JACE Volume 1, Number 1

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education Volume 1 Number 1 2007

The Dialogues and Differences Special Edition

CONTENTS EDITORIAL: INTRODUCING THE DIALOGUES AND DIFFERENCES SPECIAL EDITION –––––––––––––– ACE IN THE HOLE WITH ALICE: ARTS AND PLAY IN TWENTYFIRST CENTURY EDUCATION John O’Toole, The University of Melbourne –––––––––––––– EXPLORING CHILDREN'S DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS IN MUSIC AND DANCE Clare Henderson, Deborah Fraser and Graham Price, University of Waikato –––––––––––––– ARTS PRACTICE, THE CHALKBOARD AND THE PEDAGOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE Robert Vincs, Victorian College of the Arts –––––––––––––– THE RELATIONSHIP MANAGERS: TOWARDS A THEORISING OF THE TEACHER-IN-ROLE / STUDENT RELATIONSHIP Viv Aitken, University of Waikato –––––––––––––– CREATING HARMONY IN PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY ACROSS THE PRIMARY CURRICULUM THROUGH AN INNOVATIVE ARTS PROJECT Deirdre Russell-Bowie, University of Western Sydney –––––––––––––– THIRD THINGS: THE WONDROUS PROGENY OF ARTS INTEGRATION Madeleine Grumet, University of North Carolina –––––––––––––– LITERACY, LEARNING PREFERENCES AND MULTIMEDIA John Vincent, University of Melbourne –––––––––––––– AFTERNOON TEA IN THE VALLEY: EVENTS, DISCOURSE AND THE WRITING OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH Trevor Hay and Julie White, University of Melbourne, LaTrobe University –––––––––––––– CAN I GET A WITNESS? MAPPING LEARNING IN AND BEYOND THE DRAMA CLASSROOM Christine Hatton, National Institute of Education, Singapore –––––––––––––– PARADOX AND PROMISE IN JOINT SCHOOL / UNIVERSITY ARTS RESEARCH Deborah Fraser, Clare Henderson and Graham Price, University of Waikato –––––––––––––– THE FUTURE OF ARTS EDUCATION – A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE Anna-Lena Østern, Åbo Akademi University

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HARMONISING OR HOMOGENISING ARTS AND EDUCATION PERSPECTIVES ON THE ARTS IN AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS, OUTSIDE IN AND INSIDE OUT Robin Pascoe, Murdoch University

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249

Editorial: Introducing the Dialogues and Differences Special Edition It is with a great deal of pleasure that I introduce this first edition of the Journal of Creative and Artistic Education (JACE), a unique publication promoting the role of the arts in contemporary education.

Creativity has long been lauded as foundational to a child’s social and educational development. During the first decades of the past century Wallas (1926) argued that creative thinking needed to be actively taught and John Dewey (1932) advocated an educational philosophy with the nurturing of creativity as its central theme. The 1960s witnessed a swathe of creativity-focused research, ranging from attempts to empirically define it (Guilford, 1968), quantitatively measure it (Torrance, 1967), and qualitatively assess its value in educational practice (Clifford, 1964). With such a long history, and due to the persuasiveness and quality of that discussion, it comes as no surprise that creativity has recent reappeared in a number of Australia’s state curricula in recent years.

However, as Getzels and Jackson point out, creativity is often “elusive to systematic inquiry” (1962:7). The concept of reifying creativeness and artistry into the practicalities of education – beyond the limited forays of the 1930s-1960s, and DeBono (1992) and Gardiner’s (1988) more recent successes - remains the central challenge to educators in contemporary schools. A recurrent symposium shared annually between Sydney University and Melbourne University, titled Dialogues and Differences (D&D),has provided a forum for exploring exactly this issue. It is with a great deal of pleasure that this first edition of JACE draws on key presentations from the 2006 D&D symposium to launch its inaugural edition.

The articles in Volume 1, Number 1, are organised according to three themes, each being introduced by one keynote address. In the first of these, we explore what might be; John O’Toole's engaging narrative opens our eyes to the possibilities of artistry and playfulness in education. The whimsical world of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland serves as a metaphor to explore the interplay of artistic play and learning. O’Toole's paper opens the door for others to follow. Henderson, Fraser and Price use succinct case studies to explore how children’s idea generation is enriched by the arts. Vincs discusses the transpersonal element inherent to music making and hypothesises a pedagogical approach that constitutes a vessel or conduit through which this force can flow for students. Aitken compares the multi-layered relationship between participants in theatre to education, and provides insight into more artistic, teacher-in-role approaches to pedagogy in classrooms. Russell-Bowie describes the rewards “at-risk” students can gain when exposed to an innovative arts-based project.

The second theme concerns what is; Madeleine Grumet’s keynote argues that learning is about more than just organising patterns and structures, it is also about making sense (the ‘third space’), and in this regard making learning whole necessitates integration of the arts into daily classroom practice. The arts allow students to encode what they know into

something they make. A suite of articles explores this concept in practical terms. Vincent discusses how understanding the way individual students make sense of their world informs effective literacy pedagogies, and for many students, this is centred in the arts. Hay and White explore the habitation of Grumet’s ‘third space’ from a research perspective. A vignette is used to describe how narrative is produced not so much by events as by 'discourse', and how this serves to convey a sense of the 'passionate participant' in research writing. Hatton explores the qualities of dramathat make it a unique pedagogy tool for facilitating the development of personal identity, of making sense of “the self”. Fraser, Henderson and Price describe how collaborative arts-focused university/school research projects offer substantial rewards for primary schools.

The third theme in this edition focuses strongly on what can be; the future of artistry and creativity in education. Anna-Lena Østern’s Keynote address from the Dialogues and Differences conference emphasises that we are forming the future by what we are doing now, and advocates a more thoughtful approach to transformative learning, an approach including awe and wonder beyond the socially constructed structures of curriculum. To help us reflect on this in practical terms, Pascoe summarises recent (and on-going) Australian national reviews of Music and Visual Art education. While such reviews and international viewpoints are welcomed, they are further valued when they offer suggestions for change.

Both these articles provide critique for future directions.

This first edition of JACE would not have been possible without the support of the editorial management team (Professor John O’Toole, and Dr Christine Sinclair), and JACEs editorial assistant, Ms Robby Nason. It is with sincere gratitude that I thank these people for the extensive work associated with launching a new publication, and it is with great pleasure I present the first edition ofJACE to its electronic audience.

Dr Wesley Imms Editor JACE 10th June 2007

References Clifford, G. (1964) “A culture-bound concept of creativity: a social historian’s critique centering on a recent American research report” in Educational theory v.14 pp.133-143 DeBono, E. (1992) Serious creativity: using the power of lateral thinking to create new ideas New York: Harper Collins Dewey, J. (1934) Art as experience New York: Minton Gardner, H. (1988) “Creative lives and creative works: a synthetic-scientific approach” in Sternberg, R. (ed) The nature of creativityNew York: Cambridge University Press pp.

298-324 Getzels, J. & Jackson, P. (1962) Creativity and intelligence: explorations with gifted students London: John Wiley&Sons Guilford, J. (1968) Intelligence, creativity and their educational implications San Diego: Robert R. Knapp Torrance, E. (1967) "Scientific views of creativity and factors affecting its growth" in Kagan, J. (ed) Creativity and learning Boston: Beacon Press pp.73-91 Wallas, G. (1926) The art of thought London: Jonathon Cape

Ace in the hole with Alice: Arts and play in twenty-first century education John O’Toole University of Melbourne

Author’s biography John O’Toole is Chair of Arts Education at the University of Melbourne, and Head of Artistic and Creative Education. He was formerly Professor of Applied Theatre and Drama Education at Griffith University. He was co-founder of the professional associations for drama teachers Drama Australia and Drama Queensland. He has taught drama and community theatre to all ages on all continents. Among his many publications are standard text-books and scholarly works such as Dramawise (cowritten with Brad Haseman, 1988), The Process of Drama (1992) and Pretending to Learn (co-written with Julie Dunn, 2002). His publications have won several prizes, and in 2001 he was given the Judith Kase-Cooper Honorary Research Award by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education for lifetime achievement in researching drama education. j.otoole@unimelb.edu.au.

Abstract This paper firstly identifies some educational anomalies that occur in

conventional schooling systems, and the marginalised position of both arts and play in those systems. It then goes on to identify and describe some uses of arts education with marginalised communities and people with disadvantages, and speculate on the possibilities the arts offer that are largely not taken up in orthodox schooling contexts. The author proposes a theoretical model linking arts and children’s play, and uses this to explore what he terms ‘the common aesthetic’ of contemporary life. This then forms the basis for a further exploration of teaching itself as an aesthetic activity closely connected to this common aesthetic, and the need for that to be better understood in the training of teachers, and also the training of artists.

This paper will be a bit playful, and I hope that it will be a bit artful too.

It was originally given as a keynote, and in a presentation to a symposium called Dialogues and Differences it seemed to me

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inappropriate to present a monologue, which is what a keynote normally is. Accordingly I involved the audience a couple of times actively both in discussing with each other, and in responding in unison to some prompts I raised. I attempted further to create a dialogic structure by using a powerpoint presentation in a visual/verbal dialogue, with the visuals commenting ironically on my verbal exposition. Now I am confronted with the irremediably monologic form of a journal article (though I suppose readers could write a rejoinder if you have the energy and the patience to wait for the next issue of JACE), and I must ask the readers to forgo the dialogue, or just imagine it… and preferably, find a volunteer to read together the transcript of classroom dialogue which is still embedded in this paper as script.

For most of my career I have been a teacher, much of it in working-class inner-city schools. From that experience I learned that in teaching, dialogue is a lot better than monologue. I have also spent some years as an actor and writer for theatre in schools. From that, I learned that if you are going to involve the audience in active participation, you have to do it early, before they get settled – and you have to make it unthreatening, painless and simple. So if I want to break up this monologue and make it the tiniest bit dialogic, I’d better do it now! This is the point where finding a volunteer to help you, and together reading aloud the transcripts below, will significantly enrich your understanding of the whole of this paper.

I am going to ask you in a very tiny way to experience and analyse two moments from Australian school classrooms (O’Toole 1991:11-14). I wasn’t the teacher in either of them. You don’t have to find a friend to do this with, but if you don’t, you’ll miss even a taste of experiential social

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learning - which is what this paper is all about. Please read, aloud if you are not reading this in an embarrassingly public place, and preferably with your volunteer co-reader, a short piece of script, transcribed from two lessons in the same subject, which was SoSE (what they call HiSE in NSW, and what we used to call geography and history). Both lessons are doing much the same thing, identifying and defining what the children know about the important elements of their community. Both deal with knowledge in an ordered, systematic way. The first involves Year 6 children, eleven year olds.

The script alone is a poor record of the complex event that is a classroom, but readers do not need a lot of contextual background here.

It’s a very ordinary lesson, there’s nothing special or unusual about it, and you can probably imagine the classroom quite easily. If you are embodying the script with a colleague, will one person please take T, the teacher, and the other read P, which is the pupils’ part of this dialogue.

T: [sarcasm] Isn’t that amusing! So we need a town, and what’s a town, Lyn? P: People living together, roads, houses and shops.

T: OK, so the Company has to build a town for the people to live in.

But if your parents were to go there what would they need? Sit down, Neil!

P: A car.

T: Yes. P: Shops.

T: Yes. P: Water supply.

T: What else would be needed, Mara? What do you have to say that’s so important to be rude, Chris?

P: [giggles] I just said he’s cute.

T: Carry on Mara.

P: Place to live, place to shop.

T: Are there any other things… I’ve spoken to you twice, Chris! Is there anything else?

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P: Schools.

T: Yes. P: Transport.

T: Yes. What do you think would be the main transport?

P: Railway.

T: Yes. Hands up those who think rail would be the major form.

P: Planes?

T: Hands up those who think planes… yes so we need an airport too.

Do you have any other needs.

P: Schools.

T: Yes. P: Toilets.

T: Right. But there’s one very essential need no-one’s mentioned.

P: Clothes.

T: No, another one.

P: Petrol pumps and things.

T: No. It starts with ‘R’, the one I’m thinking of. Edward?

P: Rivers. [Audible sigh from the class.]

Please now consider: what’s going on here? In particular, take a few moments to analyse the characteristics of the children’s language, and the quality of their thinking. Unfortunately, we cannot make this paper dialogic, so the question must remain, for the moment, rhetorical I will be asking you to compare that lesson with this next lesson. For this one, a little background is necessary. These children are Year 2, seven year olds. For a few days, there have been rumours that a dinosaur is loose, lost in the school. The children have discovered enormous dinosaur footprints around the grounds. The teacher is wearing a large green and yellow spotted dinosaur tail, made by the children, who helped him put it on to become Dino the Dinosaur. There was then a great dinosaur hunt round the school grounds, where they discovered Dino, their class teacher, with his green and yellow tail, cowering, very frightened, behind a tree. They rescued him, brought him back to the classroom, where they are now reading to him from a big book they have

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written and illustrated for him, about the school. Again, T is the teacher and P are the pupils.

Ps: We all go to Baytown State School. It’s a big school.

T: [as Dino] Do all little children have to come to school?

Some Ps:} Yes. Some Ps:} No. P: When they get bigger, but not when they are two and five and six.

And Mr Dino, some… not when we’re babies, not when we’re smaller than this – we have to grow up to big children.

Ps: [Reading together] At school we have a playground, a library, a swimming pool, a dental clinic…

T: I don’t understand – what’s a playground?

P: It’s a sort of park with swings in it and we play.

P: Remember, when you first met us, you got frightened and you ran out there. That was the playground.

T: What’s a swimming pool?

P: It’s like you lay in it and it’s got water in and there’s a teacher – we’ve got a man teacher – and the teachers tell us how to swim.

You’ll find out who the teacher is. Tomorrow you’ll find out. We have swimming tomorrow.

T: Now what’s a dental clinic, …thing?

P: It’s where you go to the dentist and have your teeth fixed.

P: These are teeth.

P: They make sure your teeth are clean and that.

P: They pull them out if they are bad… and fillings, you get fillings. But I haven’t got any.

T: Is it good to have fillings, or bad to have fillings?

P: Bad! P: Good! If you’ve got holes in your teeth, that is.

T: Where do holes come from - the dentist?

P: No! They come from bacteria in your teeth. If you eat too much sweet things, and you don’t clean your teeth properly you get holes in your teeth.

P: That’s probably what happened to dinosaurs. They got holes in their teeth and died out.

T When did dinosaurs die out? Before people or after people?

P: Before, when there’s no people.

P: Millions of years.

P: And now there’s just little tiny bones.

P: No, BIG bones!

P: Fossils.

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P: T: P: P:

Hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Would dinosaurs have had big swimming pools and schools?

No, they just had swamps.

Would you like to come with us to the museum next week and see some dinosaur bones?

T: I’m not sure.

These children are four years younger than the first class, so if school is working effectively to develop language and thinking one might expect both to be more limited. Once more, analyse the quality of the, language and the thinking. Now, four quick questions about the two lessons: •

Which lesson demonstrated more deep understanding and creative thinking?

•

Which one had the more elaborated language from the children?

•

Which one was the more artistic?

•

Which one was the more playful?

These questions are not rhetorical, but they do have a right answer - in other words one that I imagine all the readers will agree on.

Talking of play, and plays, there’s a famous review of a production of Shakespeare’s Scottish play that describes the actor in the part of Macbeth ‘playing the King as if he momently expected someone to play the Ace’. This elegant mix of metaphors juxtaposes the quests and conquests in dramatic literature with those in games and in real life – all are evanescent and to some extent fictional: we construct our reality through partly-experienced metaphors. That’s part of the enduring fascination both of Shakespeare, and of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, (1865) where playing cards are explicitly a central theme .

[The relevance of arts education to a house of cards has already been well made by Brad Haseman in his reflective keynote to the Australia

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Council symposium on arts education, Backing Our Creativity (Haseman 2005)].

As one of Shakespeare’s most famous clichés has it: ’To hold, as ‘twere the mirror up to nature‘ might indeed be the purpose of drama and all the arts - but Shakespeare as usual only told part of the story. Drama and art are not a mirror to beam back an exact likeness, but as Alice found out on her second quest (Carroll 1871), they are a looking glass to step through into a provisional space. In this case the game is a chessboard.

Here Alice discovers that all is not as it seems, and given wisdom is constantly being destabilised for examination, occasionally reassuring, nearly always disconcerting. In the looking-glass world, just as in her first trip to a fictional dream-world, Alice finds another world of deadly serious power-games where everything has a logic and a meaning but makes no sense to her.

The practice of stepping away from experienced reality into a looking glass of new, fictional possible realities is not confined to dreamers, artists and children, of course. Plato (c.350BC) did it in his Republic. So too do modern day generals and military strategists in their simulation games, moving whole armies of real soldiers through elaborate and often elegant games of ‘let’s pretend’. Plato was most ungrateful to the artistic inspiration that created The Republic, incidentally, as in Book 3 he banned dramatic storytellers from his ideal republic, because they tend to destabilise things. This is a theme to which I will return.

Nor is the creation of artificial worlds limited to fiction, worlds where reality is turned on its head and that make little sense to their inhabitants. Consider Western schooling. Before they go to school,

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usually unhelped by any professionals, just their entirely amateur parents and family and friends, children have already learned lots and lots. Young children learn: •

Through all the senses

•

Through brain, body and emotions all working together

•

Through exploring and testing, trial and error

•

By taking risks - learning by getting it wrong first, so you can get it right next time

•

Through creative leaps and humour, playing with juxtaposition

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By scaffolding on what is already known

•

Through copying and social interaction

•

By learning from everybody around, including peers & playmates, television, the people they see and meet, their surroundings

•

By discovering the external world together, through the worlds of social relationships and personal feeling & expression

•

Above all, through PLAY … experimenting through the artistry of play – musical, linguistic, visual & design, dance, dramatic play

Around five years of age or so, we take them and pitch them for about half their waking life into a new game of chess called schools, where we: •

Leave play outside in the playground: ‘Stop playing around’

•

Focus on the brain and ban the emotions: ‘No tears’, ‘Stop laughing’

•

Restrict or ban movement and the body: ‘Stop fidgeting’

•

Restrict or ban language: ‘A quiet classroom is a good classroom’

•

Restrict or ban social interaction: ‘Stop talking and listen to me’

•

Replace their normal surroundings with a single room with specialised equipment and closed doors called: ‘the classroom’

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•

Replace exploring with THE curriculum: ‘This is what you’re learning today’

•

Replace playmates, television and the people round them with a small number of grown-up strangers called: ‘the teacher’

•

Replace trial and error with right answers: ‘The teacher knows’

•

Replace the excitement of risk and failure without penalty with caution and penalties for failure: ‘No marks for that’

•

Discourage creative leaps, imagination, and jokes: ‘That isn’t funny’, ‘That’s silly’.

•

Transmit knowledge as: new, not scaffolded: ‘Today we’ll learn about families’

•

Marginalise the arts: ‘that’s messy/noisy/disruptive’.

’Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice. Of course, all of these lookingglass conventions are really nothing to do with educating for life, but they have their purpose, the same as when they were devised for the needs of nineteenth century industry – to create an efficient workforce and a compliant populace.

It may be suggested that this is a cruel and unrealistic parody of contemporary education.

Outdated, too, as most of the education

profession, the readers, my colleagues and me, try to give children and young people the very best education we can. Is it such a parody?

Might one speculate that some children do learn to be nuclear scientists and Melbourne University graduates partly because, like Alice, they relish the curious. Partly, too, because generations of dedicated teachers, together with parents and all the forces of the educational systems themselves, which are on the whole well-meaning and have merely inherited those oppressive structures, do provide a relentless

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focus on learning. So children do learn lots, in spite of the obstacles that schooling puts in their way. To be fair, schools are well-structured to teach some very useful things – social skills for instance, and how to like and live with weird people. And it teaches a lot about power, and how power works.

Many of us remember our schooling with pleasure, pride, and gratitude to the imaginative and passionate teachers who conquered and subverted all these obstacles on our behalf.

Well, some of us, some

children… and we despair at that alarming and not decreasing proportion of school failures. By this we actually mean those whose needs the schools fail to provide for, whose voices are drowned out and who fall out of the game, the hapless pawns for whom the eighth square is out of reach in the game where only the lucky and privileged become queens.

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We still don’t really know what to do about them, other than blame the victims or more and more desperately try bandaids. [Currently in the UK there are about half a million support staff in schools, roughly half the number of teachers themselves. (TDA 2006)]. Then we focus even more relentlessly on pushing the others up the board to be successes and win.

Living ourselves in the world of education, behind the looking-glass, we still believe it is possible to change it. The white queen believed six impossible things before breakfast every day. The problem with virtually all our attempts to change the looking-glass world to fit our real needs is that like Alice, we look for the answer inside the glass, in the unreality of the classroom, where teachers and children courageously and imaginatively pursue learning in spite of the grandiose nonsense of the

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single curriculum devised by the red queen, where sometimes it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.

Suppose instead, we were to climb back outside the looking glass, and find what was left at the classroom door with the fresh air and the bags of sandwiches – and the body and the emotions. Among the other things we’ve left behind are: Art and Play. Play is seen as the

province of the playground, or the fill-in time between matters of more importance. Art, somewhat more uneasily, is so often relegated to the margins and the co-curriculum.

And, fortunately, art is also bequeathed to the marginal and marginalised. These days, the arts are often turned to as a last resort.

More and more the arts are being acknowledged as a therapy, as a form

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of empowerment, as a way of helping the dispossessed to find or regain their identity. The growing research is affirming this – the 2005 Risky Business conference held in Melbourne highlighted numerous examples, local and national, of this use of the arts. Stanford Professor Emeritus Shirley Brice Heath, who gave a memorable lecture at that conference, is herself an example of a surprised advocate of the arts, when she engaged in a ten year study of the language of deprived adolescents, and discovered that what gave them more linguistic confidence and therefore agency and power in their lives than anything else was an artsrich program of activities (Brice Heath 2004). Here are a few more examples.

•

In the so-called developing world, many millions of dollars are being invested in arts for development. A not untypical example would be Dramaide’s arts-based approach to HIVAIDS in South Africa, started over a decade ago and still operating.( Dalrymple 1996). It starts with a theatre-ineducation program in a school, but the real primary targets are the parents, adults who would be resistant to health messages purveyed by outsiders. With the artists’ help, the young people create their own multi-arts exhibition and performance about HIV for the school open day. In this structure, the agency, the knowledge and the persuasive power are in the hands of the young people.

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Untitled. Artist name withheld. Used with permission of the Victorian Department of Corrective Services, and the artist.

•

As another example of art with the marginalised, look at this photograph which was designed as a Valentine’s Day card.

This photograph clearly shows sophisticated use of artistry: composition, colour, light and a highly imaginative idea made explicit in the juxtaposition of real flowers with the shadow figure. It is the work of one of a group of long-term high-security prisoners, with a severe literacy problem, who three months earlier could barely hold a camera, and who

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has

been

taught

only

the

technical

rudiments

of

photography. It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate

on

its

effect

as

pre-literacy

training

and

rehabilitation, which was actually the purpose of the introduction of photography to those prisoners. Similarly its effect as a Valentine’s Day card on its recipient is unknown, because prison regulations forbade its sending. However, it is unmistakeably art.

•

Bruce Burton and I have been involved in a ten-year action research project on trying to deal with conflict and bullying in schools (Burton & O’Toole 2005). We wondered whether the looking-glass world of orthodox schools was the best place to tackle conflict and bullying. For one thing, young people know that adults are hardly the people to do the teaching – many young people face constant conflict in their home lives, and they see daily images of adult conflict and bullying. We analysed some of the anti-conflict programs in schools and noted that nearly all of them are: −

Top-down, driven by the grown-ups – the worse the conflict, the higher the source of appeal.

−

They concentrate on the victim, and implicitly or explicitly blame and demonise the bully.

−

They are extra-curricular – conflict is not something that is supposed to occur in the classroom, let alone as content to be studied

−

Methods from the margins – the arts, outdoor education, pastoral care – are often invoked, but usually in ad-hoc or short-term projects

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On the other side of the looking-glass, we reasoned, the image would be the opposite. Starting with our belief in the capability of kids, our aim became to democratise the process – to give the students themselves control over their conflict and bullying agendas. Most of all, and this may seem strange, we wanted to remove the morality, and replace it with cognitive, cool understanding and the tools for action.

We came up with a combination of drama and whole-class peerteaching, embedded in the curriculum. The older students use drama to learn about conflict, then they peer teach younger students, who themselves then peer teach younger students through drama, from upper secondary to lower primary.

From O’Toole, J., Burton, B., & Plunkett, A. (2004) Cooling Conflict. Pearson: French Forest AU. Used with permission.

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They learn what we called conflict and bullying literacy: understanding of the structures of conflict and bullying: like the latent, emerging and manifest stages, that can escalate or be de-escalated. They like, and quickly make sense of the terminology. In peer teaching they reinforce what they have learned themselves from the drama, as nothing reinforces knowledge so well as having to teach it to other people; for the peer learners, they are learning from students just a bit older than themselves, whose knowledge of their own problems they can trust – Year nine students know that their Year eleven mentors have only recently survived Year nine themselves, so they must know something useful. For both groups, it was an opportunity to create new networks of friendship and respect, between the ghettos of schools’ artificial agebarriers.

Incontrovertibly, all this fiction translates to real-life change. Often in small ways, like the Year 8 student, who had been taught the program three years earlier in Year 5, by Year 8 students. He poked his head into the teacher’s staff-room, saying ‘Miss, you’d better come – there’s a conflict down at the swimming pool’. Then as she hastily rose to deal with it, he counselled, ‘Don’t hurry, Miss, it’s only emerging – hasn’t escalated to manifest.’ This simple interchange embodied an impressive piece of learning: the student was using words he’d learned three years ago to give a teacher considered advice about a real-life conflict.

The ongoing, intransigent problem is that the structures of schools make it very difficult to operate sustainably, such as fitting peer teaching into secondary school timetables, where both timing and available time

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operate so arbitrarily and erratically - as the White King said: ‘you might as well try to catch a bandersnatch’.

Examples like these indicate clearly that at last the Arts are finding a useful job in the educational community, picking up the debris of ‘real’ education, and those whom it has not yet reached. Is that as far as it goes? How does that tie in with the curious fact that in the professional world of the Arts, the vast majority of time, money, skill and talent is not expended on the jetsam of society, but on its cream – giving artistic pleasure, usually passive, to those who have the background to appreciate and the means to pay for opera, theatre, fine art and concerts of classical or rock music – or a bit less to be a passive audience for film and television. It is actually the converse in the looking glass world of schools, where authorities are more willing to spend the small bits of available money on the arts if they are picking up and healing the wounded and the victims rather than on the privileged – those who are prospering in the Red Queen’s world. For those, little money and time can be spent on the arts, because we have to spend more than ever of both, running on the spot with literacy and numeracy to keep in the same place.

However, pouring more and more money and time into literacy and numeracy programs may indeed be a looking-glass way of going about these crucial skills. A recent global study of arts in education suggests that arts-rich schooling, particularly drama, does not harm literacy, but actually increases it by up to twenty-five per cent; and arts-rich schooling, particularly music and visual arts, increase numeracy by around six per cent. This merely confirms almost exactly statistics that keep being re-confirmed from forty years ago (Clegg 1972), twenty five

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years (Shaffner et al 1984), over fifteen years ago (Gardner et al 1989), nearly ten years ago (Wagner 1998) and five years ago (Fiske 2002).

The response of the Red Queen’s advisers is interesting. Whenever I hear this argument raised, that the arts or an arts-rich pedagogy, actually increase literacy or numeracy, or raise it myself, professional educationists almost invariably use the same counter, and even the same phrase: ‘Oh, the jury’s still out on that.’ This is an unanswerable piece of sophistry. The looking glass jury, maybe, but in the real world, the jury is not out, and the judge has given the verdict in the thousands of pages of argument and statistics mentioned above, and thousands more.

Some brave schools, like FACE in Montreal and the growing number of arts-specialist schools and senior programs in Australia, are living proof of it, and parents, if not systems, are taking notice. Montreal’s FACE centres its curriculum on the arts. It has been going for thirty-one years, and at the last school registration day, two-hundred parents queued up in tents for three days to try to get their child registered for four years hence (These details were presented to the 2006 UNESCO Summit on Arts Education, together with documentary evidence, by the founding Principal). The school has a waiting list of a thousand, it always figures in the top band of literacy and numeracy results, though the socioeconomic status of the children’s families does not. Only Tweedledum and Tweedledee could say ‘Nohow’ or ‘Contrariwise’ to the arts, surely.

Ironically, the growing demonstrated successfulness of

arts as a

learning tool has caused alarm in many artistic circles, where artistic purists believe it is traducing the real place of the arts in education, devaluing real art and artistry, and reducing them to a functionalistic tool.

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There is another high profile battle going on in academia that is focused on a quite unreal and unnecessary polarity between ‘elite’, ‘heritage’ arts and ‘popular’ arts. However, rather than buying into that, I will explore a rather more fundamental connection – the dialectic between Play and Art, which is structurally the strength of art, but in the culture of the western world, its weakness. Both play and art are serious business – the business of the human imagination, defining reality through new possible realities, models of human experience, new angles and perspectives, creating order from chaos and also disturbing order to imagine new orders, finding harmonies and previously unheard melodies. Long ago in the first half of the twentieth century the visual artists were the first to perceive the sophisticated aesthetic of very young children’s play – their management of form and space combined with the boldness and freedom of discovery. Very grown-up artists like Picasso, Paul Klee and Joan Miro were among the host of elite artists humble enough to acknowledge the debt they owed to the art of ordinary children and learn from it for their own art. Nearly a hundred years ago John Dewey (1934) was urging exactly the same thing in education.

From him there is a line of theorists and educators demonstrating and proving that children’s play and art are inextricably linked, from Herbert Read (1964) and Louis Arnaud Reid (1969) to Elliott Eisner (2002), Claire Golomb (1992) and John Matthews (1999) in visual arts, Keith Swanwick (1988) and Bennett Reimer (1992) in Music, Johan Huizinga (1955), Peter Slade and Dorothy Heathcote in dance and drama, and across all the arts Maxine Greene (1995), Malcolm Ross (1983), Peter Abbs (1987), David Best (1992) and now Ken Robinson (1999), and Madeleine Grumet (2005), and hundreds more of us.

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Here is how I think Play and Art work together, depicted in three separate diagrams, because print cannot provide an animated sequence. And please pay particular attention to the middle of the third diagram. Both Play (depicted in blue) and Art (depicted in cream in Figure 1) are about IF. Play starts from the dimension of curiosity, and asks the question ‘What if…’. Art finishes with the dimension of control, and creates the statement ‘As if…’.

Figure 1. The dialectic of play and art (1)

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Here are some of the characteristics of those dimensions (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The dialectic of play and art (2)

Of course none of these pairs of concepts are binary opposites, as they look on this two-dimensional diagram, but just at the opposite ends of an interplaying continuum, where players and artists, and player-artists find their own places, moving along the continuum between the more playful forms of art and the more artful forms of play. Hard-core art is at the right side of the diagram, and hard-core play is at the left. Both ends of the dimensions are open, as there is an element of play and negotiability in nearly all artworks, just as there is a strong component of art in nearly all play.

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There is, you may notice, a very large area of common ground in the middle, the territory of neither hard-core artists nor players (Figure 3).

The phrase ‘common ground’ is doubly significant, as this is the territory of

Figure 3. The dialectic of play and art (3)

not just artists and players, but everybody, the social and personal places where our lives intersect with: •

the aesthetic of everyday life (the emotional and cognitive understanding of how we design, perform, story and sing our lives) and

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•

the playfulness of everyday life (the pleasure, the humour, the ironic subversion of our observation and wit and social intercourse).

Paul Willis (1990) coined the phrase the ‘grounded aesthetic’ to denote part of this, and I am going to use the phrase ‘common aesthetic’. There is a major unrecognised aesthetic dimension in almost everything about contemporary life. I am not devaluing the word aesthetic by making it so broad as to be meaningless, or merely a simile for ‘beautiful’ or ‘nice’. I am actually referring to the formal shaping of media to create a fusion of emotional, sensory and cognitive impact in our lives: •

visits to art spaces like theatres, cinemas, concerts and galleries;

•

the pleasure we take in sketching, gardening and decorating our walls;

•

the meticulous design of adverts and the performance art of the whole promotion industry aimed at grabbing both our conscious and our subliminal attention;

•

the music and dance we hear and make at parties, on iPods, in karaoke bars;

•

the muzak that insinuates itself into our subliminal minds in lifts and supermarkets;

•

the chants that lift us in religious and spiritual contexts, and the marches that equally inspire us into battle and slaughter;

•

the hours we watch television fictions;

•

or perform to each other the stories of our day and the strange encounters that happened to us

•

and then there’s all the aesthetic of sport and many other of our pastimes

•

and the festivals.

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Readers will no doubt have had very differing approval responses to this list of examples. Some of them readers may like me have shuddered at, like the subliminal ads, the supermarket muzak and the military marches.

We need to remember that art and play are neither of them in themselves civilising or ethical, but powerfully neutral. This makes another overwhelming case for the arts in education – nobody could call that list unrelated to our real life, and unless we help to give young people the tools to understand, to manage for themselves and to critique the forms and media of these ubiquitous arts, our young people will be unable to make their own ethical decisions, or wrest the power of art from the hands of those who do manipulate it for their own ends. In other words, we need to give the students the holistic thinking – including understanding of the emotional, sensory, performative, kinaesthetic and embodied parts of cognition that are so often left out of what passes for cognition in the classroom – to make sense of the good and bad artistry in the real and virtual worlds we are all part of. We must also give them far greater access to the skills of these arts, the technical and aesthetic skills, for them to have agency in these worlds.

How much of that aesthetic of everyday life can be found in our schools and

in

our

faculties

of

education,

or

even

our

arts-training

conservatories?

We are fortunate in Australian looking glass schools to have now established the arts as a more or less key learning area, and have been developing a skilled specialist workforce of arts teachers. Some readers may not agree, but I think that having the Arts as a single Key Learning Area has far more advantages than disadvantages. For one thing, we

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have been forced to look at our commonalities, as well as our differences, and to mount a strong, unified case. I know the danger here, and for many of us the terror that seems to lurk in the imprecision of curriculum documents like the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VCAA 2005-7): that the Red Queen, who controls the timetable, will immediately lump us all together and schedule us as ‘integrated arts’ or arts porridge. However, across Australia all our curricula and syllabuses show that inside this holdall each art-form is quite distinct, and I think we have quite an important role to help the whole curriculum to integrate. In Arts as in multiculturalism, ‘integration’ does NOT have to mean assimilation. We know that the arts serve all three purposes in learning that VELS identifies.

1. Discipline-based learning – learning in and about the arts.

This is where the arts are currently placed in the VELS framework, the only place. The arts are the most lasting parts of the cultural heritage of all societies: our dreaming – that which makes us understand who we are as humans, like the most recent chroniclers of the older part of Australia’s dreaming: gifted artists like Johnathan Jagamara Ross – a child artist, by the way. Johnathan’s My Country (Aboriginal Children of Australia, 1977) is an acrylic painting with haunting qualities, a depiction of a homestead huddling under an overbearing sky, the juxtaposing of skeletons and live horses suggesting an eerie quality of timelessness.

Of the newer part of our dreaming, my part and that of most of us here, artists have brought and made their own heritage, like Tuan Vanh Tranh’s haunting painting ‘Farewell to Saigon’, of the moment he set off for Australia.

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Farewell to Saigon by Tuan Vanh Tranh.

Collection of the author. Used with permission..

2. Physical, personal and social learning - expressive and emotional skills Though VELS does not explicitly acknowledge this, the Arts are of course crucial to physical, personal and social learning. As we’ve seen, nothing provides personal and social agency better, as even a rather surprised Queensland Board of Senior School Studies report (1997) acknowledges, admitting that in teamwork and social skills, the arts and physical education were about the only subjects with positive ratings!

3. Interdisciplinary learning - learning THROUGH the arts

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The arts are now a fully developed pedagogy, where subjects across the range of all Key learning areas can be brought to life as realistic models of real life contexts which can transform the classroom and its inhabitants to places and people beyond. Teaching is much more than a practice, or a method. Teaching is an art – and I don’t just mean a craft.

It actually demands artistic skills and knowledge of quite a high order – what Eisner (1982) calls connoisseurship, though I prefer the word artistry. Those skills are needed right across the art forms, and preeminently in drama, the most likely art-form to be entirely absent from teacher-training programs. This is obviously true if we are intending to use an arts-based pedagogy. As many adults can attest, there’s nothing so excruciating or counter-productive to learning than an instructional role-play training session run by those who have no understanding of how dramatic empathy actually works.

I don’t mean that teacher artistry is necessary for teaching just the arts.

For all teachers, one of our jobs in facilitating learning is to create an appropriate, congruent environment: a harmonious, inspiring and motivating ambience where enthusiastic, embodied learning can flourish.

Science, Maths, Social Studies and English teachers also need the artistic skills to bring out the creativity, wonder and imagination, the artfulness and the playfulness in their own subjects.

Visually, aurally and kinaesthetically, how much of what we and the students do contributes to that? A classroom needs sophisticated understanding not only of the pictures on the wall, but how our bodies move and are grouped in the space and the aural harmonies and disharmonies. Good teachers know instinctively, and have found ways of subduing the cacophony, of brightening the visual barrenness, and

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embodying the learning. Contemporary teaching resources, and now especially the internet, certainly all provide ancillary visual and aural stimulation … but do we have to retreat into cyberspace to provide an atmosphere fit for learning?

