Arts-Based Teaching and Learning in the Literacy Classroom

Cultivating a Critical Aesthetic Practice

Jessica Whitelaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429797026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book highlights the unique and co-generative intersections of the arts and literacy that promote critical and socially engaged teaching and learning. Based on a year-long ethnography with two literacy teachers and their students in an arts-based public high school, this volume makes an argument for arts-based education as the cultivation of a critical aesthetic practice in the literacy classroom. Through rich example and analysis, it shows how, over time, this practice alters the in-school learning space in significant ways by making it more constructivist, more critical, and fundamentally more relational.

1 Toward a Framework for Arts-Based Literacy Teaching and Learning

Take what we love and turn it into school.

—Tenth grade student Ariana

To conceive of a project where the arts and literacy are centered in learning requires understanding and navigating the systemic challenges that this centering is up against. With this in mind, I begin this chapter with attention to enduring forces of arts marginalization as a way to begin to think about a framework for arts-based pedagogy. Then, I map a terrain for arts-based pedagogy in relation to two relevant bodies of research—arts integration and arts-based research. I introduce the context for the examples in the chapters that follow and I outline the particular way that the knowledge generated in these chapters emerged through collaborative inquiry with teachers and students around our shared concerns related to the arts and learning.

The Radical Project of Centering the Arts

Placing the arts as central to learning in school is a radical effort, albeit not a new one. In principal, integration has been put forth as an ideal in American schooling as far back as 1918, when the Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education issued a report promoting integration, a correlated curriculum, and curricular organization around major themes. Several decades later, John Dewey (1934) and Herbert Read (1944) argued for learning through and with the arts across all disciplines as part of an experiential and cohesive vision of schooling. Around the same time, Leon Loyal Winslow’s (1939) The Integrated School Art Program described a set of relationships between the arts and the core curriculum, believing that art was a way of connecting students to everyday life and solving community problems. Later, in the 1970s, Harry Broudy called for the integration of arts and aesthetic education across subject areas as a means of cultivating the imagination as “basic education” (Broudy, 1991). Yet while arguments and attention have been longstanding, integration has not seen a unified or widespread movement, nor has it become a standard practice in public schools where efforts to include the arts in substantive ways persist as a site of ongoing struggle. Painting a bleaker picture, research asserts that access to the arts across all populations in school is in steady decline (Rabkin & Hedberg, 2011). Even when the arts may be nice to have, they are not essential and certainly not at the center of learning for most students.

Marginalization and restricted access to the arts in school coalesces from a number of intersecting and persistent factors, among them: 1) a high stakes testing climate with its emphasis on corporate values and competitive workforce preparation; and 2) longstanding and conflicted ideas about what the arts are and can do and who they are for. I will explore each of these factors in turn, not as an exhaustive analysis, but to stake a terrain for an inquiry into arts-based pedagogy.

High Stakes Testing and Accountability

In recent years, an emphasis on testing as the driver of instruction has narrowed the focus of teaching and learning to what can be easily standardized and tested (Au, 2007, 2011; Ravitch, 2000, 2007; Krashen, 2008). Within a logic of scientism, psychometrics, and assessment and policy measures that operate upon uniformity and predictability, this narrowing bypasses a commitment to art and re-inscribes it as immeasurable and less important than testable subjects. Consistent with corporate values and competitive workforce preparation, the pressures of school accountability and performance have had a shaping and sorting effect, limiting not only what gets taught but how and for whom in classrooms. As is common, the arts (along with other non-foreseeably testable subjects) are the first to be cut (Shaw, 2018), at best, remaining as electives, enrichment, or add-on, but typically for students who are already proficient in testable subjects. Under these conditions, if the arts are included at all in everyday learning, they often play a subsidiary role as handmaiden to a testable host subject (Bresler, 1995; Mishook & Kornhaber, 2006).

Marginalization, reduction, and removal of the arts under these conditions signals a further widening of the gap between opportunities for students in served and underserved schools, contributing to a host of broader structural and racial inequities that have caused researchers to reframe the achievement gap as “the opportunity gap” (Flores-Gonzalez, 2005; Darden & Cavendish, 2011). Students whose test scores fall below proficient levels are routinely scheduled out of art and into additional instructional time in core content classes such as literacy where instruction is reduced to technical, short-term interventions that focus on highly controlled and discrete skills (Chappell & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2013; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2018).

