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We have the tools for great arts education
By Pat Boyd, Executive Director, South Dakotans for
the Arts
The South Dakota Alliance for Arts Education advisory council held our semi-annual meeting on a cool rainy weekend in early September. With the new school year just begun, the nip in the breeze helped to usher us inside the South Dakota Art Museum. We meandered among the current exhibits before descending to the meeting room on the lower level to focus on the state of arts education. The first large gallery was filled with color, humor and imagination. The Tools in Motion exhibit propelled us along, confident in our assumptions about the arts and their rightful place in education, and in the whole course of human development, for that matter. As we moved toward the museum’s rear staircase, however, we were met and followed by the sobering stares of political leaders of the past, whose formal and foreboding portraits hung in the adjacent gallery. They all believed in the power of the arts, since each had sat for a portrait. Each of them understood the weight of the immortality conveyed by the resulting penetrating countenance, the one used to confront and conquer war, catastrophe, Depression and injustice. We hurried downstairs, as though bidden to get on with our work. We hoped that when no one was looking, those level, knowing eyes could shift, so they could appreciate the whimsy and invention next door, and shift again to the beauty and stories of the Dunns and Howes in the next gallery, as they would have in life.
The SDAAE council advises both South Dakotans for the Arts and the South Dakota Arts Council, and the fall meeting serves to assess the promises and challenges in arts education in the current school year and attempt to predict and possibly influence the future. After a review of our own programs, those shared by SoDA and SDAC under the Arts Education Initiative, Arts for Every Child, the agenda moved out into the world of national, state and local issues. The aggressive reforms of No Child Left Behind continue to test the limits as well as the achievements of our schools: students, teachers, administrators and school boards. The tremendous power of the arts to develop imaginative inquiry and critical thinking in children is being chronicled and documented with excellent research, even as the demand for those very skills in science, mathematics and communications explodes. The Tools in Motion exhibit hung in the corner of my mind as the discussion moved on. From the constraints of time and money on arts instruction, to the imminent retirement of a large percentage of our professional arts teachers with few replacements in sight, to the flight of our brilliant graduates, to the increasing challenges of special education, the picture that emerged was not a pleasing composition. Have we polished up our tools and hung them on the wall, eyeing them as furtively and longingly as the ghost portraits might?
When the discussion moved away from the Big (Ugly) Picture to real-life South Dakota adventures in arts and arts education, things began to look up. Training in Visual Thinking Strategies, design of a new visual arts curriculum for an elementary school, the challenge of a doubling in entries in the One Act Play Competition, the Arts Education Institute, Poetry Out Loud, healthy competition in music education, the growth and popularity of outreach activities by arts institutions, the delights of being an artist in residence at a small rural school, a new studio, a published poem, a brand new elementary school, incredible welcome-back- teachers productions in Sioux Falls and Rapid City – spirits rose to the challenge.
The No Child Left Behind legislation is up for reauthorization, but if NCLB is left behind in the heat of this legislative season, it can automatically continue through another year, through the elections of 2008. NCLB recognizes the fine arts as core curricula, but has not gotten around to them yet. While we are waiting for the inevitable aggressive reforms to the aggressive reforms in education, real teaching and learning is going on. In the meantime, SDAAE will study how arts education really works in South Dakota. There is every evidence that it does, despite the overwhelming challenges that loom at the beginning of every school year. Our own goal, the Arts for Every Child, is not subject to reform, and we will continue to move toward it by connecting with the enormous energies and resources directed toward math, reading and science. We will bring out the best tools for deep learning in these subjects, and develop the skills to use them. The mirror image for this endeavor is essential to the study of the fine arts. The world is full of inspiration for creative expression through the arts, and that is our greatest artistic resource.