Using the Visual Arts for Cross-curricular Teaching and Learning

Imaginative ideas for the primary school

Karen Hosack Janes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136451935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As schools are being encouraged to develop more flexible and creative approaches to education, Using the Visual Arts for Cross-curricular Teaching and Learning provides practical guidance and ideas on using the visual arts as a starting point for imaginative, effective learning across a wide range of curriculum subjects.

Underpinned by established and current educational thinking, it uses real-life examples to explore how this approach has been used successfully by individual class teachers and as whole-school projects. Offering proven strategies supporting the principles of personalized learning, it will help you involve children in devising cross-curricular themes and setting their own lines of enquiry.

Supplemented throughout with case studies and ideas for great artworks to get projects started, as well as examples of children's own work, it explores:

• developing individual pupils' talent and respect for their own and other cultures;
• using a single painting as a starting point for learning in a range of subjects;
• finding inspiration for your own cross-curricular projects using the visual arts;
• underpinning all activities with educational purpose;
• planning for and assessing progression in learning;
• discovering and using art resources in your region.

The tried and tested strategies in Using the Visual Arts for Cross-curricular Teaching and Learning will give all primary school teachers the confidence to explore the benefits of placing the visual arts at the centre of a creative, appealing curriculum.

Integrating the visual arts across the curriculum

The case for the arts in education

DOI: 10.4324/9780203125731-1

The world is facing huge challenges, and they are growing daily in severity and in scale and complexity. It is no exaggeration to say that they are not going to go away; indeed, they will get worse unless we can start to find solutions, and soon. If we are going to survive, we desperately need the next generation to be smarter, more adaptable and better prepared than any that have gone before. Our only chance is to improve the way we teach our young — to equip young people with the skills and attitudes that might steer this world of ours to a far safer place than at present looks likely.

We are the people we've been waiting for.

(Rowland 2010)

This opening statement sets the scene for the 2010 documentary We Are the People We've Been Waiting For. Inspired by the McKinsey Report on Education (Barber and Mourshed 2007),¹ which compared 25 of the world's school systems, including 10 of the top performers, the film explores how many young people in the UK are not provided at school with the opportunities that they need to make the most success of their lives, and how ultimately this affects all our futures. The film supports the idea that pupils need to be given opportunities to develop creative thinking skills to become excellent problem-solvers, and that they need to enjoy and effectively work with other children and adults to hone their social skills and to become responsible citizens. It also highlights how young people need to learn about the world in which they live to actively evolve their own relationship with it. At a conference in 2006, run by the very well-respected non-profit organization TED,² Ken Robinson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick, who appears in the film, proposed that education systems across the world favour models of learning that are not conducive to the conditions needed to prepare young people for the twenty-first century, going as far as saying that ‘schools kill creativity’ (the title of his talk) (Robinson 2006). He put forward the argument that children are educated out of creativity (which he defines as ‘the process of having original ideas that have value’) as they grow up because school systems prioritize those subjects that seem most relevant to the economy, where maths and languages are more highly valued than the humanities, and where the arts appear at the bottom of an education hierarchy. In his book Out of Our Minds, Robinson points out that ‘Employers say they want people who can think creatively, who can innovate, who can communicate well, work in teams and are adaptable and self-confident’ (Robinson 2011: 69). These are the very skills that the arts can effectively develop, and they need to be given equal status to other subjects in our schools.

The importance of the arts in education has been a matter of protracted public and professional debate, particularly over the past 45 years. In 1967, the Plowden Report (Plowden et al. 1967), a wide-ranging review of primary education in England chaired by Lady Plowden and commissioned by the Conservative Education Minister Sir Edward Boyle in 1963, made this compelling statement:

Art is both a form of communication and a means of expression of feelings which ought to permeate the whole curriculum and the whole life of the school. A society which neglects or despises it is dangerously sick. It affects, or should affect, all aspects of our life from the design of the commonplace articles of everyday life to the highest forms of individual expression.