And drama skills are the most important of all, because the classroom is a performative space and must have a performative pedagogy. This does not mean a teacher up the front giving a monologue to a silent audience. Dramatic performance means dialogue, not monologue. The students are equally actors, and a performative classroom means maximising the opportunities for meaningful dialogue. We could do much worse than follow the ancient Greek scholar Aristotle’s (c.330BC) analysis of drama here. Looking at Classical tragedy (and some among us might think an average classroom has quite a lot in common with a Greek tragedy) he identified the six key elements of dramatic performance, which tally very nicely with contemporary educational jargon that defines documents such as VELS and Queensland’s Productive Pedagogies (Queensland Government 2004-7): The classic tragedy must have: •

thought (high level thinking and deep understanding)

•

understanding of character (connectivity and diversity)

•

dialogue (language, relationships. and social skills)

•

plot, and unity of action (learning as coherent narrative)

•

music (understanding of harmony, energy and rhythm)

•

spectacle(understanding of the visual/kinaesthetic dimension)

Aristotle had not even read the VELS handbook when he diagnosed those two and a half thousand years ago.

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The classroom is a public stage, where a narrative of learning is to be enacted, and so dramatic tension and focus are crucial. The teacher herself is the key performer too, and must have some of the skills and range of an actor to command and shift focus, engage the students in the dialogue, inspire them with the story of what is to be learned, and above all model and embody the learning stance of the students. These all demand very specific artistic knowledge and skills.

How much of this do pre-service teachers get, except implicitly from absorbing the gifts of those lecturers who teach artistically and resist the dumbing down of university pedagogy in the interests of economic efficiency? Very little, and getting less. So many of the students and their lecturers too were largely untouched by arts in their own looking-glass schooling and teacher education, so how can we expect them to have those skills, that understanding of the elements of the art form – harmony, balance, rhythm, aesthetic shaping, effective dialogue and personal performance? And the situation is not improving: student teachers today, apart from arts specialists, are almost certain to get less of the arts in their pre-service courses than twenty years ago. We have to address this elsewhere at the moment, mainly in in-service education, where we can at least call on the services of the communities of artists help us.

This paper has been mainly addressed to educators. Artists and arts trainers reading it might be feeling smug at such a pillorying of the education industry. It should equally be asked how appropriate for the contemporary world the conservatory arts training approach is. I read a recent PhD thesis which demonstrated that many elite theatre trainers resist the term ‘educators’, and more so the notion that some kind of

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pedagogy might be needed for training talent (Prior 2004). I would not for a moment question the need for those artists with exceptional talent and the opportunity to use it at the highest, virtuoso level, to get the maximum dose of intensive training that they need. But it must be asked what we want from most of our artists in contemporary society. In the short term, we have to have something to fill the very large cultural centres we have built, to satisfy the sophisticated palates of cognoscenti like ourselves.

However, every time I look at children’s art and their dramatic play, I marvel again at the sophistication and controlled purposeful creativity of their invention, their composition – and I realise what an incredible artistic resource, life-long, is devalued, allowed and in fact encouraged to wither, in every ordinary person, never mind the ‘mute, inglorious Miltons’ that Gray mourned in his elegy. But the twenty-first century is not as certain sure as the eighteenth or the twentieth were. I look at art today, particularly my own dramatic art, how it is changing, and no longer fits so easily into those cultural centres. The once derided notion of community art is once more becoming currency in the wave of postmodern, post-structuralist life, where the opportunities for art are open, processual, unfinished: community television and radio; group-devised film; verbatim and forum theatre; arts therapy; the visual art of the palimpsest such as altered books and interactive performance art, with multiple artists at work; the collaborative music and multi-medial art that can be constructed with a sampler and digital technology.

A lot of our artists whether they want to or not already spend a great deal of time in educational or community settings. So they should do.

UNESCO’s just published global research compendium of arts education

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identifies as the first characteristic of a quality national arts program; active partnerships between schools and arts organisations and between teachers, artists and the community. How far do traditional conservatory models of training fit artists for these kinds of futures? Theatre artists-inresidence usually have to be actor, playwright, director, teacher-in-role and teacher-out-of-role, administrator and production manager, and often designer and stage manager as well. There are few drama schools or courses which fit them for all these roles, or the other roles they will also be asked to fill in artistic partnerships with community organisations.

Teachers do not want actors in theatre in education, or visual artists in residence, or music and dance teachers for their students, who are merely using that job as a bread-ticket while waiting for the ‘real job’ – ie in adult theatre or art - to come along.

In conclusion, it may be like a mouse roaring to suggest it, but I believe that education needs artistry as much as art needs pedagogy, and that artistic educators and educated artists can and must make common cause in our universities. We must listen to each other, collaborate and adapt our creative practice to what our colleagues are offering – and help them to realise that the arts are the real hidden trump card of education - as Paul Simon says: the ace in the hole.

Some people say music [and all the arts] That's their ace in the hole…

Ace in the hole Lean on me Don’t you know me I'm your guarantee Hey, Junior, I'm your ACE in the hole Hey, Junior, I'm your ACE in the hole

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This is the kind of pedagogy I am dreaming of: the teacher and classroom that is both playful and artful.

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References Abbs, P. (1987). Living powers: the arts in education. London: Falmer.

Aboriginal Children of Australia (1977). The Aboriginal children’s history of Australia. Sydney: Rigby.

Aristotle (c.330BC). The poetics. Variously published.

Best, D. (1992). The rationality of feeling: understanding the arts in education. London: Falmer.

Brice Heath S.(2004) Individuals, Institutions and the Uses of Literacy.

Journal of Applied Linguistics. Vol.1 (1): 74-91.

Burton, B., O’Toole, J. & Plunkett, A. (2005). Cooling conflict – a new approach to managing bullying and conflict in schools. Frenchs Forest: Pearson.

Carroll, L. (1871). Through the looking glass, and what Alice found there.

Variously published.

Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Variously published.

Clegg, A. (1972). The changing primary school: its problems and priorities . London: Penguin.

Dalrymple, L. (1996). In Reflections in the river: the IDEA 95 Video.

Brisbane: IDEA Publications.

Department of Education, Training and the Arts. (2004-7). New Basics Project: Productive Pedagogies. Brisbane, Queensland Government. http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/html/pedagogies/pedagog.html.

Retrieved 2 May 2007.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Minton.

Eisner, E. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale UP.

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Eisner, E. (1982). Cognition and curriculum: a basis for deciding what to teach. New York: Longman.

Fiske, E. (2002). Champions of Change – the impact of the arts on learning. Washington, DC: Arts Education Partnerships.

Gardner, H & Perkins, D. (1989). Art, mind, and education: research from Project Zero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Golomb, C. (1992). The child's creation of a pictorial world. Berkeley: California UP. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Grumet, M. (2004). No one learns alone. In: Nick Rabkin & Robin Redmond Putting the Arts in the picture – re-framing education in the 21st century. Chicago: Columbia College.

Haseman, B. (2005). Card Sharps – Playing our creativity. Reflective Keynote: Backing Our Creativity Symposium. Melbourne: Australia Council. http://www.ozco.gov.au/arts_resources/publications/backing_our_creativity_symp osium_final_report/files/3711/BOC_reflective_keynote.pdf. Retrieved 2 May 2007

Heathcote, D. & Bolton, B. (1995). Drama for learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture.

Boston: Beacon.

Matthews, J. (1999). The art of childhood and adolescence : the construction of meaning. London: Falmer.

O’Toole, J. (1991). Oracy: the forgotten basic. Brisbane: Minister’s Consultative Committee on Curriculum.

Plato (c.350BC). The Republic. [Book 3.] Variously translated.

Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (c 1997): Unidentified report on Board Subjects and Key Competencies.

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Prior, R. (2004). Characterising actor trainers' understanding of their practice in Australian and English drama schools. Ph.D. Thesis.

Brisbane: Griffith University.

Read, H. (1964). Art and education. Melbourne: Cheshire.

Reid, L. Arnaud (1969) Meaning in the arts. London: Allen and Unwin.

Reimer, (1992). The arts, education, and aesthetic knowing. Chicago: U. Chicago Press.

Robinson, K. (1999). All our futures: creativity, culture and education.

London: NACCCE. Ross, M. (1981). The Aesthetic imperative: relevance and responsibility in arts education. Oxford: Pergamon.

Schaffner, M., Little, G. & Felton, H. (1984). Drama, language and learning: reports of the drama and language research project.

Hobart: Speech and Drama Centre, Education Department of Tasmania.

Slade, P. (1954). Child drama. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Swanwick, K. (1988). Music, mind and education. London: Routledge.

Training and Development Agency. (2006) Developing people to support learning - A skills strategy for the wider school workforce 2006-09.

London: TDA. VCAA (2005-2007). Victorian Essential Learning Standards. http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au. . Retrieved 2 May 2007.

Wagner, B-J. (1998). Educational drama and language arts: what research shows.. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Willis, P. (1990) Moving culture: an enquiry into the cultural activities of young people. London: Gulbenkian Foundation

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Exploring children’s development of ideas in music and dance Clare Henderson, Deborah Fraser, Graham Price University of Waikato

Authors’ biographies Clare Henderson is Senior lecturer in Music Education at the University of Waikato, where she co -ordinates the primary and secondary music education teaching team.

She teaches at undergraduate, graduate and post – graduate levels. Her research interests centre around inclusiveness in music education and children's development and refinement of musical ideas. She regularly musically directs for the local Operatic Society. clhend@waikato.ac.nz Deborah Fraser has published books and articles extensively on a range of educational topics from special and gifted education through to spirituality and children’s use of metaphor. Her particular interest in the arts relates to the power of the aesthetic to inform our understanding of many ways of knowing. Deborah@waikato.ac.nz Graham Price has taught arts education across the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. He maintains roles in national resource development, national art assessment, regional professional development in the arts and arts research initiatives in primary school settings. He acts as subject matter consultant for The Australian Learning Federation’s Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative (SOCCI). grahamp@waikato.ac.nz

Abstract Eisner maintains that the Arts education community needs ‘empirically grounded examples of artistic thinking related to the nature of the tasks students engage in, the material with which they work, the context’s norms and the cues the teacher provides to advance their students’ thinking’ (2000:217). This paper reflects on preliminary results of a collaborative research project between teachers and university researchers that is investigating how children develop and refine arts-making ideas and related skills in Dance and Music in a small sample of schools in New Zealand.

Factors such as the place of repetition in the development of ideas, the relevance of offers, the place of verbal and non-verbal communication in arts idea generation, and group work as an accepted ritual of practice, are explored and discussed.

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Introduction This paper describes some preliminary results from research that investigates how a sample of primary school children develops and refines ideas in dance and music. This is part of a more comprehensive project in arts idea generation, in which three university researchers and eight generalist teacher-researchers are working collaboratively over two years to jointly identify and devise aims, methodology, analysis and related action research phases on this topic. Such collaboration is in line with a worldwide trend in educational research that is moving from research done to teachers, towards working with teachers (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). The project utilises ethnographic, case study, self-study and action research traditions of educational research, and in keeping with naturalistic inquiry, recognises that ‘meaning arises out of social situations and is handled through interpretive processes’ (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2000:138).

The first phase of the project investigated the curriculum focus of the participating teachers, and subsequent learning by children in each of the arts disciplines. observation,

Hours of actual practice were captured through

video,

audio

and

interviews.

The

raw

data

was

collaboratively analysed using a process of categorisation based on what supports, constrains, or is interesting about children’s idea development, in addition to teacher or classroom ‘rituals of practice’ that were seen to be of influence during this process. This phase acknowledged that there exists a growing body of research recognising that teachers’ conscious and unconscious rituals of practice impact significantly on children’s learning (Nuthall, 2001).

From this work, case studies of teachers’ Journal of Artistic and Creative Education

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practices were produced, that identified a set of central themes and issues that in turn provided a rich platform upon which to base the next action research phase. Some preliminary data from two of the eight, coconstructed case studies in dance and music are now described and discussed.

Case Study 1: Dance The dance unit, based on a Kiwiana theme, was designed for a 9-10 year old option group in an urban, high socio-economic school. Kiwiana is anything that is iconically symbolic of life in New Zealand (NZ). The Kiwi is a famous NZ native bird and people born in this country are frequently nicknamed Kiwis. The children in the focus group were of mixed gender.

Collaboratively, they had been creating a dance that was based on the theme of Fish and Chips, a theme devised through teacher and class negotiation. One aspect of the NZ Arts curriculum is the practical knowledge (PK) strand, which focuses on the development of practical knowledge in the arts. This involves exploration of skills and knowledge of elements, devices, techniques and terminology in each arts discipline.

This class had already completed considerable PK exploratory work on repetition, sequence, travelling steps, unison movement, levels and shapes. Within this phase of the research there were more than six hours of video data featuring groups as they devised their dances. The still photos shown in Figure 1 capture the progression of the focus group’s idea development as they constructed their dance, from first response to the informal presentation stage. However, the work shown here is representative of a similar process demonstrated by the other six groups, who were working concurrently in the school hall.

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Figure 1. Development of ideas identified in Dance research case study

While seated, all groups started by developing a mind-map of dance ideas related to the theme. This phase continued for at least 20 minutes.

The mind-map was a means of charting their dance ideas graphically onto a piece of paper so that they could recall the movements later. It Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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was common to see children in groups using hand movements as a type of shorthand to demonstrate their intent, while they discussed their ideas (Figure 1a). Shorthand examples included undulating hand movements from low to high levels to represent waves, or wriggling movements with hands joined at the palms and fingers to show the wriggling of a fish.

Once the music started, the children immediately stood up and proceeded to negotiate their way, verbally and non-verbally, into their series of sequenced dance moves. This process, which was driven by the children, not the teacher, involved improvising and imitating each other in a repetitive way, sometimes together as a group, or in pairs (Figure 1b). Significantly, all groups appeared to be linking or sequencing a number of different moves together in a similar method of negotiation.

At times, individuals became engrossed in refining a move out of phase with the others. There was clear evidence in all groups of parallel imitation of favoured moves between individuals in a group, or even between groups. This kinaesthetic trial and error method of developing ideas occurred for over 25 minutes.

The focus group appeared to have a very clear picture of what move followed the next in the sequence and as one move became refined, they added the next (Figure 1c, and Figures 1e to 1i). The progression in their Fish and Chip scene was clear as they moved from fish moving in the water, either on the same or individual pathways, to fish which were caught. Here their moves suggested that the fish were killed and battered and cooked unceremoniously in hot oil and this was shown graphically by jiggling of their arms and legs as they sat in a wheel formation on the floor (Figure 1h). The focus group favoured either unison moves, or individual repetition of the same move one after another, in sequence.

On several occasions, the teacher modelled aspects of their work in an Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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effort to help extend and refine some ideas (Figure 1d). For example, she encouraged them to make their initial wave movement in ways that explored size. What might happen if you make your moves using a wider range of levels.

Case Study 2: Music This teacher was working on a bush unit with a class of 6-7 years olds, who were from an urban, mid to high socio-economic school. The bush theme was part of an integrated science, language, music and visual art project based around not only the lushness of New Zealand bush, with its green ferns and evergreen trees such as rimu, totara and kauri, but also the animal life contained within it. This case study relates to a lesson very early in the teaching/learning sequence. At this point the children had not experienced the bush first hand. A regular ritual of practice for the teacher was extensive experimentation (PK) with the class, while they were seated in a large circle. Using stones and ribbons as sound makers, the children individually explored different techniques of playing to represent bush sounds (Figure 2a). They listened to each other’s efforts and imitated some of these, after teacher directed discussion related to the sound qualities. This experimentation, where the teacher established a raft of sound making techniques and possibilities, continued for at least 25 minutes. Such an emphasis on exploration was seen in subsequent lessons too.

The follow-up activity to this

experimentation involved a small group composition, where the children were required to sequence sounds to represent the bush, using the same sound makers, stones and ribbons (Figure 2b).

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Figure 2. Development of ideas identified in Music research case study

The groups generated ideas for approximately 17 minutes, with minimal verbal negotiation.

In the focus group, there was no evidence of a

negotiated ‘game plan’. Rather, the children engaged in parallel, exploratory play, which involved little apparent organisation.

Most other groups

operated similarly, with an emphasis on generating sound as opposed to talking about it. In the focus group, there was evidence of imitative behaviour between pairs as well as the whole group. This involved a high degree of repetitive sound making such as swirling ribbons in the air and snapping them tautly while holding both ends, as well as the scraping of stones in circles on the floor. These sound ideas (motifs) appeared to change little over their time together.

On presenting to the class, the

children improvised their piece and a greater sense of ensemble awareness appeared to develop. They made some new moves and revisited favourite

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old ones, which they layered over each other, moving in and out of the sonic texture, all the time using non-verbal visual, kinaesthetic and listening cues as they worked together. Group unison and individual work was evident as they played in parallel, imitated and repeated ideas. The piece showed no evidence of musical structure, as adults may understand it, and there was little sonic idea development, or repetitive refinement.

Discussion Although these case-study findings represent a small sample, they are indicative of some compelling issues, tensions and points of interest relative to the development of ideas in the arts. These findings have also been replicated in other subsequent episodes of the data collection.

Three aspects will now be discussed.

1. What is the place of repetition in development and refinement of dance and music ideas?

Repetition of several kinds was observable in the generation and development of ideas in music and dance. There was repetition and imitation of idea fragments, or motifs, between group members, which was demonstrated as a type of improvisatory play. Repetition was also used as a means of developing and extending ideas, such as a structuring device. Thirdly, repetition was used as a refining technique.

These will be discussed in turn.

The repetition and imitation of ideas that were demonstrated through improvisatory play between individuals, pairs or the whole group, appeared to be integral to the idea generation phase in both disciplines.

For example, in dance, such repetition involved the seeding of a movement by one child, such as undulating the hands in parallel, which Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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would then be quickly picked up in peripheral vision by another child. As each child caught the move, refinements such as size or level variation were often added. This imitative parallel play occurred with seamless fluency, almost as if by osmosis. In addition, the children repeated the moves and sounds over and over again, as if they derived kinaesthetic pleasure from this repetition. In music, ribbon waving or snapping and stone rubbing or scraping were motivic cell ideas, which were quickly imitated and repeatedly played. It is possible that such repetition and imitation is an instinctive means of validating the efficacy of an idea; that is, a winning idea is one taken up by others, as idea possibilities are explored. This may be a subtle way of accepting or rejecting offers that are made in the group and is a concept that will be discussed later in the paper.

The dance group utilised repetition of ideas as a structuring device to extend, or develop their sequences. For instance, their undulating hand movements representing fish swimming in water were introduced and enacted by one student, and each student in turn repeated this identical movement in canon. This move was then transmuted to a sideways wave which two groups of three then repeated in unison on different pathways, so reinforcing the affect. The researchers observed other groups who also repeated previous material that had been used earlier in their piece. It is feasible that the verse or chorus nature of the music may have triggered such repetition. However, these children seemed to be aware of the importance of repetition in their dance structure. In contrast, the younger children in the music group did not significantly develop their ideas structurally past improvisatory, parallel play, generally just repeating their favoured moves over and over. Kratus cited by Glover (2001:31) maintains that there is an age related continuum of idea generation in music, which Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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starts with exploration, followed by an ability to develop ideas, which occurs around nine years of age. The same may be true for dance. The issue as to whether development and extension of ideas past initial exploratory response is an age related phenomena, begs further scrutiny.

In both disciplines, sound and movement motivic ideas generated and discussed in the exploratory work of the whole class (Practical Knowledge, or PK) were utilised in the children’s follow-up group work.

For instance, children in dance had explored repeating ideas one by one in canon as opposed to all enacting the move in unison. In music, the scraping and tapping of stones and ribbon waving or snapping ideas had also been explored in the ritualistic, PK class experimentation stage.

The fact that both groups used ideas seeded in earlier class work can be considered from several perspectives; follow-through from deliberate teacher scaffolding can be heartening. The children’s joy in repeating the favoured moves and sounds that were seeded earlier, indicates that the need to copy may be a necessary stage in developing ideas, and perhaps fosters confidence to create further. In addition, imitation of structuring devices such as canon is historically an inherent component of musical composition. Take for instance 12 bar blues in jazz, or sonata form from the classical period, both of which are used as a structural scaffold for creative invention. Such a structural blueprint, within which innovation can occur, has undoubtedly provided security throughout composition history. On the other hand, there can be a tension for teachers between honouring children’s intuitive knowledge and teaching to explicit techniques, elements or structural understandings, as the latter can impact on the originality of creative work.

The delicate balance

between these positions and its relationship to what we teach, or not, is Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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an ongoing area of debate (eg. Lavender & Predock-Linnell, 2001; Sternberg, 2000).

Repetition as a refining technique in idea development is an interesting area to interrogate. The older dance groups were willing to move past a first response, and to repeat and rework their creative work, independent of the teacher. However, this differs from the younger children in the music focus group who did not rework, or refine. What promotes the need to repeat and refine ideas?

Development and refinement of ideas past first response means that parts or all of a work need to be repeatable.

However, this can be

difficult with the performance arts, which tend to be temporal and intangible; what is produced is transient, in the moment.

There are

particular challenges in asking children to develop, or refine something that is located in the past and is reliant upon memory. The children in the dance example were applying a repeat factor to their project, which, by deduction, means that they could remember what they had done in order to repeat it.

We can speculate as to what factors supported the dance groups’ memory recall to repeat and refine. Certainly, the visual mind-map, the kinaesthetic movement cues and the music cues appeared to aid memory and triggered movement recall. Notably, the focus group and all other groups repeated and refined their work over and over again.

Because the music was on a continuous loop over an extended period of time, it is likely that the children were subconsciously triggered to go back and start again. Interestingly, as soon as the music stopped, they sat down.

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The relevancy of the creative theme could be significant in the children’s willingness to refine. The dance groups had co-constructed the theme with their teacher, which arguably gave them ownership over the outcome. In fact, they asked for two more sessions to keep reworking.

This tends to corroborate that learning embedded in students' personal life-world intensifies the level of engagement (Bean 1997, Efland 2002).

On the other hand, the music groups were working to a prescribed task outlined by the teacher, and although they may have complied with the requirements they may not have been so personally involved in the process.

It is highly likely that the pre-planned group mind-map facilitated the dance devising process, in that it helped them clarify their ideas and provided the group with cues to prompt memory. Data from a follow up interview with the focus group confirms that most of them could clearly articulate their group idea development process; (“I usually think about it first. If you leave the thinking to the last minute, you don’t really know what to do”. Participant “Z”).

In contrast, no such overt planning was evident at any stage with the music group. Their end product was as delightfully spontaneous and haphazard as their initial group devising process. When asked in interview to talk about what they had done, they had clear difficulty in recalling or articulating any of the choices made.

We can speculate that age plays a significant role here, which raises several questions. Is the ability to imagine and negotiate a common sound or dance piece of any sequence or length, age related? Does this demand a schematic maturity that younger children do not necessarily Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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possess, as it requires the retention of sequenced segments in memory for a long period of time? Or, is it harder to imagine or retain in memory sound bytes (as opposed to movement) information that can be triggered visually, symbolically, or kinaesthetically? This does raise the question of the place of symbols in music composition to prompt the memory of a momentary, intangible event.

All these questions require further

investigation.

2. What is the place of verbal and non-verbal communication in the idea development process?

The major difference between the two groups in regard to group collaboration was that the dance focus group’s process revolved around a negotiated common goal that they were actualising, verbally and nonverbally. In contrast, the music group did not appear to negotiate a common sonic outcome, verbally or non-verbally. Their outcome was more sonic exploration and an improvised free-flow of ideas, devised through parallel play. There is arguably value in children working out their structural overview by discussion, as shown by all the dance groups’ process. However, it is clear that an initial lack of confidence to create through sound, or movement can pressure children to default to words as a means of working out their ideas. It begs the question as to what extent verbal discussion might be given supremacy over kinaesthetic and sonic exploration. Teachers need to be conscious that each art form is a language in is own right, which should have supremacy over verbal language as a communicative medium. Clearly, teachers need to encourage children to tease out their ideas through experimenting and improvising physically with the art form, as opposed to becoming entrenched in a verbal discussion phase for too long.

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Creative collaboration demands the ability to negotiate both verbally and non-verbally and raises the place of ‘offers’ of ideas within the process (Torelle & McNamara 1998).

In dance and music the children made

verbal, kinaesthetic or sonic offers of their ideas, which were unceremoniously accepted, ignored, or rejected by others.

In music,

sonic and kinaesthetic cues appeared to be accepted, if they were picked up and imitated in parallel play. Words were not needed. In comparison, there was considerable verbal negotiation accompanying the giving and receiving of dance offers, at both the idea generation and development and refinement stages, although there was greater time devoted to dancing overall.

One can speculate as to why offers are received, rejected, or not given at all.

Torelle & McNamara discuss the place of offers in drama

improvisation where group members need to be ‘…open and ready to accept new situations…. saying ‘yes’ to ideas and actions that evolve’ (1998:93). However, some team members can stall or block offers, so hindering the development and extension of ideas completely.

Fear of losing esteem may influence whether a student will make an offer in the first place, as individuals in a group need to feel emotionally safe to offer ideas (Smith 1993).

Significantly, in music there is evidence to

suggest that creative collaboration is facilitated by shared tastes, commitment to the task and friendship amongst the group members (Davis 2005; Meill & MacDonald 2000). It is likely that grouping on such a basis would help establish the emotionally safe environment required to give and receive offers, without the threat of put-downs (Smith 1993).

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The novelty of the idea to engage may also influence the viability of offers.

But more importantly, so does the status of the offerer. For

example, one student in the dance group whose principal language was not English could not contribute verbally in the discussion phase. During the subsequent dance idea development phase, she made movement offers but these were ignored. Because of her previous non-contribution in the verbal pre-planning stage, it can be speculated that her status in the group was minimal, and therefore her contributions were not consciously seen.

Craft (2000) describes creativity as idea generation embedded in possibility thinking, which requires one to be open to a wide range of solutions. By default, this means that creators, who are uncomfortable with delayed closure, may feel compelled to find a quick solution to a creative task. This could explain why some offers are not received, or developed in groups, especially if there is a time restriction placed on producing an outcome. Teachers could help enable children in this respect, if more emphasis and time were given to generating multiple solutions coupled with sensitising children to the notion that first response is not necessarily best response.

3. What is the place of group work as accepted ritual of practice?

We are seeing group work as an accepted ritual of practice in dance and music creative work in all primary classrooms involved in the research. It is likely that group work as accepted practice in these arts disciplines is for pragmatic and management reasons, rather than for arts pedagogical reasons. Group work clearly helps children to learn from each other, and to develop, extend, vary and contrast ideas that require more than one or two people to be actualised. What we are not clear about is: what is the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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best use of group work in the classroom creative process. Clearly group work is one way of children developing ideas, but it should not always be an unchallenged practice.

Arguably, group dynamics influence the idea development pathway and outcome,

as

collaborative,

creative

outcomes

inevitably

require

compromise. This can mean that idea generation and development by individuals can be thwarted by the collective power of the group, or subgroups within it.

One might question whether group work is

necessarily the only way for children to develop their dance and music ideas, as it takes a level of maturity and skill to verbally and non-verbally negotiate a desired group outcome (Webb and Dean cited by Kutnik and Rogers, 1994). Group work may also impact on the quality and depth of creative idea development and imaginative possibility thinking of which an individual child is capable and it is debatable whether, as a ritual of practice, mixed-ability grouping necessarily allows for this.

Further

investigation is required as to when individual or paired work, divorced from the negotiation demanded in large groups, might better extend children’s imaginative capabilities in dance and music, or when larger groups might be preferable.

Conclusion These preliminary findings raise a number of factors for dance and music educators to consider. It may require us to review rituals of practice regarding group work, and to provide more extended opportunities for individual, or paired idea development work; to be sensitive to the composition

of

groups,

recognising

that

shared

interests,

and

commitment to a creative project play an important role in the arts; to teach to the mechanics of giving and receiving offers and what may block Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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offers; to increase the level of ownership children have over the design of a creative project; and to give greater supremacy to the language of the Art form as opposed to verbal language in artistic idea development. It may require an increase in the amount of time given for creative production, and an increased awareness of the need for repetition in refinement.

It may also necessitate greater teacher acceptance of

children’s improvisation as a valid creative outcome, so that what children actually bring to creative work can be observed more objectively, unfettered by adult lenses.

We are heartened by the ownership and empowerment shown by the teachers in the project and feel privileged to be part of this on-going collaboration. Although the sample is small, these snap-shots of arts practice in New Zealand provide a significant catalyst for further investigation.

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References: Beane, J. (1997) Curriculum integration: Designing the core of democratic education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2000). Research methods in education 5th ed. London: Routledge Falmer.

Craft, A. (2000) What is creativity? Creativity across the classroom.

London: Routledge.

Davis, S. (2005) That thing you do! Compositional processes of a rock band. International Journal of Education in the Arts, 6 (16), 1-20.

Eisner, E. (2002) From episteme to phronesis to artistry in the study and improvement of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, (18), 375-385.

Efland, A. (2002) Art and cognition: Integrating the visual arts in the curriculum. New York: Teachers’ College Press.

Glover, J. (2001) Children’s composing 4-14. New York: Routledge Falmer.

Kutnik, P. & Rogers, C. (eds). (1994) Groups in schools. London: Cassell Education.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2004) A handbook for teacher research: From design to implementation. Berkshire: Open University Press.

Lavender, L., & Predock-Linnell, J. (2001) From improvisation to choreography: The critical bridge. Research in Dance Education, 2 (2), 195-209.

Meill, D., & MacDonald, R. (2000) Children’s creative collaborations: The importance of friendship when working together on a musical composition. Social Development, 9, (3), 348- 369.

Nuthall, G. (2001) The cultural myths and realities of teaching and learning. The Jean Herbison Lecture, New Zealand Association for Research in Education, Annual Conference Christchurch, NZ.

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Smith, Bruce L. (1993) Interpersonal behaviours that damage the productivity of creative problem solving groups. The Journal of Creative Behaviour, 27 (3), 171-187.

Sternberg, R. (2000) Indentifying and developing creative giftedness.

Roeper Review, 23 ( 2), 60-64.

Torelle, L., & McNamara, M. (1998) A practical approach to drama.

London: Heinemann Books.

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Arts Practice, the Chalkboard and the Pedagogy of Transcendence Robert Vincs Victorian College of the Arts

Author’s biography Rob Vincs is a Melbourne based musician who specialises in improvised and experimental music. He has performed in the United States, Europe and Asia in a diverse array of performance contexts. Having completed his PhD examining the phenomenon of transcendent experience, Rob’s research interest is in the creative process. r.vincs@vca.unimelb.edu.au

Abstract Against a backdrop of jazz based improvised music practice, this paper explores the idea that the ‘transcendent’ experience reported by many master musicians is the core experience of music making.

The psychological and spiritual aspects associated with the transcendent experience may assume multiple levels of engagement that are available to both the master musician and the musical lay-person alike. This paper reports on my experience in teaching student musicians to access the transcendent state, beginning with over-coming issues of low-self esteem, progressing towards a state of ‘flow’, then further allowing for the deeper experience of contact with an undefinable transpersonal force.

Arguably music departments across the tertiary sector ignore the transcendent experience, for to acknowledge the experience and place it centrally within a curriculum would demand an extreme makeover of the pedagogy of musical and personal mastery.

Introduction When addressing the question of how can arts practice and pedagogy can stimulate innovative and creative learning and teaching across the curriculum, I offer the example of my PhD study where, utilising a practice-based research methodology, I made significant and profound changes to my art making practice that subsequently challenged me to

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revise my thoughts about how I taught students, particularly in the discipline of musical improvisation.

I have been evolving a pedagogy that is more aligned with my thoughts about the concept of ‘mastery’ and the significance of the ‘transcendent experience’ arising from listening to music either as a musician or an audience.

My development has been aided with the emergence of

various popular texts, which will be discussed, relating aspects of Zen Buddhism and the concept of musical ‘mastery’ to a Western audience.

My research is directed toward understanding the phenomenon of ‘transcendent experience’ arising from musical performance, particularly in improvised music. I contend that the transcendent experience is the highest level of musical experience and ironically, it seems to be more accessible to the musical layperson. The transcendent experience is arguably the fullest realisation of the creative mind. I have therefore attempted to introduce these concepts into my teaching of ‘elite’ music artists.

In the first instance I will attempt to make the case that the transcendent experience is a central experience to the master musicians in the field of improvised music, particularly in jazz derived genres and some areas of alternative rock music. I will then attempt to define the transcendent experience, albeit in a limited way, to suit the purposes of this paper.

Finally, I will discuss some of the ideas arising from my PhD research that I use in my class, that place the concepts of ‘mastery,’ ‘depth’ and the experience of ‘transcendence’ as the highest priority.

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The Phenomenon of Transcendence In a tale from jazz folklorei a story is told about master saxophonist John Coltrane who, when asked by Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley about his playing style said, ‘Well, I just get into this thing and I don’t know how to stop!’ Amusingly, Miles Davis’ reaction to this comment was simply that Coltrane should ‘Try pulling the goddam horn out of his mouth!’ This story is significant because it suggests there are at least two distinct ways improvisatory music comes into being. Davis’ comment, in this context, may be read as Davis the ‘modernist’ suggesting that ‘the self’ constructs each artistic act, and that each note or musical phrase uttered by a jazz improviser is a direct representation of that player’s ‘will,’ thus defining the ‘self’ of the player. However, Coltrane was alluding to an approach to improvisatory music that is concerned with transcending the ‘self.’ In the ‘transcended state,’ a player is no longer concerned with identifying ‘self’ as the author of an artistic product; rather, ‘forces’ at work outside the ‘self’ control the creation of the music when the player dissolves the concept of ‘I.’ii There is reason to believe that this state of transcendence may be experienced not only by master musicians, such as Coltrane, but also musical ‘lay people,’ that is people who ‘enjoy’ music but have no theoretical knowledge of the structural foundationsiii upon which the music they are listening to has been constructed.

The problem here is

that people, particularly musicians in the act of playing music, are able to experience a state of being that arises through (but not exclusively from) listening to music. However, the experience of transcendence does not appear to have a way of being commonly verbalised or expressed in a manner, which correlates to the experience of a musician. Co-founder of Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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musical group The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, in conversation with Derek Bailey, states: Sometimes this feels to me as though you don’t have to really think about what’s happening. Things just flow. It’s kind of hard to report on but it’s a real thing. I mean we’ve checked it out with each other and after twenty-five years of exploring these outer limits of musical weirdness this is stuff that we pretty much understand intuitively but we don’t have a language to talk about it. (1992:42) As a musician, the experience I have of transcendence manifests itself in two primary ways: firstly, as a physical phenomena where I experience a sense of ‘release’ from my body, and secondly, as a ‘transcendence’ over my technical limitations as a saxophone player including my conceptual and technical limitations as an improvising-composer. In an article I wrote in 1997, (which became a turning point in my own artistic growth) I expressed my sense of the transcendent experience: Sometimes, when I am improvising, I feel as if I leave my body, able to hear my performance as the audience hears it, external to myself in a type of aural projection.

In these

moments, all that I can imagine or sonorize is expressed through my saxophone, well executed technically and coherent as musical expression. With little effort from myself, the music manages itself, reveals itself and I am a conduitspirit medium, a willing participant in an exhilarating interplay of sound-emotion-sensuality. Too often, the moment is brief, I become self-aware and become responsible once again for managing the composition in real time, cajoling the sound to speak from the saxophone, risking bad note choices and the honks and squeaks of an ill tempered saxophone. (1997:7) Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Many musicians share this experience at some level. In Philip Sudo’s book Zen Guitar, guitarist David Torn is quoted as saying: I lose myself at some point during almost every musical performance. There’s some point of struggle and super selfconsciousness, but I always get lost at some point. While I’m playing, there’s a pattern of struggling through something and then cracking through it by a weird combination of willpower and letting go. That’s the most enjoyable thing for me: “Uhoh, he’s gone!” (1998:168) English guitarist John McLaughlin experiences something comparable with

Torn, however,

McLaughlin

attributes the

phenomenon

of

transcendence to spiritual forces outside himself that shape the creative process when he is able to relinquish his own sense of ‘self.’ McLaughlin states: If I can get out of the way, if I can be selfless enough, and if I can be generous loving and caring enough to abandon what I have and my own preconceived, silly notions of what I think I am-and become truly who in fact I am, which is really just another child of God-then the music can really use me. And therein lies my fulfilment. That’s when the music starts to happen. (1998:77) Defining Transcendence Garcia and Torn’s experience of transcendence appears to correlate closely with the Buddhist concept of ‘samadhi.’ Musician and author Steven Nachmanovitch in his book Free Play: the Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts defines samadhi: Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Buddhists call this state of absorbed, selfless, absolute concentration samadhi. Samadhi is best known to be attained through the practice of meditation, though there is also walking

samadhi,

cooking

samadhi,

sandcastle-building

samadhi, writing samadhi, fighting samadhi, lovemaking samadhi, flute-playing samadhi.

When the self-clinging

personality somehow drops away, we are both entranced and alert at the same time. (1990:52) The Buddhist concept of samadhi is arguably similar to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s now well-known theory of ‘flow.’

Another way of

conceptualising samadhi, or flow, is encapsulated in the idea of ‘unconscious competence’. For example, when you learn to drive a car, each step has to be consciously thought about. Make sure mirrors are adjusted, seat in correct position, turn on the motor whilst the car is in a neutral gear, do not use the accelerator when doing this (unless you have an old car with manual choke), indicator on, clutch in, put car in gear, check for oncoming traffic, if clear –go. Accelerate, change up gears, push the clutch in, no-that’s the brake, head check, turn off indicator and so forth. In time with practice and experience all these steps move to the realm of the unconscious, we don’t consciously think about them and we expand our awareness to the complexities of the traffic and its flow around us. We do not limit our experience to what we need to do to make the car operate.

Many of us have experienced

arriving

recollection

at

a

destination

with

no

of

the

journey.

Nachmanovich might call this ‘driving samadhi.’

