Teaching the Arts in the Primary Curriculum

Susan Ogier, Suzy Tutchell

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781529742473, 9781529742480
• eBook ISBN: 9781529760767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Learning in the arts does not fit in with simple, conventional methodologies for teaching and assessing in the traditional sense, but it has an immense power to transform children's understanding of the world around them, and their lives. Many jobs, currently and of the future, will demand the skills that learning in the arts will develop.  

This book brings Arts Education sharply into focus as a meaningful, learning experience for children of pre-school and primary age (3-11 years).  It reinforces the potential for the wide range of physical, mental and emotional development, through learning opportunities that engagement in arts practice facilitates. 

• Provides insight into how teachers can support children to consider contemporary challenges that face their generation.
• Includes expert voices from the world of education to demonstrate an expansive, and perhaps surprising, view of where and how the Arts can be found. 
• Shows how we can bring the arts so easily into our curriculum, and into our classrooms.  

1 What is learning in the arts?

Susan Ogier

Suzy Tutchell

Keywords: arts; creative and critical thinking; embodied learning; multisensory; self-resourceful

Chapter objectives

This chapter will help you to:

• understand what the arts are, as well as why they are important in the early years and primary curriculum;
• understand why we need learning in the arts to provide a balanced and holistic education for children;
• consider the interdisciplinarity that arts learning facilitates;
• develop awareness of cultural diversity through the arts, as well as applying concepts around cultural capital to planning for learning;
• consider how we can create a place for the arts in daily practice.

Links to the Teachers’ Standards

This chapter maps to the following Teachers’ Standards:

• TS1 Set high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils
• TS3 Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge
• TS5 Adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils

See the Appendix for links to the ITT Core Content Framework.

Every child should have access to arts and culture, and to the benefits that access brings. The arts are a positive force in society: children feel more confident in their ability to create, challenge and explore, to be part of society, and to make change happen. The arts empower children. They contribute to the development of all aspects of a child’s potential and personality: studying the arts fosters creativity, innovation, empathy, and resilience. The arts enrich young lives, making them happier and healthier.

(CLA, 2019)

Introduction

In this chapter, we shall define what we mean when we are talking about ‘the arts’. We shall discuss the contribution that the arts make to children’s lives and why they are an important component of a well-rounded education. We shall focus on the wide-ranging nature and value of arts subjects within the education system and beyond by establishing a rationale for arts learning that is common across discipline contexts. We shall offer suggestions for re-establishing a meaningful place for the arts in any early years and primary curriculum, as well as underpinning this with tested pedagogical models and examples from educational research.

Why do we need to define the arts?

You are perhaps wondering why we need to define the arts at all. Everybody knows what the arts are – right? ‘It’s what you do in your spare time, isn’t it?’ There was certainly a huge spike in all sorts of creative activity happening while everyone was in lockdown, and many of these arts-based activities were essential in keeping ourselves sane during those challenging times. However, the sad fact is that participation in arts subjects has declined dramatically in the education of young children in English schools and early years settings in recent years, and we do need to remind ourselves of why this trend should urgently be reversed (B. Cooper, 2018). In schools where the arts are not taught consistently or regularly, it is easy for teachers to lose confidence in their own subject knowledge in these areas; and before you know it, the arts have dropped right out of the curriculum, or have been relegated to extracurricular activities, which means that not all children will have access. To fully understand how arts subjects can not only be re-established as key learning experiences for every child, but can be utilised across the curriculum to motivate and inspire children, is to view these areas of learning in new and different ways.

Reflection

How would you define the arts? Why do you think arts subjects are part of the curriculum for young children in primary schools? Reflect for a moment on your own experiences of learning in the arts and make a list of the positive and negative memories of this.

Your personal experiences in arts engagement in your own life are likely to have impacted on how you feel about teaching these subjects, as well as where you place them on a scale of importance within the busy curriculum. This will take a key role in influencing how you design a syllabus for the children in your class; but beyond this, we must be mindful of external factors that shape the curriculum which we offer, and we need to consider the effects of that.

What do we mean by ‘the arts’?

The Encyclopædia Britannica states that the arts form ‘modes of expression that use skill or imagination in the creation of objects, environments or experiences that can be shared with others’ (Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.). The same source goes on to name traditional categories that we might easily recognise:

• performing arts (theatre, dance, music);
• visual arts (painting, drawing);
• plastic arts (sculpture, modelling);
• graphic arts (painting, drawing, design);
• architecture (often including interior design);
• literature (poetry, drama, story);
• decorative arts (enamelwork, mosaic, crafts).

(Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.)

From this list, we can begin to realise the expansive nature of where the arts lie in the domain of learning: that the arts as modes of expression and participation stretch far beyond traditional perceptions of the main four – art, drama, music and dance. Have you ever considered that everything around us, such as furniture, mobile devices, clothing, architecture and even town planning, is fundamentally camped within the arts? It has all been imagined, visualised and designed. Even experimental chemistry and surgical procedures require attributes such as flexible and creative thinking as well as manual dexterity: skills that are learned through practising the arts. So, when we question, ‘What are the arts?’ it is perhaps much more pertinent to wonder, ‘What is the role of the arts?’ and acknowledge that what we are doing is thinking through the arts. We are using the language and skills that we learn through arts engagement and participation to make vital connections in every aspect of our lives.

