Arts

Arts in a Teaching for Understanding Process Focussed Upon Sustainability

How the Arts might contribute to a scope and sequence for Sustainability has more to do with the arts as expressive media and ‘arts pedagogy’ that a direct “curricular content connection” like Science or the Social Sciences. The arts offer students a variety of ways of acquiring knowledge, developing and demonstrating understanding, particularly where they are using knowledge to convince, persuade, alert, entertain or communicate to an intended audience. So often in education the audience is the teacher and educational success is “guessing what the teacher wants” and supplying in the accepted form. The new Arts syllabuses encourage the development and presentation of materials with a particular audience in mind. The Teaching for Understanding framework often used is as follows:

                   W=Where are we going and why are we going there? The Arts have a significant role to play here because if we want learners to understand at human levels we need more than the language of empiricism or data. Arts provides ways of making learning stick because it humanises the issues,  poses ethical dilemmas that do not have right or wrong answers and provides a range of media from which students can select.

                   H=How will we hook and engage students' interest? Again the Arts often provide the “hook” for kids engagement – a film, a series of prints, a poster, a song.

                   E=How will we provide experience-based learning activities to help students explore what they need to know, do, and understand?  The Arts involve the whole person – imaginatively, creatively, cognitively, emotionally, kinaesthetically – active engagement. E.g. drama places individuals in other people’s shoes, media reportage requires a research and provides a purpose for working collaboratively to communicate ideas and information to an intended audience.

                   R=How will students be encouraged to revisit, revise, rethink, and refine their learning? As students aim to communicate their ideas through the arts, with a particular position to an intended audience they must engage in reflective practice to move beyond what we know, to what we think, to how we communicate that and to whom – all with the ultimate question of how we want an audience to feel and to know as a result of the presentation. This, by its very nature requires revisiting, revising, rethinking and refining what they know and understand.

                   E=How will students be asked to self-evaluate and self-express throughout this unit? The arts process is by nature collaborative requiring disclosure and actively seeking feedback from others. Students are engaged in reflective processes in their efforts to be expressive through arts media. It is a natural part of arts pedagogy.

                   T=How will we tailor teaching and learning to maximize students' strengths and address students' areas of need? By selecting from a range of potential expressive media students natural learning styles are catered for and given legitimacy – a digital documentary is as valid a mechanism as an essay in this scenario for communicating understanding.

                   O=How will we organize students' learning experiences to help them move from initial concrete experience toward conceptual understanding and independent application? The function of audience is very powerful here, not just in providing students with the need to develop a position or point of view, but also by providing a powerful incentive to deeply engage with tasks and process to meet presentational deadlines. The presentation/performance is a powerful means of them communicating their understanding, knowledge and demonstrating their skills – in other words transferring their learning into a succinct powerful expressive statement that positions their audience. Transference is one of the most powerful indicators of learning

So, without being too pushy about it, learning in, through and about the arts is a means by which the deep issues around sustainability (or any other topic) can be humanly engaged with. The engagement can be controversial and powerful using the full range of expressive media.

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