McLaughlin’s experience of transcendence is slightly different to Garcia and Torn insofar as McLaughlin attributes his transcendent experience to Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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being in the correct alignment with a transpersonal force McLaughlin calls God.

This suggests that there are multiple levels of the

transcendent experience confirmed in the following Sufi teaching: …the Sufi, through an act of the will and deliberate deeds, suppressed

his

individual

ego

and

its

concomitant

attachments to worldly things and emotions in order to become receptive to the following level of “states” (ahwál), which were vouchsafed to him through God’s grace. These culminated in the goal of the mystical quest, the final states of bliss, which were identified by Sufis according to their proclivities,

as

love

(mahabba,

later

`ishq),

mystical

knowledge (ma`rifa), and the total loss of ego consciousness and the concomitant absorption and subsistence in and through God (fana’ and baqa’). (1995:776) In defining transcendent experience, Robert M. Adams writing in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy includes, ‘the property of rising out of or above other things.’ (1995:807) What is ‘risen out of’ in this context?

David Torn, in the previous quotation, articulates the struggle in overcoming ‘self’ where self-consciousness is perceived by Torn to be a barrier to transcendent experience.

For the purposes of this discussion, the concept of ‘self’ is expanded to include, the set of limitations that we believe about ourselves that form a boundary to our personal experience. MacDonald, Hargreaves and Miell define this self-boundary more simply as self-esteem where, ‘self-esteem is the evaluative component of the self, and has both cognitive and emotional aspects: how worthy we think, and feel we are.’

This is

significant because this definition suggests a reflective perhaps Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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judgemental aspect of ‘self’ as if ‘self’ looks in the mirror at ‘self.’iv Hence, transcendence may be defined in this context as ‘self’ overcoming the judging ‘self’ to achieve a psychological-spiritual state that engages with a commonality of transcendent experiences that include: Experiences

associated

with

sensations

of

flying,

weightlessness, floating, rising up and so on – as well as “contact words” – that is, experiences that include claims of union, presence, mingling, identification with totality, god, nature, spirits, peace, timelessness, perfection, eternity, knowledge, and bliss. Such feelings include a loss of self, of time, of place, and of limitation and language. One likewise feels a gain of eternity, a feeling of release, a new life, another world,

joy,

satisfaction,

salvation,

perfection,

mystical

knowledge, and enhanced mental capacity. (Allison 2000:67) Arguably,

McLaughlin’s transcendent

experience

that

speaks of

‘selflessness’ and ‘getting out of the way’ for the purpose of wilfully engaging with a transpersonal force is a higher level state of transcendence then that of Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow.’ This is not an uncommon sentiment. The idea that music can originate outside the human creator and the notion that ‘musical flow’ is musical experience outside the ‘self’ appears to be commonplace outside traditional Western musicology. Nachmanovitch elaborates: Spiritual traditions the world over are full of references to this mysterious juice: ch’i in China and ki in Japan (embodying the great Tao in each individual); kundalaini and prana in India; mana in Polynesia; orendé and manitu among the Iroquois and Algonquins; axé among the Afro-Brazilian Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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condomblé cults; baraka among the Sufis in the middle East; élan vital on the streets of Paris. The common theme is that the person is a vessel or conduit through which a transpersonal force flows.

That force can be enhanced

through practice and discipline of various sorts; it can become blocked or bottled up through neglect, poor practice, or fear; it can be used for good or evil; it flows through us, yet we do not own it. (1990:32-33) Arts practice and the institution How then does one teach the concept that the student ‘is a vessel through which a transpersonal force flows?’

There is arguably a

considerable body of literature spanning the research of educational psychology, consciousness research and the practice of Zen Buddhism that deals with the phenomenon of transcendent experience.

The

pedagogy I have been evolving draws to some extent from all of these branches however, my prime teaching source has come from my personal experience of investigating these ideas as they apply to my art making practice.

I am now able to access a state of samadhi in

performance quite readily however, the arguably higher state of transpersonal experience (fana’ and baqa’) still happens too infrequently.

But when it does! If we begin with the premise that the transcendent experience is available to all and even seems to occur more easily in the lay audience then it is reasonable to suggest that the reason we don’t as musicians experience transcendent states in performance more often is due to, as Nachmanovitch states, some kind of blockage. This blockage is likely to come from one of two ostensibly related sources; ‘moral perfectionism’ or low self-efficacy.

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In regard to the former, author-musician William Day draws together Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘moral perfectionism’ and jazz improvisation.

Day argues: Moral perfectionism is best characterised not as a set of moral axioms or principles, as though it stood in competition with the dominant theories of morality (Utilitarianism and Kantianism), but as a kind of thinking that begins after or beyond such theories. It is a thinking whose distinguishing features are a commitment to speaking and acting true to oneself, combined with a thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with oneself as one now stands. (2000:99) Day’s comment ‘speaking and acting true to oneself’ may be likened to the notion in jazz improvisation of finding ‘one’s own voice’. Derek Bailey embellishes this idea. music".

‘Improvisers in all fields often speak of "my

It is not a claim of ownership but a complete personal

identification with the music they play' (1992:11). However, if the music created by a musician is motivated, as Day suggests, via intense ‘selfloathing’ and there is, as Bailey argues, ‘a complete identification with the music they play,’ then, logically the musician experiences the music he or she plays in an intensely negative frame of mind.

Worse still, the

musician’s lack of perfection is perceived by the musician as an offence against an unconscious moral order God, or one’s music teacher. I know of a teacher who said to her student after hearing her perform, ‘you pollute the air I breathe.’ Music performance and music practice become like a religious confessional temporarily absolving the artist of their lack or perfection through demonstrating an appropriate attitude of contrition.

Attaching oneself to one’s playing in a moral sense forms a distinct

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barrier to musical mastery and yet seems a common attitude amongst music students.

Self-efficacy, the second of the blockages to mastery, is articulated via Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy. Bandura states: Perceived self-efficacy is defined as people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. Selfefficacy beliefs determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves and behave. (1994:71-81) Problems with self-efficacy appear superficially to have a relation to moral perfectionism.

However, the moral perfectionist sees him or

herself as imperfect and practices music to lessen the pain of imperfection and receive some measure of respect from mentors, whereas the student that has problems with self-efficacy lacks faith in their ability and is unlikely to achieve any level of mastery. Bandura explains: …people who doubt their capabilities shy away from difficult tasks which they view as personal threats. They have low aspirations and weak commitment to the goals they choose to pursue. When faced with difficult task, they dwell on their personal deficiencies, on the obstacles they will encounter, and all kinds of adverse outcomes rather than concentrate on how to perform successfully (1994:1) A pedagogy of transcendence In recent times a number of paths have opened up utilising mainly Zen and Buddhist concepts adapted to Western pedagogy for the purpose of Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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clearing these blockages, such as Edward Herrigal’s, Zen in the Art of Archery,

Steven

Nachmanovitch’s,

Freeplay:

The

Power

of

Improvisation in Life and Art and Effortless Mastery by jazz pianist Kenny Werner.v My practice and subsequent pedagogy has evolved a hybrid model of these essentially Eastern teachings.

I begin with trying to

visualise what mastery looks like, what if feels like and feeling the sense of liberation experienced in the transcendent state. Over the last five I have been practising various meditative forms and mind focussing exercises that enable this type of visualisation. Significantly, Bandura states: Most courses of action are initially organised in thought.

People’s beliefs in their efficacy shape the types of anticipatory scenarios they construct and rehearse. Those who have a high sense of efficacy, visualize success scenarios that provide positive guides and supports for performance. Those who doubt their efficacy visualize failure scenarios and dwell on the many things that can go wrong.

(1994:3) I teach each of my students to do these mediative and visualisation exercises because as each creative act begins with a thought, unless one can conceptualise the optimal performance it is unlikely to happen by accident. As the student learns to meditate, thoughts of limitation are dissolved. The student learns to do musical practice from an 'effortless'vi state, meaning that the student is able to do the work of musical practice without moral attachment or self-judgment.

In Jungian terms this

equates to 'crucifying' the self where a person, through an act of self will, disintegrates the boundaries of self. If the student makes an error in the execution of a technical aspect as their playing, then the student repeats Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the exercise without self-judgment or attachment to the outcome. The mind becomes immersed in the sound of the instrument. Deep listening allows the student to hear his or her intention through playing a note. As the experience deepens the self disappears until all that is left is vibration. This is an essentially Sufi teaching (Khan 1983). Thus, optimal music performance is defined as the experience of performer and audience dissolving into the transcendent state.

The performer, the

composer, and the audience experience a delimiting of self-boundary, and optimally allow for the as yet undefined transpersonal force to flow through all thus collectively sharing ‘the moment.’

Both in the private teaching studio and classroom it is essential to create an atmosphere of non-judgement, non-competition and detachment.

This is no easy task in a university environment that embraces peer group

assessment,

competition

and

intellectual

property

rights.

Nevertheless, if mastery and the transcendent experience are taken as the priority focus of teaching, then it is necessary to find ways to ‘work around’ university protocols and values that arguably stand in the way of the path to mastery.vii I will use my first year Improvisation Materials Class as an example of my teaching and associated ‘work-around.’

I ask students to get their

instruments ready to play and then put them aside for a moment. We begin with a guided relaxation-visualization session whereby students are encouraged to relax and ‘let go.’

After a time, as the students

become entrained, I suggest to the student that they have the skills to achieve musical mastery and that the only impediment to reaching this goal is doubt of their own ability. I ask them to imagine a flame and see them own sense of limitation as cumbersome, black articles of clothing Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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which they shed until they reach a feeling of freedom, being comfortable with themselves. I suggest to the students that they are to temporarily suspend judgment about what they play and what others play, as there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I then instruct the students, whilst maintaining a relaxed frame of mind, to pick up their instruments. They play a drone note that we had previously agreed upon, where each student plays a solo over this drone for as long as they like. Then, in turn, each player solos using the harmonic gravity of the drone to control their melodic, harmonic and rhythmic propulsion until each player has experienced making music from, in Werner’s terms, ‘the effortless space.’ Bandura suggests: Social persuasion is a … way of strengthening people’s beliefs that they have what it takes to succeed. People who are persuaded verbally that they possess the capabilities to master given activities are likely to mobilize greater effort and sustain it than if they harbour self-doubts and dwell on personal deficiencies when problems arise (1994:2).

Persuading students, especially when they are in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind, that they have the necessary skills to achieve whatever level of playing they aspire to allows the student to play in the forementioned improvisational exercise with some measure of confidence, forgoing the limiting sense of playing the ‘right’ notes or worse still the ‘wrong’ note. The image of taking responsibility for casting off limitation gives students the sense that they are in control of the limitations they choose to experience, and subsequently, the limitations they are willing to let go of.

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Creating a musical experience where there is no sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ allows the student to experience the music in a deep listening state, which is in my view the essential aim of music and essential to the transcendent state. The student needs to understand that ‘pure music’ does not concern itself with ‘right and wrong.’

Right and wrong are

concepts that have to do with musical style. At the conclusion of the improvisation, I do not critique the compositional attributes of the music just played, rather, we allow ourselves the luxury of enjoying the moment and the pleasure of ‘floating’ out of the room. Many times after such a session the student will report to me that their playing was the best they have ever played.

The subject of Improvisation Materials is a compulsory course that the student undertakes in each year of their three-year undergraduate degree. I get to know the students and the way they play very well. I perform as often as I can with the student, and subsequently, they get to know my playing very well. It is my intention to model my approach to performance as an example of a fellow musician engaging with similar issues to the student, albeit at a different level. Bandura confirms this approach as an important method of developing the self-efficacy of a student. Bandura states: Modelling influences do more than provide a social standard which to judge one’s own capabilities. People seek proficient models that possess the competencies to which they aspire.

Through their behaviour and expressed ways of thinking, competent models transmit knowledge and teach observers effective skills and strategies for managing environmental demands.

Acquisition of better means raises self-efficacy

(1994:2).

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Prior to my research my approach to teaching Improvisation Materials followed essentially the same forms as I had experienced as a student, in that each week I would ask to students to perform improvisations in solo, duo, trio, quartet contexts giving highly critical feedback at the conclusion of their performance principally regarding compositional development, use of shape, form, rhythmic structure and so forth. At the end of the semester students would perform a solo improvisation between five and seven minutes in duration, and I would write a critical evaluation of each performance.

The intention was to have the student approach the

improvisation as a ‘real-time’ composition.

It occurred to me that I was asking the students to be highly analytical about their playing at the moment that they were constructing their composition, and also, that the principal concern of the student was to demonstrate that they understood previous instructions. However, it was clear that this practice would not allow the student-musician to experience any level of transcendent experience. Worse still, it might impede the student’s ability to play with depth and certainly, discounting the possibility of the transcendent experience entirely.

Contrary to my approach I have heard the argument that a student needs to learn ‘the rules’. Once the rules have been learned then they may be broken. Presumably the student reaches mastery when they are able to break these rules at will. An example might be the jazz musician that plays ‘outside’ notes, that is, notes considered distant from the harmonic certainty of a chord. However, I contend that the highly analytical method of constructing real time composition becomes habituated disallowing the prospect of the higher transcendent experience for both the player and Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the audience. The performer who learns the rules to break the rules sets his or her performance in a metaphorical courthouse to demonstrate to the judge (peers and audience) that they know the rules and are therefore breaking them.

This approach disallows the audience the

transcendent experience.

Rather, the audience is only allowed to

appreciate the skill to which to performer is able to wield his or her harmonic knowledge. At one level this is perfectly reasonable because, as Bandura states: A major function of thought is to enable people to predict events and to develop ways to control those that affect their lives.

Such skills require effective cognitive processing of

information that contains many ambiguities and uncertainties.

In learning predictive and regulative rules people must draw on their knowledge to construct options, to weight and integrate predictive factors, to test and revise their judgments against the immediate and distal results of their actions, and to remember what factors the had tested and how well they worked (1994:3).

However, the practice of musical improvisation is ‘uncertain and ambiguous’ and the transcendent experience even more elusive. The ‘predictive and regulative’ rules of real time composition in the manner that I was teaching and had been taught actually led students away from the experience of transcendence that I was primarily becoming concerned with.

I began introducing a number of exercises designed specifically at moving away from the regulative and predictive rules of composition to allow the student the experience of making music from non-judgmental, Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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non-analytical frame of reference. After each exercise there is no critical feedback, rather I ask the students to describe the experience of the exercise, what it means for them, how do they make sense of what just occurred? An example of one of these exercises is that I ask students to ‘pair-up into a number of duo settings. The students have three minutes of improvised music performance to try and make each other laugh using only their instruments and their bodies in whatever way they think necessary. Whoever laughs first, looses. The game continues until we have an eventual champion. The significance of this exercise is that it allows the student to reach a state of flow in their music as they focus on making their opponent laugh not on constructing ‘musical ‘meaning’ in a real time composition exercise. The student players often utilise tactics of ‘breaking the rules’ or ‘parody’. Some students demonstrate amazing contortions and athletic ability not usually associated with musicians.

In another example, the student is to play a three-minute improvisation whilst maintaining eye contact with another student and being in very close physical proximity to each other.

The student then performs

another improvisation with two other students in turn, whilst maintaining eye contact and close physical proximity. If the student does not play a portable instrument, for example a piano, they have the option of either sitting the listener directly in front of their instrument, or the student may choose the option of verbally saying one personal thing about themselves to three different members of the class.

The intention of this class is to explore the nature of human communication, investigate the idea that as an artist one is obliged to become vulnerable to the audience and make art ‘honestly.’ This class challenges the self-efficacy of the student from the perspective of the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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student’s confidence and ability to engage with other people in an honest and open way and importantly seeing that music at its highest level comes from the same space. Significantly, in this exercise the student’s awareness is

again

shifted

from

constructing

a

‘compositional’

improvisation, the more usual paradigm, to a type of musical flow that is created through playing an improvisation as an intimate ‘gift’ to the receiver.

Conclusion I contend that as the student gains familiarity and understanding of these exercises, he or she learns through personal experience to construct her or his own regulative and predictive rules that may be used in the uncertain and ambiguous environment of improvised music performance thus, allowing for the possibility of flow and perhaps the higher state of transpersonal flow. To be sure, the first level of transcendent experience is the overcoming or transcending one’s self-limitation. The next level, arguably defined as ‘the musical experience’ is ‘contact’ and ‘flow’ with an as yet unknowable transpersonal force.

As we know, in art making, rules that work for one artist will not necessarily hold true for another artist. Therefore the student needs as many art making experiences as possible that allow them to test their creativity in a host of environments, particularly if they are to challenge their own self-efficacy.

This must be done within a ‘safe’ emotional

space that allows the student the freedom to explore the possibility of the transcendent experience.

My pedagogy, arising from my arts practice, now focuses on teaching the student to use the tools of music and dispossess the mental baggage Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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that has invariably accumulated in the student’s development. This is done primarily through teaching meditative and mind focusing exercises, then, teaching the student how to do the ‘work’ of musical practice from a flow state. I provide the students with as many performing experiences as possible in a safe non-judgmental environment but an environment that will move the student sharply outside of their comfort zone: challenging their understanding of self and their musical identity. Hence, the student utilises their own experience and develops their own voice.

As the student spends more time making music from a flow state under a variety of challenging performance conditions, she or he is more likely to achieve a transpersonal state of flow. Even if this high state of music making is not quite reached, the student performs with a greater sense of ‘play’ and honesty.

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Notes This story is recounted by John Voysey in his notes accompanying John Coltrane’s CD entitled Transcendence (SUMCD 4166). ii In defining the concept of ‘self’ Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald write, ‘There is a good deal of current research on different aspects of the self and its development, and it might be useful to start by clarifying some of the current terminology in this field. We might say that the self –system is made up of a number of self-concepts, or self-images, which are the different ways in which we see ourselves. These self-concepts can be context- or situation specific (e.g. how I see myself as a linguist, or a musician). Self-identity is the overall view that we have of ourselves in which these different self-concepts are integrated, although the ways in which individuals accomplish this remain a central and unresolved theoretical question.’

In Musical Identities, R. MacDonald, D. Hargreaves & D Miell (Eds) Oxford University Press: Oxford (2002:7-8). iii There is an argument suggesting that ‘meaning’ in music arises from a listener’s essentially ‘innate’ understanding of the structural foundation of the music he or she is listening to. For example, see, F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. MIT Press: Cambridge, 1983. Although this proposition is persuasive, in his article, Perception: A Perspective from Music Theory, Nicolas Cook argues against Lerdahl and Jackendoff on the grounds that ‘cognitive psychology and music theory are two disciplines with essentially different and mutually incompatible aims.’

See Aiello’s introduction to Cook’s article in Musical Perceptions, R. Aiello (Ed.) Oxford University Press: Oxford (1993:65). iv D. Suzuki makes this distinction between the dual aspects of self but goes further by introducing the idea that ‘absolute self’ as having a ‘divine nature.’ Suzuki writes, When we talk about self it is generally confused with relative self, which is to be distinguished from the Absolute Self. When this distinction is not clearly made we are apt to talk about the individual, empirical, psychological self as the divine nature of Absolute Self. When we say, “I am,” this “I” is generally considered to originate from the relative “I.” But the relative “I” cannot stand by itself; it must have something behind it which makes “I” possible, which makes this “I” really “I” in the deepest possible sense. If i

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there is no real Absolute Self behind this relative, psychological “I,” this psychological “I” will never achieve its I-ness. The relative “I” assumes something of the real “I” because it has at its back the real “I.” When the absolute “I” is taken away no relative “I” exists. But in our ordinary way of thinking this relative “I” is separated from “Absolute I,” and we take this separated “I” as something absolute – something independent, something that can stand on its own right.

When this notion is adhered to we have what we call egotism, the ego-centred notion which ordinarily governs our consciousness.

(2000:91) W. Timothy Gallway (having been influenced by Suzuki) similarly discusses the dual nature of self by referring to ‘Self One’ and ‘Self Two’.

(1974:31) v I acknowledge that there is an enormous body of research literature that attempts to cover similar territory, Bandura 1994, H. Marsh 1997,1993, Csikszentmihalyi 1992 for example. Arguably however, this research has had less impact in training elite musicians because it has simply not been commercialised in the same way that Sudo, Herrigal Werner and Nachmanovitch have been. If you walk into a music store you are more likely to encounter the text Effortless Mastery compared with Bandura’s Self-Efficacy. vi 'effortless' is to be understood in the context presented in K. Werner's book, Effortless Mastery vii Attali’s (1989) argument that essentially art institutions are established to politically control ‘creativity’ is relevant here. Attali argues persuasively that governments establish controls over the creative process through privileging particular forms of art making over others via the art training institution for the purpose of maintaining cohesive social order.

References Aiello, R. (1993) Music and Language: Parallels and Contrasts. In: J. Sloboda, & R. Aiello (Eds) Musical Perceptions. Oxford University Press: New York.

Alperson, P. (1998) Improvisation: An Overview. In: M. Kelly (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol.2: 478-479. Oxford University Press: New York.

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Attali, J. (1989) Noise: The Political Economy of Music. J.Shulte-Sasse & W. Godzich (Eds), (Trans. B. Massumi) Vol.16. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Audi, R. (1995) (Ed) The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.

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Bailey, D. (1992) Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Da Capo Press: New York.

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Berendt, J-E. (1976) The Jazz Book. (Trans. D. Morgenstern) Palidin: Frogmore.

Berendt, J-E. (1987) The World is Sound: Nada Brahma. (Trans. H. Bredigkeit) Destiny Books: Vermont.

Berendt, J-E. (1992) The Third Ear. (Trans. T. Nevill) Henry Holt: New York.

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Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. O. Flanagen (Ed.) Oxford University Press: New York.

Cook, N. (1993) Perception: A Perspective from Music Theory. In: Musical Perceptions. J.Sloboda &. R. Aiello (Eds) 64-95. Oxford University Press: New York.

Corbett, J. (1995) Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Free Improvisation. In: Jazz Among the Discourses. K. Gabbard (Ed.) 217240. Duke University Press: London.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., (1992) Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. Rider Books: London.

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Day, W. (2000) Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism. In: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol.58 (2) Spring: 99-111.

Durant, A. (1989) Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music. In: Music and the Politics of Culture C. Norris (Ed.) 252-282. Lawrence and Wishart: London.

Gabbard, K. (1995) The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences. In: Jazz Among the Discourses K.Gabbard (Ed.) 1-28. Duke University Press: London.

Gioia, T. (1988) The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture.

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Hamilton, A. (2000) The Art of Imperfection and the Aesthetics of Imperfection. In: British Journal of Aesthetics Vol.40 (1): 168-185.

Hargreaves, D., Miell, D. & MacDonald, R. (2002) What Are Musical Identities, and Why Are They Important? In: Musical Identities Oxford University Press Inc: New York.

Herrigel, E. (1985) Zen in the Art of Archery. (Trans R. Hull) Penguin Arkana: Melbourne.

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R.&C. Winston) Fontana Press: London.

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Tinnin, L. (1990) Biological Processes in Nonverbal Communication and their Role in the Making and Interpretation of Art. In: The American Journal of Art Therapy (29) 9-13.

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The ‘relationship managers’: Towards a theorising of the Teacher-in-Role / student relationship Viv Aitken University of Waikato

Author’s Biography Viv Aitken is a lecturer in Drama in Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Dr Aitken has broad lecturing experience, including Theatre Studies and English, as well as professional theatre experience locally and internationally. Her research interests include Drama in Education, Theatre in Education, Irish Theatre, and Audience Response. viva@waikato.ac.nz

Abstract This paper considers how arts practices (in this case drama) can invigorate learning and teaching across the curriculum. It explores the potential of the ‘teaching-in-role’ strategy to generate experiential learning environments and allow new assessment and management possibilities to emerge. The paper does this by comparing teaching-in-role with the relationship between theatre makers and audience members, in the process identifying the creative tensions that emerge when the theories and practices of arts education are compared with those of the arts industries.

Tensions inevitably arise when drawing parallels between theatre and classroom drama, particularly process drama (not intended for an audience). While the goals of theatre and classroom drama may be very different, it is reasonable to argue that teaching-in-role, like theatre performance, is posited on a relationship between two parties. This relationship requires a shared understanding of social, behavioural and aesthetic conventions, and an agreement on how power will be shared. By scrutinizing teaching-in-role and theatre through a common lens of ‘relationship’ new resonances emerge, which usefully inform pedagogical practice in the classroom.

The focus for this paper is the pedagogical strategy of teaching-in-role. It is acknowledged that teaching-in-role can be hugely valuable for both Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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teachers and students in a classroom situation (see, for example, Bolton & Heathcote 1999, O’Toole & Dunn 2002, Bolton 1998, Edmiston 2003 and Neelands & Goode 2000). As one commentator argues, ‘If used appropriately, [teaching-in-role] is one of the most powerful techniques available to the teacher’ (Fleming 2003:111). By going into role, the teacher can generate experiential learning environments, share in the children’s learning from within, shift normal status and knowledge patterns within the classroom and allow new assessment and management possibilities to emerge. The strategy allows the teacher to model creativity and risk-taking and demonstrate their own commitment to the imagined world. It can also be great fun.i If a key question for education is ‘how can arts practice and pedagogy stimulate innovative and creative learning and teaching across the curriculum?’ one answer is ‘teaching-in-role’.

Put simply, teaching-in-role works by transforming the relationship between teacher and student. This paper suggests a way to theorise this transformed relationship, arguing that the relationship between teacherin-role and student can be usefully compared to the relationship between theatre makers and audience members in theatre. It must be acknowledged, however, that any attempt to align drama in education and theatre in this way is fraught with tension. The paper begins by discussing why this is so.

The chart shown in Figure 1 has been adapted from Fleming’s Starting Drama Teaching (2003:18) and shows his summary of the history of drama in education since the latter half of the twentieth century. Fleming suggests there has been something of a division between two camps within drama education over this period, with practitioners of ‘theatre arts’ Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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on one side (including such figures as David Hornbrook)ii and advocates of ‘process drama’ on the other (influenced by the work of Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton, and others).iii

Figure 1. Dynamics of Theatre versus Drama Education (adapted from Fleming, 2004:18)

Fleming’s chart shows the two camps moving apart as they define themselves by their differences, followed by a more recent move back together as the they re-define themselves and begin to value what the other side has to offer: theatre arts practitioners conceding the value in the levels of engagement, belief and commitment found in good quality process work, and process practitioners increasingly identifying the need Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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for structure, polish, refinement and opportunities to share work. These are the features of theatre arts at its best. Fleming suggests that in 2007, we are approaching a more inclusive definition of drama education where striving for excellence emerges from interrelationships between both approaches.

The repositioning of theatre arts and process approaches has been reflected in some significant theoretical work in drama in education in recent years, including Gavin Bolton’s Acting in classroom drama (1998) and Judith Ackroyd’s Role reconsidered (2004) in which the authors looked at the significant aesthetic similarities between teaching-in-role and acting. In discussing these parallels, neither Bolton nor Ackroyd suggest that process drama and theatre arts are the same thing. As Ackroyd insists, the two can have quite different goals and outcomes and the pull away from each other was a necessary part of drama’s struggle for status within the education world (Ackroyd:28-9). Bolton, Ackroyd and Fleming were attempting to move drama beyond a polarised dialogue of difference, to an exploration of the commonalities that also existed.

In this more mutually accepting research environment, it may be that models developed for the study of theatre performance may prove useful in theorising of the practice of teaching-in-role. The remainder of this paper introduces a model of theatre developed in my recent PhD studies, and argues for its usefulness in a drama in education context.

Aitken (2005) posited the idea that any theatre performance is founded on a relationship between two parties; theatre makers on one side and the audience members on the other (of course these are collective terms and somewhat ‘slippery’ but useful to describe what is essentially an Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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exchange between two parties). We might add that this relationship is experienced within a space, or context. This definition of theatre as a relationship recalls Peter Brook’s well-known definition of theatre: ‘a man walks across (an) empty space whilst someone else is watching him and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to take place’ (Brook 1997: 9) or Eric Bentley’s suggested formula ‘A impersonates B while C looks on’ (Bentley 1965: 150). However, the theatre relationship must be consensual between both parties, as is emphasised by Maria-Martin Kohtes’ addendum to Bentley’s statement: ‘A impersonates B while C aware of that quality looks on.’(Kohtes 1993: 87).

Aitken (2005) goes on to emphasise that theatre relationship relies on a set of shared understandings about how a particular performance is to be organised. Three key areas of this can be identified: realities, aesthetics and behaviour. In terms of reality, for theatre to work successfully both parties need to have shared ideas about how they will decide what is part of the fiction and what is part of the external social reality in which they operate. Reality can be organised very differently in different types of theatre. For example, if we consider a naturalistic performance, the relationship in place asks the audience to pretend that what is on the stage is real, but not real enough to intervene, while the performers also pretend that what is on stage is real, but the audience is not. Compare this to a Pirandellian performance where the edges of reality and fiction are deliberately blurred and we can see that specific performances can organise realities in different ways. What matters, for this discussion is not that all performance organises realities in the same way but that they always need to be organised in some way.

The second thing that the theatre relationship must organise is the matter Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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of aesthetics. Aitken (2005) suggests that for performance to work, both parties need a loosely shared sense of how the performance will be read, what the codes will be and also what will be valued, or considered ‘good quality’.

As before, the aesthetic values might be very different in

different circumstances; a schools’ Shakespeare competition and a piece of avant-garde performance art in an Off-off Broadway studio may have very different set of understandings.

Thirdly, according to this model, parties in the theatre relationship need a shared understanding about the behaviour of participants; what behaviours will support and sustain the event and what will not be appropriate. Once again, these depend on the conventions of a particular genre. For example, British pantomime expects the audience to cheer and boo and call out while such behaviour would be unsupportive in another genre.

Finally, Aitken (2005) suggests that the theatre relationship depends on a shared understanding about how power, particularly the power to perform, will be shared. As before, the ways in which power can be shared may be very different: in some performances audiences will be physically passive while in other relationships, they may intervene and participate. Sometimes, as with Augusto Boal’s work, audience members are granted the power to become active participants in the performance and Boal acknowledges this by his use of the term ‘spect-actors’ (1992).

Again, what matters is not how the power is organised, as this can be different on every occasion, but that it is organised.

This, in simple terms, sums the notion of ‘relationship’ presented in Aitken (2005). When assessing the balance of control within that Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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relationship it becomes evident that whatever the understandings in place for a particular performance, the terms are always under the control of theatre makers. Even in the most liberal form of theatre with high levels of audience participation, or loose framing devices where audience members are free to behave as they wish, this is so because theatre makers allow for that. The ultimate ‘say’ over the relationship lies with theatre makers, as they are the relationship managers.

The question is whether we can apply the same model to teaching-inrole? I would suggest that we can. Whenever a teacher takes on a role it is akin to what happens in the theatre relationship. Once again there are two parties in this relationship: the teacher ‘in role’, and the students.iv The teacher is akin to the theatre maker; note here that I have chosen the term ‘theatre maker’ rather than the word ‘actor’ used by Ackroyd.

The teacher-in-role is akin to an actor but the role can also encompass functions of director, designer and author of the drama, as Ackroyd herself suggests (2004:31-46). On the other side of the relationship are the receivers of the drama, in this case the students. Once again, as in the theatre, the exchange takes place in a context. In this case, this is usually an educational setting, and this is significant because the parties may already have a relationship with its own ground rules and expectations.

Once again for the relationship to work, students and teachers need a loosely shared agreement about what is happening, based on a shared understanding of how the fiction is to be distinguished from reality, what is to be considered of value, the behaviours that will support the relationship and, finally, who will have the power to perform. As in theatre, varying educational dramas may organise these things Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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differently. For example, as in the theatre, a teacher may well give students substantial power to perform. Indeed most classroom drama, particularly the process approach described earlier, depends on active participation of students. It is fair to say that they become fellow ‘actors’ in the drama alongside the teacher, but I would argue that they do not become theatre makers. This is where the distinction between theatre maker and actor is important. Students (like audience members) may be entitled to, or expected to participate in the drama, they may have a good deal of say over the direction of the drama but it is the teacher who maintains the ultimate say over the relationship; he or she is the one who grants the students their power within the relationship. So, once again, the management of the relationship is in the hands of one party, in this case the teacher. Teachers, like theatre makers are relationship managers.

If we can accept that teaching-in-role, like theatre, is posited on a relationship, and that this relationship is managed by one party, then we can turn to some of the ways it is managed and the implications of this on the other people involved. First, we can ask how the ‘managers’ in each case impart the terms of the relationship to the other party.

In theatre there are many signals used to let the audience know ‘this is a fiction’ and ‘this is how to behave and what to expect’. As ever, the particular signals chosen will depend on the genre. Where Elizabethan theatre used a prologue, modern theatre may use a ticket, advertising or a program. All of these can be used to send messages to audience members about the nature of the relationship on offer. Once audience members arrive at the theatre, the communication of terms continues. If theatre is taking place in buildings, theatre makers may signal the divide Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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between reality and the fiction through the use of space (perhaps using a proscenium arch, tabs or fixed seating). Those not operating in buildings might draw a chalk line on a pavement, or may display signs or slogans.

Performers might be distinguished from audience members through use of costume, props or the use of voice. In short, the theatre maker hooks into the conventions of the genre in which they are operating and uses them to transfer information to the audience about the rules of the relationship.

In just the same way, when a teacher takes on a role, he or she draws on the visual, verbal and symbolic aspects of drama to signal that role. The signalling may be done from outside the role, with a statement like “I’m going into role now” could be said to be akin to a prologue. The teacher may also draw on a symbolic prop or a costume item in order to signal the role. “When I’m holding this clip board you will know I’m in role”.

Such props or costume items are part of the drama world, a microcosm of what would be used in a theatre performance. The teacher can also hook into the conventions of drama teaching (such as role on the wall, conscience alley, freeze frame, thought tapping) to let the students know the terms of the relationship. So, teachers in role, as relationship managers, use the same languages to set up and sustain the terms of the relationship with their students as their counterparts in theatre do with their audience members.

Once the relationship managers have decided what the terms of the relationship might be, and offered this to the other party, how do participants recognise the relationship and opt to join? One answer is offered by the frame analysis of Victor Turner (1982), Erving Goffman (1986) and others, who suggest that people behave in social situations Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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by selecting a

‘frame’, a way of understanding the event.v Having

‘framed’ the situation, the individual then adopts a set of behaviours they think will be most fitting to support that frame. Turner’s description of this is appropriately ‘theatrical’ in its metaphors: ‘When we act in everyday life we do not simply react to indicative stimuli, we act in frames we have wrested from the genres of cultural performance’ (Turner 1982:4 - my emphasis). The image of ‘framing’ could be used to describe the process by which people learn to be audience members in the theatre and also how students cope with a teacher going into role in a classroom. The recipients of a drama relationship adopt frames of understanding built from prior experiences. In the case of students, especially children, the ‘cultural performance’ they draw upon may be their spontaneous sociodramatic play, and their prior experiences in classroom drama as well as any live performance experience. Students and audience members will also learn by watching their peers, for in a new or unfamiliar situation frames can be learned (Goffman 1986).

If the notion of ‘framing’ is useful for describing how students respond to teaching-in-role, it may also be useful to consider what can block this framing process, both in the theatre and in the classroom. For example, Aitken (2005) found that a successful relationship between theatre makers and audience could be inhibited when audience members attended theatre as part of a pre-existing group. For example, in 1999 a group of boys from a local high school in Christchurch, New Zealand disrupted a Shakespeare performance by talking amongst themselves and throwing objects onto the stage.vi In this case the director of the play concluded that these young people did not know how to behave. He commented “obviously they hadn’t been primed about the play very well . . . these people are not ready for live performance”.vii This suggested that Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the behaviour was attributable to an error in framing. However, even if they were unsure how to behave, these young people could have modelled appropriate behavioural conventions from other audience members around them. The issue arose because they attended in a group and chose to give priority to the behaviours consistent with ‘success’ within that group, rather than behaviours that supported the relationship with the theatre makers. Aitken describes a number of other occasions where audience members (children and adults), who attended theatre in groups, disrupted the performances in similar ways (Aitken 2005).

If the theatre relationship, and successful framing of the performance can be inhibited by group attendance at the theatre, this has important implications for teachers-in-role where children are part of a very strong preformed collective; that is, the class. Like audience members in the theatre, students may prioritise behaviours that make them feel ‘successful’ in that group and these may not be the ones that support the success of the drama.

It is perhaps sobering to realise that every

teaching-in-role experience is like playing to a block booking in a theatre!

The teacher must recognise the importance of captivating children so that they are willing to frame the teacher-in-role experience in a new way, rather than falling back on unhelpful behaviours carried over from the classroom context. With this knowledge in hand, the teacher-in-role can plan ahead by adopting new and surprising tactics, such as a low status role or a transformed space. There would also seem to be a good argument for arranging children into unfamiliar groupings.

Having considered teaching-in-role by comparing it to how participants in theatre

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process, it is necessary to consider how audience members ‘opt out’ and compare this to the classroom context. Aitken (2005) looked at the degrees of opt out behaviour in a theatre context and suggested that these could be seen as ranged along a scale from slipping out at interval (a minor disruption, a private act) to staying to protest (a much more major disruption, a social act) to full scale takeover of performance power (a subversive overturning of the event, a political action).

In general, students in drama lessons have much less agency than audience members in a theatre relationship. Not only have they had the relationship foisted upon them, they do not own the right to opt out, something that is normally extended to audience members in theatre. If it is not possible for students to ‘slip out at interval’, then this limits the possibilities for private withdrawal and any opt out behaviour on the students’ part moves directly to being social action, such as misbehaviour or refusal to participate, or political action such as attempts to take over the drama. This is a real challenge for teachers for whom the loss of control over the class and/or the direction of the drama may be a frightening prospect. Perhaps by seeing the drama as a relationship and being aware of the lack of agency students have in comparison to audience members, teachers may be able to predict, diagnose and understand misbehaviour as part of the fabric of the relationship.

