Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to be invited to be a speaker at TEDxRockhampton. If you don't know what a TED conference is, then you need to check 'em out at the TED website. They're awesome, and I still feel pretty humbled by the fact I was asked to be a speaker.
Obviously, I was speaking about art, but in particular, how we should be making more of a focus on the arts in our primary schools. You can go to the TEDxRockhampton site to view a video capture of the live stream (well worth it, there were heaps of amazing talks!), or you can read my original version below.
Before you do read on (and I'm sure you will...), I'd like to thank the whole crew of TEDxRockhampton, and in particular Treassa Joseph who was the curator of the event, for putting on such a wonderful event. I can't wait for TEDxRockhampton 2014!
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In 2008, I
was on holiday in London with my family.
One day, I made everyone go to the Tate Modern to see the works of art
first-hand I had studied and loved from journals and slides back home as an art
student. I didn’t quite get the
experience I had expected. I marvelled
at the Pollocks and Judds; I was in awe of the overwhelming beauty of Monet’s
Waterlilies; just as I thought I would.
It was a painting by American artist Mark Rothko that stopped me in my
tracks. Of course I’d seen images of his
large-scale, colour field paintings and read about how seductive and engaging
they were, but this painting literally took my breath away. I gasped and I couldn’t move. It ate me alive. I stood slack-jawed until my wonderful wife
actually moved me away from it. Even
after years of study and making art, being in the presence of this one
painting, I felt like my eyes had been opened, and I often think back to my
‘Rothko moment’. I could show you a
slide of the painting, but showing an image of an artwork that needs to be
experienced in the flesh seems a little redundant.
Back to the
here and now. As a primary school
teacher and artist, I’m passionate about the role of the arts and creativity in
our children’s education, but at the moment I’m afraid we’re pushing our kids
towards an arts-less society. Recent neuroscience research from the United
States tells us that interaction with The Arts in an education setting can play
very real role in helping to create critical, flexible, hard-working, and
creative students with significant long-term memory improvements. These are the kind of kids we want to become
the future leaders of our communities.
The ability to be a creative and flexible thinker is now thought of as
one of the most important traits for business and industry leaders. Unfortunately, the subject area that best
teaches this is given little to no importance, both by the bureaucracy of
education systems and by educators ourselves.
I’m afraid for this to continue.
I’m worried that an appreciation for the arts could be a dying trait.
The Arts
currently has a recommended allocation of teaching time in primary school
classrooms of between 4 and 5% of total teaching time. This equates to only 40 hours a year to cover
Visual Arts, Media, Music, Drama and Dance for year levels up to Grade 2, and
only 50 hours a year to Grade 6. I’m not
going to stand here and say that all subjects should be given equal teaching
time, I understand that literacy and numeracy are a huge focus, but one hour a
week seems pretty slim for a subject area that will improve problem solving
skills, critical thinking, and mental flexibility, all in a way that gets kids
excited, motivated and enthusiastic about learning.
Teachers
can often be their own worst enemy. It’s
a job where children look to you in an expert role, but what happens when you
don’t feel like an expert yourself? So
many people believe that they’re not ‘creative’ and therefore not qualified to
teach The Arts. For many years the
concept that being a creative genius is like a God-given talent, and if you
don’t have it, you shouldn’t try has been inadvertently pushed through our
education system. It usually happens in
one of two ways, arts assignments dropped onto desks and telling the students
to ‘have at it’, thereby completely abandoning good teaching practices of
providing guidance and support (no teacher in their right mind would introduce,
say, division without explanation and giving working examples, so why do it for
The Arts?), or the other, more detrimental outcome of reducing The Arts to
colouring in on rainy days. Both of
these situations allow for the children who are more practiced or feel more
comfortable in the arts excel in their own way, and the less confident students
feeling lost and ‘uncreative’.
I’m not
saying that these are necessarily bad teachers, it’s just that they feel
ill-equipped to carry out the syllabus effectively, and for many years they
have been allowed to treat a subject with a smaller focus as a worthless
subject. But if the same situation was
to be applied to another area, let’s say, a teacher not providing any
instruction in English because they didn’t feel confident in it, they would be
totally condemned. And rightly so. It would
just be nice to see some more equality.
If students are passing through our school system feeling uncreative,
they will enter and leave university with the same self-concepts, becoming
teachers who will be doomed to continue the vicious cycle. More needs to be done both at the school
level and at the teacher training level to improve the confidence levels of our
beginning teachers in the Arts.
Having said
all of this, the tide is slowly changing for the poor, neglected arts.
Uber-popular arts education champions like TED legend Sir Ken Robinson are
advocating for a complete rethink and reorganisation of the structure of our
education systems to embed creativity as a core, guiding principle. But unlike
Sir Ken, I’m working in a classroom right now, and as much as I would love it
to happen, the allocation of hours dedicated to the arts or a total reshaping
of our education system is not going to change any time soon. I’m not sure we’ll ever see a nation-wide,
standardised Arts test. I believe that
one day, the importance of creativity and the arts will be given more emphasis, but in the years (maybe even decades)
it’s going to take to make those monumental changes, we urgently need to do
something for the students in our system right now.
We need to
approach the problem from a new angle. I
believe that we can enrich the small amounts of time we do teach the arts so
that each sliver is powerful and meaningful, and at the same time, enhance the
built environment of our schools. Let’s
fill our schools with contemporary art. We should be installing actual examples
from working contemporary artists. I’m
not talking about delivering a set of mass-produced prints to every school and
classroom, or getting kids to paint a mural on every wall, but having experts
curate high-quality contemporary art to be put on permanent display in the open
areas of our schools.
