McKay School of Education > News > The Arts in Education
The Arts in Education
Elliott Eisner and Steve Baugh
"Because the mind is malleable it can be trained," he told his audience. Educators are in the engineering business. They help young minds expand. Culture also influences the individual and personal undertaking of converting brains to minds. Culture, including school, is a shared way of life that leaves its imprint on thinking and actions.
Eisner said that through curriculum and teaching, educators help students become architects of their own minds. Giving students a variety of content in the classroom will impact the kind of thinking they are able to do. Eisner observed, "Curriculum is a mind-altering occurrence. Art has been put on the edge of education. When the arts are marginalized, students are shortchanged and deprived of experiences and information that come only through engaging in the arts."
Eisner said that the arts have sometimes been dismissed as having no intellectual value, but he asks, "Can you work well with your hands without working with your head?" We learn to think in many ways. Transformation of an image in the mind to a medium--whether it is in music, visual arts, dance, or prose--involves a complex process, including knowledge of interactions and relationships. Eisner listed what occurs in the creative process.
- Stabilization: working in a medium, giving concrete existence to an idea
- Editing: enhancing the process
- Sharing: expanding consciousness through the efforts of others
- Discovery: an end product that is not always what we expect, surprising results--a development for which we must leave space
"The arts give the student somatic knowledge--sometimes called embodied knowledge. It is experienced in different locations. Some images resonate with our gut, others with our eyes, still others with our fantasies; artists play with our imagination," Eisner said. "Imagination gives us the sense of possibility."
The arts promote critical thinking and offer different perspectives. "The arts teach us that there is no common answer," continued Eisner. In math, for example, uniformity is expected; in art uniformity is a disaster. The arts teach us that questions can have more than one answer. The various answers are shaped by the individuality of those answering the question. "The arts teach us that in complex circumstances there are seldom fixed purposes," Eisner observed. "We know more than we can tell. We appeal to images to say what we cannot. The shrines of 9/11 were built to express feelings."
In the arts, all processes interact and, as Eisner pointed out, we give attention to nuances. For example, in a painting color, value, and composition are all interrelated. Students working in the arts are asked not only to look, but also to see, and then, said Eisner, they must find a literacy form to express what they see. Additional ideas are triggered through the process of creating, and minds are expanded. "Art is a giving tree," he said.
Eisner suggests that the meaning of literacy needs to be expanded to include the arts. They are a vital part of a balanced curriculum: capable of expanding minds, providing varied experiences, and increasing knowledge. "What we need," said Eisner, "is not for the arts to look like academics, but for academics to look like the arts in that they are playful, unanswerable, intellectual--as well as risk-taking and mind expanding."