Teachers may need to look at how they can factor in ‘opt out’ options for students, perhaps coming out of role, pausing the drama and discussing the student’s options.

In all the situations discussed so far, it has been assumed that participants are aware they are in a relationship with the theatre makers, or the teacher-in-role. The situation becomes even more problematic Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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where participants are not aware that what they are watching or participating in is a fiction. It can happen that the relationship managers (theatre makers or teachers) generate relationships where the role, or the frame of the drama itself, is not made explicit. This paper will conclude by discussing the issues that can arise in this instance.

Examples of non-signalled, non-consensual theatre relationships are uncommon but they do occur. Perhaps most notable is Augusto Boal’s ‘invisible theatre’ where actors impose a performance on unwitting passers-by (Boal 1992). For example, actors may stage an argument on a street corner or in a restaurant in the hopes of motivating political action in the real world. Passers by may never be told that what they had witnessed was a theatre performance. Indeed Boal stresses the importance of keeping them in the dark: ‘One should never explain to the public that Invisible Theatre is theatre lest it lose its impact’ (Boal 1992:16) As a child I personally experienced two examples of such ‘invisible’ dramas. Both happened when I was in the Girl Guides. Once, on a hike through a forest I led my group round the corner to find a man sitting on a tree stump with a small hatchet embedded in his leg (in fact a realistic mock up of a wound complete with fake blood). On the other occasion our group was told that we were going to a house where a burglary had taken place, to look for clues. On neither occasion did I realise that these were fictional events. Only years later, when I read about Boal for myself, did I recognise that what I had experienced was a form of ‘invisible theatre’.

Similar experiments can, and do, take place in classrooms. Indeed, in many ways it is easier for ‘invisible’ drama in the classroom context because the parties are already operating within a highly structured Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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relationship where ‘social roles’ of teacher and student are both ongoing and potentially fluid (see Edmiston, 2003 and Carlson 1996). For the teacher to convince the children that something is ‘real’ all he or she needs to do is to leave the drama, or the role unsignalled. It is possible for this to occur even if the children know the teacher well. Where the teacher is unfamiliar the apparent reality of an unsignalled role may be even more compelling. Furthermore, in a classroom context where students attend day after day, it is possible for teachers to sustain their unsignalled role or ‘delusion tactics’ (McKeogh nee Aitken 1993) for quite long periods. One striking example of this is found in a program called Holland New Town, performed by UK based M6 TIE group in 1973 (Schweitzer 1980). During the program, which lasted for a day and a half, a group of young people was led to believe they were on a town planning course, whereas in fact all the adults (including the janitor) were teacheractors enacting a complex corruption scandal. The young people became very caught up in the fiction. Here, one of the company explains the outcome: At the end of the first performance the Company was faced with an unforeseen problem. The pupils had gradually become so absorbed by the events that they believed the Town Planning Course and the corruption tale to be absolutely real. It left the teacher with an awkward situation, maybe restraining pupils from reporting the story to the police or the local paper. If they were left to discover the fictitious nature of the events for themselves they might feel ‘conned’ and dismiss the important learning experience together

with

their

hurt

feelings.

Therefore,

subsequent

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and parallels were drawn with current corruption cases described in the news media. (Schweitzer 1980:127).

It seems amazing that members of this company should not have foreseen these young peoples’ reaction. The teacher who does not signal the fiction, or their role, to the students can expect frame confusion, and the consequences that follow. I have described the drama ‘relationship’ as being founded on understandings about realities, aesthetics, behaviour and power. If the understandings about realities are not made clear, then the relationship manager can expect repercussions on every other level of their relationship with the students.

Aesthetically, the teacher’s action assumes that ‘real’ world is more important or has more status than ‘imagined’ world; by assuming that ‘they will take it more seriously’ if the action is set up to be framed as a part of reality, the teacher denies what drama is about; creating safe places in which participants can explore possibilities and options not necessarily available to them in the ‘real’ world. As O’Toole remarks, ‘the teacher who trusts the power of drama does not need to use deceit’ (O’Toole 2002:6). In terms of behaviour, if the frame is not signalled, almost inevitably, there comes the time when participants need to be informed ‘it’s just pretend’ (with all the implied diminishing of the fictional world inherent in that word ‘just’). At this point the teacher may find him or herself working with unhappy, mistrustful students, as the teacheractors in Holland New Town discovered. Or, if students do catch on to the fiction, they are likely to spend time trying to confirm their suspicions rather than getting on with exploring the drama world. Put simply, if the teacher tells the children the rules of the game, they can get on with playing the game.

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It is in terms of power, that perhaps the most significant implications in unsignalled role arise. Certainly, the teacher may find students get caught up in the drama, take it seriously and behave as they would in real life, as was Boal’s aim. However, in the case of children and young people, they tend to be much less empowered in ‘real life’ situations, so the teacher actually reduces their options. In my own case, as a child faced with the scenarios described earlier, my response like those of the other young people around me was to stand still and do nothing, waiting for the adults present to react to the apparent emergency. We were simply mystified. We framed the situation as reality and behaved within the limited powers we had in that world. We would have been much more empowered if the adults had told us they were in role, and even more so if we had been put into role ourselves, perhaps as detectives or St John’s Ambulance workers.

An important ethical issue also arises where teachers do not signal their role. If participants are unaware they are operating in a fiction then they are denied the ‘safety’ of the frame - the sense of security that gives young people the permission to go places they would be unable to go in reality. As adults working with children, I would suggest that to deny this security is something of an abuse of power and trust. Surely, as with theatre makers and their audiences, teachers as relationship managers must take seriously their obligations to the other party. Several commentators have argued that without consent, Boal’s invisible theatre cannot be described as ‘theatre’ at all but rather ‘guerrilla action with theatrical characteristics’.viii By the same token, we could say that without informed consent, teaching-in-role becomes guerrilla action with the characteristics of teaching. Teachers need to ask themselves if this is an Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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appropriate way to conduct their relationship with students.

This paper has covered a lot of ground. It has examined the strategy of teaching-in-role through a theoretical lens previously used to theorise theatre practice. The questions and issues it has raised deserve greater examination than has been possible in this short paper. What is clear, however, is that it is valid and fruitful to explore the commonalities within drama in education and theatre studies.

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References Ackroyd, J. (2004) Role reconsidered: An evaluation of the relationship between teacher-in-role and acting. Stoke on Trent: Trentham.

Aitken, V. (2005) ‘Riot’ ‘revolution’ and ‘rape’: the theatre relationship and performance breakdown. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Waikato.

Bentley, E. (1965) The Life of the Drama. London: Methuen.

Boal, A. (1992) Games for actors and non-actors. London: Routledge.

Bolton, G. (1984) Drama as education. London: Longman.

Bolton, G. (1998) Acting in classroom drama: a critical analysis. Portland, Maine: Calendar Island Publishers.

Brook, P. (1977) The empty space. London: Granada.

Carlson, M. (1990) Theatre semiotics: signs of life. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press.

Carlson, M. (1996) Performance: a critical introduction. London & New York: Routledge.

Edmiston, B. (2003) What’s my position? Role, frame and positioning when using process drama Research in drama education 8 (2), 221-230.

Fleming, M. (2003) Starting drama teaching. London: Fulton.

Goffman, E. (1986) Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Heathcote, D. (1988) Drama as a learning medium. London: Hutchinson.

Holland New Town (1973) by M6 Theatre Company, Rochdale, in Schweitzer, P. (1980) Theatre in Education: four secondary programmes. London: Methuen.

Hornbrook D. (1998) Education and dramatic art. London: Taylor and Francis.

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Kohtes, M-M. (1993) Invisible theatre: reflections on an overlooked form.

In New Theatre Quarterly 9, (33), 87.

McKeogh (nee Aitken), V. (1993) Theatre audiences: confrontation and contract. Unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Wales.

Morris, D. (1998) The forgotten art makers. Drama magazine 17-21,18.

Neelands, J. & Goode, T. (2000) Structuring drama work: a handbook of available forms in theatre and drama (2nded). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O’Toole, J. & Dunn, J. (2002) Pretending to learn: helping children learn through drama. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education.

Turner, V. (1982) From ritual to theatre: the human seriousness of play.

New York: The Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Watson, I. (1997) Naming the frame: the role of the pre-interpretive in theatrical reception. New Theatre Quarterly 13 (50)161-170.

Notes

i

For a fuller exposition of the possibilities of teaching-in-role see Edmiston (2003), Heathcote (1988:128-146) or O’Toole (2002:8-9). ii

See, for example, Hornbrook’s Education and Dramatic Art (1998) in which the author argues that drama education must focus on teaching the customs and practises of theatre, and that the neglect of these has led to the aesthetic impoverishment of drama as a subject in schools. iii

See, for example, Bolton’s Drama as Education (1984) where he argues that drama in education is ‘an art form in process not product’ quoted in Morris, David (1998:18).

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iv

I may seem to be making some broad assumptions about the teachingin-role situation here – a teacher-in-role is not always in a classroom situation, not always with young people and not always in a class of students who know each other. However, I would suggest that whatever the circumstances, as with theatre, teaching-in-role is essentially an exchange between two parties. v

See, for example Goffman (1986), Turner (1982), Watson (1997) and Carlson (1990 & 1996). vi

This was a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Court Theatre in March 1999, directed by Elric Hooper. vii

Elric Hooper made this comment when he was interviewed on the Arts Week programme on National Radio shortly after the event. viii

See Kohtes (1993) and Aitken (2005)

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Creating harmony in practice and pedagogy across the primary curriculum through an innovative arts project.

Deirdre Russell-Bowie University of Western Sydney

__________________________________________________ Author’s biography Deirdre Russell-Bowie has been lecturing and researching in Creative Arts education for over twenty-five years and has published prolifically in the area of music and creative arts education. In recognition of her teaching she was the winner of the 2001 Australian Award for University Teaching and the 2002 University of Western Sydney Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence. d.russell-bowie@uws.edu.au

__________________________________________________________ Abstract Eighteen children from Years 4-6 with minimal arts experience and considered 'at risk' in terms of low literacy levels, lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem, were chosen to work in the Community Harmony Project at Greentree Public School. The project involved participation in music, dance, drama and visual arts activities, leading to curating and launching an art exhibition at the local University art gallery. This was followed by the children peer-teaching visual arts and music activities to another cohort of children. Interviews focusing on perceptions concerning arts learning, self-esteem, and views of life were conducted with teachers, principals, and the children during and after the project.

Results indicated that children achieved discrete outcomes in each of the art forms of music, media, dance, drama and visual arts and showed a significant development in the area of self-confidence, self-esteem and leadership. The project imbued in many students a need to be prepared, a need to keep their students engaged, and a wish to build relationship with fellow students. The coresearchers who observed these lessons were impressed with the children’s teaching ability, initiative, leadership and organisational skills in this environment.

Introduction According to Oddliefson (1994), teaching arts everyday in the core curriculum of primary schools is the single most powerful tool presently available to educators to motivate students, enhance learning and develop higher order thinking skills. Learning the arts for arts sake is vitally important. Children need to experience and understand the complexity and beauty of the world of music, drama, dance and visual arts for Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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themselves both as discrete art forms and as a holistic experience. Being involved in the arts gives children the tools for lifelong learning within the arts so they have the opportunity for pleasure and for self-development, for creativity and self-expression, opening up a range of new and exciting experiences and opportunities they may have never realised existed. However quality arts programs also have far-reaching tangential effects that influence every aspect of children’s lives, both inside and outside of school, that enhance their social, cognitive, spiritual, physical, emotional and creative development and give them a deeper understanding of themselves and others.

Involvement in the arts can enhance children’s academic achievement (Combs 1991, Fiske 1999, Jensen 2001), develop respect for themselves and others (Mahlmann no date), give them training for life (Perrin 1994) and develop their self-expression, (Mills 1998, Russell-Bowie 2006).

This paper describes a Community Harmony Project, which utilised both discrete and integrated arts experiences to develop children’s achievement in each of the art forms.

The project was also considered a vehicle through which children could enhance their self-concept, and develop leadership, communication and artistic skills.

It was

anticipated that through their engagement in the arts, the children would develop academically, enhance their respect for themselves and others, have the opportunity to learn more about the possibilities for future work and leisure, and develop tools for meaningful self-expression.

Background The state of NSW does not have a policy for using specialist arts teachers in the primary school; creative arts subjects are the responsibility of the generalist classroom teacher.

Both national and international research confirms that generally, where the

classroom teacher is responsible for the children’s arts education, the arts are not taught consistently or effectively in primary schools (Jeanneret 1997, Lepherd no date, Mills 1989, Russell-Bowie 1997). This appeared to be the situation at Greentree Public School. There were several teachers who had an interest in one of the arts areas and developed learning experiences in this art form with their children, but generally, there was little evidence of a consistent quality developmental arts education program throughout the school. When interviewing interested arts teachers and children in the school, it was confirmed that visual arts was the main art form taught; music lessons, if Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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included, generally consisted of singing; drama lessons focussed on short skits and assembly items; dance was part of the Physical Education program, with little emphasis on creative dance. Therefore the children involved in this project had little significant or developmental background experiences in any of the art forms.

Participants Children from Greentree Public School* were given the unique opportunity to explore their role in the community through the creative arts, and to learn how they could use the arts to promote harmony within that community. Greentree Public School is located in a low socio-economic area with 87% of children coming from a non-English speaking (mainly Arabic) background.

Many of them were in their last two years of primary

school, had experienced minimal art education, and could be deemed to be ‘at risk’ in terms of their low literacy levels and lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. Eighteen children from Years 4–6 were chosen to work on this project; they were selected mainly on the basis of their artistic ability and some of the children also had basic leadership skills.

A classroom teacher in the school was the impetus for the project and worked in conjunction with a university lecturer to plan and implement the project. The university lecturer acted as mentor and ‘critical friend’ to the teacher, taught the music and visual arts lunchtime workshops, and was a participant-observer within the framework of the case study. During and at the end of the project the teacher, principal, other teachers and children were interviewed by the participant-observer about their perceptions of the outcomes arising from the project.

Community Harmony Project Over a period of two terms, during lunchtimes and after school, the 18 children worked with their teacher and a university lecturer to develop and curate an innovative art exhibition of their works on the theme of My community: The power of story.

To

prepare for this, the children were involved in a series of arts learning experiences that focused on the theme of Community Harmony.

Children were encouraged to talk,

learn, research and think about what community harmony meant to them, and how they could bring about harmony within their own community whether it be in the classroom,

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at school, at home or in the wider local community. They were asked to consider how they could express their understanding of this theme in a variety of media and art forms.

As part of the Community Harmony Project, the children visited art galleries to learn about conceptual art, practised sketching in the city, took black and white photographs of their community, visited the Brett Whiteley gallery, enjoyed drawing with pastels as taught by a visiting artist, learned about curating an exhibition and created a series of artworks that were then exhibited for six weeks at the local university’s art gallery.

Art Exhibition In the lead up to the exhibition, the children were involved in a series of after school arts experiences as well as music and visual arts learning experiences during their lunchtimes. The visual arts activities included glass painting, silk painting, marbling and clay work.

Most of the children had received very little musical input in primary school

apart from singing, although some of them were involved in the choir and dance groups for the local performing arts festival. Therefore the music activities were simple and focussed on the elements of pitch, tone colour, structure, dynamics and duration. As well as a variety of tuned and un-tuned instruments, concrete materials such as flashcards of instruments, note value, and scores, were used to assist with learning.

They also developed a rap about community harmony and the arts, a Readers’ Theatre presentation, a multi-media presentation and a puppet play, all of which focused on Community Harmony.

Each student was responsible for different aspects of the

preparation of the exhibition and before the launch, and they spent a full day hanging and labelling all the artworks. Children were responsible for welcoming the guests, introducing the artworks to interested guests and running the official launch, where they presented their music, dance, drama and visual artworks with confidence and professionalism that clearly showed their development in these art forms over the past months.

Peer teaching Following the successful launch of the art exhibition, the young artists/tutors practised teaching a selection of music and visual arts learning experiences to their immediate peers in the group. They discussed and practised appropriate teaching strategies and behaviour management strategies. The activities they were preparing to teach were the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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ones they had experienced themselves in the lunch-time workshops, and which they would then teach the rest of their school in groups of 5–6, giving them the opportunity to create music and visual arts artworks. During the two days after the exhibition launch, three classes at a time were bussed onto the university campus, where every class walked through the exhibition, were encouraged by two of the 18 children to talk about it, and write or draw their responses to the displayed artworks. Each class then rotated around the music and visual arts activities, and pairs of leaders taught small groups of children how to read and make up pieces of music on tuned and un-tuned percussion instruments, and how to create visual artworks using silk painting, marbling, clay and glass painting.

Over 300 children aged 5 to 13 were involved in this project that brought the whole school community onto a university campus and exposed all the children to peer-taught music and art activities. For most of the 300 children this was their first experience visiting an art gallery and working with these types of arts materials and instruments.

Although teachers reported that there were a significant number of children who usually exhibited challenging behaviours in the general classroom, it was interesting to observe that there were virtually no behaviour problems throughout the two days, as every child apperared engaged and interested, and learned to respect and work cooperatively with their new ‘peer teachers’. For legal reasons, a classroom teacher supervised each class and was available as back-up support for behaviour management problems; this was not utilised as, generally, the 18 peer tutors had each of their small groups in control and on task.

When observing the peer tutors teaching the groups of children, it was clear that they knew their subject matter well and had planned how they would proceed. When a new group came to their part of the room, they would greet them, sit them down, explain briefly what they would be doing, then step by step introduce the instruments, demonstrate them, set out the rules and consequences, allow the children to explore playing the instruments (remembering that most of the children had never used musical instruments before) and then proceed with the activity. When a class signal was given, each group tidied up their instruments and resources, shared briefly an example of their music making, and then moved onto the next learning experience, taught by another pair of tutors. This series of music and visual arts peer teaching activities was repeated

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for all 12 classes from the school over two days with peer tutors rotating around the groups so that each child experiences teaching all of the activities.

Outcomes Over the few months that these 18 children worked together on this project, they achieved discrete outcomes in each of the art forms of music, media, dance, drama and visual arts and showed a significant development in the area of self-confidence, selfesteem and leadership. When they took on the role of teacher in the workshops they showed that they understood the need to be prepared, the need to keep their students engaged as well as the need to build the relationship with the students by welcoming them into the room, explaining the rules and consequences, demonstrating skills and praising the children who did well. Their teachers, the university lecturers and the preservice student teachers who observed these lessons were amazed at the children’s teaching ability as they showed outstanding initiative, leadership and organisational skills in this environment.

The project had significant arts outcomes. The children flourished in an environment that allowed them to create and express themselves freely. They learned that art could be free from rules and that they could express themselves in a way that they couldn’t in any other learning area.

The project also appeared to give children a reason for

learning, it gave meaning, depth and understanding to their learning, and it put education in a real-life context. They could see why they were doing activities, they were not just time fillers but there was a purpose to their learning and it was up to them to ensure the success of the project and the exhibition. The children also learned to appreciate different art forms and to see the art in their surroundings that previously they had taken for granted. They also learned skills, knowledge and understandings in each of the art forms which allowed them to create and appreciate art in ways which were new to them.

Apart from achieving outcomes in a variety of discrete art forms and Key Learning Areas, one of the major successes achieved by the project was giving these particular children an opportunity to experience the arts in a way that they would never have had otherwise. The majority of children had never been to an art gallery and had little experience in arts education within their schooling, so this was a life changing

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experience that will affect them for many years to come.

As they embraced the

opportunities the project gave them, they opened a door that had been shut by circumstances, by the poverty of their arts experiences in home and in school and the lack of any similar experiences in their lives.

The project had significant non-arts outcomes. Involvement in this project made the children aware of their own behaviour as students and as a result some of them have made very positive changes in their own behaviour. They were given responsibility and, knowing that people were depending on them and that the success of the exhibition depended on their carrying out their jobs, they became accountable and rose to the occasion. Being part of this select group, they developed a sense of being special and they felt they had to live up to the important role for which they had been chosen.

Although the children were unused to these sorts of social situations where a lot of selfcontrol is required, and in class were often impulsive and easily distracted with short attention spans, they were able to modify their behaviour to suit each situation because they were the leaders of an important project and this was their event for which they were responsible. They took total ownership of the event. Taking them outside their normal school environment was important because it brought them out of their comfort zone, it exposed them to experiences that they would not have had otherwise and it broadened their horizons, opening up to them previously unknown possibilities in the area of future study and careers as well as artistic experiences.

Case studies Interviews with the teachers after the project indicated how much each of the children had developed in a variety of ways. For children like Ahmed, the project was a platform for developing and extending his confidence, maturity and leadership skills and it allowed him to express himself through art and dance.

It allowed him to prove to

himself, his teachers and his family what he was capable of doing.

Mary’s involvement in the project increased her maturity and understanding of what a responsibility it was to be so capable. It helped her deal with jealously and to learn to be dependable. She also saw the benefit of being responsible, and how to develop trust, respect and admiration in others. Through the project she developed significant leadership and organisational skills.

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Iman grew up in a family of six girls and often struggled in academic areas. She felt her identity was in her appearance and focussed on this as being the most important aspect of her life. This project gave her a new identity, that of teacher and artist – she even surprised herself and well as others with her artistic ability, initiative, leadership and teaching skills. It was a wonderful opportunity to inform her parents and teachers about what she was capable of achieving. She initially had no idea what she wanted out of life, and had no affirmation about her artistic and leadership skills; after this experience she is now determined to go to University and become an art teacher! Her comment about the project was: I learned in this project that if I set my heart to anything, I can do it!

Conclusion These short examples of changed lives show only a small part of the project outcomes; it is hard to predict just how much this arts project has influenced the lives of each of these 18 children. Now that they have had these opportunities and have experienced authentic artistic and broader life possibilities, they have more choices in life and in their future. They have learned that there can be other futures for them that they had not previously considered, their horizons have widened, they have developed personal tools to help them meet the challenges of life and they know that they ‘can do anything’.

It is anticipated that if they continue their involvement in the arts that these gains in both arts and non-arts areas may not only remain and be enhanced. *(names and details changed for privacy reasons)

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References Combs, M. (1991). Decline in Arts Education Lessens Student Creativity, Specialists Say. Boston Sunday Globe. March 10, 1991.

Finn, B. (1991). Young people’s participation in post-compulsory education and training. Melbourne: AEC. Fiske, E. Champions of change: The impact of arts on learning. The Arts Education Partnership: Washington.

Jeanneret, N. (1997). Model for developing preservice primary teachers’ confidence to teach music. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 133, 3744.

Jensen, E. (2001) Arts with the brain in mind. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development: Virginia.

Lepherd, L. (No date). Music education in international perspective – Australia.

Queensland: University of Southern Queensland.

Mahlmann, J. (No date). What students should know and be able to do in the arts.

Summary statement, at http://www.menc.org/tour/summary.html.

Mills, J. (1989) The generalist primary teacher of music: a problem of confidence.

British Journal of Music Education, Vol.6, (23) 125–138.

Oddliefson, E. (1994). What do we want our schools to do? Phi Delta Kappan. (75) 5, 446–452.

Perrin, S. (1994). Education in the arts is an education for life. Phi Delta Kappan, 452453.

Russell-Bowie, D. (2006). MMADD about the arts: Introduction to primary arts education. Sydney: Pearson, Education Australia.

Russell-Bowie, D. (1997). Reflecting on Challenges in the Creative Arts in Teacher Education. In Leong, S. (Ed.). Music in Schools and Teacher Education: A Global Perspective. Perth: ISME/CIRCME.

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Third things: The wondrous progeny of arts integration Madeleine Grumet University of North Carolina

Author’s biography Madeleine Grumet is a professor of education and communication studies at the University of North Carolina, where she has served as Dean of the School of Education.

Prior to her appointment at Carolina, she served as Dean of the School of Education at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. A curriculum theorist, specialising in arts and humanities curriculum, Professor Grumet has published many essays that interpret curriculum and teaching through the lenses of feminism, psychoanalysis and the arts.

She is the author of Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching, a study of gender and the relationship of teaching and curriculum to experiences of reproduction. grumet@email.unc.edu

Abstract Deploring the disassociation of emotion and cognition in educational theory and practice, this essay explores the advantages of curriculum that brings them together. It discusses cognitive operations that are important to work in both the academic disciplines and the arts, as well as the expressive and social opportunities that occur when the arts are integrated with instruction in the core subjects. Descriptions of arts integration practice drawn from observations of the work of the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education are analysed, using Fauconnier and Turner’s model of conceptual blending, The remarkable transformations that are often the hallmarks of arts integration may be marvellous, but they are not a mystery. There is an understandable logic to this practice. This word I am using, integration, comes from the Latin word integrare, which means to make something whole, just as we call whole numbers integers.i When we speak of arts integration we are speaking of a process of curriculum development and instruction that enriches relationships among students, teachers, and parents, as well as relationships within each of these groups. Arts Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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integration is an approach to teaching and learning that lives in lessons and curriculum. When a teaching community embraces arts integration, and children meet it in different classes and share it with various teachers over time, arts integration is a process that profoundly changes schools, embracing its approaches to instruction, and assessment, to individualisation and differentiation, to values, community relations, and ultimately, spirit.

The arts integration programs of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education

(CAPE),

Arts

for

Academic

Achievement

(AAA)

in

Minneapolis, the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, North Carolina’s A+ Schools and Music and Community project, and the Lincoln Center Institute in New York grow from the conviction that the strong emotions which inform both arts work and academic work cannot be isolated from the relationships of students to each other, their teachers, and communities. Arts integration planners understand that each child’s development is contingent on the support, resources, relationships and interest of his or her community.

Now this assertion

would not be surprising if we were talking about character development, or civics, curricula that we immediately associate with the category of human relations. What is new is our conviction that the processes and quality of relationships surrounding the making of art influence not only the cultural and moral tenor of the school but also cognitive achievement in mathematics, science, foreign languages, and literature.

Evaluation studies of arts integration programs indicate that through this work teachers see their students in a new light.

In arts integration

programs students reveal enthusiasms and hidden capacities, express ideas and feelings, and new dimensions of their intelligence. Teachers marvel at what their students can accomplish.ii Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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In The Intelligent Eye, David Perkins (1994) has made a case for a threedimensional understanding of intelligence: neural, experiential and reflective.

Neural intelligence is the capacity of the neurological system to process information and contribute to intelligent behaviour. The development of neural circuitry is largely inherited, but it is also influenced by our experience. Donald Hebb's (1949) theory of learning and brain plasticity is now widely accepted by neuroscientists. It suggests that a growth process and metabolic change occurs in brain cells when neurons and synapses that are close together are activated simultaneously and/or frequently. Connections or pathways are formed among neurons and their synapses, and among areas of the brain that specialise in specific functions, among cognition, emotion, and motivation, and are coordinated in yet other areas of the brain where language and the executive function reside.

In other words, experience contributes to

neural development and intelligence Experiential

intelligence

is

the

accumulation

of

context-specific

knowledge that contributes to intelligent behaviour.

Experiential

intelligence is learned over time and is threaded through the subjectivity and activity of individual persons. Connected to our lived worlds, it is situated in time and place, often associated with strong sensations, emotions,

and

powerful

human

relationships.

And

experiential

intelligence is also attached to the society that surrounds each individual with history and culture.

A core purpose of schooling is to develop

experiential intelligence through the study of academic subjects that reflect the accumulated wisdom of centuries, what we call human culture.

From culture we inherit an understanding of the organisation of the world Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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that tells us what is important and deserving of notice, and what is merely background and not worthy of our attention. Without these conventions of value and emphasis we would be immersed in a colourful but always shifting and confusing landscape.

Reflective intelligence is the capacity and inclination to think about our own thought, and apply strategies and different approaches to complex problems. It is a kind of control system for the other two dimensions of intelligence.

As the pianist plays, he or she also listens and adjusts

touch, pace, and colour to better approximate the ‘right’ feeling in the music. Reflection relies on our experience, blends with it, and revises it, for experience is not what happens to us; it is the sense we make of what happens to us. It was reflective intelligence that enabled Copernicus and Galileo to upset Ptolemy’s geocentric universe, and it is reflective intelligence that leads us, sometimes, to see beyond the sedimentations of past experience, culture, and perceptions that we know as reality, to the contradictions and inconsistencies of our own beliefs and understanding.

Eric Booth reminds us that the arts interrupt what he

calls the gestalt-default, our tendency to… …grab something we notice and snap it onto a previously placed guideline. Artists learn to delay the mind’s snap to a previous guideline long enough to perceive the specific feature of what is really there. They can intentionally disrupt, postpone, surprise, and

challenge

the

matching

process,

to

allow

for

new

understandings. (1999:79) Cynthia Weiss, a teaching artist in Chicago, gives small cardboard frames to children in a CAPE school, to peer through as they look around the room. This simple act of identifying a scene for study interrupts the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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‘gestalt default,’ inviting children to notice and engage a piece of their everyday world that has receded into the background.

They are

surprised by what they see.

The three dimensions of intelligence complement and transform each other. If we were to use a crescendo in music, a geometric progression of numbers, contrasting images of small and huge proportions, poetry that moved from spare, brief phrases to dense prose—all to express an idea of menacing growth, we would be mirroring the parallel processes that go on in our brains as auditory, visual, tactile, emotional and language systems all respond synchronously to the bulldozer or the snake that we meet in the road. Le Doux tells us that working memory is involved in all aspects of thinking and problem solving, and cites Marvin Minsky’s comparison of the functions of working memory to the aesthetic judgments engaged in rearranging a room of furniture: You shift your attentions back and forth between locations.

Different ideas and images come into focus, and some interrupt others. You compare and contrast alternate arrangements. You may concentrate your entire mind on a small detail one moment, and on the whole room the next. (2002:175) The visual, aural, tactile, vocal, and kinesthetic experiences of art stimulate, exercise, and enhance our embodied and our cognitive ways of knowing our world.

What is most important about Perkins’ three-

dimensional model is that it recognises that intelligence, and reflective intelligence, in particular, can be developed and learned.

These three resources—neural, experiential and reflective intelligence— are clearly implicated in the work of sculptor Hardy Schlick’s melting Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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marble lesson. The task of the lesson is to create a clay shape that will hold a marble when it is fired. Neural intelligence is displayed as images of the sculpture are pressed and pinched and rolled by the sticky fingers of these ten year olds. How thick must the wall be to hold the weight of the marble, of the molten glass? This kind of question stretches the body knowledge that walks us up hills and stairs and finds the light switch in the dark with our fingertips.

Experiential intelligence operates as the

kids remember water slides and pictures of molten lava. Maybe they have sat on the edge of the ocean letting wet sand drip between their fingers to make castles, maybe they have helped to paint the house, remembering the errant drip that escaped the roller, snaking its way down to the baseboard. Reflective intelligence is provoked by the terror of destroying the kiln. No opportunity for unbridled expression here, just so much, just so far.

Curriculum But integrated arts programs refuse to dichotomise learning and achievement.

The evaluation studies of CAPE, AAA and other arts

integration programs provide evidence that when arts experiences are connected to academic instruction, achievement is sustained and increased, not diminished by this enriched curriculum.iii

So while we

expect students in an integrated arts curriculum to improve on tests of reading and mathematics, we also expect them to participate in powerful learning experiences where they make sense of the curriculum just as they need to make sense of their experience in the world. That is a high standard.

In an arts integrated curriculum we ask students to find order and form for their ideas and their feelings, as we hope that they will find order and form for their lives. We ask them to work together, and find pleasure and Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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interest in each other’s ideas, as we hope they will when they form friendships, families, and civic associations. We invite them to bring their imaginations and feelings to their studies, as we hope they will connect their temperaments and abilities to enterprise that sustains them and promotes their interests. All these processes of making a life rely on our capacity to find life meaningful.

Contemporary theories of cognition also emphasise the construction of meaning. The research and theories of Levi-Strauss 1972, Piaget 1977, and Jerome Bruner 1960, have dissuaded us from thinking of learning merely

as

the

acquisition

of

discrete

pieces

of

information.iv

Contemporary cognitive theory is persuaded that learning involves developing webs of concepts and categories we need to interpret and order our experience.

Concept formation requires analysis—pulling

things apart to know and name them—and synthesis—bringing things together.

The complementary processes of noting differences and

similarities, of separation and connection, are rhythms that pulse through our identities, our politics, and our cognition.

Thinking and Learning The conventional patterns of schooling, David Perkins wisely observes, are precisely backwards. In most schools, most of the time, students are expected to acquire knowledge—from texts or teachers' lectures—and then think with and about that knowledge. But Perkins reminds us: learning is a consequence of thinking. Retention, understanding, and the active use of knowledge can be brought about only by learning experiences in which learners think about and think with what they are learning. (1992:8) Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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For Perkins thinking comes first, and knowledge is its consequence.

Thinking almost always begins with non-logical, non-verbal operations— feelings, intuitions, and senses.

In Larry Scripp’s discussion of the

relationship of music and mathematical processes in the learning of the children in the Lab Charter School, he observed that there is a correlation between children’s ability to find a pitch and their ability in mathematics.

In finding pitch one must sense the interval, feel the

relationship between the note and its key, the note and its triad, the note and its precursor.

When children sing, they are feeling and thinking

intervals before they represent them with notation or read them on a staff. They are feeling the beat that gives coherence and unity to the piece before they can count.

Their tapping feet or clapping hands

measure the time between downbeats. Quarter notes and half notes have value only in relationship to measure, the whole of which these fractions are a part. The same is true for music and language. When children learn to sing songs like Pop, Goes the Weasel or Three Blind Mice the musicality of the words provides contextual clues to their meaning before they can read or write them.

The logical, verbal, mathematical, and scientific dimensions of thinking, symbolisation

and

communication

then

rest

on

this

pre-logical

foundation. The Root-Bernsteins (1999) offer a rich menu of examples of these tools in action, constantly emphasising that the foundation of thinking is in the embodied human nervous system.

Thinking is not

something that we do with our brains alone. It is something that engages our brains with the world through our bodies. These operations are the constituent parts of thinking.

They are also intertwined with subject

matter in the curriculum: Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Observing: patient, detailed, sustained perception Imaging: forming mental representations of the world when we do not actively perceive it Abstracting: paring down complicated things to simple principles Recognising patterns: discovery of repeated structures in nature, mathematics, rhythm, music, movement, language Forming patterns: combining and repeating of structural elements or operations Analogising: identifying shared properties in two or more different things Body thinking: drawing preverbal and preconceptual intuitions from our bodily sensations and responses Empathising: sensing the lived experience of another person or organism, or thing Dimensional thinking: imagining an object in another domain, from two to three spatial dimensions, or from present to future time, for example Modelling: creating a virtual, mental, imaginary, or representation of a concept, idea, object, or set of conditions

physical

Playing: irreverent and imaginative reordering of conventions and rules Transforming: serial or simultaneous use of multiple mental operations Synthesizing: bringing together understanding the world. (25-27)

many

of

these

operations

in

These are the thinking operations we use to construct a new energy policy, direct a play, design a dance, or vote. They are the actions going on in our minds when we shift from decimals to fractions, or speculate on transmission of SARS across the world’s population, or transform a Virginia Woolf novel into a play. These are the cognitive processes we employ as we make sense of our experience. It is helpful to keep them in mind as we describe these arts integration programs, for these are the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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operations of deeply immersed and engaged thinking. And it is important to remember that when we talk about learning the curriculum, that curriculum is not just content—the revolutionary war or molarity—it is the processes that we design to help students think about these topics and use these tools.

Because the arts invite originality and idiosyncrasy, they reveal authorship, and each artwork, poem or painting, is a mirror that reflects the ways that the artist, da Vinci or our first grader, has thought about the world. Because art produces things that other people can see, hear, and feel, they bring evidence of an individual’s thought into social and cultural spaces where other people can pay attention to it, argue with it, and care about it.

So the meaning we seek in the world is not only a complicated set of recognisable patterns and structures, as proposed in cognitive theory, but also a complex system whose structures provide a home for our deepest hopes and grandest adventures. And the arts, mixing material with fantasy, hope with memory, form with possibility, and individuality with community, are powerful processes of making meaning.

Artistic Teaching and Learning Conceptual blending is the name that Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner give to these processes (2002). Their portrayal incorporates the transfer of information from past experience but also emphasises the new ideas and understandings that can emerge when material from more than one domain is brought together. They designate four spaces: Input space I Input space II Generic Space Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Blended Space And in their text they work through many variations to show how we combine what we know to make something derived from that experience, yet new. This is the work that I observed in CAPE classrooms. They were not only complicated combinations of arts and academics; they were complex events, bringing together relationships, processes, disciplines and media.

The Fauconnier-Turner model is a powerful

heuristic for the descriptions of classroom practices of integrated arts programs that follow.

The Third Space: Integrated Arts in Classroom Practice Chemistry in silk In Renaissance in the Classroom (2001) Arnold Aprill, Gail Burnaford, and Cynthia Weiss provide vivid descriptions of the ways that art making and study in the disciplines inform and augment each other. High school chemistry instruction is usually extended into laboratories where students get the opportunity to mix solutions, although these are rarely solutions for which they have a use. Sophomores at Lakeview High School design textile art made from pieces of silk. Chemistry teacher Pat Riley and textile artist, Eleanor Skydell work with students studying acids and bases to make the dyes that will create the colours and patterns they have envisioned. This approach does not sacrifice a study of molarity in solutions to creativity. The concept of acids and bases is one of the oldest in chemistry, dating back to the 17th century when acids were used to change the colours of dyes extracted from leaves or plants. While Pat Riley’s

students

work through

the

process of

hypothesis

and

experimentation, they are also pulling colours from nature that capture the vivid kaleidoscope in their minds.

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Notice how this integration of chemistry and textile art provides a new space that invites the students’ interpretations and resymbolisation of the disciplines. Many of these successful projects rely on this generic space, an unmarked field—in a school day and lived world crowded with media, messages, words and distraction—that can elicit, hold, and display the sense that students are making (the blended space) of what they study.

