Arts Education in Canada and the United States

Abstract

In this chapter, O’Neill and Schmidt consider some contemporary issues facing arts education in schools across Canada and the USA. It is important to avoid oversimplifying across these two vast countries as arts education curricula and policy fall under the different jurisdictions of provinces and territories in Canada and states and counties in the USA. Nevertheless, there are shared concerns about the concept of “schooling” in the twenty-first century: what this means for the arts in public education can be gleaned from different curricula and policies. Within both countries, the idea that the arts are of fundamental significance to public education is not widely shared. Arts education programs have continued to decline over the past decade, creating a need for arts educators to spend more time defending the importance of the arts in schools and less time addressing much needed educational reforms. In particular, arts education has been slow to adapt to the rapid pace of change in today’s digital and globalized world. What is needed is a better understanding of what arts engagement looks like within models of twenty-first century learning and how to best harness the potential of arts education within the changing cultures of schools. An understanding of diverse arts learning ecologies, particularly through students’ and teachers’ own accounts of their experiences, is also needed to provide insights into new possibilities for curricula and policy. This chapter also explores the role of cross-curricular and multimodal arts practices, as well as current trends in personalized learning in schools and the potential they hold for creating more inclusive educational opportunities in and through the arts.