149. Learn To Express, Express To Learn
Arts Education and Arts Integrated Education need each other.
Arts Education is learning to express through art forms – music, dance, visual arts, poetry, drama…and more.
Arts Integrated Education is giving expression to learning through an art form (or forms) in order to assimilate, deepen and broaden one’s understanding and to develop high function mental and emotional faculties.
Education, at its core, is truly one of the highest art forms.
To be able to express oneself through an art form;
to develop skill by practice and training inside an art form;
to improve sensitivity, perception and self-reflection inside that art form;
to study an art form, its origins and evolution;
is part of Arts Education.
Learning to express.
To use an art form to translate and transmit core concepts; to build interconnecting webs of reference by generating simile, parallel or analogous expression through an art form; – is to “integrate the arts” in education as a learning and teaching tool.
Express to Learn.
Both require caring, perceptive and creative guidance.
Music education serves as a useful comparison between ‘arts education’ and ‘arts integration’:
“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.” ~Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke”
Encouraging children to speak the ‘language of music’ by giving them vibrant musical tools in a developmental sequence is part of Music Education. Gradually it allows greater range, depth and fluency of expression. And…it is truly a natural and universal language.
The Arts Integrated approach to music education begins not with music. It begins with the compelling NEED to express a feeling, a knowing, a message, a process…and then provides the tools to give expression. The need drives the learning to give translation to the powerful stirrings of human life. The ‘feeling’ teaches you how to express it.
Human creativity varies from culture to culture, place to place…As educators, find ways to get immersed in other cultures, in other ways of thinking, feeling, doing. It is humbling, eye opening, astonishing. We realize ‘our’ ways are not the only ways. For example, in some cultures the idea of music used for ‘entertainment’ is seen as a degradation of a sacred art. In others, music is used to communicate the daily village news in call and response medleys that literally go on for hours.
The arts are a powerful tool to breakthrough cultural bias, arrogance and assumption.
Music used as a conveyer of ‘feeling-knowledge’ and a theater of learning comes within the idea of Arts Integrated Education. Learning about the water cycle by enacting it through song and movement choreography is a brilliant example, especially when the music, movement and song evoke the wonder of water.
Now, to say it more simply:
Arts Education is learning to express through art forms – music, dance, visual arts, poetry, drama…and more.
Arts Integrated Education is giving expression to learning through an art form (or forms) in order to assimilate, deepen and broaden one’s understanding and to develop high function mental and emotional faculties.
Education, at its core, is truly one of the highest art forms.
~PAZ