Literature and History in a Codex A codex provides this generic space in the collaboration of art teacher Amy Vecchioni and English teacher Linda Garcia at Waters School in Chicago.

Mayan and Aztec texts were inscribed in picture language

composed of designs called glyphs, and assembled in an accordion style book, called a codex, that held their stories, history, and the passage of time. Continuity is literal as the codex unfolds into an unbroken stream of images. The English curriculum requires the 8th graders to read The Pearl, Steinbeck’s novel about a poor fisherman in southern California.

Throughout the novel, Kino, the main character, sings his life, creating songs of family, evil, the enemy, and the sea. It is a tale that moves from happiness to despair, as Kino finds a pearl that promises prosperity, but ultimately separates him from the joys that animated his life and relationships. Vecchioni works with her students to recover the artwork of Mesoamerica and to use its images for their readings of The Pearl.

She shows the children pre-Columbian designs and has them choose a design to represent each of Kino’s seven songs.

These 8th graders empathise with his desire for prosperity, his love for his family, and his fears and losses. Many of them have emigrated from Mexico and, like Kino, share a hidden cultural history. The art project requires the students to interrogate their own responses to the book, for they are held to a minimalist re-presentation of those feelings and Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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thoughts as they select the design and the colors that seem to best capture them.

Here again are the moments of judgment and

consideration that Eisner has identified as significant artistic and educational processes.

In groups of six, the students print their glyphs on codex paper they have washed in watercolours. Note that in this project where literature and social studies point to loss, Vecchioni teaches the children a printing process that ameliorates the erosion of culture by providing multiple copies of their ideas and images. The groups select a glyph that best represents each of Kino’s songs and choose the order of colours to best represent the moods of the narrative as it moves from its beginning to its sad end when ‘the music of the pearl drifted to a whisper and disappeared.’(Steinbeck, 2000:90) Sharing their various interpretations of the text, the children select the interpretation they can agree on as well as the glyph which best represents it for their group codex.

Vecchioni and Garcia intertwine

individual and group processes as children bring their images together to create a codex of their collective reading. This is how culture moves and grows, as one generation reads the work of another and answers it with new work that represents their lived understandings.

Finally in this act of recuperation and art making, these teachers resist the despair of loss that sings through The Pearl, and the demise of a brilliant pre-Columbian culture. What is the point of showing immigrant children the richness of their eclipsed cultural history as they struggle to make their way through the poor neighbourhoods of Chicago? Vecchioni and Garcia have turned loss into creation, interruption into continuity. In the making of the codices they have pulled the past into and beyond the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Steinbeck text, showing these children how they can use the making of art to recover and recreate a rich life.

In this way they enact the

transformative processes of art and literature, not as esoteric experiences granted to the gifted, but as everyday possibilities. They also provide a multicultural curriculum that acknowledges the struggles and losses of cultural politics without reducing that history to nostalgia, split off from the agency and energy of these children’s vivid everyday lives.

Science in a CD: Beyond Critical Thinking The open space Nick Jaffe offers his students to mediate the curriculum and their experience is a blank compact disc. Jaffe integrates music and science in a charter school organised by the Chicago Children’s Choir.v Music provides the arts focus for classes across the curriculum. I watch Jaffe teach a lesson on sound waves, distinguishing between rarefaction and compression and showing the students how waves can cancel each other out when they cross. The lesson is fairly conventional, with Jaffe presenting

some

information,

asking

students

to

speculate

on

hypothetical situations, and to draw diagrams of the widely spaced or compressed molecules.

But then the beat changes. “Move around the room as I throw some sound at you” Jaffe says as he works the oscillator, and they note where the volume is louder and softer, where the chairs are vibrating, where they are still. Feeling this knowledge with their bodies, hearing it as they move, these students are enjoying a solid activity based curriculum. In the land of science demonstrations, of baking soda volcanoes, magnets and iron filings, this is pretty good. But after Jaffe has taught them to identify the node, the place where sound waves cancel each other out, or Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the anti-node, where they reinforce each other, he asks them to use this information in placing the mikes for their recording session.

The students listen to a recording they have made. They comment on what they like and want to retain, and what they would like to change.

There are three vocal tracks, echoes on top of echoes. They wonder about intelligibility. Jaffe teaches them the word, ‘ambiguity’. They like the variety of mood that the three tracks contain, but some think that some of the vocals are too prominent. Then there is discussion about the purpose and range of their critique. Are they being too negative or positive? When one student worries whether they are being too critical, one girl parodies what usually passes for classroom critique: ‘OK,’ she declares, ‘I liked it. It was wonderful!’ And Jaffe, supporting her irony reminds them that they must listen as engineers.

Educators trying to transform the passivity that characterises students in many classrooms, often encourage their activity under the rubric of ‘critical thinking’ seeking strategies and assignments to provoke students to bring reasoned, independent judgment to topics in the curriculum.

Students will be asked to develop arguments that express diverse points of view in discussions, debates, or simulations. The problem with this approach is that it overstates students’ interest in these topics. Kids like games and will respond to an adversarial debate process, but the contest becomes the point and because the content is not connected with their own experiences, their learning remains largely rhetorical.

The

discussion and critique that Jaffe’s students use to argue for the sounds they want to make and hear are generated by their investment in the music and the necessity to work together to make their CD. We learn what we care about.

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After their critique, the students move to their places on the new ground.

Some are typing out the lyrics on a computer: We started out high school sweethearts‌ Others

are practicing

the

percussion and guitar

accompaniments, working to get the rhythm down right.

Some are

measuring the distance from the instruments to the mikes. One smiley fellow works the console, coached by Jaffe, earphones and all, moving to the beat of the percussion that he is recording. A boy and girl work together at another computer, engrossed in learning how to use a program that provides various rhythms.

These are middle schoolers. Their song is called Sweethearts.

So what is science about if not discovery of how to predict and control the forces that surround us and affect our lives? Here science is about learning how to control volume and sound in a song about the joy and pain that can be predicted but cannot be controlled. Jaffe makes it clear that his integrated music/science curriculum is about making music and making community, and about controlling waves of feeling and impulse that are both external and internal.

Blending Systems of Representation In the three preceding vignettes, the blended space, where students encode their understanding of the academic and the arts curricula, holds symbolic representations drawn from more than one symbol system.

Riley and Skydell use textile art and chemistry.

Vecchioni invites

students to draw on literature, history, painting and printing. Jaffe invites students to draw together the vocabulary and diagrams of science with music and technology musical phrases played as one composition.

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We can think of the curriculum areas in the academic disciplines and the art disciplines (molarity and textile design; literature and visual art; science and music; social studies) as the inputs in the Fauconnier-Turner model. That third space (the unmarked cloth, the blank codex, the new CD) marked out for the children’s sense making is the generic space, and it becomes the blended space once they have encoded through painting,

writing,

performing,

and

building

their

old

and

new

understandings.

To this space we bring what we have. In bringing our math and history, our physics and dance, our painting and readings together, we make something new. This was, in Dewey’s vision (1899) the space of the school. This was the dream of a heterogeneous society and the public schools.

In these integrated arts programs that blend symbolic

representations, alert to distinctions, receptive to abstraction and linkages, students learn the semiotics of democracy.

There are

differences in people’s experiences, interests, and cultures. There are different ways of expressing similar things.

Powerful ideas can be

apprehended through multiple and diverse representations.

Peter Abbs reminds us that our words for poetry are derived from the Greek word, poieen, ‘to make’. The Anglo-Saxons actually called the poet, maker. It is the same for our word art. It derives from the Latin ar meaning ‘to join’, ‘to fix’, ‘to put together’. (1982:108) When students have the opportunity to encode their understandings in something they make—a play, a mural, a sculpture, a dance—they have brought their thought and feelings together in a cultural object that they and their classmates can think about, for thought translated into art provides experience. In arts integration classes students experience each other’s ideas.

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We learn what we care about An example: in Rochester, New York, Paula Salvio and I brought theatre work to a class of young ESL children taught by Chojy Shroeder. Hoping to engage her children in reading and writing, Chojy had been asking children to read, edit, and make suggestions to each other for improved drafts. Sweet and compliant, the children followed her instructions, but their suggestions were repetitive and empty, for they had no particular stake in each other’s narratives. We asked the children, instead, to perform each other’s stories. After enacting one little boy’s description of a trip to the zoo, children gathered again around the table. This time they had wonderful language for the world of his story, for they had inhabited it with their bodies, memories, and imaginations as the played the parts of the boy, his friends and family, the polar bear, tiger, and giraffe. Through performance they had participated in his world and that enactment brought language both to them and to him. They had lived for a little while in the world of his story, and now their suggestions were grounded in a shared desire that the story’s language convey the fun, furious beauty, and rambunctiousness that they had performed.

The creation of this art of understanding justifies our habit of bringing children together to learn reading and writing, mathematics and social studies. Why do we read books with other people? It cannot be to keep our eyes on the page. As we join others to make sense of a common experience, we are learning the skills of democracy, the capacity to appreciate what is different within what we share. The creation of art objects that express our ideas and feelings moves interchange from debate to the interactions of the theatre, or the museum, and to a sensibility that may even empathise with opinions we oppose.

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We learn what we care about—and we learn what the people we love care about. This is a form of transfer, of mimesis, as children adopt attitudes and dispositions of the people who surround them in their homes and schools.

These processes of art—abstraction, recognising and forming patterns, analogy, and modelling—support another form of transfer, essential if learning is to be meaningful to us outside of the classroom and the laboratory.

How are citizens to make sense of our ever-surprising

society, of our constantly changing jobs, partners, children, or ozone layer, if we cannot extrapolate from past and similar experience?

Integration and Diversity For some time now we have been working to acknowledge the diversity of the population of our countries by diversifying the curriculum so that it represents the literatures and world views of nationalities, ethnicities, social classes, and genders. Despite the efforts and resources devoted to this worthy project, the time and space of the curriculum will never expand to include all these materials for each of its topics. Choices must and will always be made.

Arts integration processes augment

multicultural curricula by providing a broad repertoire for interpretation and expression of focal texts and disciplines. If children are provided with the opportunity to resymbolise the content of the curriculum and to present this resymbolisation to the people who form his class, school, and neighbourhood, multiculturalism flourishes in the display of diverse responses to common material. Furthermore, because the arts blend imagination with experience, the expression of specific cultural practices becomes figurative, not merely literal. We are where we came from, and we are where we are going. We are who are parents are, and we are who they are not. If we are to invite cultural specificity into the classroom Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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without Balkanizing classroom and communities into defensive enclaves of identity politics, we need the flexibility and openness of the arts to provide for the expression of evolving and dynamic identities. We are complex students and teachers, from complex cultures, in complex schools, sharing a complex world.

The Power of Learning Communities The tension educators encounter as we work to address the interests of individual children and the interests of the whole community of children is deeply connected to other issues that surround learning in the 21st century. We struggle to address the ancient tension between knowing and feeling inherited from centuries of celebrating the triumph of rational thought over fantasy and superstition. We are haunted by the ambition to escape working class immersion in manual labour, an aspiration that idealises and dissociates thought from the sensuous, physical act of making things.

As we struggled to make learning a thing apart, a

meditation, we also generated a politic that removed schools from their communities, from families, politics, and stuff. Finally, we burdened the people who teach our children with the weight of all these abstentions: Don’t feel. Don’t move. Don’t talk. Don’t act. Work alone.

In arts integration schools teachers do not work alone. They work with arts specialists and teaching artists instead of leaving to grade papers or get a coffee during the arts class. Together they plan continuous process that intertwines art and academic curricula.

And they go with their

students to museums and theatres, parks and concerts in their communities.

They work with parents, grandparents, and community

members who come to perform, share their skills, or just help out.

And they work with each other.

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No one learns alone.

It has taken western civilisation a very long time to admit that human relationships are absolutely necessary to the development of cognition.

But after centuries enthralled with learning theories focused only on individual students, our current educational leaders have recently declared this nation’s belated acknowledgement that no one knows alone. From it takes a village to raise a child, to no child left behind, we now acknowledge that every community is responsible for the achievement of even its most vulnerable children. These slogans are admirable as they express a communitarian ethic, but they also mask the complex tensions between the interests of the generation and the selfinterest of its individuals. They raise issues, particularly in times of fiscal stress, about the need to support excellence and creativity as well as basic literacy and numeracy.

They raise issues that have always

challenged public education as we struggle to develop the individual interests and strengths of every student in a participatory democracy striving for equity.

Curriculum that can contain these tensions must be broad and deep. It must have room for imagination as well as information. It must offer opportunities for expression as well as attention. It must acknowledge individual creativity as well as group achievements.

Arts integration

meets these challenges as it brings powerful ways of learning to our nations’ schools.

This presentation was drawn from a longer essay, No One Learns Alone published in Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Grumet, M. (2007) Third things: The wondrous progeny of arts integration Page 135

21st Century, edited by Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond, and published by the Center for Arts Policy, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois. I am grateful to the editors for their permission to reprint sections of this essay.

Notes i

Compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1 (1982:1455). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ii

In the summary evaluation of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, published in Champions of change, James Catterall and Lynn Waldorf report data drawn from a 1998-99 comparison of CAPE and nonCAPE Chicago public schools test data in grades 3,6,8,9,10, and 11. In none of the 52 separate comparisons run by the researchers did they find nonCAPE schools outperforming CAPE schools. While a moderate case could be made for CAPE program effects in reading and mathematics at the 3rd grade level, Catterall and Waldorf concluded that a very strong case could be made at the 6th grade level, and that middle and high school data showed significant improvement of scores in CAPE schools between the planning years and the years when the project was implemented (p.54). Catteral and Waldorf reported these CAPE gains in 6th grade mathematics: Prior to CAPE, CPS schools averaged about percent at or above grade level: CAPE schools averaged about 40 percent. By 1998, more than 60 percent of CAPE sixth graders were performing at grade level on the ITBS, while the remainder of the CPS schools averaged just over 40 percent (p.55).

In the 6th grade reading tests they reported an eight percentage point differential in favour of CAPE schools in 1993 that grows to 14 percentage points by 1998.

In their evaluation of the North Carolina A+ Schools project, Bruce Wilson, Dickson Corbet, and George Noblit observe that while at the beginning of the pilot project in 1995 of the 24 schools only 9 had achieved test scores on the state-wide accountability ABCs testing system that met norms for expected growth. At the end of the pilot project in 1999 all twenty-four schools had met that criteria. Finally, Debra Ingram and Karen Seashore, evaluating the Arts for Academic Achievement project in Minneapolis, compared student achievement scores in third grade reading and mathematics to the degree of their teachers’ use of arts integration, finding a student gain score increase of 1.02 for every unit increase in the teacher’s use of arts integration. In mathematics the gain score was 1.08 points per unit increase in integrated arts instruction.

Significantly, the researchers found even larger gains for students in the free and reduced lunch programs: in reading these girls’ scores increased 1.75 per unit increase; in mathematics these boys’ scores increased 1.28 points per unit increase. In the 4th grade tests, these gains were even higher.

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Booth, E. (1999) The everyday work of art. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks.

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R., (eds.) (2000) How people learn: brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council.

Burnaford, G., Aprill, A. & Weiss, C. (2001) Renaissance in the classroom: arts integration and meaningful learning. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Catteral J.S. & Waldorf, L. (2001) Chicago arts partnerships in education: summary evaluation. In E. Fiske (Ed.) Champions of change: the impact of the arts on learning. Washington, D.C.: Arts Education Partnership.

Dewey, J. (1899) The school and society. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Eisner, E. (2000) What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education? Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Fall 2002, 18 (1) 4-16 .

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Gardner, H. (1990) Multiple intelligences. In W. Moody (ed.) Artistic intelligences: implications for education. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Grumet, M. (1988) The line is drawn. In Bitter milk: women and teaching.

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Hebb, D.O. (1949) The organisation of behaviour: a neuropsychological theory. New York: Wiley.

Ingram D. & Seashore, K. (2003) Arts for academic achievement: summative evaluative report. Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Jackson, P. (1986) The practice of teaching. New York: Teachers College Press.

Le Doux, J. (2002) Synaptic self: how our brains become who we are.

New York: Penguin.

Langer, S. (1957) Problems of art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Perkins, D.N. (1992) Smart schools: from training memories to educating mind. New York: The Free Press.

Perkins, D.N. (1994) The intelligent eye: learning to think by looking at art. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Trust.

Piaget, J. (1977) The development of thought: equilibration of cognitive structures. A. Rosin, trans. New York: Viking.

Root-Bernstein, R. & M. (1999) Sparks of genius: the 13 thinking tools of the world’s most creative people. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Seidel, S. (2004) To be part of something bigger than oneself. In Making learning visible: children as individual and group learners. Reggio Emilia, Italy: Project Zero & Reggio Children, SRL. Seidel, S. (2001) Stand and unfold yourself. In E. Fiske (ed.) Champions of change: the impact of the arts on learning. Washington D.C.: Arts Education Partnership.

Steinbeck, J. (2000) The pearl. New York: Penguin Books.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Wilson, B., Corbet D., & Noblit, G. (2001) The arts and education reform: lessons from a four-year evaluation of the A+ Schools Program, 19951999. Winston Salem, North Carolina: North Carolina A+ Schools.

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Literacy, learning preferences and multimedia John Vincent Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne

Author’s biography John Vincent has spent 40 years teaching in both secondary and primary schools. His Master of Education (Melbourne 1999) focused on visual learners and multimedia, and his PhD, completed in 2004, addressed Cognitive style and children producing texts. At present he is lecturer/tutor in computers in education in the Department of Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Melbourne.

_________________________________________________________ Abstract Individual differences in the classroom can refer to special needs and degrees of talent, to cultural and social variations, or to individual processing differences. There is considerable evidence that the last of these, the natural styles used by students to process and organise information, have a very strong influence on the way that the students approach the creation of texts. This paper argues from recent studies and particularly a one year study of text production by ten-year-olds, that recognition of individual differences is important for understanding the literacy needs of students, and thus is a pre-requisite to implementing the literacy curriculum in order to admit the majority of students into the world of creativity with text production. Such studies suggest that a recognition and understanding of the role of learning preferences in creativity of text production is fundamental to literacy education planning, and that for some students, the only avenue for creative expression is an integration of a variety of semiotic modes derived from all of the Arts through multimedia.

Text production There have been numerous calls for the inclusion of multimodal text production to widen the understanding of literacy in the school curriculum. Most of these calls have arisen from a cultural or Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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environmental perspective. The New London Group (2000) called for a radical review of the pedagogies of literacy to include the multiliteracies of the world around them.

Cope and Kalantzis (2000) asked for

multiliteracies to be considered in the ‘design of social futures’.

Lo

Bianco has called for a ‘new foundational literacy which imparts the ability to understand increasingly complex language and literacy codes’ (2000:92). Kress (1997, 2003) has written of multi-literacy needs from the viewpoint of the multimodal cultural skills of children entering school as well as the multimodality of the world around them as they grow up.

Unsworth has claimed that ‘the notion of literacy needs to be reconceived as a plurality of literacies, and being literate must be seen as anachronistic’ (2002:62).

Laudable as these calls for situating multimodal literacies are, they have distracted us from another issue. While monomodal(verbal) texts can be created with great flare and creativity by some students, many find the verbal medium a considerable struggle throughout their school careers and beyond. Many students may never experience the satisfaction of crafting words in an artistic and creative way. This paper, while accepting the cultural and social imperatives driving the ‘multimodal’ agenda, argues that multimodal literacies address the learning preferences of a sizeable proportion of students better than monomodal verbal literacy.

A small number of academics have highlighted this problem by examining the text products of students when they work not only with words but with multiple means of expression, multiple semiotic modes. It is significant that most of these studies have emerged as the computer, with its ability to produce text multi-semiotically through multimedia applications, has become a common tool in the classroom. One study Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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that preceded widespread availability of multimedia in schools was that of Olson (1992). Olson described a number of such children whose creativity with text grew greatly as they were encouraged to draw and paint as they wrote. Olson called these children ‘visual learners’ because she claimed they seemed to process information in a visual format, but she did not theorise beyond that. Another early researcher with multimodal texts, Dauite (1992) studied three Grade Four students who displayed great weakness with verbal text production, but who became very skilled at composing texts with a computer multimedia application.

Ruttle (2004) conducted a study with eight to nine year old boys. Ruttle describes Reece, a student receiving Special Needs help and a very reluctant communicator in verbal text production. Ruttle comments, ‘When you talk to Reece, he talks fluently, easily and charmingly about what he has seen … Reece also draws very well’ (2004: 73). However, Reece can communicate very powerfully by pictures aided by a few words. Ruttle includes one of his story excerpts, (Figure 1) showing a

Figure 1. Reece’s text product [after Ruttle 2004:73]

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huge truck, also shown as an enlargement with a fierce faced driver, tailgating a car. The text is ‘A booly is like a vane it rushes you and boolys you’ (A bully is like a van. It rushes you and bullies you).

The message given by the image is very strong and does not need more words. Ruttle comments that ‘all meaning making involves intertextuality; not simply between texts in the same mode, but also between texts in different modes’ (2004:73). This was reinforced when Ruttle discovered that when Reece was given the opportunity to record a story with actions, he became a fluent user of words. This increased fluency and creativity with words as a result of working with images and other modes became a constant theme with the current study reported here, as it did with a study by Beavis (2001). She wrote of a student, Ben, who was part of a programme to use electronic games as a literacy genre in some Melbourne secondary schools. Ben was described as ‘a student who found writing difficult, and spelling and handwriting considerable obstacles’ (2001:158). Yet Ben produced in paper form a remarkable multi-layered and multi-semiotic story based on a Nintendo game. He selected fonts to fit the fantasy and pasted in word-processed text. He then overlaid drawings he had made that folded out both horizontally and vertically. He included a personally invented and profusely illustrated map for his game-story and added a computer disc with a music compilation to accompany the reading of the work. Beavis comments: Ben’s image of his story, and of his teacher’s reading of it, is of a multimodal montage of texts, entailing reading, listening and visual dimensions, and ranging across the print story, the fold-out pictures, the map and the music, all in turn linking back to a range of intertextual resonances to the Nintendo games and websites from which they derive.

(Beavis 2001: 158–159).

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Stein (2003) has worked with a school in a very poor neighbourhood in South Africa, and describes a multimodal approach to literacy through making traditional dolls and the language that surrounded their making and use. She writes of the creative multimodal narratives that emerged from the crossing of the modal boundaries, of the unexpected creativity.

Vincent and Rizzo (2005) worked with four Grade Five (ten-year-old) classes and their art teacher to investigate the processes of narrative that emerged from creating ‘claymation’ films. The visual narratives that resulted were complex and arresting. A serendipitous observation was that the students who became most involved in telling a narrative through claymation, to the extent that they entered flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1996) and produced the most striking and complex narratives, were by-andlarge those who were struggling with verbal literacy in the classroom.

Each of these studies deals with difference and textual creativity for a particular group of students who struggle with verbal text, and each searches for a concept of style without overtly embracing it as a construct. It is likely that within each classroom, as the Dauite (1992) and Olson (1992) studies strongly hint, there is a substantial minority who fit this pattern. And each researcher pleads for the inclusion of multiple modes of representation into the literacy curriculum.

Thus multimodal texts in the literacy curriculum may be more than a cultural imperative: it may be an equity imperative. Of the researchers discussed here, only Olson (1992), coming from a fine arts background, speculated on why it was that some students found it very difficult to cope with creative monomodal text production. She noticed that a group Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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of students who were failing to work with literacy expression also seemed to want to express themselves visually. She called this group of students ‘visual learners’, and referenced the phenomenon to early work on brain hemisphere differences. Daiute (1992), Ruttle (2004) and Beavis (2001) do not speculate on learning preferences or style. Yet style differences in one way or another permeates each study.

Text production in a class of ten-year-old students In a study of a class of ten-year-old students in a Melbourne primary school, the students’ total text production output was collected and analysed over a year as they moved from handwritten verbal texts (monomodal) to computer generated multimedia texts (multimodal).

Observations and a cognitive styles analysis suggested that there were strong difference of preference for communicating with textual modes.

Five students had serious difficulties with verbal language expression.

These five students all found oral expression hard to organise, characterised by unfinished sentences, part-developed ideas and in the case of two of them, a reluctance to communicate orally at all. However, it was in their verbal written texts that they displayed the greatest difficulties. Although these children had received 5 years of compulsory schooling to this point, their skill and fluency with written texts was minimal, often in the region of five to twenty words, with poor spelling, syntax knowledge and with frequent unfinished or proto-sentences. They did, however display some creativity. Sophisticated concepts and a wide vocabulary store was evident. Sam, (Figure 2), demonstrates this with his candle description. The candle is “pround” (proud) and there two instances of initial letter alliteration for effect (“dancing, diying”

and

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“flickring flame”) as well as a possible alliteration in “diying, guying (?)”.

Peter and Kosta also displayed these characteristics of minimal verbal fluency and some evidence of verbal sophistication and creativity.

Figure 2. Descriptive writing, Sam: observation of a burning candle

At no time in the year did any of these students achieve a competent level of text production with words. In the researcher’s log that was compiled during these sessions, there are frequent instances of the students not being engaged with the tasks, and of distress with the writing process. Several times, Student A, for example, is recorded as dissolving in tears when being encouraged to expand on his texts.

It is difficult to reconcile this picture of verbal misery, one which is familiar to many teachers, with what followed as these students were introduced to the opportunity to create texts in multiple semiotic modes. They were shown how to use MicroWorlds, a multimedia application that allows the creation and use of text, drawn images, animated images, on-screen sound

creations,

on-screen

music

composition

and hyperlinking

(navigation) across a multi-page document. Immediately the students became absorbed. They became so heavily absorbed that I often had to lever them off the computers and out of the classroom. The researcher’s Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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log recorded a number of instances which recall the criteria that Csikszentmihalyi (1996) used to describe the ‘flow’ experience, notably that action and awareness are merged: concentration is focussed on single activity;

distractions are excluded form consciousness;

worry

about failure is excluded; self-consciousness disappears; sense of time becomes distorted and activity becomes autotelic: rewards are intrinsic, thus activity is enjoyed for its own sake (p. 111).

However it is the products that speak loudest. Csikszentmihalyi (1996) came to the conclusion that in many creative people, especially those in areas of the arts, flow was a necessary condition for creativity. What emerged from the study of these students, characterised as imagers in cognitive style, but possessing an inability to become involved in verbal text production, was their ability to use multiple modes to communicate creativity and effectively, and to be very creative in their use of multiple modes in an integrated way.

Figure 4. Screen 5 from 8: multimodal narrative by Sam

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When Sam, for example discovered that he could use images, colours, navigation devices, sounds and animations to offer an integrated message in his narrative, he produced a sophisticated multimodal text (Figure 3). In a two-dimensional black-and-white paper such as this, it is, of course, impossible to show the contributions that movement, sound, colour and navigation make to the overall message.

The text is more substantial than previously created work, but is placed peripherally to reduce its domination of the page, and is a muted apricot colour. It is there as much to guide the user to other semiotic messengers as it is to convey messages by itself. The ‘reader’ has to look carefully in the pool for clues in order to make the correct choice and find a successful pathway through the narrative. If the ‘reader’ notices a pair of nostrils, then wariness is needed. If the nostrils are not noticed, then a monster/dragon rears up out of the water and consumes the boy with a tongue of fire and a terrifying roar. To achieve this, a complex piece of programming has been written to coordinate the action, and a hidden navigation tool has to be tripped. This then has a hidden navigation device to take the ‘reader’ back to the start of the story to be given another chance of successfully negotiating its pathways. There are eight screens like this, all carefully interwoven with navigation choices that demand both moral and logical decision-making.

In every case, these five students also created verbal texts that were integrated into the multimodal whole. Peter wrote more text in his multimodal text than most of his wholly verbal texts put together, yet words never dominated.

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Discussion There has only been space here to develop the relationship between learning preferences and text production from the point of view of those who struggled with words, and in particular, by taking a zoom lens to one small example. What was remarkable was that all five of the students who fitted this pattern exhibited the lack of linguistic cohesion when producing texts, and showed great cohesion and creativity when using multiple semiotic modes and constantly crossing and recrossing the semiotic boundaries (although one, Laura, less so than the others). This strongly echoes the findings of Stein (reported above), working in a quite different social and economic environment. She wrote that “multimodal pedagogies work consciously and systematically across semiotic modes in order to unleash creativity, reshape knowledge and develop different forms of learning beyond the linguistic” (p. 123). As in Stein’s classroom, each of the students in this group unleashed creativity that had been totally unexpected before the use of the multimodal technologies. They broke boundaries of genre and narrative conventions with an ease that suggested they had never really absorbed the gentle brainwashing, gleaned from five years of school, that narrative had rules. Peter, for example, inserted a computer game into his narrative. He wrote a program for a page that made the ‘reader’ play a guessing game with buttons before being allowed to progress to the next part of the work.

Peter also used multiple semiotic modes as message carriers, including music to set a mood, engineered sounds (his own voice distorted) to convey mystery, animations to create tensions and move the narrative line along and complex navigation devices to involve the ‘reader’ interactively in the story.

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There is no space here to discuss the rest of the class beyond some brief comments. More detailed findings are being reported elsewhere (Vincent 2007, 2006). At the opposite end of the learning spectrum were five skilled verbalisers. Four were in control of their verbal texts, were highly skilled with language, and were capable of entering into flow in production mode. Their creativity with words was, at times, breathtaking.

However, they found multimodal text production stressful, they subverted it or avoided it and produced verbal texts, illustrated by some images.

Nikita complained in interview that multimedia stifled her creativity by “stopping the flow of thought.� The strong match suggests that in this class, and one has to suspect in any class, there are some for whom the prime means of communication is words and this relates directly to their learning preferences. Between these two extremes were a whole range of intermediate cases. Some were able to work happily in both multimedia and in monomodal, verbal formats and switch between the two. Two of these were gifted artistically as well as able to work at a high level verbally, and found in multimedia a release for wonderful creativity.

One student seemed to need to work in a dramatic and kinaesthetic mode, and found monomodal texts stressful. The multimedia was enthusiastically embraced as a surrogate stage, and from then on every piece of work was a production. Others had difficulties with all text production, whatever the medium. A much more detailed study would be needed to tease out all the variables involved in such cases.

Conclusion In this paper, a number of studies, and in particular the study undertaken by the author has closely linked different forms of text production to individual learning preferences, especially for those with very strong preferences towards verbal, and to multimodal expression. It has Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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highlighted the need for differences of approach to text production and that there is no one means of expression that is right for all. It has also shown that for many, creativity is a function of working with multiple modes and that it emerges from the crossing of the various arts modes in the process of production. It also strongly suggests that there is a need for all the arts to work closely together to help students create narrative in whatever way they need to succeed. More research needs to be undertaken in this field, especially in the relationship of learning preferences to communication, and in the widening of a literacy curriculum to encompass multiple modes of representation. What is clear is that to judge a child’s literacy competencies on the basis of verbal literacy alone is no longer justified.

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References Beavis, C. (2001). Digital culture, digital literacies: Expanding notions of text. In C. Durrant & C. Beavis (Eds.), P(ICT)ures of English: Teachers, learners and technology (pp. 145–161). Adelaide: Australian Association of Teachers of English / Wakefield Press.

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Introduction. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 3–8). London: Routledge.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Collins.

Daiute, C. (1992). Multimedia composing: Extending the resources of the Kindergarten to writers across the grades. Language Arts, 69, 250– 260.

Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking paths to literacy. London: Routledge.

Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge.

Lo Bianco, J. (2000). Multiliteracies and Multilingualism. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis, (Eds.), Multiliteracies (pp. 92–105). London: Routledge.

New London Group (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis, (Eds.), Multiliteracies (pp. 9–37). London: Routledge.

Olson, J. (1992). Envisioning writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Ruttle, K. (2004). What goes on inside my head when I’m writing?

Literacy, 38 (2), 71–77.

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Stein, P. (2003). The Olifantsvlei fresh stories project: Multimodality, creativity and fixing in the semiotic chain. In C. Jewitt & G.Kress (eds.), Multimodal Literacy, pp. 123 - 138. New York: Peter Lang.

Unsworth, L. (2002). Changing dimensions of school literacies.

Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 25 (1), 62–75.

Vincent, J. (2007). Writing and coding: Assisting writers to cross the modes. Language and Education 20 2 Vincent, J. (2006) Children writing: Multimodality and assessment in the writing classroom. Literacy 40, 1 51-57 Vincent, J. and Rizzo, J. (2005). Computer generated cartoon animating with upper primary students: Texts that cross the modes. Australian Edcuatoinal Computing, 20, 2

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Afternoon Tea in the Valley: Events, Discourse and the Writing of Qualitative Research Trevor Hay and Julie White University of Melbourne, LaTrobe University

Authors’ biographies Trevor Hay is the author of several books, including biography and ethnography, and is a contributor to the recently published Encyclopedia of East Asian Theatre (Sam Leiter, ed. Greenwood, 2007). He has written numerous short stories, and is a regular essayist, critic and commentator for magazines and journals. He has published may journal articles with Julie White on narrative and narrative method in qualitative research. His PhD was on the narrative structure of Cultural Revolution dramatic literature. t.hay@unimelb.edu.au Dr Julie White lectures in pedagogy, curriculum and professional teacher issues in the School of Educational Studies at La Trobe University. Her research interests include narrative enquiry, creativity, pedagogy and contemporary qualitative research. She is a co-managing editor of Creative Approaches to Research, a new electronic journal, and was elected to the executive of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in 2006. She currently supervises ten postgraduate students and founded the Narrative Research Group. Julie.White@latrobe.edu.au

Abstract In this paper we describe a workshop we conducted at the 2006 'Dialogues and Differences' conference at The University of Melbourne. We explored the potential of narrative approaches to professional reflection and qualitative research by means of our own writing process, and invited analysis of our writing using a three-question method (Hay and White 2005a). In this illustrative tale there is an example not only of our joint writing performance but of dialogic interchange between narrator and observer, highlighting the way voice, perspective and stance contribute to narrative. We use these fragmentary texts to problematise a common definition of narrative in which 'events' are crucial, and to show how narrative is produced not so much by events as by 'discourse' in the narratological sense. The nature of teacher-researcher discourse is then contrasted with more 'artistic' and 'creative' forms and finally compared with 'paradigm positions' (Guba and Lincoln, 2005) for the selection of research issues. Finally, the three question approach (Hay and White, 2005a) and the 'story form model' (Egan, 1989) are linked with these positions in order to provide research Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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students with a means of locating their own research interests within a genre of writing that conveys a sense of the 'passionate participant' as well as the 'events' of their selected research issue (Guba and Lincoln, 2005).

Introduction In our previous work we have drawn attention to the limited uses of narrative in teacher writing of the kind that emphasises identity (Hay and White 2005a, White and Hay 2005). In earlier work we have also engaged with narrative theory in order to posit a more suitable match between the content of qualitative research and the writing style frequently adopted by teacher researchers (White and Hay 2006, Hay and White 2005b). For some years we have been working with tertiary education students on narrative approaches to pedagogy (Morton et al.

2004) and on uses of ‘creative’ genres in the formulation and writing of research questions (Senior and Hay 2005). What follows in this paper is a description of a recent workshop for researchers in which we used our own process of writing to demonstrate a distinction between ‘academic’ discourse and the kind of discourse in which narrative theory is linked with research writing.

We opened with the idea that the teacher researcher and thesis writer might well benefit from an exploration of narrative as much as the more ‘artistic and creative’ writer of a novel or a play. We explained the use of a cue card system based on key questions (Hay and White 2005a, White & Hay 2006). These questions were derived from an interpretation of elements of narrative, or discourse, used originally to permit early childhood teacher-storytellers to use a theoretical basis for the development of a repertoire for storytelling. In this paper we describe how we used the ‘three question approach’ in the different contexts of research and pre-service teacher training (see below). Ultimately we Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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intend to refine our approach in order to encompass a comprehensive list of elements of narrative within a compact framework. This paper, however, focuses on ‘discourse’ (Culler 1997:86-87, Barthes 1957:109111) and ‘events’ (Porter Abbott 2002:12-24) in narrative, subsuming the much more complex and formulaic narratological distinction between story and plot (Forster 1963, Eagleton 1996, Cuddon 1991).

The ‘Three Question Approach’ The narrative questions (Table 1 below) were distributed to workshop participants for initial consideration in relation to any simple story of their own choosing, whether ‘literary’ or recalled from their own experience.

Table 1. Narrative focus questions

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The questions led us inevitably to familiar elements of narrative such as ‘voice’, ‘perspective’, ‘story’, ‘plot’ and ‘characterisation’ and to a broad appreciation of ‘discourse’ in the narratological sense (Culler 1997; Barthes 1957). Complex theory about elements of narrative was distilled into a blend of the key elements needed to convey the story, thus emphasising the effect (or possibly ‘affect’) of particular kinds of discourse (e.g. myth, folk tales, biography and ‘research tales’). After warming up with application of the three questions to stories and recollections by workshop participants we then provided a sample of our own writing which starkly illustrated the difference between a complete sequence of events minus discourse and a rich but fragmentary discourse minus events. We wanted to show that events were only part of a discourse, part of narrative, and ultimately part of narrative enquiry.

We chose as our theme our recollections of a visit to a village during a recent British Educational Research Association (2005) conference in Wales.

1. Text One We went to a conference in Wales and delivered our papers and had tea in a village in a valley and then we all went home on an aeroplane.

2. Text Two (Julie’s story) Late afternoon and it’s already a little darker than we’d thought it’d be and everything seems to be yet another bus trip away after a trip round the backwaters of Swansea. Huge terminal, scraps of paper and subdued miserable looking people – a very dismal terminal with gate – more like a cage – separating one gate from another. All the romance evaporated in the bleak post-war brutalism of Swansea.