So, while a climate of high stakes testing that privileges what can be easily measured affects the landscape of learning for all students, access to the arts is thus further restricted by race and class and has its greatest impact upon poor and minority learners.¹ For these students, the effects can be either removal of the arts altogether or a reduction of learning to testable skills over a diverse and culturally responsive curriculum (Gándara, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 2009). Rethinking who has access to the arts, where it is to be found, and the kinds of learning it encourages is one invitation to trouble the reach of a technical, testable knowledge orientation and curriculum policy that mistrusts the ineffable and limits what students learn to what can be measured.

Assumptions About the Arts and Learning

However, it would be shortsighted to assume that marginalization of the arts is solely an issue of high stakes standardized testing and a new phenomena unique to the current climate. Struggles around marginalization and the arts in school are indeed a longstanding issue linked to deep and conflicted ideas about what the arts are, what they can do for learning, and who they are for, and these are attitudes that influence school practices whether or not testing dominates. To be sure, marginalization predates state and national standards, the school accountability movement, and the Common Core. It is both a historic problem and current one that circulates even in school contexts not driven by testing, such as independent schools.

This enduring marginalization can be understood in light of deep beliefs that circulate in discourses writ large in schools and in the public consciousness concerning what counts as rigor. For instance, assumptions about rigor have long contributed to the ways that access to the arts is also limited by age in school, whether or not standardized testing is involved. While it is not unusual for young students to sing, dance, and draw their way into learning, the arts get pushed further into the margins as children get older. By the time adolescents enter high school, lines around what counts as rigor tend to be sharply drawn, where arts talent is associated as an elite activity but where the arts as ways of knowing are either subtly or directly devalued. The differences between the physical space of a pre-school classroom (learning stations, books, easels) and a typical high school (desks) help to illustrate this trajectory. To harbor the possibility of placing the arts centrally, we can map this arc onto the daily lives of adolescents outside of school, where they are immersed in all manner of music, media, film, and endless manifestations of creative expression.

By middle school, adolescents tend to be well aware whether they have been invited into the arts or not, and have decided whether they are, or are not, an artist. To place the arts centrally in learning would entail opening up elitist assumptions about who art belongs to as well as whether it counts as rigor. It would require expansion beyond the walls of museums and the studios of professional artists and recognition that the arts are innovatively present in subaltern spaces across all cultures and locations. Moving the arts to the center would require interrupting this gatekeeping that has long kept art on a pedestal (Dewey, 1934) and move the arts further toward what Jenkins (2006) calls a participatory culture, one with low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement and with strong support for creating and sharing.

Revisiting rigor and challenging elitism by centering the arts in epistemic activity would require rethinking how the arts contribute to knowledge generation. This would mean interrupting the idea that the arts are mainly about making aesthetically pleasing objects. It would entail an interrogation of policy and practice that singularly defines the arts in terms of skills rather than as a field that includes agents and their interactions (Bourdieu, 1993). Skills-oriented policy and images of teaching overlook significant aspects of art’s potential for learning when they are couched in formalist understandings about the arts, framed as raising achievement and success (Arts Education Partnership, 2018b) and linked to discourses about career and college readiness and workforce preparation (National Arts Policy Roundtable, 2010).

Research should be called upon to interrogate the language we use to talk about the arts and to question whether or not that language serves the potential that the arts makes claim to. In order to develop language and images for more expansive possibilities for knowledge generation via the arts across various disciplines, research needs to attend to social practices and not purely skills development (Gadsden, 2008). This attention will aid in a rethinking of what counts as knowledge and recognize the ways that the arts make contributions to that knowledge generation that other forms of learning cannot.

Mapping a Terrain for Arts-Based Pedagogy

Research on teaching and learning through the arts has an extensive history from multiple traditions, each framing art and its purposes differently. In an effort to map some of these distinctions, I will frame my inquiry in relation to two broad and overarching related efforts that I see as most relevant to arts-based literacy teaching and learning. The first is arts integration, which has been the predominant framework for learning through and with the arts across the curriculum for almost a century. The second is arts-based research, a tradition that employs the arts as a mode of inquiry and representation that emphasizes multiple ways of knowing. Although these bodies of scholarly work intersect, I approach them separately for the sake of making distinctions and toward a framework for arts-based literacy teaching and learning.

Arts Integration

Arts integration is defined by the Arts Education Partnership (2018a) as “a holistic approach to educating students that involves incorporating arts competencies into other school curricula” and “expanding access to arts instruction.” Scholarly work on integration has been taken up from a range of directions over the years, including John Dewey’s (1934) perspectives on art as experience and Howard Gardner’s (1983) theory of multiple intelligences, each of which reframed and expanded notions of arts learning in significant theoretical ways.