(Plowden et al. 1967: 248)

Recommendations from the report, although only partially implemented due to a change of government at the time of its publication, have been key in the development of the primary education system we have today. As well as articulating the crucial role of art in education, it promoted, among other ambitious ideas, parental participation in schools, and introduced the idea of educational priority areas to address issues of social disadvantage. It also set in motion the availability of nursery education for all 3- to 5-year-olds, prompted the end of the 11+ as a selection process for entering secondary education, and asked for regular reports evaluating the quality of education being taught in schools. These ideas are now widely viewed as desirable in a democracy that believes that every child has the right to a high-quality education. At the time of the report, when there were cuts in public expenditure due to recession, the lack of standardization across schools made many people nervous. Plowden strongly advocated a child-centred approach to learning, which essentially saw the teacher as an autonomous professional. However, with calls for schools to link their teaching more to the needs of the employment market, the ‘great debate’ around making mandatory a National Curriculum for all children between the ages of 5 and 16 was opened, outlined in 1976 by James Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister, in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford.

The suggestion of state control over what children should learn in school was so controversial that it was not until 1988, under the Conservative administration lead by Margaret Thatcher, that the National Curriculum was established for England, Wales and Northern Ireland as part of the Education Reform Act.³ Concerns over the place of the arts in a National Curriculum — what role they would play, if any — prompted the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to commission Ken Robinson, and others, to undertake a review of The Arts in Schools in the UK (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 1982). The final report aimed to challenge two misconceptions about the arts. The first being that ‘the main role of education is to prepare young people for work’, therefore making arts education ‘unnecessary except for those looking for arts jobs’, and second, that ‘the arts had become associated with non-intellectual activities, and therefore seemed to lie outside the priorities of those who argued for a return to “traditional” academic values’ (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 1982: xii). Widely acclaimed for presenting the case for the arts in terms of being essential to the general purpose of education, the report argued that the arts should be taught as part of a broad and balanced curriculum. It described ways in which the arts make a vital contribution to the personal development of children, as well as having long-term economic and social benefits for the country. The Arts in Schools discussed how the arts appeal to the full range of human intelligence (a subject focused on by Professor Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education, in his theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I will come back to later), thus allowing for a more effective experience of education for a greater number of pupils. The report detailed how the arts provide a means of expression to organize thoughts and feelings about the world in which children live and how the arts promote an understanding of cultural change. It recommended that ‘creative thought and action should be fostered in all areas of education’ and how ‘In the arts they are central’ (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 1982: 11).

Fortunately, the arts were included in the 1988 National Curriculum, although the structure of it, and where the arts were placed, produced problems that are still evident today. Subjects were divided into ‘core’ and ‘foundation’, with the core subjects — English, Maths and Science — being used as key indicators of educational standards. The implication was that the foundation subjects — Art, Music, Physical Education, Technology, History and Geography (and a modern foreign language from age 11) — were of lower importance, and as such fewer hours were allocated to them by schools, although the amount of time spent on any subject was not stipulated in the statutory requirements. The legacy of this two-tiered model has meant that specialist expertise in foundation subjects has been given a lower priority than for core subjects. The arts have been particularly affected by this, attracting minimal Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training provision, and sometimes even being dropped from Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses altogether.

Undermining the foundation subjects further, 10 years after the establishment of the National Curriculum, schools were granted permission from the then Labour government to suspend the requirements for the foundation subjects in order to make time to embed the new frameworks for the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE 1998) and National Numeracy Strategy (DfEE 1999), which were part of the Governments's drive to improve standards. In what seems like a strangely timed move, Ken Robinson was simultaneously invited to chair the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett, and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith. The NACCCE, which included highly respected members from the education, business and arts and entertainment sectors, was asked ‘to make recommendations to the Secretaries of State on the creative and cultural development of young people through formal and informal education: to take stock of current provision and to make proposals for principles, polices and practice’ (NACCCE 1999: 2). The report, entitled All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education,⁴ basically highlighted the same key messages about the arts that were put forward in The Arts in Schools, contextualizing them within an examination of creative education, favouring ‘a democratic conception of creativity: one which recognizes the potential for creative achievement in all fields of human activity; and the capacity for such achievements in the many not the few’ (NACCCE 1999: 30). In addition, the report articulated unease with the general enduring debates around education itself:

Over a number of years, the balance of education, in our view, has been lost. There has been a tendency for the national debate on education to be expressed as a series of exclusive alternatives, even dichotomies: for example as a choice between the arts or the sciences; the core curriculum or the broad curriculum; between academic standards or creativity; freedom or authority in teaching methods. We argue that these dichotomies are unhelpful. Realising the potential of young people and raising standards of achievement and motivation includes all of these elements.

(NACCCE 1999: 9)

John Dewey, American philosopher and acknowledged pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century, drew attention to this problem in educational philosophy over 60 years earlier. He recognized in his essay Experience and Education how ‘Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites’ (Dewey 1938: 17) and described the extreme characteristics of traditional and progressive forms of education. The former he portrayed as a method that transmits bodies of information that have been worked out in the past to a new generation via textbooks, where teachers deliver the material and the attitudes of the pupils must be one of ‘docility, receptivity and obedience’ (Dewey 1938: 18). The latter he outlined as a set of principles that emphasize ‘the freedom of the learner’ (Dewey 1938: 22), which have been developed purely as a rejection of the traditional system. Dewey noted that simply reacting against old-fashioned ways of teaching did not address the fundamental problem that many pupils encountered in their schooling, namely disengagement.

Fundamental to Dewey's philosophy of education is ‘the organic connection between education and personal experience’ (Dewey 1938: 25). Although not suggesting that within a traditional classroom no experiences take place, he described them as, in the main, poor quality and ‘mis-educative’ (Dewey 1938: 25), meaning they have a negative impact on future learning — turning pupils off their education — echoing Ken Robinson's view that ‘schools kill creativity’. Dewey talks about high-quality learning experiences resulting from teaching approaches that promote experimentation, sensitivity and inquisitiveness. This leads to pupils making connections with further experiences, therefore ensuring growth; a principle that Dewey calls the experiential continuum, more widely known today as experiential learning, a concept that I will return to in the next chapter. It can be said with certainty that teaching and learning through the visual arts, and the arts in general, encourages experimentation, sensitivity and inquisitiveness, and therefore these subjects embody the characteristics needed for high-quality educational experiences to take place.

What and how teachers teach will always be a political football as successive governments attempt to solve problems in society through educational reform.

However, the fundamental issue to be addressed is always the same: how best can we motivate learners in wanting to learn? If a significant level of interest is not present in an individual, then progress is unlikely, or at least diminished.

Two recent substantial reviews of the National Curriculum, the Rose Review (Rose 2009), commissioned by the Labour government, and the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) (Alexander 2010), funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, have stressed the importance of the arts in a curriculum that supports deep engagement, with the impact being an improvement in overall educational performance. Both reviews warn that the National Curriculum should be truly broad and balanced and not be too overloaded in order to allow teachers the time and the flexibility to shape learning around the needs of the children at individual schools. ‘The trend — usually motivated by the desire to strengthen particular aspects of learning — has been to add more and more content with too little regard for the practicalities and expertise needed to teach it effectively’ (Rose 2009: 3).

In a government press release on 20 January 2011, the coalition expressed their intentions to tackle this overload with a review of the National Curriculum, effective in schools from 2014. In slimming down the content to reflect ‘the body of essential knowledge all children should learn’ but ‘not absorb the overwhelming majority of teaching time in schools’, concerns around the role of the arts in education have re-emerged once again, as have general anxieties over how much freedom teachers are afforded in designing their learning objectives around the needs of their pupils and making the curriculum as engaging as possible for everyone. During the drafting and consultation phase, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, wrote to Tim Oats (on ...