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tourist bureau had told us. In spite of this, Trevor, who thinks he’s one of the Grimm brothers, is banging on about essential nature of the Welsh banshee as opposed to the Walt Disney witches on broomsticks. Perhaps this is his way of paying me back for dragging him out here?

All waiting expectantly for their bus to take them home. But our bus doesn’t come. We ask.

‘Well, now. Cwmgrach then, is it?

Suddenly I’m enchanted again, because it’s the voice of my grandmother.

Half an hour later the bus arrives.

I’m on the top step of the bus. Sally has still got one foot on the road while Trevor hasn’t yet taken the fateful step.

‘Well, we’re here now. This is why I came to this conference. How much are these two going to put up with? It’s getting quite late.

We’re all tired and I don’t even know how long this trip is going to take or what I’ll find when we get there. What kind of look is that on Trevor’s face? Is he still with me on this, or has he had enough?

What do I do?’

The bus driver’s looking at me, waiting for a reply. I feel like an inconvenient and time consuming foreigner.

Trevor is fumbling again. It’s never a good sign. We need exact money.

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‘There’s no bus back tonight, mind,’ in response to my innocent question about how regular the buses are.

Like a tableaux, three of us standing on different levels on the bus – all looking to someone else for a decision. I’m responsible and anxious, and Trevor is looking grumpy.

Sally steps up.

‘No. We’ve come this far now. We’re not turning back. We’ll get back somehow.’

Sally, who’d told us of her school report that described her as ‘wan and ethereal’ was suddenly transformed into a leader and saviour.

The workshop participants were then asked to consider the three questions in relation to both texts. With the first text, the question, ‘What happened?’ was hesitantly greeted with responses such as, ‘You went to a conference’ and ‘nothing happened.’ The unanimous response to the second question, ‘How do you know?’ was, ‘It says there what happened’- “We went to a conference.” You told us yourselves.’ And the third question, ‘What does this mean?’ drew a bemused blank. The second text, on the other hand, produced a lively discussion. The process we used this time was to pair up the participants to discuss each of the three questions in turn and, of course, there was no clear agreement as to the meaning of the text – or even what happened, if indeed anything at all happened.

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We then introduced the commonly held view of narrative - that it must contain events in order to even qualify as a narrative. We introduced H. Porter Abbot’s treatment of ‘events’ documented in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, where he says: Simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events. ‘Event’ is the key word here, though some people prefer the word ‘action.’ Without an event or an action, you may have a ‘description’, and ‘exposition’, an ‘argument’, a ‘lyric’, some combination of these or something else altogether, but you won’t have a narrative. ‘My dog has fleas’ is a description of my dog but it’s not a narrative because nothing happens. ‘My dog was bitten by a flea’ is a narrative. It tells of an event. The event is a very small one – the bite of a flea – but that is enough to make it a narrative.

(2002:12) When the participants asked us what we were looking for in using the questions we pointed out that we had not even commenced our bus journey, let alone been to the conference or come home again, so it was rather strange that we had managed to elicit half an hour of discussion out of the second text and nothing from the first, where the whole action was complete.

It seemed, from this example that every moment of an incident or part of an event may have significance when invested with elements of voice, perspective, character - in short, when events are embodied in a discourse. One of the key observations from participants themselves concerning discourse was that the second text clearly ties events to character. Without Trevor being grumpy, Julie being anxious and Sally displaying an unexpectedly intrepid spirit, this would amount to a simple Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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sequence of events not much different from the first. Does character drive events?

We followed this with amplification of the Porter Abbott idea of ‘My dog has fleas’ in order to test his contention that this did not constitute a narrative. First we added a form of characterisation (intonation) to these four words by placing the emphasis on each of the words in turn, showing how each intonation changed the meaning, and then we invited the participants to turn the four words into a narrative using any device of their own. The results enabled us to distinguish between discourse and events in a quite entertaining and novel way. For example one of the keynote speakers at the Dialogues and Differences Symposium came to our workshop and handled it in this way: My Dog Has Fleas was the tune she sang over and over. I heard it in the kitchen and the living room. She hummed it in the car and under her breath in the supermarket. The tune seemed to beg for an ending and lacking one, she would repeat the melody over and over. One day as I was struggling to close the zipper on my overstuffed suitcase, I heard to my horror My Dog has Fleas coming from my own vocal chords. It seemed to orchestrate exertions, to deny anxiety, to smack of fact.

A second participant wrote: My dog has fleas. It wasn’t my fault. Like any very busy mother juggling 1000 (at least) projects, demands, friends, commitments (and did I mention a PhD thesis) while at the same time trying to be a calm, dutiful, supportive wonder mother, I actually bought the flea collar. (You know the kind in the ads that promise not only ridding your dog of fleas but actually changing your dog into one that sits in your lap calmly and rolls toilet paper under your toddler). Yes, I Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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bought the flea collar. Is it my job, too, along with every other aspect of my life aforementioned to put it on…?

While a third wrote: ‘My dog has fleas’, pleaded the elderly woman to anyone who would listen. Shabbily dressed, carrying an old weathered bag, she shuffled through the park. People avoided her. She came to an empty bench seat and placed her bag carefully on it. Opening the top of the bag she peered inside. A dirty, scruffy mongrel sat inside shaking and whimpering. Filled with love for the animal, she touched its head lightly with her sleeve. A voice in her head kept repeating over and over…’Don’t pat the dog. Dogs have fleas’.

Our own quick-fire analysis of these texts using the three question method yielded the following, which we contributed to the group discussion: ‘What happened?’ In our keynote’s narrative, someone remembers a tune hummed by someone that seems to have been irritating. ‘How do you know?’ Someone (was it the author? was it the narrator?) told us.

And thirdly, ‘What does it mean?’ One interpretation is: this person who’s telling the story is reproducing the behaviour of the person who annoyed her in the first place – but it’s got nothing much to do with dogs or fleas.

In the second participant’s narrative: ‘What happened?’ Someone bought a flea collar and wondered whether she should put it on. ‘How do we know?’ Because someone (the author?

The narrator? A fictional character?) told us.

What does it mean?

Whoever this person might be is annoyed and resentful that she has to think about such things and take responsibility to remember to do everything – despite the fact that she’s extremely busy.

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In the third participant’s narrative: ‘What happened?’ A poor old woman sits on a park bench and pats a dog she keeps in a bag. ‘How do you know?’ The author/narrator tells us.

What does it mean? Interestingly we each had quite different

interpretations of what this meant. Workshop leader Hay’s interpretation was that the old woman had been brought up in such a way that she thought love was dirty. White, on the other hand, assumed that the old woman herself had been treated like the neglected and dirty dog.

In all these cases it would seem that ‘events’ do not constitute the bedrock of narrative.

Narrative and Research We then set out to relate narrative to research in the following way. Using a sociological meaning of discourse (Mills, 2004) we introduced the idea that research has certain discourses of its own that are not dictated by necessity so much as convention. Taking `bullying’ as our theme, we invited participants to formulate research questions and to begin a written introduction to the ‘research’, based on the discourse they believed was appropriate to this form of enquiry. Predictably, the mood shifted from the excitement of storytelling and uses of narrative as in our Wales example, to a more ‘academic’ discourse.

In order to provoke the participants back into the storytelling frame of mind, we then displayed a number of quotations, including some from well known ‘literary’ writers.

Stuart Hall said: Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Academic work is inherently conservative in as much as it seeks, first, to fulfil the relatively narrow and policed goals and interests of a given discipline or profession and, second, to fulfil the increasingly corporatized mission of higher education; intellectual work, in contrast

is

relentlessly

critical,

self-critical,

and

potentially

revolutionary for it aims to critique, change, and even destroy institutions, disciplines and professions that rationalize exploitation, inequality and injustice. (Hall cited in Olson and Worsham 2003:13) Ursula Le Guin said: People often use the passive voice because it is indirect, polite, unaggressive, and admirably suited to making thoughts seem as if nobody needed to take responsibility. Thus the passive is beloved of bureaucrats and timid academics, and generally shunned by writers who want to take responsibility. (1998:68) Henry Giroux said: [Writing allowed]…me to speak to many audiences and extend the meaning of what it means to make one’s pedagogy more public. It also allowed me to define myself as something other than a traditional academic, which always conjured up for me a kind of professional posturing defined through the degraded ritual of being disinterested, specialized, apolitical, and removed from public life.

Writing allowed me to break out of the academic microcosm, take sides, fight for a position, push against the grain, and say unsettling things – all those attributes that make one ‘un-cool’, as one of my colleagues recently suggested of those who avoid the cleverness of academic posturing and happen to believe that intellectuals actually have some public responsibilities in fashioning a politics of resistance and hope. (2003:99-100) Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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And Laurel Richardson said: I have a confession to make. For 30 years, I had yawned my way through numerous supposedly exemplary studies. Countless numbers of texts I abandoned half read, half scanned. I would order a new book with great anticipation – the topic was one I was interested in, the author was someone I wanted to read – only to find the text boring. It was not that the writing was complex and difficult, but that it suffered from acute and chronic passivity: passive-voiced

author,

‘passive

subjects’.

‘Coming

out’

to

colleagues and students about my secret displeasure with much of qualitative writing, I found a community of like-minded discontents.

Undergraduates, graduates, and colleagues alike say they have found much of qualitative writing – yes – boring. (2000:924) We also provided a handout of Guba and Lincoln’s (2005) paradigm positions on selected issues and highlighted the issue of ‘Inquirer posture’: • ‘Disinterested scientist’ as informer of decision makers, policy makers, and change agents; • ‘Transformative intellectuals’ as advocate and activist; • ‘Passionate participant’ as facilitator of multi voice reconstruction; • Primary voices manifest aware self-reflective action; secondary voices in illuminating theory, narrative, movement, song, dance, and other presentational forms (see Guba and Lincoln 2005:196, Table 8.4).

In light of these ‘positions’, we then asked the participants to work in groups to revisit and analyse the discourse in which their questions were couched. The results were most revealing, and using Guba and Lincoln’s Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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(2005) paradigms, we decided as a group, that by and large, the passages were at the most conservative end with no proposals venturing into the spectrum of ‘critical theories’, ‘constructivism’ or ‘participatory’ paradigms of contemporary qualitative research (see Table 8.4:196).

However, the subsequent interlocutory discussion about possible ways of ‘researching’ bullying rapidly moved the discourse from areas such as the ‘prevalence of bullying in schools’ or `the need for education about bullying’ into the realms of ‘What does it feel like to be bullied?’ - and even into the realms of ‘What does a bully feel like?’ We then discussed what kind of discourse was appropriate for telling each tale.

In order to extend our three question approach and link it with other narrative approaches, and other pedagogical theory and practice, we closed the workshop by drawing attention to Kieran Egan’s ‘story form’ model, used for planning teaching. We suggested a modified form that might be suitable for research.

Under the heading, ‘Identifying Importance,’ Egan suggests: 1. What is most important about this topic?

2. Why should it matter to children?

3. What is affectively engaging about it? (Egan 1989:41) We modified the questions in this way: 1. What are some important aspects of this topic?

2. Why does it matter to you as a researcher?

3. Why should it matter to your readers?

The last of Egan’s questions, ‘What is affectively engaging about it?’ we absorbed under questions 2 and 3 and, in the course of discussion, related it to Guba and Lincoln’s ‘passionate participant’ in the paradigm Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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positions (2005: 196). We closed the workshop by reminding the participants of our distinction between ‘events’ and ‘discourse’ and asked them to consider this distinction in the context of an issue for research, such as bullying. We asked them to think of the difference between research that emphasises frequency of bullying episodes, definitions of bullying and locations in which bullying occurs and research which is ‘affectively engaging’. Could this be the difference between ‘events’ and ‘discourse’ in the writing of research?

Conclusion In our own Faculty of Education we frequently wonder at the rather haphazard process that leads students to select a research theme, and to match it with a research paradigm. Even if that all comes together mysteriously, students never seem to find their way clear to a means of matching their own ‘passion’ to a suitable discourse for conveying the story they have on their minds. These workshops are a beginning. We have found that it is not terribly difficult to enthuse students with the possibilities of narrative forms of qualitative research or to convince them of the value of ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ (Richardson, 2000), but it is very tricky finding ways to illustrate how writing differently makes for different research. One of the principal obstacles is to be found in the conceptual gap we have previously identified (Hay and White 2005a, White and Hay 2006) between writing of the kind associated with creativity (imagined, fictive) which is contextualised and illuminated not only by literary theory but by critical and cultural theory, and writing of the realist or naturalist kind associated with teacher identity or teacher lives and work (biography, autobiography) (Hay and White, 2005b). This latter kind is more likely to find a conceptual paradigm within sociology. In this paper we have outlined our approach in one of a series of workshops we devised initially for pre-service students undertaking pedagogical Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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research for the first time, and for research students undertaking dissertations in qualitative educational research. We are in the process conducting our own qualitative research into the kinds of responses we get to exercises in writing which are open-ended, ‘creative’, not necessarily linked to the kind of themes one normally encounters in research topics or research questions, and certainly not embedded in conventional academic discourse. As we proceed we will try to collect an anthology of short pieces like the ones we have presented here, which may help to illuminate the links between discourse and paradigm. In this paper we have outlined the steps we took to highlight the place of ‘events’ and, by implication, the ‘findings’ of research within a form of discourse. In time we hope to link these writing/storytelling exercises with other forms of narrative at work in ‘creative’ dissertations (art installations, performance ethnography, exhibitions) and with specific research topics and questions.

Finally, and in keeping, with the spirit of our workshop, we should explain why we called the paper ‘Afternoon Tea in the Valley’. The greatest ‘event’ of the visit to Wales was an unforgettable

meeting with old

neighbours of Julie White’s family in the village of Cwmgrach, and the rich – and poignant – experience of sharing tea and cake one late autumn evening in a street that had changed little in fifty years. When we started the workshop - on the theme of events and discourse – we intended to tell the ‘whole story’, but we only got as far as the steps of the bus to Cwmgrach in the Valley of the Witches.

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References Barthes, R. (1957) Mythologies (Trans. Annette Lavers) (2000). London: Vintage.

Culler, J. (1997) Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eagleton, T. (1996) (2nd edition) Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Egan, K. (1989) Teaching as Storytelling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriuclum in the Elementary School. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Forster, E.M. (1963) Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Giroux, H. (2003) ‘Interview’ in Olson, G. A. and Worsham, L. (Eds) Critical Intellectuals on Writing. New York: State University of New York Press.

Guba, E. & Lincoln, Y. (2005) in Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. The Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edition). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Hay, T. (2003) Critical Literacy and the Oral Interpretation of Children’s Literature Unpublished Paper, The University of Melbourne.

Hay, T. and White, J. (2005a) Writing as Pedagogy: Inquiry, Research and the Teacher. Creative Dissent: Constructive Solutions.

Australian Association of Research in Education Annual Conference. 27 Nov–1 Dec 2005: The University of Western Sydney, Parramatta.

Hay, T. and White, J. (2005b) Beyond Authenticity in Hay, T. and Moss, J. (Eds) Portfolios, Performance and Authenticity. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson.

Le Guin, U. (1998) Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussion on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland, Oregon: Eighth Mountain Press.

Mills, S. (2004) Discourse. London: Routledge.

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Porter Abbott, H. (2002) The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morton, E., Anderson, P., Tresize, N., Williamson, R. Glaahn-Bertelsen J., Hwee Yan Toh, D., Hosseini, F., & Phillips, J. (2004) Issues Explored Through Personal Stories. Unpublished Paper, The University of Melbourne.

Olson, G. A. and Worsham, L. (2003) (Eds) Critical Intellectuals on Writing. New York: State University of New York Press.

Richardson, L. (2000) Writing as a Method of Inquiry in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition).

Thousand Oaks, California:Sage.

Senior, K. and Hay, T. (2005) It Would Hardly be Fish: A One Act Play about Authenticity, Voice and the Educational Researcher. Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, The University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, 14-17 September.

White, J. and Hay, T. (2006) Teacher as Writer: Is There a Place for Narrative Theory? American Education Research Association Annual Meeting. San Francisco, 7-11 April.

White, J. and Hay, T. (2006) Have we Eaten on the Insane Root?

Narrative, Pedagogy and Research Workshop. Dialogues and Differences Conference. The University of Melbourne, 20-22 April.

White, J. and Hay, T. (2005) Passport to the Profession: Standards Based Portfolios in Hay, T. and Moss, J. (Eds.) Portfolios, Performance and Authenticity. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson.

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Can I get a witness? Mapping learning in and beyond the drama classroom Christine Hatton National Institute of Education, Singapore

Author’s biography Christine is an Assistant Professor of Drama at NIE Singapore. Her research interests and publications focus on the nature of drama learning and teaching, gender and identity issues in drama and the notion of drama as a positive change agent in schools and communities. Christine has taught in schools and universities in NSW and the UK. She is the former president of DRAMA NSW and has served on the Drama Australia executive. In Singapore she teaches in the area of drama pedagogy and practice, and supports schools and teachers in their introduction of drama into the curriculum. chatton@nie.edu.sg

__________________________________________________________ Abstract It can be argued that there are common aesthetic and expressive elements inherent to all arts learning experiences. Whilst such connections are critical for the purposes of advocating and articulating the value and importance of the arts in schools and communities, this paper argues that there is still a pressing need for drama educators and researchers to map the particular contours of the learning process and its outcomes for students. This paper attempts to ‘give witness’ to some of the unique practices, processes and outcomes of drama pedagogy. In particular the paper will explore the notion of drama as identity work, where the drama classroom can become a dynamic space for improvising identities, for telling, listening to and enacting stories, and for experiencing resonance through the dramatic artistic process.

Drawing on recent drama research in secondary schools, this paper discusses the distinctive nature of drama pedagogy and learning and considers some of the lasting outcomes of classroom drama projects.

Introduction This paper will discuss aspects of drama learning in the secondary classroom and its impact on young people’s lives. The paper will focus Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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on the way drama work in everyday, secondary school classrooms might contribute to and support the way young people improvise, perform and construct their notions of themselves and others.

The paper will explore the notion of witnessing from two angles: •

How drama research might bear witness to what happens in classrooms through its use of narrative methods and play forms for investigation and reporting.

•

How drama learning and playmaking in particular offer ways for young people to be the makers and shapers of meanings, using the drama work as a means of giving witness to their stories and perspectives,

creating

a

space

for

resonance

and

new

understandings to emerge.

To illuminate my discussion, I will refer to my doctoral research on these topics and will use excerpts from the research playscripts from my study to show some of the ways in which drama learning encounters provide evocative contexts where student identities can be performed, shaped and witnessed.

By way of a brief introduction, my research study focused on two all-girl classrooms, where playbuilding was the focus of the drama learning. The girls made their own plays which were then performed to an audience of other girls. I completed two playbuilding projects in two very different but highly multicultural schools – one was a Catholic girls’ school in Sydney and the other a comprehensive girls’ school in south east London. Both groups of girls made plays that were drawn almost entirely from stories and experiences from their own lives, like educational ethnodramas (Saldana 2005). These were ‘factional’ not fictional works. The drama art Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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form was used to interrogate the girls’ sense of cultural capital, to play with it and juxtapose it alongside the girls’ own views and personal narratives. The projects were framed and guided by a feminist praxis. My aim as a feminist drama teacher and as a researcher was to use the art form as a platform for dialogue for girls and between girls about issues and experiences that were ‘real’ or important to them. The creative process used in the teaching was designed to pay attention to girls and enable them to take charge of the drama form as authors and makers; to ‘own their own words’ (Celina) and shape the work in ways that communicated their views and honoured their stories. Students were encouraged to voice their ideas and see their own lives and stories as worthy content for drama investigation. The two groups used different thematic foci for the playbuilding but the process of constructing the works was the same. Thematically the Sydney group investigated the way girls’ identities are shaped by and in response to their mother/daughter relationships. The London group focused thematically on stories and experiences of being a ‘girl’. Both groups engaged in a series of investigative drama workshops and the scenes that were generated were shaped collaboratively into plays, which were performed for and discussed with other girls.

I was positioned centrally within the research study. I was leading the teaching episodes and researching them at the same time. On one hand I was interested in the possibilities of girl–friendly drama teaching methods and on the other hand I was interested in the impact of drama learning process on the girls’ understandings of themselves and others.

My methodology was a blend of drama research, narrative inquiry and case study research. The data collected was derived from a range of sources: my reflective journal in the main, plus students’ comments, Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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student writing, interviews, writings, videos, photographs, emails and letters and also the plays they produced. These were analysed, shaped and reported in play form, so that each case study journey was reported as a short play. These plays were read, checked and amended with the participants. Member checking was critical to my inclusive, feminist research ethic; I wanted to report the events poetically but also authentically. I was a participant / a character in the plays, as were the girls, who are identified by their own real first names. They were keen to be ‘known’ as a result of this research. Pseudonyms were used to replace the real names of the schools.

The excerpts presented in this paper are taken from the play I wrote in my thesis to describe and present my findings from the first case study at St Brigid’s in Sydney. Scenes were fashioned from multiple data sources with few ‘fictional’ representations or additions by the researcher; however they were structured deliberately to present the critical moments and key findings in dramatic ways. In each research play time shifts seemingly in a chronological fashion from the beginning to the end of each project. However within the scenes moments of drama learning ‘in process’ (as it happened) are juxtaposed with the excerpts drawn from the ‘product’ of the project, that is, the play that was created and performed in the project. This is to give the reader / viewer a sense of the learning moments and show how they fuelled the choices the girls made in their final performance piece.

In recent times researchers from a range of contexts and disciplines have turned to poetic, artistic and ethnodramatic ways of representing data and research (See Bagley & Cancienne 2002, Denzin 1997 & 2003). Given the recent performative turn in the broader field of Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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qualitative research it would seem that the need for drama education researchers to use and trust the art form in their own research is becoming more necessary and urgent. Using playform to report research enables the rich experiences of drama to be witnessed and to reach others, beyond our own discipline. It also allows students and their experiences to be voiced and truly included in the research process, beyond them merely being the subjects of the research. My own drama research project set out to trace the nuances of gendered learning in drama. Using the art form to research the art form in action was a logical choice for me as a researcher. The art form seemed to allow me to give witness to what had happened in these projects, to capture the dynamics of drama learning as it unfolded and the discoveries both small and large, made by both the students and teacher/researcher along the way.

Play form allowed me as a researcher to capture the lived 3D space of drama teaching and learning, not as separate, disengaged ‘acts’ but as a woven, intensely relational and ‘lived’ pedagogical exchange. Writing in non-naturalistic play form also enabled me to honour and represent the multiple voices, tensions and processes inherent in these projects. In writing my study in this way, I was not attempting to manipulate and represent my students’ ‘performances’ of learning like an ‘enthusiast’s infatuation’ (Conquergood in Lincoln & Denzin 2003: 404). In a voicecentred feminist research project it was important for me not to ‘translate’ the girls’ words or experiences but to allow them to speak for themselves within both the playbuilding and the research process. Because I was immersed in the work as both teacher and researcher, I had to engage with and interrogate my own ‘participant’ journey alongside the girls and to question my own part in their meaning-making. Play form enabled me to represent and reflect on my own presence or ‘situatedness’ in these case

study

contexts

and

also

to

capture

my

concerns

and

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understandings unfolding over time, in dialogue with my students, immersed in the creative process. Within these research plays I am represented as two characters: Chris the teacher and the Narrator, which is my researcher’s voice. This splitting of character gave me a structural drama frame for reflection on my own practice. Like the girls seeing their voices and selves become visible through playmaking, I was excavating and making visible my own feminist praxis through our playmaking journey together and the process of researching that journey.

Further papers regarding this study have been published in various journals (see Hatton 2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b).These papers have focused on the nature of feminine adolescence and identity construction, narrative playmaking and interventionary drama processes.

This paper focuses on the notion of witnessing and its importance in both classroom drama practice and drama education research. It offers examples of student and teacher meaning-making (in process) and considers the ramifications for drama as a dynamic and potentially transformative pedagogy.

Arts learning as important learning The arts give expression to important aspects of our lives. They enable the aesthetic representation of lives. Through their forms and processes the arts enable artists and non-artists to re-view, re-interpret or bear witness to aspects of lives, stories and experiences.

Malcolm Ross

(1978) asserts that one of the main functions of the arts is to enable us to sort out our feelings through our acts of creative self-expression, so that like storying, art experiences give us opportunities to find coherence and to process our experiences by giving them a symbolic form. Charles Fowler (1994) suggests that the arts help us to realise our own humanity.

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The arts provide the aesthetic space to shape who we are, in terms of how we see ourselves and how we respond to others and our world. In the arts the conversation is often reciprocal - with ourselves and with others…as works are made and received. Arts philosopher Maxine Greene (1995: 43) reminds us that the arts offer opportunities for students to experience ’wide-awakeness‘ so that their consciousness and imaginative action is stirred. Similarly Felicity Haynes (2001) says that drama enables us to step outside our mundane space allowing us to reflect on ourselves in a conscious way. Ross (1984) echoes this sentiment in his case for the centrality of the aesthetic experience in our lives when he says that to be aestheticised is to be turned towards life.

In arts education we want young people to be ‘turned toward life’ surely?

Within the curriculum the arts have much to offer young people and their development. There have been many studies across the world mapping the impact and outcomes of arts projects and arts learning in schools. In education, the place of the arts in schools has grown and arts learning within the curriculum has a growing body of theory, practice, pedagogy and research documenting its rise in education. And yet, to be honest, in curriculum provision and in education circles, all is not equal. The arts continue to fight to maintain their existing positions in the curriculum club.

If we look at the ‘arts’ as a group of subjects, we can see that some arts are more ‘equal’ than others. In some states and countries even the ‘arts curriculum’ is not a balanced or shared stage. The arts educators may wish for unity, for a level playing field or a sense of common purpose, but in practice in systems and in schools, some arts are indeed considered more valuable than others. Perhaps this is due to history, or lack of support, or a lack of general understanding about what each art can and does do within education. Some arts have more room to manoeuvre Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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within schools, with education authorities, with agencies and in the public eye. Some arts have the ear of the minister of education and some can’t get close enough to be heard. If we are truly interested in advocating the generic shared value of the arts in schools I believe we need to consider how the ‘hierarchy of value’ is played out in education and learn to value and support each of the arts in a more level way. In my view, we continue to need a witness, to find ways of explaining the importance and distinctive nature of the work we do in drama education. Drama makes a significant and lasting impact on the learning of young people as evidenced by my own research as well as the work of other drama researchers. It would seem that drama can substantially enable and support learning and the process of identity formation, particularly for adolescents.

Drama as identity work “Who are you?” said the caterpillar… Alice replied, rather shyly, “I - I hardly know, sir, just at present… at least I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) So how might drama contribute to identity negotiation? Post-structuralism offers ways to ‘see the subject’s fictionality, whilst recognizing how powerful fictions are in constituting what we take to be real’ (Davies 1997). The blurring of boundaries between the real and the fictional happens in the performances of gender and identity in everyday life as well as in the drama classroom. These performances are shaped by a bank of competing, contradictory and power-laden discourses.

Post-modernist and post-structuralist notions of fragmentary fluid ‘selves’ are useful when theorising in particular about adolescent girls as Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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subjects, where the post-modern girl subject can be seen as a subject-inprocess. Many writers in the fields of both theatre and drama in education, as well as psychology, anthropology and sociology, have discussed and debated the dialectic relationship between life and drama.

From Erving Goffman’s (1959) notions of everyday life as a performance to Judith Butler’s (1990) notions of performativity and gender as a performance there is a continuum of theoretical discourse concerning the intersections of life and performance. Victor Turner’s (1974) notion of ritual social drama points to social action as a performance which is repeated. Judith Butler argues that gender itself is an act and that the performance renders social laws explicit. So the performances we may give in aspects of our lives are shifting and open to both change and regulation. If arts experiences force us to reflect and step outside our mundane space (Haynes 2001) so that we may awaken our human consciousness, then through engaging in the artistic process we can see anew, challenge and change ourselves. The art form of drama gives us the aesthetic space to ‘hold the moment up to scrutiny’ and to rehearse new performative possibilities in both life and art. My own research tried to map out how this might happen in the drama classroom context, for and with adolescent girls.

Young people in drama classes explore and play with cultural discourses and codes and re-interpret them through drama processes and products.

They re-enact, celebrate, interrogate and lampoon popular culture, they use role to question established codes of behaviour in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and class, and they interrogate beliefs and morality.

Importantly, in drama they blur the boundaries between fantasy selves and private or home selves as they present their work within the public domain of the classroom and school community. Whilst teenagers are Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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making plays, taking on roles, testing ideas in action and even doing their exams in drama, they are engaging in the serious play of sorting through selves and making lasting meanings about their lives, relationships and cultures. The drama work can provide contexts for knowing our ‘selves’ and others better. But drama can also provide safe and shared spaces for negotiating change and staging resistance. Selves are at play in classroom drama work, they can re-negotiated or re-imagined through the drama forms and enactments of the classroom. The dramas of the classroom in fact feed the development of students’ life narratives and personal myth making (McAdams 1993) as they can open up possibilities and suggest alternative ways of being and living (Gallagher 1998 & 2000). Drama allows students to see identities as fluid open works, as constructed but also ‘in process’… as negotiable and performative. They can rehearse alternative role frames and position themselves in relationship to the drama work. Working dramatically can give students opportunities and ways to perform selves anew or differently…to become aware of the discourses that shape and position us and rehearse ways of ‘playing’ and ‘storying’ differently. In this way the meanings made about oneself through the experience of dramatic processes can be substantial and lasting.

Secondary drama teachers are often acutely aware of the way students engage on a personal level in their work; they see daily evidence of the way drama contributes to the shape and quality of students’ lives as the students

journey

towards

adulthood.

Group

presentations

and

playbuilding exercises become collective investigations of ‘where this group is at’; individual performance projects explore personal interests and tap into students’ own life stories. As Jonathan Neelands suggests drama work involves acts of identity (1998).

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In collaborative processes, which constitute the most common learning experiences in drama, meaning-making involves the participants negotiating the representation of role, narrative and symbols with other individuals. One can see Bruner’s notion of the ‘transactional self’ (1986) at play in dramatic activities. As drama educator Helen Nicholson suggests this is where drama can offer powerful learning experiences. “If the self is a text, and identity is created and sustained through performance acts, then through the process of play we become socialised and might try out new ‘selves’”. (1995:21).

Working in the ‘what-if’ modes of drama activities allows students to try out new and possible selves and see how they work in action and in relation to other characters in the fictional realm of the drama. Much has been written about the various merits of play for younger children (for example: Piaget 1951, Bruner et al 1976, Vygotsky 1978, Moyles 1994).

‘Play’ enables individuals to make meanings, to find coherence to rehearse possibilities through language, symbolism and enactment.

Vygotsky (in Bruner et al 1976:554) holds that ‘play for a child under three is a serious game, just as it is for an adolescent’. In the critical phase of adolescence selves are perhaps more malleable and fluid than ever as individuals negotiate their identity locations (Grady 2000) and as subjectivities are shaped. Whether we conceptualise adolescence as a period of trauma or peace, or rebellion or conformity, it is clearly a time of change in terms of self and ‘other’ perception, sexuality and relationships. In adolescence one’s sense of agency develops as individuals’ awareness of the workings of culture expands. In my experience as an educator, adolescence can be seen as an extended improvisation, where students take on or try out ideas, personas or Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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storylines whilst balancing the forces and discourses at work in their lives. In these times adolescence is a complex juggling act, where playing with discourses and enactments, audiences and reception, self and other, the real and the virtual are all part of the daily struggle of living. Drama can give shape and make sense of that struggle. In symbolic ways, it can trace patterns of experience; it can weave or juggle the contradictions. It can strengthen and support by giving students the recognition, processes and tools of humanity so they can be ‘players’ in their own lives as well as the fictions of the classroom. Drama can suggest other ways of seeing and being, and also give the aesthetic space to imagine and rehearse change.

Negotiating identity in and through drama The following playscript excerpts from my Sydney case study highlight the intersections of drama, narration, enactment and meaning making.

They are presented in this paper as a way of demonstrating how research might give witness to the personal and educational significance of ordinary drama work in the classroom. These excerpts are not offered as exemplary models of drama teaching and learning per se, but as examples which might make more explicit the ways in which drama can fuel student meaning making about themselves and others. These scenes bear witness to the learning and teaching that took place within this project and the sense-making that evolved for the participants.

These excerpts, taken from the beginning, middle and end phases of the project, show meaning-making emerging at different times over the duration of the whole project. In these scenes there is at times a shift between my teacher voice and researcher voice as I both lead and reflect upon the work as it happens. Whilst the play roughly tracks the project from start to end, within scenes I chose to blur time frames, Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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blending data from the creative workshops as well as material from the final play the girls created. This gives readers a glimpse of some of the critical moments of sense-making ‘in process’ and also gives them an indication where and how they ended in the final performance piece which was created and presented by the girls.

Excerpt 1 depicts one of the very early workshops conducted with the Sydney girls at St Brigid’s. Drama was a thriving part of the curriculum at this school and many girls experienced successes in the subject. I was the girls’ drama teacher at this school and the Subject Head for drama.

The student population at St Brigid’s was culturally and linguistically diverse. Students in this case study group were from diverse backgrounds:

Portuguese,

Lebanese,

Italian,

Tongan,

Singaporean/Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Philippina as well as Anglo / Irish. It was a large, mixed age group comprising students from Years 9, 10 and 11 (14 – 17 year old girls). They came together weekly for a four month period and devised a play built out of the views and stories of the group and also of their mothers. The project set out to provide a dramatic platform for staging dialogue between girls and women about ‘girlhood’ and the way they felt it was shaped. It involved writing, improvising and storytelling from the girls’ and their mothers’ offerings (these were responses to written surveys and discussion groups). The two perspectives were shaped into one play. There were also ‘real life’ family photographs and video excerpts of the mothers telling their stories included in the final performance. Even though the mothers were a part of the work, the perspective shown and interrogated throughout the play was primarily the daughters’ perspectives of girlhood. The final play was performed at a series of girls’ schools, where the girls as creators/actors led follow-up discussions with their audiences after their performances.

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This project was called ‘The Girls’ Own Project’. The girls who were my focus girls for this study were Celina (Anglo / Portuguese parents), Trisha (Singaporean / Indonesian parents) and Caroline (Anglo/Irish and Austrian parents) – three Year 11 drama students who were aged 16-17 years at the time of the project.

At the start of the project at St Brigid’s, a few of the students expressed a concern that any drama work entirely about them or their mothers could indeed be ‘crap’. To offset this early negativity and lack of gender esteem I wanted this early workshop to show the girls simply but effectively how rich and powerful the territory was that we would be investigating and how it would probably be far more interesting than they first imagined.

Guided by my interest in women’s studies and theatre, I wanted to use some evocative symbolic teaching strategies early on in order to open up the themes of girlhood and identity to the group and kick-start the project as a whole. This first phase of the exploratory work involved positioning the girls clearly as central to the investigative drama process and also giving them permission to explore in a dramatic sense those rarely discussed areas of their own experience or views. Later the girls told me that this was such a new challenge for the group; they had never before been asked to engage on that level in their schooling (nor indeed in any of my previous ‘girl-centred’ drama lessons prior to this project!). Both case study groups in Sydney and London also told me that their own personal stories had never been invited or included in any aspect of their schooling until these projects.

As they worked, the tension and excitement of working directly and ‘playing’ with these themes and their personal knowledge was clearly evident as the workshop took place. The strength of their movement Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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work and descriptive words reflect an intensity and urgency about their work, almost as if the drama opened a window on hidden experience…or new worlds. The students worked seriously and in earnest, as if they were at last doing ‘real’ or ‘important’ work. The levels of concentration were intense as they worked both individually and then as a group in the movement sequence. As their teacher, I wanted the work to highlight to the girls, in symbolic and physical ways, how fluid, changeable and complex our sense of identity was and also, how different we all were.

This was an important step in building trust and empathy in this early phase of the project. As I heard and saw their responses to the activities, I became starkly aware of my own precarious positioning in this new learning process and the need for me to proceed carefully and ethically through this terrain. How I managed my relationship with the girls was going to be critical to the project and its potential for rich learning to take place. Their movement pieces and descriptive words were later shaped and choreographed into the opening sequence of their final play.

Script excerpt 1: Playing with fire – representing ‘me’ in dramatic form.

Act 1, Scene 1.

Chris:

Okay girls...for the next part of the drama workshop I want

you to find your own space in the room, your own space to just play for a little while. Try to ignore the other people around you. In front of you is a box, inside it is a piece of fabric. I want you to imagine for now that your identity, who you are, is a fabric of some kind.

What would it look like? Close your eyes for a minute and visualise it. As a piece of fabric can you imagine what it would feel like?

Open your eyes, and just where you are, explore the qualities of

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this imaginary fabric...its weight, its texture, its surfaces, its strength...show in your movements now the type of fabric this is...

(The girls begin to move in their own space onstage – some with eyes closed others eyes are open. Chris plays some music which sounds tribal and rhythmic, like something is being made or created by hand.

This helps the girls to play. They become absorbed in the activity).

And gently come to a stop. (Some look disappointed at this interruption)...Now I’d like you to move into small groups and discuss the qualities of your fabric...try not to explain why or how, just describe the fabric... (the girls do this).

Now can your group come up with a motif in movement to represent each of these fabrics in your group – it can take the form of a tableaux or a whole group movement...try to represent each one somehow, and as you do come up with one word or phrase that describes it.

(The girls move into a freeze to show them creating their work).

Now Trisha’s group can you show us what you have made?

(The girls move through various moves and still images, saying their accompanying titles as they go).

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Narrator: There is a vast ocean before me...this sea of life...brimming with so many interesting corners… changeable... fluid... terrifying... .

How can we swim through all these stories in this play? Do I have the courage for this adventure? Things aren’t meant to get this close to the heart. Suddenly my small dusty classroom becomes a beautiful sanctuary...Must I remain professional and detached? I have to walk beside them now and show I am not afraid...otherwise however will I get them to come on this adventure at all? As I watch them carefully work, I experience a realisation like a jolt through my spine...I have an influence here...in how they feel about themselves... This work is going to matter more than I realised.

