What the Arts Teach...

Special Interest Oral Presentation

Base Group Assignment - EDU Foundations of Education

Emily Bone

Lola Groves

Ashley Kluge

Wesley Morgan

Stacy Wahl

Topic:  The Value of Arts in Education

Elliot Eisner’s 10 Lessons Arts Teach has become something of a declaration for those interested in championing the arts in education. Our presentation provides, in just 15 minutes, compelling evidence in support of the arts as an essential part of the overall educational experience. Emily Bone provides examples applied to early education. Lola Groves discusses the impact of participation in Band. Ashley Kluge offers findings from the Chorus Impact Study in further support of music.  Wesley Morgan summarizes research results on the value of field trips (in particular for visual arts). Stacy Wahl uses a report by the Center of Arts Education that examines the correlation between the arts and graduation rates in NYC.  

Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA. - See more at: http://www.arteducators.org/advocacy

Samuelsson, I. P., Carlsson, M. A., Olsson, B., Pramling, N., & Wallerstedt, C. (2009). The art of teaching children the arts: music, dance and poetry with children aged 2-8 years old. International Journal Of Early Years Education,17(2), 119-135. doi:10.1080/09669760902982323.

Chorus America, Chorus Impact Study - How Children, Adults, and Communities Benefit from Choruses. (Chorus America 2009)

JAY P. GREENE, BRIAN KISIDA, and DANIEL H. BOWEN The Educational Value of the Field Trip - Education Next (Winter 2014)

Staying in School Arts Education and New York City High School Graduation Rates – A Report, The Center for Arts Education (October 2009) 

What the arts teach

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source  and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young  what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA. - See more at: http://www.arteducators.org/advocacy/10-lessons-the-arts-teach#sthash.I2x6Xz0g.dpuf