Handbook of Arts Education and Special Education

Policy, Research, and Practices

Jean B. Crockett,Sharon M. Malley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317210030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The Handbook of Arts Education and Special Education brings together, for the first time in a single reference volume, policy, research, and practices in special education and arts education synthesized to inform stakeholders across a broad spectrum of education. This handbook encompasses arts education for students with disabilities, from pre-K through transition to postsecondary education and careers as well as community arts education, with particular attention to conceptual foundations; research-based practices; professional standards; students' cognitive, artistic, and social growth; career education; and future directions for research and practice in special education and arts education.

SECTION III

Developing Students’ Artistic, Academic, and Personal Growth

Arts educational opportunities for students with disabilities long predate academic opportunities. Before the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94–142) in 1975, arts therapies, and other arts offerings deemed as therapeutic, dominated opportunities for children with disabilities to engage in the arts. Once free and appropriate public education became available for all special education students, arts classrooms began to serve as widespread placements for students with disabilities. Inclusive opportunities for learning have often occurred first in arts classrooms, particularly for students with significant disabilities.

Arts education offered in school and community settings in dance, drama, music, visual arts, and media arts have not precluded arts therapies for students with disabilities, which continue to provide vital services to individual students, both within and outside of schools. An additional approach to arts learning is through arts integration, which maintains a more recent history of pedagogical practices incorporating arts education within other subject areas.

Michelle Kraft (Chapter 9) addresses inclusive practices within the visual arts classroom, with particular attention to transformative learning that takes place as students focus on commonalities while respecting differences. She indicates that in the open-ended and flexible structure of the art classroom, students are allowed to express a broad continuum of ways of knowing, encompassing a wide variety of learners’ special needs. Visual arts education and special education share an intersecting history as approaches to educating students with disabilities have historically valued arts education. In conclusion, Kraft addresses practices in inclusive visual arts education and the power of arts education to examine differences and increase self-determination.

An examination by Alice-Ann Darrow and Mary Adamek (Chapter 10) of the role of music in the lives of students with disabilities begins with a brief history, emphasizing its significance as a therapeutic and educational modality in special programs and schools. Within current practice, educators recognize that, with appropriate individualized instructional supports, students with disabilities can develop musical skills corresponding with those of their peers. Darrow and Adamek address the particular preparation and knowledge base, instructional approaches, and assessment and transitional practices needed to include students with disabilities in music education. The authors also emphasize the value of music education in lifelong learning and pursuits, describing how music educators can positively influence the futures of students with disabilities.

Dance education for students with disabilities continues to evolve from its roots in the modern dance companies of the 1960s. Jenny Seham (Chapter 11) describes the seminal work of dancers and their companies and more recent developments in their including people with disabilities in dance. The influence of their work has resulted in principle-based instruction that emphasizes the elements and qualities of dance over form, allowing for diverse interpretations, inclusive of all dancers. Students with disabilities benefit from instructional practices that include the use of translations, collaborative partnerships, and universal design for learning. Seham provides an example of the structure and pace of a typical inclusive dance class and offers the rationale for giving all students opportunities to experience the joy of dancing.

When students with disabilities have opportunities to engage in drama education and activities, they experience growth in a wide range of skills and knowledge. Sally Bailey (Chapter 12) indicates that drama is easily accessible and versatile, providing a useful tool for social-emotional and academic learning, and critical thinking skills. Students with disabilities engage in school drama as a distinct arts discipline or as it is integrated into other subjects as well as in communities, through extracurricular activities, or in formal theater. Bailey highlights the work of innovators in developing drama curricula that facilitate learning for students with disabilities in social, emotional, and academic domains. Instructional practices and outcomes associated with those practices are emphasized throughout the chapter.

Alida Anderson and Katherine Berry (Chapter 13) examine the relationship between arts integration and special education. They provide a historical overview of the intersection of arts integration and special education, and trace the evolution of arts integration research. From their review of arts integration research with students with disabilities, they indicate cognitive, behavioral, and linguistic improvements. They point to the need for more high-quality interventions and the increased inclusion of students with disabilities in arts integration research, and offer recommendations for practice drawn from research and the synthesis of trends in arts integration and special education.

Arts therapies have elicited positive outcomes for students with disabilities in mental health treatment programs and schools since the early 1900s. Adamek and Darrow (Chapter 14) define and describe the development and practices of art therapy, dance/movement therapy, and music therapy, with a particular focus on the needs of students with disabilities in school settings. They examine the benefits and research outcomes of each of the arts therapies and describe recent trends, with recommendations for the continuation of arts therapies in schools.

9
INCLUSION AND DISABILITY IN VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION

Michelle Kraft

In a university-level visual arts pedagogy class that I taught to pre-service visual arts educators, my students and I partnered with a regional transition center for autism, offering a series of visual arts classes for the autist¹ students. Over the weeks, as pre-service art educators and adult students with autism came to know each other through teaching and learning about art, we (the university class) marveled at the transformative experiences that the art class community offered for both groups of students. One university student, in teaching her art lesson, showed a YouTube video interview with Marilyn Cosho, an artist with Asperger’s syndrome (Miller, 2010). The student recalled the response of one young autist woman as she watched the video: “[She] raised her hand and stated, ‘That’s like me! I didn’t want anyone to see my artworks and thought people would... think I am weird’” (Personal communication, December 5, 2015). As our time together drew to an end, that same young woman with autism gathered together a body of her artwork in a mini-exhibition that she installed at the transition center for our university class to see. Another of the pre-service visual arts educators reflected upon this moving gesture:

She took the time before our next lesson at the [transition academy] to put all her artwork up around the room, kind of like a mini-gallery show. She did that for us. [She] felt a strong need to show us her work. When you put work up on the walls for critique, it is a way to empower yourself, to show others what you have made and to invite comments.

