“Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.” Dana Gioia
Art brings joy. It is a unique gift of our humanity. Art provides energy, expression of emotion, excitement, and community. However, school budget cuts and the move toward standardized testing profoundly threaten the role of the arts in schools. For years school systems across the nation dropped the arts to concentrate on rising test scores in reading and math. Yet a growing body of brain research may suggest that teaching the arts can boost students’ test scores and help students across all disciplines.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, the federal government started assessing school districts by their students’ scores on reading and math tests. As a result, school districts across the United States increased the time they devoted to reading and math, while cutting spending on non-tested subjects such as the visual arts and music. The more a school fell behind by NCLB standards, the more time and money was devoted to those tested subjects, with less going to the arts. In a round of federal education cuts for 2006 and 2007, art education was slashed by $35 million. Those cuts fell hardest on schools from low-income areas with high numbers of minority children.
Given such stiff fiscal and political challenges, art advocates and educators have sought whatever evidence they can find to argue that art contributes to measurable gains in learning. New research in several scientific fields has emerged in favor of the arts. For the first time ever, neurologists and cognitive scientists are using different techniques to examine how music, dance, drama, and the visual arts might positively affect cognition and intelligence. There is also a line of research that explores other benefits that are unique to the arts.
In 2007, Hetland and Winner published a book, Studio Thinking: The real Benefits of Visual Art Education, and is one of the most rigorous studies of what the arts teach. They state that, “Before we can make the case for the importance of arts education, we need to find out what the arts actually teach and what art students actually learn.”
Working in high school art classes, they found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the school curriculum; what they call “studio habits of mind.” One key habit was learning to “engage and persist,” meaning that the arts teach students how to learn from mistakes and press ahead, how to commit and follow through. “Students need to find problems of interest and work with them deeply over sustained periods of time,” write Hetland and Winner.
The researchers also found that the arts help students learn to envision what they can’t see. That’s a skill that offers payoffs in other subjects, they note. The ability to envision can help a student generate a hypothesis in science or imagine past events in history class.
Jessica Hoffmann Davis is a cognitive developmental psychologist and founder of the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In her book, Why Our Schools Need the Arts, Davis outlines many benefits, including the quality of empathy. “We need the arts because they remind children that their emotions are equally worthy of respect and expression,” she said in an interview. “The arts introduce children to connectivity, engagement, and allow a sense of identification with, and responsibility for, others.” As a young researcher, Davis once asked adults, children of varying ages, and professional artists to draw emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger. She found that even very young children could communicate those emotions through drawing. In fact, she observes, “The arts, like no other subject, give children the media and the opportunity to shape and communicate their feelings.”
Such elusive, immeasurable benefits of the arts may, in fact, be among the most valuable. “At this time when we are facing the threat of the reduction of learning to testable right and wrong answers,” says Davis, “we might say the most important thing about arts learning is that it features ambiguity and respect for the viability of different perspectives and judgments… We have been so driven to measure the impact of the arts in education that we began to forget that their strength lies beyond the measurable.”
Elliot Eisner, a professor of art and education at Stanford University and a longtime leader in the field, has emphasized the subtle but important ways the arts can enhance thinking, such as the ability to use metaphor or the role of imagination. “These are outcomes that are useful,” says Eisner, “not only in the arts, but in business and other activities where good thinking is employed.”
At an annual convention for the National Art Education Association, Eisner told the crowd, “In the arts, imagination is a primary virtue. So it should be in the teaching of mathematics, in all of the sciences, in history, and indeed, in virtually all that humans create.” “To help students treat their work as a work of art is no small achievement. Given this conception, we can ask how much time should be devoted to the arts in school? The answer is clear: all of it.”
Dr. Eisner believes it is beyond time to make the case for teaching the arts for their own sake. “Not only should we teach, with professional expertise, the disciplines of music, dance, theater, and the visual arts to our children, but also we should change the ways of teaching and learning math, science, history, and other core subjects to more closely resemble the way teaching and learning take place in the arts.”
Dr. Eisner presented several cognitive development attributes he believes make the case for including the arts in the core curriculum. Those attributes, he said, are among the essential skills an individual must learn, and are learned best through the serious study of an arts discipline.
The notion that the value of the arts lies in their ability to help teach other subjects, in Eisner’s opinion, is backwards. He thinks the rest of the core curriculum needs to make use of the teaching and learning approaches that address the same cognitive development that comes naturally and powerfully through a study of the arts. Nuance, imagination, surprise, and relationships should be part of the learning platform for all subjects. As the nine skills come to be valued and nurtured in other academic subjects, Eisner believes that learning becomes a creative process and accomplishment in these other subjects then takes on the character of a work of art.
