Take the Lead- Arts Education

Tony Wagner's Global Achievement Gap, one of his seven survival skills was creativity.  And I believe that art education is the best way of nurturing this skill.  Now, I am going to do something somewhat creative and combine the philosophy of the survival skill of creativity from Wagner's Global Achievement Gap with Milton Chen's Education Nation in the both-and category as well as the curriculum edge.

So, we can look at this issue, art education, as an either/or situation.  So, either we teach the generals for the test or we teach art education.  But, why can't it be both?  I propose a rather creative way of combining these two.  If you are talking about geometry, make the students paint an isosceles triangle or the never-ending half-triangle trick (You take any kind of triangle, equilateral works the best, and you draw a line to split it in half.  Then, with those two parts, you draw a line to split those two in half and keep drawing lines to split it in half.).  By doing this, you are promoting creativity by allowing the students to draw any kind of isosceles triangle in any color.  Thus, this is combining the core concepts that are taught on tests with the art education.

Art education is important, and by art education, I mean more than just art.  I am talking theater, music, etc.  So, let's look at theater because this can be another both-and thing only for an English class as well as a study skills class (I will describe why in a minute).  So, in the theater, the actor typically has to memorize their lines.  But, once an actor becomes proficient enough, they are no longer saying the lines from memory, they are feeling the lines and understanding why they are saying those lines.  But with memorization comes the strengthening of three different kinds of learning.  It is strengthening the reading, kinesthetic, and auditory memory/learning of students.  This is the reason why, they have to read the script in order to know what they are supposed to say.  So, part of the memorization of their lines comes from reading.  The auditory memory/learning is strengthened by recognizing in time that there is are words that are said before your line, as well as lines that are said after you say your line.  So, it is strengthening your recognition that "Oh, they are saying this, so my line is right after this."  Finally, and this one may not make much sense on the get-go, but acting helps strengthen kinesthetic memory.  It does this by the director telling the actor to move stage left when they are saying this.  So, they will recognize that they are supposed to move at this line, what was that line, oh, yeah, that is what the line is.

I am an actor, and that is why I typically always, for some reason, score the same on all learning styles inventories.  So, either this works, or I'm an odd person (Which is very possible).