Ongoing debates in arts integration scholarship were put forth in the 1990s and early 2000s as to whether the value of the arts is inherent (having value in and of itself) or instrumental (having value in the service of another subject area). For instance, instrumental studies have examined how the arts affect various aspects of literacy learning and achievement such as: how music affects spatial-temporal reasoning, reading achievement, and social-emotional behavior (Scripp, 2002); how dance might improve reading (Keinanen, Hetland & Winner, 2000); and how drama and imaginative play affect comprehension (Caterall, 2002). In the overview essay to Critical Links (Deasy, 2002), a compendium on arts integration, Caterall (2002) clarifies the centrality of the issue of transfer, its theoretical underpinnings from cognitive science, and establishes “a neuro-function argument supporting learning through the arts—the cultivation of capabilities and understandings that occur as ‘by-products’ or ‘co-developments’ of the changes in cognitive and affective structures brought about by experience in the arts” (p. 152). Although Caterall suggests that further “inquiry would ultimately need to accommodate growing evidence and beliefs that learning is situational, interactive, and complex” (p. 156), the call for further research is nonetheless framed as “more thorough understandings of transfer learning,” a “higher order of transfer” (p. 157), and “transfer with a capital T” (p. 157).

Alternatively, research advocating for the inherent value of the arts has raised questions about claims that lean too heavily upon transfer outcomes, challenging the impulse to justify the arts for their effects on other disciplines by suggesting that these arguments undermine the value of the arts in their own right (Eisner, 1998; Burton, Horowitz, & Abueles, 2000; Winner & Cooper, 2000; Winner, 2003). Highlighting the difficulty in asserting causal links between arts and non-arts areas, this scholarship has called for the need to go beyond transfer, to question unidirectional causality to examine the inherent as well as the instrumental value of art. Both configurations have been challenged—instrumental for the ways that art can become subservient to other disciplines without regard for its unique contributions, and inherent for the ways that it has tended to present art as autonomous without enough attention to social context and the conditions under which arts experience occurs.

Despite the vast body of research on arts integration, there has been little agreement about its goals and the theories of research and practice that inform what it sets out to accomplish (Parsons, 2004). It has even been argued that advocates for arts integration seem to outnumber critical research attention, in part because full integration is unusual and difficult to study (Bresler, 2003). In a review of research on arts integration, Joan Russell and Michalinos Zembylas (2007) cautioned against broad arguments for integration and underscored the importance of studying contextualized possibilities and challenges in particular cases. Questions about the content and purposes of arts integration as a body of work were brought further to light in a review of research on this subject by Gail Burnaford and a team of researchers (2007) who found, among the 247 studies they reviewed, a multitude of ways of characterizing arts integration. Citing the range and variation of conceptual frameworks and purposes undergirding these studies, Burnaford and her colleagues argued that the field of arts education was in need of a clearer research agenda. They argued that issues of skills transfer had dominated arts integration research and that more complex theoretical frameworks and research designs were needed. In a related vein, Arts Education Partnership (2004) argued that arts education was out of synch with contemporary frameworks concerning cognitive and personal development and other strands of social science research, making an appeal for dialogue among scholars and researchers from multiple disciplines (p. 3).

Questions about whether arts integration could detract from or dilute the study of arts disciplines and studio learning have also been cause for concern. Particularly given the fragile nature of arts funding, some worry that efforts to integrate could lead to a de-prioritization of art teachers and further rationalize art education as non-essential (Brewer, 2002). If research were to understand these debates however as a false dichotomy (Aprill, 2010), we might be better positioned to work across a coalition of efforts with a shared investment in a greater presence of the arts in schools. Over the past decade and from a different angle, the arts partnership model of integration has grown as one alternative, a model that brings together and provides professional support for teaching artists and classroom teachers in ongoing and sustained partnerships of which there are many strong examples, such as Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, Project Zero at Harvard University, The Philadelphia Arts Education Partnership, ArtsLit at Brown University, Arts For Academic Achievement in the Minneapolis Public Schools, The Empire State Partnership and Arts Connection, both in New York City, and ArtsBridge, located at a number of university campuses across the United States. This work has relied upon the collaboration between a teaching artist and classroom teacher to meet goals that are specific to each discipline.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Toward a Framework for Arts-Based Literacy Teaching and Learning
• 2 Art as Story
• 3 Art as a Theoretical Instrument
• 4 Art as Research and Participation
• 5 An Expanded Way of Being Literate
• Index