(Personal communication, December 5, 2015; Kraft, 2017)

Visual arts educators have long understood the unique potential of the art classroom as a place for transformative learning for students experiencing a range of (dis)abilities (Malley, 2014); visual arts education’s history of including disability precedes special education legislation (Derby, 2011; Gerber & Guay, 2006), and visual arts classes are among the most frequent settings that include students experiencing moderate to severe/profound disabilities in pre-K-12 education (Kraft & Keifer-Boyd, 2013; Schiller, 1999). In this chapter, I provide an overview of approaches, benefits, practical strategies, and considerations for teaching a diverse student population in the unique setting of the K-12 visual arts class (expressed in this chapter as art class or art classroom) as a least restrictive environment (LRE). In doing so, I provide a brief summary of the parallel histories of visual arts and special education. I then examine the role of visual arts educational standards in curriculum design and assessment of a visual arts education that includes all learners. I investigate the art class as a site of transformative education and offer research-based resources, strategies, and models for an inclusive visual arts education that empowers and values the contributions of students experiencing disabilities in the classroom community.

Why Visual Arts?

The art classroom can act as a catalyst for holistic, inclusive education in that art brings into focus our commonalities while being respectful of our differences (Campbell, 2005; Kraft & Keifer-Boyd, 2013). Additionally, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2006) are now aligned with one another to include the arts among the subjects defining a well-rounded education “with the purpose of providing all students access to an enriched curriculum and educational experience” (see ESSA, 20 U. S. C. §7801 – Definitions (52); IDEA, 20 U.S.C. §1401(4).

In its structured open-endedness and flexibility, the art classroom offers a space for self-representation and expression; communication; and thinking creatively and critically about culture, history, geography, family, and personal experience. Through art, students may explore and demonstrate their values, identities, and belief systems (Guay, 2006). Malley (2014) pointed out the exceptional potential of inclusive arts education as a “means of diverse and variable expressions, responses, and outcomes, allowing students opportunities to diverge from rote learning often required in other subjects” (p. 5). In its diversity, arts education encompasses a broad continuum of ways of knowing, “from the purely instinctual and unconscious to the fully cognitive” (Rolling, 2013, p. 12; see also Wexler & Luethi-Garrecht, 2015). Special educators Burnette and Lokerson (2006) cited an analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS: 88), which found that students with high engagement in the arts, especially those from low-income backgrounds, outperformed “arts-poor” peers in almost every assessment measure. Visual arts education has the demonstrated capacity to serve a variety of learners’ special needs (socioeconomic, cognitive, physical, communicative, emotional, expressive, intellectual, etc.) in an environment and with materials that cultivate prediction and experimentation, cross-disciplinary synthesis of information and experiences, visual communication, self-advocacy through choice-making, and empowerment through self-representation. Art is both a creative and an intellectual endeavor, fluid and flexible, process- and product-oriented. In these ways, the visual arts are uniquely positioned as a space for the inclusive education of learners of all (dis)abilities.

Intersecting Histories of Visual Arts and Special Education

Spaulding and Pratt (2015) noted that the education of those with disabilities has been historically marked by progression and regression between the 19th and 21st centuries. Similarly, visual art’s role in education traces an uneven past. Many of these fluctuations in both educational histories can be traced to issues related to power; Osgood (2005), a special education historian, posited that even contemporary debate over inclusion represents a function of the power relationships between those with and without disabilities. This section provides a brief overview of the intersecting histories of visual arts education and special education, tracing the factors that have impacted current notions of visual arts education in the LRE.

The 18th into 19th Centuries: From Segregation to Enlightenment

The earliest approaches to disability historically included practices of segregation from society. Those born with physical or cognitive impairments were viewed by society as divinely punished or cursed, associated with witchcraft, or morally failing; as a result, these individuals were either cloistered within families and kept out of the public eye, cast out, or, later, institutionalized. The Enlightenment period in the mid- to late 18th century provided the philosophical underpinnings and scientific interests to advance the cause of education for those with disabilities and provided for democratic approaches to education in general and arts education, specifically. During this time, education came to be viewed as vital for all social classes: a necessary function of proper societal development (Efland, 1990). These philosophical influences—and the demands of early to mid-19th century commerce—valued visual arts education in its role toward developing skilled laborers: Growing manufacturing and commerce meant a growing need for design and drawing skills, notably in textiles, and art academies were established to meet the needs of industry. Similarly, newly established schools educating students with special needs, such as the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston, founded in 1869, included drawing as part of their vocational training (City of Boston Archives, 2016). The same factors that led to the inclusion of visual arts education as an aspect of early school curricula also influenced the establishment of institutions for the education of people experiencing disabilities, all with a focus on advancing vocation and industry.

The Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries: Social Darwinism and Scientific Management

The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species in 1859 gave rise to social Darwinism an...