Theory focus: the arts as a way of thinking and knowing

Sullivan (2001) describes this as transcognition; to understand what this means, we need to recognise how artists (in the broadest sense of the word) work and think. Artists, Sullivan explains, derive imaginative thoughts and ideas not only through an initial stimulus and motivation, but also during the process of making, and these ideas change and evolve as a result of their own critical reflection while they are engaged in the practical activity of making. Once the work is given an audience, alternative meanings and interpretations will also inform the work as part of a dialogic process. The creative process is an active one and is always open-ended. Artists – of any discipline – are unlikely to feel as though their job is ever done, so this is a very different way of thinking about how lines of enquiry progress and develop, and very different indeed to how school curricula operate. In schools, we are much more used to celebrating the end product, ticking items off a list, working towards the achievable measures that rule our curriculum. But artists do not think in this way. They think more like scientists, with enquiry as the key driver and with questions that they are determined to answer by finding all sorts of diverse means to that end. They then find ways to interpret and reinterpret, and finally communicate this through the most appropriate modes of expression. For children, this is what Malaguzzi (1994) calls ‘the hundred languages’. Artists will research via multiple channels to collect the information they need to inform their work. For example, a dancer will watch the flight of a bird or insect so that they can interpret this through their movement; an actor will research the life and times of their character in order to give a convincing performance; a composer might reference patterns found in nature to create a new piece. Watch the following TED Talk, where Cindy Foley refers to this as transdisciplinary research and encourages us to think like an artist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcFRfJb2ONk&vl=en

Reflection

What do you understand about the relevance of transdisciplinary research in the primary classroom? Do you offer children the opportunity to make connections across different areas of learning?

This could be interpreted as cross-curricular learning, sometimes known as ‘topic work’. But labelling work in this way can have a reductive effect if we are not careful. Hayes (2010) acknowledges that among other concerns, sceptics of this approach believe that without distinct subject-specific learning, children do not gain enough knowledge and skills to be able to synthesise their learning well enough for this method to be effective. Subject-specific learning can become so diluted that children are not sure of the learning objectives in anything. The sceptics might argue that cross-curricular learning is an inappropriate throwback to ideologies of the 1970s and notions of ‘discovery learning’. However, as with all pedagogical ideologies, extreme versions of either separating subjects out entirely or combining subjects so that learning becomes haphazard and fuzzy are not satisfactory solutions. It is, however, more constructive to design a curriculum so that subject-specific learning is apparent, and creative approaches are implemented so that children understand the connections between disciplines of learning (Ogier, 2019). A balance is always best, and the arts are the areas that facilitate this best of all.

Spotlight on early years

In England, there is a worrying drive to formalise early childhood education in the proposed revision to the early years foundation stage (EYFS) framework (DfE, 2020b). There is in fact a long-standing tradition of integrated learning and arts inclusion in early years pedagogy both in the UK and in developed nations across the world (Hamilton et al., 2019). There is a lot that we can take from this integrated pedagogical paradigm to include the arts as praxis when designing curricula for both younger and older children. Early years educators understand and value the arts both as disciplines in their own right and as a vehicle for learning in other areas. As a mode of multisensory engagement, the arts can encourage what Kress (1997) relates to the concept of synaesthesia. This involves the transposition of sensory information, such as colour, shape and sound, into understanding in order to make sense of what is being experienced. He suggests that young children are naturally synaesthetic but that this is educated out of them in systems where the written word rules. He also reminds us that ‘this fact of synaesthesia is essential for humans to understand the world’ (pxviii). What is education for if not to help children discover just that?

International models that we can look to as examples of excellence, where the arts are valued and integrated, might include the Reggio schools, where the youngest citizens explore lines of enquiry through all of the expressive arts and an atelierista is a natural part of the teaching team. New Zealand’s Te Whāriki has holistic core principles through which to ensure all children grow to become ‘competent, confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society’ (Taguma et al., 2013). In this paradigm, the arts are acknowledged as being the ‘first literacies’ as children learn to comprehend and convey meaning through the many symbols of communication that the arts afford. You can find out more about these arts-inclusive models where the child is central by searching online.

Why teach the arts?

Michael Rosen (2014) advocates that the arts provide a home in the classroom for ‘a set of humane and democratic educational practices’. This might seem like an idealistic notion when considering many classrooms across the country today. Children are placed in rows, heads down, working silently, while the teacher instructs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the editors
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 What is learning in the arts?
• 2 The arts and education for sustainable development
• 3 An eye on the past: curious explorations into ‘the other’
• 4 Art as a way of learning across the curriculum
• 5 Storytelling: the social art of language
• 6 Music everywhere and every day
• 7 Science and the arts – closer than you think
• 8 Poetry – the art of expression
• 9 Digital media and primary computing
• 10 Dance: the art of movement
• 11 The arts and mathematics
• 12 Writing as an art: engaging children in creative writing
• 13 Classroom drama: learning through as-if behaviour
• Appendix: links to the ITT Core Content Framework
• References
• Index