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A New Place for Arts Education
From: Columbia University
| By:
Judith M. Burton |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 In the digital age, there is a new and urgent need for arts education, according to Judith Burton, the director of the Program in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In this exclusive Fathom interview, Burton, an internationally recognized scholar, lecturer and author, discusses how arts education empowers children to draw personal meaning from the digital world that surrounds them. |
Fathom: What were the results of your recent study "Learning In and Through the Arts"? |
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| Simon Sharp, age 5, and Amy Levine, age 6, draw several pictures in which they reveal their visual interpretations of the world that surrounds them. | |
Judith Burton: In the study "Learning In and Through the Arts," which we completed last year, we set out to look at the issue of transfer, that is, where learning from the arts can be said to transfer to other subject-matter disciplines. In truth, we did not find a great deal of transfer. But we did find something that was really more interesting. We found that participating in the arts influenced ways of thinking in other subject matter. On certain occasions in science, in math, in English, it engaged a certain way, a set of ways of thinking, that was also found in the arts. What we argue is that, first of all, the arts are critical in and of their own selves as part of the school curriculum, that they're not peripheral and that they offer critical learning of the same order as all other subject disciplines; and secondly, that they do engender ways of thinking that have more common currency across the subjects. |
For example, when children are challenged to think about ideas in science or mathematics from different perspectives, this is really quite difficult for them, because it requires a degree of abstract thinking and the ability to move things around in your head. Well, it transpires that, in the arts, you can actually quite literally begin to move things around; you can move an object around. You can look at it from several vantage points if you're making a drawing or sculpture, for example. So the arts actually encourage and reinforce that way of thinking. |
Fathom: How has this way of thinking translated into specific lessons? |
Burton: It reminds me of an experience I had with a group of kids, when we made a linear drawing of Pythagoras's theorem on the floor, and we said to the kids, "Well, what is this?"  And they said, "It's Pythagoras's theorem," and they could tell you about the square of the hypotenuse, but it didn't mean anything more to them than that. It was just a series of lines and a formula that they had acquired. And we said to them, "Well, what else might it be? Could it be something else?" Through discussion, they came up with the notion that, really, this was the way that society was organized, that you have the large square, the kind of bulk of people, that the smaller square was the middle classes of people, and the little square were the rich and the professional and the moneyed people. |
The arts allow you to think about things differently, to see the relationship among diverse experiences, to imagine things from different perspectives and to elongate ideas. In this instance, it helped them understand that a mathematical formula is not just an abstraction but is a structure that is actually embedded in everyday living, and can explain all sorts of different features of everyday living. |
Fathom: When children study an object visually and attempt to render it, how does this provide them with a greater understanding of the object itself? |
Burton: If you're making a drawing of a bee or of an insect, the arts invite you to look closely, to inquire into how it's structured, so you can work out the relationship among parts, the relative sizes of parts and the functions of parts to each other. That can be taken over into science, so that  you can learn these things from the point of view of physics and numbers and measurement. |
One of the things that I often explain to my students is that if you learn about a tree through describing it or writing a poem about it, if you learn about it through making a painting or sculpture, if you learn about it through seeing it biologically, through physics, through measurement, through many of the different symbol systems that we have available to us, each time you're having to think about the tree differently. And it's only if you can approach the tree through all of those different avenues of thinking that you can really say you've got a rich and complicated concept of a tree. The arts invite you to think about things in particular ways, which is very distinctive. There have to be more comprehensive ways of tackling an idea, a theme or a piece of learning. |
Fathom: How is studying the arts important to the development of a child's social skills? |
Burton: One of the important things about the arts is that you can have children working together on a single project. Perhaps more so than in other subject-matter disciplines, you bring the children together to make a mural, a big piece of sculpture, or some kind of hanging, and this requires that children actually learn to work together, to be respectful of each other's ideas and to learn how to contribute their idea to one idea that's larger than their own. Children have to learn social skills in a very practical way in which there's give and take, thoughtfulness, respect for different levels of skill and a capacity for all of them to stay with something and to bring it to completion. And that sense of ownership over the final piece is wonderful for kids. It's something that is put up publicly, and a lot of people can see it. |
Fathom: Why are some children encouraged to study art if they show an aptitude, while other children are left out and discouraged altogether? |
Burton: I have a very different take on the role of talent or perceived talent in the offering of art education. We don't teach children English or math or science because they do or don't show talent in it. We teach it because we believe that it is important for them to study those disciplines. It's important for the way they live in the world; it gives them skills that are instrumental to getting jobs. In the arts, there is the sense that you only teach the children who show that they're gifted or talented. I believe that is wrong. I believe that the arts, at one level, are a language, and that it is within the ability of all children to acquire that language, whether they are so-called gifted or not. All children can speak and create meaning through making visual images, through creating stories, dances, musical pieces, etc. |
Fathom: Can the arts help teachers and parents to better understand and communicate with children? |
Burton: Children's everyday experiences of growing up, of being part of a family, of living in a particular place, of playing with their friends, of going to ball games, of questions and issues they have about the social world in which they live are all the subject matter of art. Those experiences children live with every day are brought into the classroom with them. And the function of the arts is to try to give them a language through which they can reflect on those experiences. |
It is a way of getting to know children better. If a teacher is teaching in a way that enables children to reflect on their own experience, their place in the world, and those paintings, drawings, sculptures, plays and poems go home, it really gives the parents an insight into the children's lives. How children feel and think about the world in which they live, how children think about themselves, comes through in their artwork as well. Quite often, this is the only way that you get at really deep and interesting issues of concern to children, because the arts are primary vehicles in which that level of experience and feeling can come through. |
Fathom: Why does art continually remain on the outside? Why isn't it considered like the three Rs, so to speak? |
Burton: I guess some of us wish that we didn't always have to do battle on this front, and that, in fact, the arts could be considered like the three Rs. I think we've often shot ourselves in the foot as arts educators. We haven't always been clear about why the arts are important and should be considered as important as the three Rs. For a long time, the arts were seen as subjects apart, they were special, they were mystical; they were too precious, too separate and too different. And so the arts, in separating themselves when budgets were scarce, finally lopped themselves off completely, because they weren't seen to be part of the larger comprehensive curriculum. I think that we need to do a better job of placing the arts centrally within a humanistic curriculum of learning. |
Fathom: Why does art education continue to be important to the future of education? |
Burton: I often say that one of the things that we have done in education is to squeeze imagination out of schools. We've become so mired in examinations and tests that we have forgotten that there is a whole world of learning that really has nothing to do with that. |
All children these days live in a visual culture, and it is absolutely critical that we help them to construct meaning visually for themselves, so that they are able to read and understand the images that are put forth for them in the culture today. We should really be thinking about how to strengthen the arts. |
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