Good
teaching practice says that we should cover the walls of our classrooms with
instructional charts and aspirational examples of literacy and numeracy, yet
the exterior of our schools are generally, a fairly dreary affair. Where in the rulebook does it say that these
high quality examples need to be confined to interiors of classrooms? In fact, where is the rulebook at all?
There’s
nothing stopping schools putting restrictions on the work of artists. They’re very creative people after all. We can say that the large-scale graphic
design piece on the tennis court wall needs to include a horizontal line at net
height. We can say that the sculpture
needs to safe for students to sit on, around, or under. We can install sound-based art, or
interactive art. Artwork isn’t
necessarily delicate, fragile, never-to-be-touched objects. Hardy, weather-proof, graffiti-proof, 2D and
3D public art has existed for millennia.
We can demand artwork that meets and reflects the needs of the school,
students, and community without diminishing artistic intent or meaning.
Creating an
art-rich environment like this has many positive benefits for our
students. The exposure to contemporary
art every day gives the arts value. We
tell our students that English, Maths and Science are important by dedicating
time to them, but that means that the reverse is also true, that the Arts are
not important because we rarely teach them.
Investing in art will finally tell our kids that art is important
because we choose to surround ourselves with it.
The
selection of these artworks is crucial.
The last thing I want to do is come out here and promote schools to coat
every wall in a half-baked alphabet mural; or the school’s football team logo;
or painting a million, boring, counting hopscotch games. As bright and colourful as these things are,
they don’t inspire us, all they do is fill the space. The key is to install bold, complex, and
intellectually challenging artworks. If
an artwork makes children (and adults for that matter) ask the question ‘why’,
then it’s doing it’s job. Why is it so
big? Why is it that colour? Why is this thing even here?! These questions are the start of critical
thinking. They’re the simple questions
that lead into complex and in-depth contemplations. And the great thing is that the teachers
don’t even need to know the answers to any of the questions at all. All they need to do is foster an honest
conversation about possibilities, meanings, or opinions, then the students have
engaged in critical thinking that they themselves have initiated and
directed. That five minute dialogue with
a student while they line up for class sets them up for a day full of deep
questioning and learning. What a rare
and wonderful thing!
Being
surrounded by challenging and unexpected artworks also helps the children to
take risks. When they understand that,
yes, that is art. And no, it doesn’t
have to cater to everyone’s taste, then they may be more willing to take that
responsible risk, and express themselves in honest and unique ways. It helps to remove the fear of engaging in
the arts. Too many people say, ‘Oh, I’m
not one of those creative people.’ Those people are wrong. They are creative. It’s just that the idea that they can be
creative has been beat out of them by a system that devalues its worth and
rarely leads by example. When students
are prepared to take risks, they become better mathematicians, scientists,
technicians, writers and thinkers. If
exposure to a piece of challenging contemporary art could potentially start
that process, then I feel that it is our obligation as educators to make it
happen. Sir Ken Robinson explains that
our education system is based on an industrial model where employment and work
skills are the ultimate goal.
Introducing contemporary art and artists into the school landscape may
help to broaden the horizons of our students and bolster the arts sector in the
future.
The
familiarity that comes with coexisting with an artwork gives the students a new
frame of reference for the arts. They
are more able to make connections between artistic concepts during arts lessons
because they have actually experienced the scale and presence of real artworks. Something that many families may not
voluntarily do in this day and age. And
it will give the real pleasure of growing older with an artwork. When you have a high quality piece of art in
your home, you experience it daily, but it doesn’t become stale. When you change, when you grow, you see and
experience it differently. Imagine being
surrounded by amazing, gallery-standard artwork throughout your formative,
primary school years. Imagine how your
perceptions of the works (and art in general) would grow and change. Those subtle changes of meaning and
experience can’t be replicated in a 30 minute lesson. By bringing contemporary art into our
schools, we have a chance to expose our students to long-term benefits rarely
afforded to many in our society.
Art breeds
pride. I believe that a school full of
art wouldn’t become a target for graffiti and vandalism. Street art and community murals are one of
the best graffiti deterrents. In fact,
at my school, there is one particular Indigenous mural next to a sink. Children have obviously washed out
paintbrushes at this sink for many years, with the occasional student putting a
handprint on the wall behind it. The
funny thing is though, the handprints have never gone onto the mural. This sink is next to a Prep & Year 1
classroom. Even five-year-olds
understand that you don’t mess up art. A
school full of art is a school full of pride.
I’ll deal
with the issue that I’m sure is flashing like a neon sign in your head right
now: great idea, but who is going to pay for all of this? Here in Australia, arts funding is available
from both State and Federal Governments.
And it’s fairly substantial. The
Queensland Government through Arts Queensland periodically releases funds for
public art, most notably, Art Built-in
(1999-2007) and art+place Queensland
Public Art Fund (2007-2012) which injected well over ten million dollars into
public art projects. For State and
public schools, the co-contributions may even be zero, meaning you could
install a significant piece of work for nothing but paperwork. Arts Queensland also partners with Education
Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts to run the Artist in
Residence program which is specifically aimed at getting working artists
directly involved with schools to improve student outcomes. Failing that, there’s also lucrative private
and community-based funding which can be explored, such as philanthropic
foundations and even crowdfunding.
Creating an art-rich environment does takes money and huge effort, but
the benefits far exceed the costs.
We have the
chance to embed so many of the amazing benefits of the arts into our education
system, without having to sacrifice crucial hours spent on literacy and
numeracy. So let’s change the way we approach arts education; swerve away from
a scary, arts-less future; invest in contemporary art for our schools, and give
our students their very own ‘Rothko moment’ every time they step inside our
school gates.