Brain hemisphere research began by identifying the origin and process of creativity. Researchers discovered that our highest cognitive activities are performed by specialized brain pathways that are concentrated in one hemisphere or the other. However, some brain processes are performed equally well by both hemispheres. Traditional education has emphasized kinds of learning that are processed primarily in the left hemisphere: analytical, language, symbols, and time consciousness. New stimuli, problems, music, and spatial reasoning are processed first by the right hemisphere. Research has proved that the full creative process involves integration and harmonious functioning of both brain hemispheres and that the creative process stimulates “traditional” learning by creating new thought patterns and symbols. Students are able to apply problem-solving skills to the arts, and then apply those same skills to other learning and to life situations.
Eric Jensen, the author of Arts with the Brain in Mind, is not an artist or educator, he is a researcher. Jenson has compiled and reviewed research studies on the arts, the brain, and learning, and following that research, is convinced that the arts are vital to educating our children and should be taught every day in our schools, just like language arts, math, science, and social studies. In effect, by conducting his review of the research, Jensen has become an advocate for the arts in education.
The book focuses on a review of the research on the arts, the brain, and learning. The review is divided into three sections: musical arts, visual arts, and what Jensen calls kinesthetic arts (including dramatic arts and dance, industrial arts and design, and recreational activities and physical education).
Jenson believes that before learning can even take place in any subject, the student must be taught how to think. Learning how to think and problem solving are inherent in all art experiences, challenging students to think critically and outside the box. They can make “mistakes” in art and learn how to “correct” them for successful products as part of the learning process without affecting their academic grade point average. Jensen believes students should be encouraged to experiment and take risks and that the fun atmosphere enables more absorbed information, developing both brain hemispheres.
Jensen also states that students who miss information about design, color, depth perception, how to cut straight, how to think the quickest, most economical solution, etc., will not progress to their potential. All fine arts assist in developing manual skills, problem solving, critical thinking skills, and perceptual awareness.
Fine arts also introduce, develop, and reinforce important values in life. Students learn patience, perseverance, appreciation for varied expression, aesthetic awareness, compassion, and academic information. All of these help establish a foundation for personal goals, because students learn a great deal more than just information. The arts are also an opportunity to reach students who are otherwise unresponsive and unconvinced that a particular study is relevant to their own lives.
Research from Karen Hamblen has found that visual arts are particularly useful in developing language arts skills. New vocabulary is in every study. Verbal expression is encouraged in comparing works of art. Written descriptions and emotional responses to artworks can reinforce grammar and handwriting. Kinesthetic learning style is addressed. Students begin to look at artwork critically using valid art principles as guides rather than just personal tastes. They will begin to know why a piece of art is successful or unsuccessful.
The research also suggests that using visual arts to teach mathematical concepts is extremely effective, especially for students having difficulty with abstract concepts. Students learn basic visual arts mathematical principles of balance, repetition, spatial relationships, proportion, symmetry, estimation, and geometric properties in nearly every art activity. It causes the analytical and symbolic skills of the left brain and spatial and intuitive skills of the right brain to work in unison, resulting in more effective thinking. In addition, theatre arts and dance can help teach the concepts of spatial relationships, concepts of time, value, melody, and harmony. Combining visual art and music can be amazingly effective.
An important benefit of visual arts studies is learning to see accurately. Several different people can all give different descriptions of the same accident, illustrating inaccuracy and/or incompleteness of seeing. This is sometimes the result of emotional triggers, but more often, it is the result of assuming information according to previous experience or understanding rather than really seeing it. At about the age of ten, children desire to make things look "real". Their frustration stems from lack of practice in really looking at things. Children (and adults) often assume that a certain line is so, when if they really looked at it, they would draw it differently.
Art projects do not have to be elaborate to produce benefits. Even the simplest ones can have profound effects. Students learn to respect materials and to use them wisely. Common materials and "throw-away" items found at home can be useful. Children can learn that instead of throwing away a “mistake,” to rework it instead, producing something different than planned, often with surprising and pleasing results.
The aim of good art instruction is to promote creative and divergent thinking, problem solving skills, seeing accurately, discernment, self-expression, and compassion. These are life skills needed for success in any endeavor in learning, leadership, business, and social relationships leaving no doubt to the importance of art and art education in our lives.
