From the Editorial Board: Aiming Beyond Success: Reinforcing the True Potential of Arts Education

Abstract

From the Editorial Board: Aiming Beyond Success: Reinforcing the True Potential of Arts Education Jamie Kudlats The arts occupy a tenuous position in the American curriculum. While the vast majority of Americans believes that arts are valuable, our preoccupation with tested subjects has cast the arts to the side, making them the victims of budget cuts and marginalization (Grey, 2010). Efforts to include the arts in legislation have only left them subordinate to these tested disciplines, their value rationalized by their potential to increase test scores or their ability to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship (Ruppert, 2006; Zhao, 2012). David Labaree (2010) described this country’s current vision for education as a private good that encourages individualistic social mobility. This vision has intensified the standards and accountability movement, and coerced arts advocates and educators to justify the arts by their usefulness to advance individual achievement. But we must recognize and champion the potential of the arts to perform far beyond these narrow capacities. When we do, we set the stage for powerful possibilities to emerge in education. According to Maxine Greene (1978), the arts should be central to any curriculum, as they have been "deliberately created to move people to critical awareness, to a sense of moral agency, and to a conscious engagement with the world” (p. 162). Lewis and Laverty (2015) argued that the arts can “affect perception, gesture, and embodied social relations in order to open up space and time for political turnings, imaginative alternatives, and affective intensities” (p. 4). The arts provide us with endless opportunities to reveal new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. Take, for example, the phrase 21st century skills, the phrase so often uttered in conversations about current goals for curriculum and teaching. These ‘skills’ – predominantly collaboration, critical thinking, communication and creativity – flourish when the arts have space, time, and depth in our curriculum. The arts can help us examine how people express ideas and feelings through paintings, songs or dance. We can work together to perform a concert or write a play, and we communicate our unique points of view, and try to better understand the points of view of others. Furthermore, meaningful arts programs and arts integration efforts can also promote a sense of community within and beyond the school walls. Arts integration projects, as exemplified by the A+ Schools initiative and the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) schools, among others, have cleared pathways for collaboration among teachers and connectedness through the disciplines (Rabkin & Redmond, 2004). Through powerful means of expression and communication the arts offer ways for teachers and students together to be a part of something bigger than the disciplines, and bigger than themselves. We thrive through our connectedness and feelings of belonging. As such, schools with a strong sense of community also thrive as we learn not only the things that matter to us, but also the things that matter to those who share our schools and communities (Schaps, 2009). [End Page 191] If we want our students to think about their own thinking, to intensely examine their world and what it means to truly be and be together in that world, we don’t just have an opportunity to include the arts - we have an obligation. The benefits, both individual and collective, are boundless. The High School Journal welcomes manuscripts that explore the broader possibilities for schools and learning revealed through the arts. We are interested in studies that illustrate how students engage with the arts in ways that may lead to a more critical examination of our worlds and our place within them. References Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Google Scholar Grey, A. C. (2010). No child left behind in art education policy: A review of key recommendations for arts language revisions. Arts Education Policy Review, 111(1), 8–15. Google Scholar Labaree, D. (2010). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar Lewis, T. E., & Laverty, M. J. (2015). Introduction: Redistributing the artistic and pedagogical sensible. In T. E. Lewis & M. J. Laverty (Eds.), Art’s teachings, teaching’s art: Philosophical, critical and educational...