Diversity of Arts and their Status in Public Education in Kenya

Abstract

The arts are an experience-based body of knowledge widely acknowledged as being pertinent to wholesome development. Elsewhere referred to as expressive arts, performing and creative arts or/and cultural expressions, these are subjects in school that allow learners a glimpse into another world of verbal and non-verbal communication, a field where imagination and expression take the upper hand. Kenyan art forms are traditionally practices in combinations, with an artistic performance often engaging multiple senses and utilising multiple media of expressions. These allow a participant (and learners) an opportunity to experience a multiplicity of symbols, and to use the same to convey selected messages. Education in public schools in Kenya is the mandate of central government, with curricula developed, teaching monitored and evaluated and learning assessed nationally from and through a state agency under the ministry in charge of education. This provides opportunity for either a nationwide success of arts education, or conversely, a national crisis in arts education, depending on how the process of teaching and learning is conducted. In teaching the arts, the curriculum has often presented them as separate entities, unlike most indigenous practices that ensured a combination of expressions for each artistic presentation. And so, whereas education provides for the learning of, for example music, dance and drama as separate entities, the indigenous practice merged these, alongside poetry and elocution, as comprising the musical experience. It is this multi-modal nature of the expression that has led to the use of the term musical arts, in recognition of the various artistic elements that go into its formation, something that education may be embracing in current planning. This chapter considers Kenya’s current provisions for arts education and, through comparison with past trends, articulates the place that the diverse art forms of the country’s people occupy in education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education. In so doing, the chapter examines policy provisions and UNESCO recommendations for arts in education, and the country’s response to the same. The chapter purposes to recommend modalities of enhancing the place of the creative and performing arts in learners’ development while ensuring cultural and educational relevance. The chapter interrogates the nature of learning experiences that have to date characterised arts education in both classroom and out-of-class arts activities in school. This should lead to a statement on the status of arts education.