(The girls complete two more motifs, as if in reply) brilliantly coloured

and the light was blinding…

Excerpt 2 bears witness to a ‘learning in action’ episode midway in the project at St Brigid’s. The scene shows the girls using the creative drama process to make sense of their everyday experiences and relationships.

It begins with a snapshot of a small group conversation that occurred as the whole group was busy devising around them. It represents a ‘flashbulb’ moment (Bruner 1994) in action as the girls move from complaining about their parents’ actions, to a realisation as to why they Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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do what they do. As their teacher I was pushing the group to interrogate the situation and move beyond their own reactive responses as daughters. The quiet, resonant moment that resulted was palpable to all present. The drama process was fuelling their meaning making and also enabling them to use the form as a way of giving witness to their own views and stories. The professor character was added to their play in response to this earlier discussion. The latter part of the scene presented here is from their final performance script and depicts a short piece created from the group’s written responses to the half sentence… ‘My mother expects me to…’

Script excerpt 2: Playmaking as a way of making sense of our lives Act 2, Scene 3.

(Chris and a small group of girls move to the centre of the stage as if in a workshop where the group is engaging in a mid-process discussion).

Chris:

So where is this group up to? What are you discussing

now?

Celina:

The things we can’t stand about our parents!

Chris:

Okay...what has been raised so far?

Celina:

Well, parents are so annoying – it’s like you have no rights

sometimes! Every chance they get, they tell you some long story about when they were young...like it’s at all relevant to whatever your problem is. It’s so unfair!

(Her group members laugh and nod in agreement) Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Chris:

Why?

Celina:

Because it doesn’t give you any room or any privacy to make

your own mistakes. Everything you do or that happens to you gets translated. They actually believe that they are helping you when they do this.

Chris:

So...let’s delve a bit deeper...why... why do you think they do

it?

Caroline: It’s love...they don’t want you to make the mistakes that they did when they were young. You’re supposed to learn from them. If you can’t, who do you learn from?

Celina:

But they don’t realise that times are really different now.

Trisha:

It’s not the same for us as it was for them...

Chris:

So you don’t think, that there are some universal milestones

we all go through? Even though times are different? Do you think there might be some useful anecdotes there?

Celina:

Yeah...but it’s so annoying when it happens!...Although... I

can see that now though.

Chris:

So... what do you think motivates them?

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Celina:

I think parents actually enjoy doing this...they like having a

captive audience, you know? They love re-telling their stories over and over again.

Chris:

Why?

Celina: (pauses to think this through and then says in a softer voice) Because... it makes them feel young again...they kind of live through it again with you ...with their kids.

Caroline: Oh that’s so sad!

(The

group

pauses

to

ponder

this

realisation,

this

new

understanding...)

Chris:

(after a while to the girls)...okay...do you think you can use

some of what you’ve discussed in a scene now?

(Chris walks centre and calls the class to attention) Chris:

Celina’s group has come up with an interesting link between

the ‘My mother expects me to...’ scene and the next scene...Girls can you show us...its only short...but it forms a great link...

Celina

(To the class) Just so you know...this is a pseudo European

accent...I’m supposed to be a nutty professor, like Freud...okay?

(The group moves centre and the whole class watches their scene – a series of tableaux).

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All:

(in unison) My mother expects me to...

Student 1: ....be a living saint like she is.

All:

(in unison) My mother expects me to...

Student 2: ...always be happy.

All:

(in unison) My mother expects me to...

Student 3: ...fail.

All:

(in unison) My mother expects me to...

Student 4: ...clean my room every day.

All:

(in unison) My mother expects me to...

Student 5: ...be a strong and determined woman with a bright and successful future.

Celina:

(to the audience) I zink zat zee reason for haffing kids iz zat

you can create your ideal person, make zem into vot you vant zem to be! I zink ziss iss in zee subconscious mind of all parents...

All: The quest for perfection Excerpt 3 shows the girls from St Brigid’s looking back on the project well after it had ended. As a researcher I was keen to see what lasting Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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learning had taken place, if any, and how they remembered the project.

The girls’ words show how the work stretched their ideas and performances of their own identities. This scene highlights the way drama works and agitates the boundaries of selves and ‘other’ understandings, inviting students to be active players in their own positioning within the performed contexts of both the drama work and their social lives. The project gave them opportunities to make significant connections that lasted well beyond the project and their schooling.

These connections it seemed were now woven into their continuing narratives as ‘nuclear episodes’ (McAdams 1993) in their life stories. The scene starts with the girls’ views and memories and then ends with the closing moments of their play as it was performed. In this scene the threads of both the play and the research process are drawn together in closure.

Script excerpt 3: Remembering the project Act 4, Scene 1.

(Chris stands centrestage. Around her are Caroline, Celina and Trisha.

They speak directly to the audience).

Chris:

I know it was three years ago now...but would you help me

out? I really need to understand how you remember The Girls’ Own Project...what you think you learned from it? Can you answer some questions for me?

Girls:

Sure…

Celina:

While I was pleased to be given this opportunity to voice my

ideas, I found it hard to put it out in the open for other people to Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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judge me on. During the performance I remember that I was supposed to say that one of the things I had in common with my mother was that I was (am) a republican. I found this probably the most confronting thing of all because, as you would know, most students at St Brigid’s took little to absolutely no interest in politics and to state for all to hear that I was not only aware of politics, but rather passionate about particular issues was rather scary. It’s strange that this is what I was most confronted about when everything else was so personal, but it was the republican thing, because I was totally out there on my own that confronted me personally the most .

Trisha:

It was a great experience as a performer, and a rare one. I

think I realise that more in retrospect .

Celina:

The project made me realise that my identity as a young

woman is dependent on many factors, not just my own will. I remember having to stand and say "piss" during one of my pieces and my mum asking why it was that the only swear word in the play had to come from my mouth. This was significant because swearing has never been allowed in my house and it was a kind of public display that my sensibilities are different to that of my mum and family. I’m not suggesting that my identity is based on my ability to swear in public, nor that this practice is particularly unique. What I’m saying is that at the time it was confronting for me and made me realise that I am an individual with my own value structure which is no less and no more valid than anyone else…I guess the project opened the door for me to express myself as an independent young

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woman while at the same time endowing me with the knowledge that I am also a product of a long line of women.

Caroline: I was very proud of the show, and my contribution to it. I felt part of a network of strong, reflective women, who were able to share with others, very intimate secrets. Not many people get to experience something like it...the show and the process of making it. I learned that my friends were women too...and that I was on my way to becoming one.

Celina:

We were trying to communicate a part of ourselves…I felt it

was an expression of who we are and why we are. The mother’s aspect of the play was designed to affect people on different levels.

For friends of mine, who were girls still living with their mothers (as most of the performers’ friends were) it was meant to break down the way we view our mothers. The typical teenage girl doesn’t spend a huge amount of time worrying about her relationship or her mother in general. Our play, I feel, provoked a re-evaluation of a daughter’s perception of her mother. What we were trying to communicate with our parents was two things…One was that we are not little children anymore, we have our own lives and minds that are separate from theirs. Yet, while we are different and growing up we are not growing away. The Girls’ Own Project showed the importance of mothers on many levels and finally, told them that we still love them…Aaaaahhh!!

(The full ensemble of girls take up their positions on stage for the closing scene of their play. The sound of a heartbeat becomes stronger as they move into place to address the audience).

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Trisha: The invisible cord pulls us tighter: moon, mother, daughter, baby. Twenty-five years apart, I am still linked to my mother.

Celina:

Fate has handed us the baton of this long, long race and

now it is my turn to run with it.

Caroline: My birth was my first original story from her, my first knowledge of women’s business and my first gothic horror tale.

Trisha:

It was not set in once upon a time, but in a definite date

and had no ending…

Celina:

It grew along with me like a heartbeat to follow me into

death.

Caroline: Every time I exasperate her – which is often as I can be a difficult child – the story unfolds, tailing off with the oldest of mother’s curses…

All:

May you be blessed with a daughter like you

Some conclusions about learning in and beyond the drama process These examples of ‘ordinary’ classroom practice give witness to some of the critical and transformative learning experiences drama makes possible in students’ everyday lives. This research has strengthened my view that classroom drama work can create an aesthetic space for Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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resonance to be experienced, for connection between young people to be established and seen, and also for the recognition of difference to emerge.

This

narrative-driven

feminist dramatic process offered

participants significant opportunities to develop a sense of ‘connected knowing’ (Belenky et al 1986) through dramatic exploration, performance and reflection. The work took up Smith & Lovat’s challenge to ‘reverse the disconnectedness’ between living and being and students experience of the curriculum (2003: 248). In this study the students’ knowledge of living in this world actually generated the classroom work. These students found that the drama process provided a safe space to tell and interpret their hidden or silenced stories and to weave them into playform. The process of staging their stories in drama form opened up the idea that identity could be re-negotiated and re-staged. The drama work revealed the ‘subject in process’, in a state of flux, constantly being revised and enacted.

The drama form enabled voices to become visible; to create a space for voices to be embodied and witnessed / received. The drama work provided a safe scaffold or structure for identities to be performed and also re-negotiated in performance and in collaboration others. The drama required them to simultaneously stage performances of self and to consider the nature of their identities as relational and performative. They were learning much from being both the authors and also the critics of their ‘identity at play’. For a number of girls in both case studies the opportunity to ‘own their own words’ within the drama was both refreshing and confronting. Many of the girls spoke to me about this as being their first and only experience of ‘owning their own words’ at high school…of ‘fessing up’ or voicing their real views. For many of these girls it seemed that schools were places where they had to comply with a Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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‘shut up and learn’ rule and appear to be ‘quietly getting on with their work’. This girl-oriented drama process offered a radical space for dialogue for and with girls; a space, they said, that was not usually given to girls in schools. This is a surprising admission in a single-sex school like St Brigid’s.

The process of witnessing their own and others’ stories being told and fashioned into drama was also critical to the learning process. The drama work gave the girls multiple ways to make connections and begin to understand each other better. The realness of the stories we used in the workshops encouraged these students to listen, to attend and to understand the ways in which others live their lives and what is important to them. Because the storyteller was present in the creative process, both the teller and listener had to bear the responsibility of witnessing. In drama fuelled by feminist or liberatory politics, it is important for the teacher to be clear about what the participants’ obligations are as they ‘bear witness’ in the dramatic process and how new knowledge is generated so that it benefits the learner and the group.

In discussing her drama work with young people in the area of Holocaust education, Belarie Zatzman refers to the important work we do in the classroom drama encounter: Young people need to know that they themselves are the intersection of histories, memory space, and art making. Teachers need to understand that they have the opportunity to construct a pedagogical architecture that leaves spaces for our students’ narratives (2003: 35).

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The responsibilities of the drama teacher are enormous if we consider classroom drama as identity work. The teacher needs to work ethically, openly and sensitively as a ‘leaderly’ drama educator (Haseman 2002) to both initiate and sense the trails of meaning-making as they happen. If the classroom drama teacher is to work as an architect of possibility (Zatzman 2003 ; Cahill 2002) or as an agent of change, resistance or hope,

the processes and structures teachers provide need to be

responsive and responsible so that the work enables the learners to negotiate both the work and their identities in positive ways that resonate for them and their lived contexts.

Jonathon Neelands (2004) has criticised the way drama educators and researchers tend to mythologise the potential efficacy of drama education. He calls for drama educators and researchers to move ‘beyond the rhetoric of transformation in the Western traditions of drama education’. He does rightly suggest there is a need to interrogate the liberal humanist claims of our work, so we do not claim that drama can in itself somehow provide the ‘miracles’ of change as a regular or everyday outcome. I agree that what we educators ‘do’ in and with drama should be interrogated; however, educationally and politically speaking, we should also continue to give witness to our particular processes and practices in the classroom. Miracles may not be a regular predictable outcome of drama learning, but significant and transformative work does and can happen in ordinary drama classrooms. In my view the notion of drama as a radical and positive educational force is still worth articulating loudly, particularly when advocating or working with students and groups who continue to be disadvantaged or marginalised in schools and societies. Herein lies the crux of the tension for drama, between being central to or on the margins of education. In many places around the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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world we still need a witness to the important educational work we do, because our work is often marginalised or dismissed in the big discussions and debates surrounding educational change and ‘quality’.

Empowerment and positive transformation still need to be central objectives of educational drama, particularly for girls whose voices and views are undervalued in various spheres of their personal, social and educational lives. My own research and teaching with adolescent girls has reinforced this quite profoundly for me. In my view there is a continuing need to articulate how drama work unfolds and what it can and does do for learners, and also why it is so significant and relevant in today’s educational climate. If we cannot claim drama provides powerful, deep or rich learning, where do we go from here and where do we ‘fit in’ in the contemporary educational landscape? Researching my own practice has forced me to consider what type of pedagogical architecture I am able to create in the classroom, why and how, and what processes are supportive of my students. It has also forced me to reconsider my own praxis and the ideas and beliefs that underpin my ‘work’ as a drama educator. Reporting on my research hopefully encourages other educators to do the same and to trouble their own practice.

The teaching choices I made in these case studies seemed to offer rich ways to extend and cut across the borders of identity and understanding.

It also generated significant ‘other understandings’ as the students learned about each other and staged the collective stories of the group.

My intention was to be interventionary because in my view young girls need strengthening practices and processes in their lives. The drama work taught them about playbuilding but it also enabled the girls to play with other ways of being and thinking. A number of the girls in both case studies spoke about the contribution drama had made to their sense of Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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and performance of selfhood. The array of performative experiences in drama classes and the understandings they generated impacted students’ sense of control and performance in everyday life, stretching beyond their actual drama courses. For the girls in this study drama helped give them the ‘power’ and ‘control’ over communication, feelings, bodies, relationships, and knowledge. The drama work engaged them in ways that no other aspect of their schooling had done, and they saw this as important, significant learning.

Eisner (1998) talks about the various outcomes of arts education. In light of my own study I am drawn to his description of the ‘dispositional outcomes’ (1998:99) of arts learning experiences. Certainly my own research and drama work with young people has tried to use the art form and its processes to open up possibilities and contribute positively to the identity performances and improvisations of my students. Canadian drama educator Kathleen Berry rightly suggests drama can be a safe, experimental haven for re-imagining the social world (2000:65). It can also be a safe haven for re-imagining ‘selves’, particularly our gendered selves. My drama case studies generated significant self/other learning for these girls, which impacted the way they felt well after the projects had concluded. The meanings they made in these drama projects, it seems, were lasting ones. Perhaps it is time for more drama educators and researchers to give witness to the rather extraordinary learning that take place in today’s ordinary drama classrooms.

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References Bagley, C. & Cancienne, M. B. (eds) (2002) Dancing the Data. New York: Peter Lang.

Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., Tarule, J. (1986) Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books.

Berry, K. (2000) The Dramatic Arts and Cultural Studies. New York: Falmer Press.

Bruner, J., Jolly, A. & Sylva, K. (1976) Play and its Role in Evolution and Development. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1994) ‘The Remembered Self’ in U. Neisser & R. Fivush (eds) The Remembered Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Cahill, H. (2002) ‘Teaching For Community, Empowerment Through Drama’ in Melbourne Studies in Education, 43 (2) November 2002.

Carroll, L. (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, variously published.

Conquergood, D. (2003) in Y. Lincoln & N. Denzin (eds) Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Davies, B. (1997) ‘The Subject of Poststructuralism: A Reply to Alison Jones’ in Gender and Education. Sept. 9 (3), 271, Dell’oso, A.M. (1996) ‘Harvest Day’ in D. Adelaide (ed) Mother Love.

Milson’s Point, Australia: Random House.

Denzin, N. (1997) Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications.

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Denzin, N. (2003) Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications.

Eisner, E. (1998) The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Fowler, C. (1994) ‘Strong Arts, Strong Schools’ in Educational Leadership. Chicago: Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

Gallagher, K. (1998) Drama and Self–construction in a Single-sex School for Girls. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto, Canada.

Gallagher, K. (2000) Drama Education in the Lives of Girls. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, Grady, S. (2000) Drama and Diversity. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Greene, M. (1995) Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Haseman, B. (2002) ‘The Leaderly’ Process Drama and the Artistry of ‘Rip, Mix and Burn’’, in Playing Betwixt and Between: The IDEA Dialogues 2001, B. Rasmussen & A.L. Ostern (eds), Bergen: IDEA Publications.

Hatton, C. (2001) ‘A Girls’ Own Project: Subjectivity and Transformation in Girls’ Drama’, in Drama Australia Journal, NJ: Voices of Australian Women in Drama, Theatre and Education, 25 (1), 21-30.

Hatton, C. (2002) ‘Staging the Subjective: A Narrative Approach to Drama’ in Drama Australia Journal, NJ: Selected papers IDEA 2001 26 (1), 81 – 88.

Hatton, C. (2003a) ‘Backyards and Borderlands: some reflections on researching the travels of adolescent girls doing drama’, in Drama Australia Journal, NJ: 27 (1).

Hatton, C. (2003b) ‘Backyards and Borderlands: some reflections on researching the travels of adolescent girls doing drama’, (extended version) in Research in Drama Education, 8 (2).

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Hatton, C. (2004a) ‘On the Edge of Realities: drama learning and adolescent girls’ in Drama Australia Journal, NJ: 28 (1).

Hatton, C. (2004b) Backyards and Borderlands: Transforming Girls’ Learning Through Drama, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, Australia.

Haynes, F. (2001) ‘The Arts: Making Sense, Making Meaning of Ourselves’ in The Applied Theatre Researcher, No 2, Online journal, Griffith University, www.gu.edu.au/centre/atr/.

McAdams, D. (1993) The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York: William Morrow and Company.

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Neelands, J. (2004) ‘Miracles are happening: beyond the rhetoric of transformation in the Western traditions of drama education’ in Research in Drama Education, March, 9 (1).

Nicholson, H. (1995) ‘Genre, Gender and Play: Feminist Theory and Drama Education’, Drama Australia Journal, NJ: 19 (1), 21.

Piaget, J. (1951) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ross, M. (1978) The Creative Arts. London: Heinemann.

Ross, M. (1984) The Aesthetic Impulse. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

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Smith, D. & Lovat, T. (2003) Curriculum: Action on Reflection. 4th edition, Wentworth Falls, NSW: Social Science Press.

Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

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Vygotsky, L. (1976) ‘Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child’ in J. Bruner, A. Jolly & K. Sylva (eds) Play – Its Role in Development and Evolution. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books p549.

Vygotsky, L. (1978) Mind in Society, Trans. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman (eds), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zatzman, B. (2003) ‘The Monologue Project: Drama as a Form of Witnessing’ in K.Gallagher & D. Booth (eds) How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Paradox and promise in joint school/university Arts research Deborah Fraser, Clare Henderson and Graham Price University of Waikato

Authors’ biographies Deborah Fraser has published books and articles extensively on a range of educational topics from special and gifted education through to spirituality and children’s use of metaphor. Her particular interest in the arts relates to the power of the aesthetic to inform our understanding of many ways of knowing. Deborah@waikato.ac.nz Clare Henderson is Senior lecturer in Music Education at the University of Waikato, where she co -ordinates the primary and secondary music education teaching team.

She teaches at undergraduate, graduate and post – graduate levels. Her research interests centre around inclusiveness in music education and children's development and refinement of musical ideas. She regularly musically directs for the local Operatic Society. clhend@waikato.ac.nz Graham Price has taught arts education across the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. He maintains roles in national resource development, national art assessment, regional professional development in the arts and arts research initiatives in primary school settings. He acts as subject matter consultant for The Australian Learning Federation’s Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative (SOCCI). grahamp@waikato.ac.nz

Abstract Collaborative university and school research projects are inevitably labour intensive endeavours that require the careful negotiation of trust and the joint development of critique of current practice. While this raises tension it also builds generative communities of inquiry that can enhance both theory and practice.

This paper reports on an Arts project undertaken in primary classrooms between university staff and generalist teacher coresearchers focusing on children’s idea development in dance, drama, music and art. This two year project is briefly outlined and some issues that arise in school research are explored. Project collaborators need to exercise caution in their examination of practice and strive to resist premature closure. All parties need to hold the tension of apparent contradictions, being both interested (in effective Arts pedagogy) and disinterested (in order to heighten Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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perception) so that they might ‘surprise themselves in a landscape of practice with which many are very familiar indeed’ (McWilliam 2004:14). These issues and paradoxes in collaborative research are considered alongside some particular processes that build school and university partnerships.

Introduction The project outlined here (The Art of the Matter) focuses on the Arts and investigates what children bring to the Arts areas and how they develop their ideas and related skills in each of the Arts disciplines (drama, dance, music, visual art) in the primary school. By focusing on children’s learning in the Arts, one is in a stronger position to ascertain the ways in which teachers can effectively facilitate children’s learning processes, particularly their development of ideas and related skills in the Arts.

The Arts are part of the national curriculum in New Zealand and every primary school teacher is expected to teach dance, drama, music and visual art. Each of the disciplines in the Arts consists of four strands to guide teachers’ planning: developing practical knowledge in the Arts, developing ideas in the Arts, communicating and interpreting, and understanding the Arts in context (Ministry of Education 2000). Music and visual art were the main arts subjects taught until 1983, when in a major change to the school curriculum, the Arts became one essential learning area, with the addition of drama and dance in the Arts curriculum in 2000. As is common across western education, the Arts in New Zealand are marginalized in a curriculum that emphasises literacy, numeracy, technology and science as separate subjects but collapses four art subjects into one learning area. Attention in this project was deliberately given to developing ideas, as this area is often neglected in research, Ministry of Education resources, and in practice.

Of particular note is the fact that this project takes the value of the Arts as a given and therefore does not need to advocate for the Arts nor Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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‘prove’ to critics how vital the Arts are for aesthetic awareness, multiple perspectives, productive surprise, non-verbal ways of knowing and expressing, and personal transformation through immersion in an art form (e.g. see Eisner 2000).

As a major outcome, the project seeks to deepen knowledge of how generalist teachers can enhance and extend children’s experiences, understanding and engagement when they are developing Arts ideas in primary classrooms. We suggest that this may be connected to teaching the Arts in ways deemed socio-culturally relevant and responsive to diverse groups of children and to the congruency between what child and teacher bring to the Arts and how ideas are acknowledged, negotiated and scaffolded.

The study is a collaborative research project between university and school staff wherein teachers are co-researchers with university colleagues. Such partnerships help to bridge the divide between academia and the teaching profession and can help to address the common problems of theory-practice divisions. Moreover, collaborative research of this nature builds research capacity amongst teachers who have direct influence on the children they teach. The research process in the hands of teachers, with the support of academics, has much potential for change that can benefit and enhance children’s learning. This paper focuses specifically on the school-university partnership which forms the basis of the research team and examines some issues in collaborative research.

Research Design The design of the study is responsive and open to the unexpected, the unpredictable and the expressive as is particularly relevant in the Arts Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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(Eisner 2002). It draws on case study, self study and action research traditions of educational research. In keeping with naturalistic inquiry, this project recognises that ‘meaning arises out of social situations and is handled through interpretive processes’ (Cohen et al 2000:138).

We are currently just over one year into the project having built a team who are passionate about the Arts and willing to engage in the hard work and soul searching necessary for critically scrutinizing current practice.

The project comprises a team of 10 generalist primary school teacher researchers working alongside three university researchers over a period of two years in eight schools, with children across the Year 0-6 age range. For the purposes of the project, two teacher researchers focused on dance, three on music, three on visual art and two on drama.

Case studies of teachers’ existing practices have been produced by the team of teachers and university researchers and these highlight themes and issues related to how children develop their ideas in the Arts and what appears to support or constrain this process (for a paper on the early emerging findings related to learning in the Arts see Fraser et al.

2005). The case studies were devised from an amalgam of classroom observations, work samples, surveys, interviews and reflective self-study comments. Initial observation data were shared after each lesson with each teacher researcher and a summary was co-constructed on what seemed to support and what seemed to constrain learning in the Arts.

Any other salient points that neither supported nor constrained were noted as ‘interesting’. The strength of this analysis was its immediacy (as close to the action as possible) and the co-constructed nature of it in order to capture multiple perspectives. The analysis also helped to identify any ‘rituals of practice’ (Nuthall 2001) that were part of each teacher’s practice.

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In addition, teacher-researchers were involved in analysis alongside Arts educators, consultants and a lecturer in human development (all whom comprise the Arts project team) at regular roundtable meetings.

Perspectives from teachers, university staff, children and school policy documents helped to build rich, triangulated sense-making accounts of current practice (Stenhouse 1985). These case studies provided a platform upon which to base the action research phase wherein teacherresearchers devised questions of concern to explore problems, issues and possibilities. Ongoing discussion amongst all the research team has enabled the refining of both questions and methods. Teacherresearchers were assisted in this process by the university-researchers acting as critical friends as well as joint investigators (see also Ewing et al. 2004). The action research cycle forms the majority of this year’s focus. Some of the questions include: • What effect does non-verbal feedback and feed-forward have on the exploration and development of ideas in dance?

• What influence do children working as individuals, and as pairs, have on the development and refinement of ideas in music?

• How are students currently exploring, generating and developing their ideas in the visual arts? What supports or constrains students’ selfdirected imagery using learned skills and strategies?

• What is the influence of ‘teacher-in-role’ on children developing and refining their ideas in drama? In what ways can ‘teacher-in-role’ contribute to deepening the drama and children’s ownership of ideas in drama?

These questions provide direction for ongoing data collection that enables a close scrutiny on learning and teaching in the Arts. They Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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represent the authentic or felt questions, issues and concerns of the teachers themselves (Lankshear et al. 2004) as they strive to scrutinize and extend their current practice. Teacher ownership of their questions is vital during collaborative action research. It affirms their knowledge as practitioners and as developing researchers.

Collaborative research of this nature is typified by ongoing dialogue, trust building and the inevitability of paradox. Living the experience of paradox is necessary and inescapable if we are to surprise ourselves in the familiar landscape of classrooms (McWilliam 2004), resist the lure of premature closure and maximize school-university partnerships. Some relevant paradoxes are discussed below.

Passion and disinterest in Arts education All the co-researchers are passionate about the Arts and appreciate their immense value for students. It is this very passion however, that can make us blind to envisaging alternatives to preferred rituals of teaching and learning and deaf to nagging doubts and questions. Passion and its attendant enthusiasm can make us positive and celebratory at times when we should be exercising healthy skepticism. With passion we defend our allegiance to the Arts but in so doing we risk losing the critical edge that is the heart of research. This is exacerbated by the way in which the Arts are largely marginalized in education so that advocacy for the Arts becomes a somewhat habitual response by those who understand the value the Arts provide for learning and the importance of the Arts as distinct and valid disciplines. Ironically, such advocacy can have the effect of diminishing the ways in which the Arts are regarded, especially if this leads to large claims that are not valid or are exaggerated (O’Toole 2006). So even though this particular project does Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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not require that the Arts assert their value in any explicit way, the way in which the Arts are positioned on the periphery in school curriculum can lead to advocacy by those aware of the fragile status of the Arts.

Some critics of action research with teachers maintain that such projects lack any objectivism and result in the unqualified ‘confirming their own common sense’ (McWilliam 2004: 114) rather than raising questions and probing assumptions. Indeed, how can we all ensure the necessary disinterest within a sphere of interest in order to think differently about current practice?

There is a need to provide practitioners with a means of discovering their situation anew while at the same time valuing the tacit knowing that is produced out of their embeddedness in practice. (McWilliam 2004:121) To ‘research’ is to re-search, or to search again (Berthoff 1987). It requires and demands a questioning of the status quo and assumptions that underlie the rituals of teaching and learning in classrooms (Nuthall 2001). It means raising doubt in a sea of certainty and asking What is going on here? Why? What does this mean? As mentioned above, it requires researchers to avoid over-blown claims that are often the result of advocacy for the Arts and to not just look for what is desired but to also be alert to surprises, nuance and exceptions. While not everything in a study can be data-based we should try to disprove our arguments and hypotheses in order to strengthen the robustness of our research (O’Toole 2006).

Inevitably, wherever we ‘stand’ we are all complicit in the research process. We need to acknowledge that we are historically constructed and locally situated as human observers of the human condition and that Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the meaning we seek to learn about is radically plural, always open and politically saturated (Denzin et al. 2000). With this in mind we are more likely to hold the tension of passion and disinterest in order to produce trustworthy research.

An example from our project is our regular ‘roundtable’ meetings where we share perceptions, insights, questions and issues including methodological concerns and theory building. Generalist teachers share alongside Arts educators, consultants and a lecturer in human development (all of whom comprise the Arts project team). In order to avoid judgement, data from the classroom teachers’ rooms are shared through a process of initial description, based on what each person sees.

After each person speaks, the same data are discussed a second time based on what each person interprets from what they saw. This describe, then interpret process (Feldman 1973) has helped the team withhold initial judgements, avoid defensiveness and minimize the biases that leaping to judgement usually entails (Claude 2005). This process does not guarantee freedom from bias but rather, helps to mitigate and counter seeing what one chooses to see. Hearing each person’s interpretation often provides contrasts and refinements and any agreements help build analysis that is robust and trustworthy. This issue is relevant for research generally but the advocacy feature (and Archilles’ heel) of the Arts as outlined by O’Toole earlier, makes trustworthiness a particularly important process.

The goals of practice and the goals of theory Lytle and Cochran-Smith (1990) note that teachers’ perspectives are often marginalized in research in favour of theories generated by researchers. School-university projects like this aim to ensure teachers’ Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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perspectives are heard and their views taken seriously. This requires ongoing dialogue wherein one set of voices (the academic) is not constantly privileged over another. Conversely however, research between teachers and university staff which focuses on classrooms often has a greater emphasis on the needs and concerns of practitioners (Johnson et al.1999) and that improvement in teaching becomes a central goal in teacher research (Lankshear et al. 2004). This practicebased preference by many teachers can dominate and obscure other research goals such as methodology refinement and creating trustworthy and substantive research findings related to students’ learning. These different goals are not necessarily competing nor discrete and there are opportunities for projects such as this to serve both sets of goals in a manner that does not detract from the value of either. Moreover, with increasing numbers of school-university collaborative projects there is a need for recognition by universities of the importance of ‘partnerships with schools as an integral part of academics’ work’ (Ewing et al. 2004:5) which includes the induction of research novices alongside valuing their insider knowledge.

However, teachers will not always share the goals of their university colleagues. Contribution to knowledge in an academic sense is generally not regarded as important as the professional development goals teachers express as their main agenda for participation in collaborative research. Improving their teaching and having time to focus carefully on the children in their classes is highlighted again and again as compellingly relevant. The research process enables teachers to see their practice afresh and gain multiple perspectives on what is happening in their classrooms. This is a practical advantage of collaborative research wherein teacher development is an inextricable part of the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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study. The tension for academics however, is that the more teacherfriendly the project, the more the goals of theory can be reduced or overlooked in favour of trust-building and practice goals. The distinctive interests of each party (Grundy 1998) are an inevitable issue in joint research of this nature. Some of the teachers are particularly keen to use the project to promote their school and this is perhaps, of no surprise given the competition between schools for publicity, boosting school rolls and parental approval. However, some teachers’ enthusiasm for media coverage and public dissemination of findings may be considered somewhat premature. Moreover, teachers’ publishing outlets seldom require the scrutiny and evaluation of peer review. On the other hand, teachers’ desire to quickly disseminate is understandable given the pace of their working lives and the slow process of academic publication. For all the teachers in the project, the months (and sometimes years) required for publishing in academic journals is excruciatingly slow and rather pointless, as their major focus on development has already been achieved. Therefore, a blend of both succinct teacher-targeted papers, and articles for academic peer review have been produced and that helps the project members feel that dissemination counts and meets their specific audiences.

Risk and trust One of the main findings of the Australian Government quality teacher program (AGQTP) evaluation (Ewing et al. 2004) was that high levels of risk-taking by teachers and trust in their university colleagues led to powerful learning related to teachers’ own practice. A major feature of collaborative research in the Arts is also this productive tension between risk and trust with the former growing in direct relationship to the latter.

One of the challenges however, is identified below: Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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If

collaborative

researchers

have

learned

anything

from

such

endeavours, it is that trust takes time, and members of a group never develop trust in synchrony. We know that collaboration is soul-searching, labor-intensive work for anyone participating, that shared understanding and significant change takes longer than expected, and that nothing is perfect (Bolin & Falk 1987; Hall & Hord 1987; Jackson 1988). Although these factors are sobering, such findings are better than feeling powerless and isolated in one’s work setting. (May 1997:230) In the first weeks of the project one teacher-researcher admitted that when she was being observed it was still quite stressful for her and she felt she wasn’t as relaxed as normal. Another very experienced teacher with previous research experience commented that she didn’t intervene nearly as much as usual with a group because of the video and other researchers in the room. These ‘confessions’ are a healthy indication of trust. Such feelings are important to acknowledge as an inevitable part of ‘exposure’ through the scrutiny of the research process.

The teachers also risk their identities with each other when exposing their practice and their research at regular roundtable meetings amongst all in the team from the eight schools, but such sharing helps to build collegiality within and across schools and across Arts’ disciplines. The roundtable meetings required considerable trust amongst the research team and helped to build a climate wherein questions, concerns and issues could be shared. As generalist teachers teaching all four art forms they seemed genuinely interested in each other’s questions and issues.

Teacher release from schools was paid for as part of the research project to enable time to share, plan, evaluate and reflect, unencumbered by the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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daily demands of classroom life. Moreover, ongoing collaboration between university and school researchers is maximized due to the flexible relationships with academic partners located fairly close to participating schools (see also Ewing et al. 2004).

There is risk and trust issues for university staff as well as we bring together different discipline knowledge and perspectives and at times are working outside our respective discipline areas (e.g., the music educator working with a teacher in dance). While the project brings in consultants to advise in areas beyond the expertise of any one researcher we need to ensure that consultants do not adopt the role of professional adviser and lesson evaluator. To maintain the integrity and purpose of collaboration the central focus needs to be on the research questions and teachers working with university staff as co-researchers to investigate these.

Developing relationships that engender trust requires regular, ongoing interaction between university and school co-researchers; interactions that create a climate of hospitality and charge (Palmer 1998).

Relationships need to be hospitable so that partners in research feel supported and understood. But the research partnership should also be ‘charged’ so that challenge is welcomed, dispute is encouraged and competing perspectives are aired. It is this challenge that also enables the taking of risks as teachers boldly try new interventions and work alongside their university partners to interrogate emerging themes and findings.

Conclusion The initial case studies revealed a number of common rituals of practice Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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in classrooms (Nuthall 2001). Depending on the context and goals of the lessons and the needs of the children, these ‘rituals’ or largely taken-forgranted assumptions could support or constrain what happened when children were learning in the Arts. The common rituals included the following: • There was an emphasis on the teaching of practical knowledge and skills, with little attention or time given to development of ideas.

• Group work was a common device for both management and pedagogical reasons in the teaching of dance, drama and music.

• Visual art was usually undertaken individually even if children were placed in groups.

• The teacher chose the topic or theme to be explored in the Arts and this was usually framed around a narrative. While these were openended enough to allow children to locate their experiences, deviation from the set brief was rare.

• There was a distinct emphasis on explaining art skills and processes in words, which was mostly spoken and sometimes in written form.

• While the value of process was recognized, explicit valuing of subtask completions, presentations and finished work was often foregrounded.

As mentioned earlier, the teacher researchers are currently involved in ‘disrupting’ some of these rituals through the action research phase wherein they are trialing interventions with the support of their university colleagues and in-school buddies. Such interventions reveal teachers’ ability to question the status quo, explore new approaches, and explore unpredictable pathways and possibilities. As evidenced by the teachers’ research questions the teacher-researchers’ role bridges the traditional Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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duality of teacher or researcher and theory or practice. Eisner (2002) addresses the need to move the initial teacher education focus from episteme (formal theory) or phronesis (practical knowledge) on into artistry because it is within artistry that the notion of knowledge viewed as embedded and resident within self appears to be understood. He writes: Teachers, for example, are not regarded now as those who implement the prescriptions of others but as those most intimate with life in classrooms….. Teachers are collaborators in knowledge construction and bring to the table of deliberation a kind of insider knowledge. . .

(2002:381) It is just this intimacy and the insider knowledge that is the strength and challenge of this project as we work together to interrogate assumptions, ask hard questions and constantly surprise ourselves in the all too familiar landscape of school classrooms (McWilliam 2004). The power of the teachers’ knowledge construction as described in this quote is such that they all have much to share with the professional and research community. Our collaboration as co-researchers extends into the dissemination of findings. Some of the teachers have already presented on this project at a research symposium last year and we are copresenting at the annual research in education conference later this year.

Joint presentation by teachers and academics underlines the ways in which practice and theory can be mutually enhancing.

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 218

References Berthoff, A. (1987). The teacher as researcher. In: D. Goswami & P. Stillman (Eds.), Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change. (28-39). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton.

Bolin, F.S. & Falk, J.M. (eds) (1987) Teacher renewal : professional issues, personal choices, New York: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Claude, C. (2005). Protocols for professional learning conversations: Cultivating the art and discipline. Courtenay, BC: Connections Publishing.

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2000). Research methods in education (5th ed.). London: Routledge Falmer.

Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Eisner, E. (2002). Arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Eisner, E. (2000, January). Ten lessons the arts teach. Paper presented at the Learning and the Arts Conference, Los Angeles, USA. Ewing, R., Smith, D., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., & Manuel, J. (2004).

Teachers as learners: Australian Government quality teacher program ‘Action learning for school teams’ project evaluation report.

University of Sydney.

Feldman, E. (1973). The teacher as model. Critical Journal of Aesthetic Education, 3 (1), 50-57.

Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2005, July). The Art of the matter: Researching children’s learning in art, music, drama and dance.

