look like? What is our ethical responsibility to music or the other art forms?

What would Gandhi do?

Last night in class we discussed Gandhi. We read A Higher Standard of Leadership: Lessons from the Life of Gandhi, by Keshavan Nair, an excellent and readable book that reflects on Gandhi. Nair notes that young Gandhi read and was heavily influenced by John Ruskin’s essays, “Unto This Last”. I know of Ruskin as a modest visual artist but he was also a 19th century thinker and writer. While not all of Ruskin’s points were adopted by Gandhi, the idea that “all work has the same value” struck him.

Ok, so what does this have to do with us and arts education? Follow me through this. The recent Coburn Amendment to the federal stimulus package removed arts organizations of all stripes from eligibility. This struck a huge nerve, of course, in the arts community because to many of us it suggested that somehow our work – our jobs - did not hold the same value as others. Subtext - our work was not worthwhile. Fortunately, arts jobs were included in the final package, including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. But the initial blow landed.

In light of this national kick-in-the-pants, we need to consider Ruskin’s idea of “all work has the same value”. We very much want our work and our art forms to share equal status with other areas of education. We expect to be fairly compensated for this work. I think this is particularly important in an ethical framework as fair compensation has historically eluded artists and arts educators. We should expect our work and our contributions to schools to be equally valued.
Gandhi would probably support this expectation on our part but I suspect he would also ask us how we are meeting that same challenge. Do we arts education folks also value all work equally? Do we see our own work as special, elevated and different? It would be easy to. The arts can transcend and illuminate. But that could also be a trap that allows us to believe our air is more rarified. Do we recognize that all work has value? Nair calls this “meeting responsibilities while insisting on rights”. Are we willing to do what we are asking of others?

Another possible standard…

- Adequate compensation for arts education work.
Recognizing that work in arts education is a professional undertaking, requiring education and experience, teachers and artists should be compensated in accordance with other professionals across the curriculum.

Getting started

I teach "Ethics & Leadership" in the University of San Diego's Nonprofit Leadership graduate program. My students are working on a code of ethics project and their work has led me to think about the role of ethics in my own field, arts education.

To start, when I talk about ethics, I refer to Frank Griswold's definition. "Ethics is about the rules we choose to live by once we decide we want to live together." I like this frame for a variety of reasons but in part because it involves consensus and choice. I think of ethics not only as regulators (which they are and which we need) but also as inspiration, encouraging us to rise to our better selves.

Out in the field there are a few stabs at codes of ethics in arts education. This led me to wonder if there are some universal ethical principles that might guide all arts education endeavors. Are there some fundamental ethics that could guide and enhance our work in schools and communities?

So, I ask, what might an ethical framework for arts education look like? What tenets or principles might it contain?

Here are some initial thoughts on my part in no particular order. Please respond to these or provide your own.

- Freedom of artistic expression. I suggest that we have an ethical responsibility to our students as well as to our art forms to promote the freedom of artistic expression in educational contexts.

- Sufficient resources for art making and art learning These resources include but are not limited to:
o time allotted to the arts during the school day
o well-trained professionals to teach (both credentialed teachers and professional artists)
o appropriate space in which to make and learn art. The blacktop would not typically be considered an appropriate place to learn math – why would we teach dance there?
o adequate budgets

- Honesty and transparency with donors and supporters. This extends to any nonprofit but it is always good to ask, “Are we using our resources appropriately and in accordance with donor wishes?”

- Authentic criteria for learning and success. Is the use of math and language arts test scores ethical in assessing the arts? Should we consider the ethical ramifications of assessment in the arts? (For full disclosure, one of my current arts education research projects includes test scores as an indicator of student learning. This was a pre-condition of funding the project).


What are your thoughts? I look forward to the conversation.