Proceedings of the Imagination and Education Conference, Vancouver, Canada. Available from: http://www3.educ.sfu.ca/conferences/ierg2005/papers.php Grundy, S. (1998). Research partnerships: Principles and possibilities. In B. Atweh, S. Kemmis & P. Weeks (Eds.), Action research in practice: Partnerships for social justice in education (21-36).

London: Routledge.

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 219

Hall, G. E. & Hord, S.M. (1987). Change in schools : facilitating the process. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Johnson, B., Peters, J., & Williams, D. (1999). Academics working with schools: Revealing the tensions. Journal of Education for Teaching, 25 (2), 123-133.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2004). A handbook for teacher research: From design to implementation. New York: Open University Press.

Lytle, S. L., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1990). Learning from teacher research: A working typology. Teachers College Record, 92 (1), 83103.

May, W. (1997). ‘Teachers-as-researchers’ or Action research: What is it and what good is it for Art education? In: S. L. Pierre & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), Research methods and methodologies for Art education (223-240). Virginia: NAEA. McWilliam, E. (2004, April). W(h)ither practitioner research? Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, USA. Ministry of Education (2000). The Arts in the New Zealand curriculum.

Wellington: Learning Media.

Nuthall, G. (2001). The cultural myths and realities of teaching and learning. Paper presented at the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, Christchurch, New Zealand.

O’Toole, J. (2006, April). Researching in, on and through the arts: Considering contemporary forms of research and modes of reporting on the arts and arts education. Paper presented at the Dialogues and Differences Symposium, Melbourne, Australia.

Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach. Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Stenhouse, L. (1985). The case study tradition and how case studies apply to practice. In: J. Rudduck & D. Hopkins (Eds.), Research as a basis for teaching: Readings from the work of Lawrence Stenhouse. London: Heinemann.

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 221

Paradox and promise in joint school/university Arts research Deborah Fraser, Clare Henderson and Graham Price University of Waikato

Authors’ biographies Deborah Fraser has published books and articles extensively on a range of educational topics from special and gifted education through to spirituality and children’s use of metaphor. Her particular interest in the arts relates to the power of the aesthetic to inform our understanding of many ways of knowing. Deborah@waikato.ac.nz Clare Henderson is Senior lecturer in Music Education at the University of Waikato, where she co -ordinates the primary and secondary music education teaching team.

She teaches at undergraduate, graduate and post – graduate levels. Her research interests centre around inclusiveness in music education and children's development and refinement of musical ideas. She regularly musically directs for the local Operatic Society. clhend@waikato.ac.nz Graham Price has taught arts education across the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. He maintains roles in national resource development, national art assessment, regional professional development in the arts and arts research initiatives in primary school settings. He acts as subject matter consultant for The Australian Learning Federation’s Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative (SOCCI). grahamp@waikato.ac.nz

Abstract Collaborative university and school research projects are inevitably labour intensive endeavours that require the careful negotiation of trust and the joint development of critique of current practice. While this raises tension it also builds generative communities of inquiry that can enhance both theory and practice.

This paper reports on an Arts project undertaken in primary classrooms between university staff and generalist teacher coresearchers focusing on children’s idea development in dance, drama, music and art. This two year project is briefly outlined and some issues that arise in school research are explored. Project collaborators need to exercise caution in their examination of practice and strive to resist premature closure. All parties need to hold the tension of apparent contradictions, being both interested (in effective Arts pedagogy) and disinterested (in order to heighten Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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perception) so that they might ‘surprise themselves in a landscape of practice with which many are very familiar indeed’ (McWilliam 2004:14). These issues and paradoxes in collaborative research are considered alongside some particular processes that build school and university partnerships.

Introduction The project outlined here (The Art of the Matter) focuses on the Arts and investigates what children bring to the Arts areas and how they develop their ideas and related skills in each of the Arts disciplines (drama, dance, music, visual art) in the primary school. By focusing on children’s learning in the Arts, one is in a stronger position to ascertain the ways in which teachers can effectively facilitate children’s learning processes, particularly their development of ideas and related skills in the Arts.

The Arts are part of the national curriculum in New Zealand and every primary school teacher is expected to teach dance, drama, music and visual art. Each of the disciplines in the Arts consists of four strands to guide teachers’ planning: developing practical knowledge in the Arts, developing ideas in the Arts, communicating and interpreting, and understanding the Arts in context (Ministry of Education 2000). Music and visual art were the main arts subjects taught until 1983, when in a major change to the school curriculum, the Arts became one essential learning area, with the addition of drama and dance in the Arts curriculum in 2000. As is common across western education, the Arts in New Zealand are marginalized in a curriculum that emphasises literacy, numeracy, technology and science as separate subjects but collapses four art subjects into one learning area. Attention in this project was deliberately given to developing ideas, as this area is often neglected in research, Ministry of Education resources, and in practice.

Of particular note is the fact that this project takes the value of the Arts as a given and therefore does not need to advocate for the Arts nor Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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‘prove’ to critics how vital the Arts are for aesthetic awareness, multiple perspectives, productive surprise, non-verbal ways of knowing and expressing, and personal transformation through immersion in an art form (e.g. see Eisner 2000).

As a major outcome, the project seeks to deepen knowledge of how generalist teachers can enhance and extend children’s experiences, understanding and engagement when they are developing Arts ideas in primary classrooms. We suggest that this may be connected to teaching the Arts in ways deemed socio-culturally relevant and responsive to diverse groups of children and to the congruency between what child and teacher bring to the Arts and how ideas are acknowledged, negotiated and scaffolded.

The study is a collaborative research project between university and school staff wherein teachers are co-researchers with university colleagues. Such partnerships help to bridge the divide between academia and the teaching profession and can help to address the common problems of theory-practice divisions. Moreover, collaborative research of this nature builds research capacity amongst teachers who have direct influence on the children they teach. The research process in the hands of teachers, with the support of academics, has much potential for change that can benefit and enhance children’s learning. This paper focuses specifically on the school-university partnership which forms the basis of the research team and examines some issues in collaborative research.

Research Design The design of the study is responsive and open to the unexpected, the unpredictable and the expressive as is particularly relevant in the Arts Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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(Eisner 2002). It draws on case study, self study and action research traditions of educational research. In keeping with naturalistic inquiry, this project recognises that ‘meaning arises out of social situations and is handled through interpretive processes’ (Cohen et al 2000:138).

We are currently just over one year into the project having built a team who are passionate about the Arts and willing to engage in the hard work and soul searching necessary for critically scrutinizing current practice.

The project comprises a team of 10 generalist primary school teacher researchers working alongside three university researchers over a period of two years in eight schools, with children across the Year 0-6 age range. For the purposes of the project, two teacher researchers focused on dance, three on music, three on visual art and two on drama.

Case studies of teachers’ existing practices have been produced by the team of teachers and university researchers and these highlight themes and issues related to how children develop their ideas in the Arts and what appears to support or constrain this process (for a paper on the early emerging findings related to learning in the Arts see Fraser et al.

2005). The case studies were devised from an amalgam of classroom observations, work samples, surveys, interviews and reflective self-study comments. Initial observation data were shared after each lesson with each teacher researcher and a summary was co-constructed on what seemed to support and what seemed to constrain learning in the Arts.

Any other salient points that neither supported nor constrained were noted as ‘interesting’. The strength of this analysis was its immediacy (as close to the action as possible) and the co-constructed nature of it in order to capture multiple perspectives. The analysis also helped to identify any ‘rituals of practice’ (Nuthall 2001) that were part of each teacher’s practice.

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In addition, teacher-researchers were involved in analysis alongside Arts educators, consultants and a lecturer in human development (all whom comprise the Arts project team) at regular roundtable meetings.

Perspectives from teachers, university staff, children and school policy documents helped to build rich, triangulated sense-making accounts of current practice (Stenhouse 1985). These case studies provided a platform upon which to base the action research phase wherein teacherresearchers devised questions of concern to explore problems, issues and possibilities. Ongoing discussion amongst all the research team has enabled the refining of both questions and methods. Teacherresearchers were assisted in this process by the university-researchers acting as critical friends as well as joint investigators (see also Ewing et al. 2004). The action research cycle forms the majority of this year’s focus. Some of the questions include: • What effect does non-verbal feedback and feed-forward have on the exploration and development of ideas in dance?

• What influence do children working as individuals, and as pairs, have on the development and refinement of ideas in music?

• How are students currently exploring, generating and developing their ideas in the visual arts? What supports or constrains students’ selfdirected imagery using learned skills and strategies?

• What is the influence of ‘teacher-in-role’ on children developing and refining their ideas in drama? In what ways can ‘teacher-in-role’ contribute to deepening the drama and children’s ownership of ideas in drama?

These questions provide direction for ongoing data collection that enables a close scrutiny on learning and teaching in the Arts. They Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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represent the authentic or felt questions, issues and concerns of the teachers themselves (Lankshear et al. 2004) as they strive to scrutinize and extend their current practice. Teacher ownership of their questions is vital during collaborative action research. It affirms their knowledge as practitioners and as developing researchers.

Collaborative research of this nature is typified by ongoing dialogue, trust building and the inevitability of paradox. Living the experience of paradox is necessary and inescapable if we are to surprise ourselves in the familiar landscape of classrooms (McWilliam 2004), resist the lure of premature closure and maximize school-university partnerships. Some relevant paradoxes are discussed below.

Passion and disinterest in Arts education All the co-researchers are passionate about the Arts and appreciate their immense value for students. It is this very passion however, that can make us blind to envisaging alternatives to preferred rituals of teaching and learning and deaf to nagging doubts and questions. Passion and its attendant enthusiasm can make us positive and celebratory at times when we should be exercising healthy skepticism. With passion we defend our allegiance to the Arts but in so doing we risk losing the critical edge that is the heart of research. This is exacerbated by the way in which the Arts are largely marginalized in education so that advocacy for the Arts becomes a somewhat habitual response by those who understand the value the Arts provide for learning and the importance of the Arts as distinct and valid disciplines. Ironically, such advocacy can have the effect of diminishing the ways in which the Arts are regarded, especially if this leads to large claims that are not valid or are exaggerated (O’Toole 2006). So even though this particular project does Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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not require that the Arts assert their value in any explicit way, the way in which the Arts are positioned on the periphery in school curriculum can lead to advocacy by those aware of the fragile status of the Arts.

Some critics of action research with teachers maintain that such projects lack any objectivism and result in the unqualified ‘confirming their own common sense’ (McWilliam 2004: 114) rather than raising questions and probing assumptions. Indeed, how can we all ensure the necessary disinterest within a sphere of interest in order to think differently about current practice?

There is a need to provide practitioners with a means of discovering their situation anew while at the same time valuing the tacit knowing that is produced out of their embeddedness in practice. (McWilliam 2004:121) To ‘research’ is to re-search, or to search again (Berthoff 1987). It requires and demands a questioning of the status quo and assumptions that underlie the rituals of teaching and learning in classrooms (Nuthall 2001). It means raising doubt in a sea of certainty and asking What is going on here? Why? What does this mean? As mentioned above, it requires researchers to avoid over-blown claims that are often the result of advocacy for the Arts and to not just look for what is desired but to also be alert to surprises, nuance and exceptions. While not everything in a study can be data-based we should try to disprove our arguments and hypotheses in order to strengthen the robustness of our research (O’Toole 2006).

Inevitably, wherever we ‘stand’ we are all complicit in the research process. We need to acknowledge that we are historically constructed and locally situated as human observers of the human condition and that Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the meaning we seek to learn about is radically plural, always open and politically saturated (Denzin et al. 2000). With this in mind we are more likely to hold the tension of passion and disinterest in order to produce trustworthy research.

An example from our project is our regular ‘roundtable’ meetings where we share perceptions, insights, questions and issues including methodological concerns and theory building. Generalist teachers share alongside Arts educators, consultants and a lecturer in human development (all of whom comprise the Arts project team). In order to avoid judgement, data from the classroom teachers’ rooms are shared through a process of initial description, based on what each person sees.

After each person speaks, the same data are discussed a second time based on what each person interprets from what they saw. This describe, then interpret process (Feldman 1973) has helped the team withhold initial judgements, avoid defensiveness and minimize the biases that leaping to judgement usually entails (Claude 2005). This process does not guarantee freedom from bias but rather, helps to mitigate and counter seeing what one chooses to see. Hearing each person’s interpretation often provides contrasts and refinements and any agreements help build analysis that is robust and trustworthy. This issue is relevant for research generally but the advocacy feature (and Archilles’ heel) of the Arts as outlined by O’Toole earlier, makes trustworthiness a particularly important process.

The goals of practice and the goals of theory Lytle and Cochran-Smith (1990) note that teachers’ perspectives are often marginalized in research in favour of theories generated by researchers. School-university projects like this aim to ensure teachers’ Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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perspectives are heard and their views taken seriously. This requires ongoing dialogue wherein one set of voices (the academic) is not constantly privileged over another. Conversely however, research between teachers and university staff which focuses on classrooms often has a greater emphasis on the needs and concerns of practitioners (Johnson et al.1999) and that improvement in teaching becomes a central goal in teacher research (Lankshear et al. 2004). This practicebased preference by many teachers can dominate and obscure other research goals such as methodology refinement and creating trustworthy and substantive research findings related to students’ learning. These different goals are not necessarily competing nor discrete and there are opportunities for projects such as this to serve both sets of goals in a manner that does not detract from the value of either. Moreover, with increasing numbers of school-university collaborative projects there is a need for recognition by universities of the importance of ‘partnerships with schools as an integral part of academics’ work’ (Ewing et al. 2004:5) which includes the induction of research novices alongside valuing their insider knowledge.

However, teachers will not always share the goals of their university colleagues. Contribution to knowledge in an academic sense is generally not regarded as important as the professional development goals teachers express as their main agenda for participation in collaborative research. Improving their teaching and having time to focus carefully on the children in their classes is highlighted again and again as compellingly relevant. The research process enables teachers to see their practice afresh and gain multiple perspectives on what is happening in their classrooms. This is a practical advantage of collaborative research wherein teacher development is an inextricable part of the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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study. The tension for academics however, is that the more teacherfriendly the project, the more the goals of theory can be reduced or overlooked in favour of trust-building and practice goals. The distinctive interests of each party (Grundy 1998) are an inevitable issue in joint research of this nature. Some of the teachers are particularly keen to use the project to promote their school and this is perhaps, of no surprise given the competition between schools for publicity, boosting school rolls and parental approval. However, some teachers’ enthusiasm for media coverage and public dissemination of findings may be considered somewhat premature. Moreover, teachers’ publishing outlets seldom require the scrutiny and evaluation of peer review. On the other hand, teachers’ desire to quickly disseminate is understandable given the pace of their working lives and the slow process of academic publication. For all the teachers in the project, the months (and sometimes years) required for publishing in academic journals is excruciatingly slow and rather pointless, as their major focus on development has already been achieved. Therefore, a blend of both succinct teacher-targeted papers, and articles for academic peer review have been produced and that helps the project members feel that dissemination counts and meets their specific audiences.

Risk and trust One of the main findings of the Australian Government quality teacher program (AGQTP) evaluation (Ewing et al. 2004) was that high levels of risk-taking by teachers and trust in their university colleagues led to powerful learning related to teachers’ own practice. A major feature of collaborative research in the Arts is also this productive tension between risk and trust with the former growing in direct relationship to the latter.

One of the challenges however, is identified below: Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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If

collaborative

researchers

have

learned

anything

from

such

endeavours, it is that trust takes time, and members of a group never develop trust in synchrony. We know that collaboration is soul-searching, labor-intensive work for anyone participating, that shared understanding and significant change takes longer than expected, and that nothing is perfect (Bolin & Falk 1987; Hall & Hord 1987; Jackson 1988). Although these factors are sobering, such findings are better than feeling powerless and isolated in one’s work setting. (May 1997:230) In the first weeks of the project one teacher-researcher admitted that when she was being observed it was still quite stressful for her and she felt she wasn’t as relaxed as normal. Another very experienced teacher with previous research experience commented that she didn’t intervene nearly as much as usual with a group because of the video and other researchers in the room. These ‘confessions’ are a healthy indication of trust. Such feelings are important to acknowledge as an inevitable part of ‘exposure’ through the scrutiny of the research process.

The teachers also risk their identities with each other when exposing their practice and their research at regular roundtable meetings amongst all in the team from the eight schools, but such sharing helps to build collegiality within and across schools and across Arts’ disciplines. The roundtable meetings required considerable trust amongst the research team and helped to build a climate wherein questions, concerns and issues could be shared. As generalist teachers teaching all four art forms they seemed genuinely interested in each other’s questions and issues.

Teacher release from schools was paid for as part of the research project to enable time to share, plan, evaluate and reflect, unencumbered by the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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daily demands of classroom life. Moreover, ongoing collaboration between university and school researchers is maximized due to the flexible relationships with academic partners located fairly close to participating schools (see also Ewing et al. 2004).

There is risk and trust issues for university staff as well as we bring together different discipline knowledge and perspectives and at times are working outside our respective discipline areas (e.g., the music educator working with a teacher in dance). While the project brings in consultants to advise in areas beyond the expertise of any one researcher we need to ensure that consultants do not adopt the role of professional adviser and lesson evaluator. To maintain the integrity and purpose of collaboration the central focus needs to be on the research questions and teachers working with university staff as co-researchers to investigate these.

Developing relationships that engender trust requires regular, ongoing interaction between university and school co-researchers; interactions that create a climate of hospitality and charge (Palmer 1998).

Relationships need to be hospitable so that partners in research feel supported and understood. But the research partnership should also be ‘charged’ so that challenge is welcomed, dispute is encouraged and competing perspectives are aired. It is this challenge that also enables the taking of risks as teachers boldly try new interventions and work alongside their university partners to interrogate emerging themes and findings.

Conclusion The initial case studies revealed a number of common rituals of practice Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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in classrooms (Nuthall 2001). Depending on the context and goals of the lessons and the needs of the children, these ‘rituals’ or largely taken-forgranted assumptions could support or constrain what happened when children were learning in the Arts. The common rituals included the following: • There was an emphasis on the teaching of practical knowledge and skills, with little attention or time given to development of ideas.

• Group work was a common device for both management and pedagogical reasons in the teaching of dance, drama and music.

• Visual art was usually undertaken individually even if children were placed in groups.

• The teacher chose the topic or theme to be explored in the Arts and this was usually framed around a narrative. While these were openended enough to allow children to locate their experiences, deviation from the set brief was rare.

• There was a distinct emphasis on explaining art skills and processes in words, which was mostly spoken and sometimes in written form.

• While the value of process was recognized, explicit valuing of subtask completions, presentations and finished work was often foregrounded.

As mentioned earlier, the teacher researchers are currently involved in ‘disrupting’ some of these rituals through the action research phase wherein they are trialing interventions with the support of their university colleagues and in-school buddies. Such interventions reveal teachers’ ability to question the status quo, explore new approaches, and explore unpredictable pathways and possibilities. As evidenced by the teachers’ research questions the teacher-researchers’ role bridges the traditional Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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duality of teacher or researcher and theory or practice. Eisner (2002) addresses the need to move the initial teacher education focus from episteme (formal theory) or phronesis (practical knowledge) on into artistry because it is within artistry that the notion of knowledge viewed as embedded and resident within self appears to be understood. He writes: Teachers, for example, are not regarded now as those who implement the prescriptions of others but as those most intimate with life in classrooms….. Teachers are collaborators in knowledge construction and bring to the table of deliberation a kind of insider knowledge. . .

(2002:381) It is just this intimacy and the insider knowledge that is the strength and challenge of this project as we work together to interrogate assumptions, ask hard questions and constantly surprise ourselves in the all too familiar landscape of school classrooms (McWilliam 2004). The power of the teachers’ knowledge construction as described in this quote is such that they all have much to share with the professional and research community. Our collaboration as co-researchers extends into the dissemination of findings. Some of the teachers have already presented on this project at a research symposium last year and we are copresenting at the annual research in education conference later this year.

Joint presentation by teachers and academics underlines the ways in which practice and theory can be mutually enhancing.

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 218

References Berthoff, A. (1987). The teacher as researcher. In: D. Goswami & P. Stillman (Eds.), Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change. (28-39). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton.

Bolin, F.S. & Falk, J.M. (eds) (1987) Teacher renewal : professional issues, personal choices, New York: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Claude, C. (2005). Protocols for professional learning conversations: Cultivating the art and discipline. Courtenay, BC: Connections Publishing.

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2000). Research methods in education (5th ed.). London: Routledge Falmer.

Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Eisner, E. (2002). Arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Eisner, E. (2000, January). Ten lessons the arts teach. Paper presented at the Learning and the Arts Conference, Los Angeles, USA. Ewing, R., Smith, D., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., & Manuel, J. (2004).

Teachers as learners: Australian Government quality teacher program ‘Action learning for school teams’ project evaluation report.

University of Sydney.

Feldman, E. (1973). The teacher as model. Critical Journal of Aesthetic Education, 3 (1), 50-57.

Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2005, July). The Art of the matter: Researching children’s learning in art, music, drama and dance.

Proceedings of the Imagination and Education Conference, Vancouver, Canada. Available from: http://www3.educ.sfu.ca/conferences/ierg2005/papers.php Grundy, S. (1998). Research partnerships: Principles and possibilities. In B. Atweh, S. Kemmis & P. Weeks (Eds.), Action research in practice: Partnerships for social justice in education (21-36).

London: Routledge.

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 219

Hall, G. E. & Hord, S.M. (1987). Change in schools : facilitating the process. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Johnson, B., Peters, J., & Williams, D. (1999). Academics working with schools: Revealing the tensions. Journal of Education for Teaching, 25 (2), 123-133.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2004). A handbook for teacher research: From design to implementation. New York: Open University Press.

Lytle, S. L., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1990). Learning from teacher research: A working typology. Teachers College Record, 92 (1), 83103.

May, W. (1997). ‘Teachers-as-researchers’ or Action research: What is it and what good is it for Art education? In: S. L. Pierre & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), Research methods and methodologies for Art education (223-240). Virginia: NAEA. McWilliam, E. (2004, April). W(h)ither practitioner research? Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, USA. Ministry of Education (2000). The Arts in the New Zealand curriculum.

Wellington: Learning Media.

Nuthall, G. (2001). The cultural myths and realities of teaching and learning. Paper presented at the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, Christchurch, New Zealand.

O’Toole, J. (2006, April). Researching in, on and through the arts: Considering contemporary forms of research and modes of reporting on the arts and arts education. Paper presented at the Dialogues and Differences Symposium, Melbourne, Australia.

Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach. Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Stenhouse, L. (1985). The case study tradition and how case studies apply to practice. In: J. Rudduck & D. Hopkins (Eds.), Research as a basis for teaching: Readings from the work of Lawrence Stenhouse. London: Heinemann.

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 220

Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

Volume 1, Number 1 Fraser, D., Henderson, C., & Price, G. (2007) Paradox and promise in joint school / university Arts research Page 221

The future of arts education – a European perspective Anna-Lena Østern Åbo Akademi University __________________________________________________________ Author’s biography Professor Anna-Lena Østern is Professor of Didactics in Swedish language, literature and drama at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, guest professor of Drama Education at the University of Vaasa, Finland and visiting professor at Bergen College, Norway.

She is a teacher, educator and researcher in the fields of drama, cultural literacy and artistic learning process in arts education. She is co-ordinator of the Nordic Drama Research group, Drama Boreale. Anna-Lena.Ostern@abo.fi

I want to thank Melbourne University for the honour to be an invited speaker at the Dialogues and Differences symposium. I am happy to be here and I pass on the warmest greetings from the Nordic network in arts education.1 We share many of the visions - and threats - concerning the future of arts education.

The Alta Stone Story In northern Norway in Alta there is a big stone (‘Storsteinen in Alta‘), on a rock which is about 60 metres square and flat on the top. Only when you are standing on top of the stone are the rich carvings in the stone visible.

The carvings are about 9000 years old, and according to Jon Nygaard (1998), a Norwegian theatre science researcher, these carvings are the directions for the play leader, the shaman, regarding some kind of ritual performance. Nygaard suggests that the Alta stone is one of the oldest theatre stages in the Arctic zone. Over a period of about 4000-5000 years this was a place for ritual performances. The stone is situated in the landscape so that different lines naturally meet, and long ago the sea and the land met here. It could have been that this was the spot where 1

Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA), the Arts, Culture and Education Network Journal of Artistic and Creative Education

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the sun first rose above the surface of the sea after the long dark period during the winter. The shamanistic rite may have been to call the sun back after the winter. At some distance from the main stone a small stone for contemplation is situated; between them are two stones placed to form a narrow passage for the shaman. If the shaman did not pass through the narrow, dangerous passage, or if he died for some other reason, it was absolutely necessary to maintain the rite; the knowledge must survive. That’s why the carvings can be interpreted as instructions for the next shaman. Nygaard calls this the very first theatre. The prototheatre shows the ecological balancing act between humans and nature where the Arctic people lived. The theatre was an expression of Arctic culture and identity. Even today the ritual performances of Arctic people show traces from the time when the theatre was conceived as a total tool for insight and communication in the society. Nygaard has found similar stones in North America, where Indians have ritual places. He thinks it is even probable that similar or parallel sites might be found in Australia.

There might be thematic similarities. At the time of the shamans the theatre played a more important role in the life of the society than ever in later ages; it was considered a necessity for survival.

What is there left today of the special importance of theatre, of arts? Jon Nygaard (2005) might suggest it is the sense of presence. The Shaman performed the rite to bring the sun back after the dark period during the winter. First came theatre, then came religion, and then came technology, argues Nygaard. When religion came, the shamans were banned and burned with their drums. When technology entered the scene, people learned that the sun comes back, regardless of what people do or don’t do. Nils Braanaas from Norway in the 70s outlined the features of drama education history and theory in the Nordic Countries.

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In Children, youth and theatre from Ancient Greece till today2 (2001) he writes that the periods when theatre has had a vital influence on education have been when theatre was part of a meaningful project closely connected to religion. What is left of the heightened state of emotion and presence in ritual theatre? Can we achieve this today – without the beliefs connected to the shaman’s world view? What is the mission of arts education today and what are the prospects for the future?

Today I will address a few issues which are considered central from a European, and especially a Nordic, perspective on arts education. The main points of my lecture are my ideas about arts education as connecting not competing, supporting integration of thoughts, feelings and reflection, arts for all, the necessity of artistic competence and the skills as well as in the pedagogy of the teacher. I will include a short report from a contemporary Swedish project Culture and school and from a Finnish project Drama, theatre and identity-forming education. The second example draws attention to the notion of otherness and cultural rights from an inclusive perspective. The second part of my lecture looks back to some aspects of arts educational history through a consideration of the ideas of the Czech teacher Jan Amos Comenius from 1650, along with my construction of a tree metaphor for arts education. In the third part of my lecture I ask you to join me in the contemporary attempts to find a place for arts education within the European Community – considering the UNESCO Road Map and the Arts-in-Education Approach. My final section, the fourth, introduces the idea of us forming the future by what we are doing now. I especially address the notion of ‘Bildung’ – how a technocultural character-forming takes place in the 2

The book is written in Norwegian Journal of Artistic and Creative Education

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interface between young people and information technology. My final words will suggest that social constructivism is not enough, we need a more thoughtful approach to transformative learning, an approach including awe and wonder beyond the socially constructed.

Cultural literacy through aesthetic learning processes I will argue for the importance of an aesthetic perspective on learning processes in school and in teacher education. I consider cultural literacy as one important goal for school in late modernity. If aesthetic learning processes can be a dimension within teaching different subjects you need a teacher education where the students learn what it takes to teach aesthetically. This means that the art form you are working in gives you the rules and the frames for the work. Teaching is connected to meaningmaking learning processes. Art is connected with skill and for a teacher to take the opportunity to integrate ‘art as method’ this demands that he or she is capable of handling the dramaturgy of the classroom and can challenge aesthetic learning processes to take place. An aesthetic or artistic learning process is characterised by learning where the individual’s relationship to something is changed, a new perspective on reality is opened.

One task for school is to provide children with images of a future worth living in. What this looks like is uncertain. A sustainable development culturally, ecologically, socially and economically is part of the images of the future. A notion of citizenship (as for instance described by Helen Nicholson, 2005) is part of a culturally sustainable development that considers preservation as well as shaping of new cultural expressions. In the Nordic countries informal learning arenas are discussed as important parts of young people’s learning. The fascination of the international Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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youth culture challenges school as a learning arena, because the virtual world is a qualified supplier of knowledge as well as fascination.

If

children and young people learn about 80-85% of what they learn outside school – what is the value of the learning in schools, and what should be focused on?

The cultural construction of reality in arts education has learning as its focus; in many ways work in an art form will teach human beings how to live their lives. Susan Wright (2003:303) writes about the cultural construction of reality in the following way: Artistic expression, in a modest or grand way, communicates and shapes our thoughts, perceptions and feelings. It helps us represent our experiences of life, and to develop, strengthen and transform our beliefs and values. Hence, the arts not only reveal cultural heritage, they are also a means by which the culture is defined and evaluated.

Today young people learn about aesthetics in their spare-time culture.

This culture is to a large extent a hybrid, a performative culture with cross-over back and forth from drama to visual art, dance and music.

This blurring of art forms often happens in a sophisticated and developed way. Young people today have a competence which has an educational potential. Their literacy is multimodal (Kress, 2003) and their character formation is taking place in an interface where humans and machines (digital media) interact in a symbiosis.

Aesthetic means are used to attract young people’s interest and the type of fascination supplied by dramatised performances has a strong appeal to a need for emotional experiences; this kind of market aesthetics has a Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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value foundation that is rarely in accordance with the value foundation of school. In Finland there is a drift back to basics and measurable achievements. What kind of learning should be supported in school?

How can teachers and pupils work in school in order to provide the adults of tomorrow with the learning needed in order to be active in their own lives and in society in a constructive way?

Anthony Giddens (1991) writes about the ontological uncertainty that young people experience, when the values and the places where they belong are not there for them anymore. Thomas Ziehe (1985) writes about the importance of aesthetic education, where young people can develop their self reflexivity and find and explore otherness in a good enough way. Character formation today includes the notion of otherness.

To take in otherness in thoughts, cultures and in oneself has long been part of the changes of perspectives undertaken when building fictional worlds. Kirsten Drotner (2004:16-17) writes that drama education has been developed in relation to two discursive and educational fields of practice: ‘namely the cultural field, where drama belongs, and the pedagogical field, where education belongs’. She suggests a dialogue scenario for drama education in the future. This scenario encompasses both the cultural and the pedagogical dimensions, but crucial is that drama education builds upon the complexity of the aesthetic processes themselves. Drotner thus suggests that drama can be equally an arts subject, a cultural subject, and support learning processes in other subjects. She links this thought strongly to the notion of understanding otherness, considering the necessity for young people today to take in the perspectives of foreign cultures and people.

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In my (2004) research a ‘dromena tree’ metaphor has been developed to serve as theoretical description of the role of storytelling in dramatic modes using different dramaturgies. The tree metaphor also can be considered a theoretical description of what drama education is. In the tree metaphor the historical perspective is visualised in the roots and the stem. The human drive to survive shapes community with structure, symbols and artefacts, disobedience, fantasy and sexuality. The ‘dromena’, or performance cult, is a place for storytelling in what can be traced as the beginning of dramatic expression. The Greek word thea = to see can later on be found in theatre as well as in theory. From the dromena have developed the theatrical forms we recognise: tragedy and comedy, scripted theatre and non scripted theatre.

The way the story is told can be described through four different dramaturgical models: dramatic, epic, simultaneous and metafictive: (Szatkowski & Kjølner 1989). The dramatic dramaturgy is used in classical drama, and in most films of today. In drama education those kinds of living-through, experiential role-play with emotional engagement and a defined climax can be seen as using the dramatic dramaturgy model. The epic dramaturgy has montage as its basic form, and contains the narrator position - like in Brecht’s theatre. There are layers of fiction (concrete, abstract, thematic, metaphoric) with symbols pointing into the same direction. In for instance Dorothy Heathcote’s drama form epic dramaturgy can find its place as well as in the later developments of process drama. This epic dramaturgy contains various distancing elements.3 The simultaneous dramaturgy builds upon the notion of fictional layers and the montage of them. In much performance you can 3

Stig Eriksson’s (2004) research in progress has Distancing as its theme. He studies Brecht’s Lehrstücke and their didactics, in order to compare the distancing elements here with Heathcote’s didactics in ‘Man in a mess’.

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see the collage form with symbols simultaneously pointing at different fictional layers, and in different directions – concerning possible meaning potentials. The metafictive dramaturgy used in post modern performance and theatre is very close to youth culture’s forms of expression, for instance in music videos. The metafictive dramaturgy has a certain irony and points at itself. It is sometimes highly interactive in giving the audience the possibility of choosing which story is to be continued. Lars von Trier in the dogma films for instance uses handheld camera and long shots in order to give another voice to the film. In performance using video recordings of the audience, or close ups from the players you also have constant comment on the fiction being performed right now. The simultaneous and metafictive dramaturgies both occur in young people’s drama as well as in the expressions of the youth leisure culture they are a part of. The outcomes of the applications of the dramaturgies are in the crown of the tree: described as existence and meaning, containing cultural learning and empowerment.

With this metaphor in mind I will give a few examples of arts education projects in the Nordic countries today. I will then make a juxtaposition looking backwards at a European endeavour from Johan Amos Comenius’ time.

A Swedish project: School and culture In the Swedish research project Culture and school, Lena AulinGråhamn, Magnus Persson and Jan Thavenius (2004) proposes radical aesthetics as an alternative to the modest aesthetics found in schools of today. A modest aesthetics is discipline-based, where the art subject in question has a few lessons in a space of its own. Modest aesthetics is marginalised, because it fights for a place of its own instead of Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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demanding to be a fundamental principle in all teaching. It is restricted in terms of being active and creative regarding new art forms and aesthetics - uninterested in the content and thus in the aesthetic form as part of meaning-making. Radical aesthetics is radical in the sense that it in a fundamental way uses the possibilities of aesthetics to create meaning, qualify the learning and develop schooling. The project suggests art as cross-curricular in all subjects and projects. The researchers argue that school today has a shortage of meaning for the pupils. By introducing arts as method the meaning project can be focused. Art welcomes questions, it embraces the not-yet-ready, it promotes a seeking and open attitude and it appreciates divergent thinking and personal solutions. The kind of negotiations necessary in collective productions could introduce school as an arena for democratic dialogues about what kind of society young people wants for themselves tomorrow. They write: …personal/individual

processes

social/collective,

popular-cultural

the

are

kept is

kept

together together

with with

established art forms, natural science perspectives are kept together with linguistic, aesthetic and cultural historical perspectives and so on. If teachers shall be able to keep all pupils’ learning processes in this way it is demanded that teacher education offers rich experiences of how aesthetic practices can be staged and how aesthetic perspectives on learning processes in all the school curriculum subjects and fields of knowledge can be introduced. The students must be able to use their own and other people’s experiences, reflect upon them, and critically and creatively relate themselves to the theories which exist concerning knowledge, culture and aesthetics. Then they might as teachers, (and already as students), stage aesthetic practices and qualified learning Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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processes in school, contribute to school development and participate in developing the field as a whole. (Aulin-Gråhamn & Thavenius, 2003:16, my translation from Swedish) A Finnish example: Drama and theatre and identity-forming education Over three academic years (2002-2005) a drama and theatre as arts education project was carried out with 14 participating schools, located within the Finland-Swedish school system. At the beginning of the project the pupils were about 10-11 years old, which in Finland means grade 4.

At the end of the project in April 2005 they were in grade 6 and 12-14 years old. The idea of the project was to support the pupils’ development in arts education, in language arts and performing skills. Every participating group had made an agreement that they would work within this program at least two hours weekly during the three years. The first year was devoted to storytelling, oral and written. The second year was focused on physical theatre and mime. The third year was focused on production, writing a play, rehearsing it and performing it. About 300 of the participating children met at a ‘Theatre party’ (‘Teaterkalaset’, a children’s and youth theatre festival) held in Tampere one weekend in April 2005. There the groups from different schools performed for each other, participated in drama and theatre workshops and carried out some final evaluation tasks regarding the impact of the project from the participants’ point of view (the pupils and the teachers).

The project was a joint venture with The Swedish Polytechnic’s Program for Performing Arts in Vaasa as the leading partner, along with The Faculty of Education at Åbo Akademi University and The Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Every year there were one or two 2 day courses, Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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where the teachers involved learnt about the ideas in the project and gained some basic skills in the focused area for the year in question. The teachers kept contact with a coordinator of the project. The students from the performing arts program had some of their practice done with the groups participating in the project.

One of the participating schools was a school for visually impaired children. I will in this presentation focus on the final production of a small group of four girls. The girls participated in the project for all three years.

Their teacher had a Masters in Special Education as well as a specialisation in Drama Education and another in Physical Education.

She worked extensively with the four girls during these years. She introduced drama as part of the school curriculum, which was new for this school. The second year she worked with a teacher assistant, one of the students from the Performing Arts Program at the Polytechnic. This assistant also participated in the final event. All four girls had been born blind and some also had other difficulties. This group was picked out to open the festival in Tampere with their performance The battle between the four elements.

This performance raises a question about what kind of meaning-making processes can be identified during this project. I ask a set of exploratory questions: What kind of aesthetic thinking is informing this project? The ideas of cultural rights and inclusion are quite obvious, but what kind of aesthetic-artistic experience is at stake when describing the participants’ discourse, the teachers’ discourse versus the discourse created through the performance, for a live audience of pre-adolescent sighted children?

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It was confusing and disturbing to watch the first minutes of the performance: the chaotic bodies, the restricted movements, the staccato tempo, the intervals spent seeking, the meta-comments produced by taps with hands on chairs, adjusting to the space; confusion of direction, the tendency to fall into introversion, the stepping out of role and laughing with the audience, the happiness and relief when it was all over.

But something was happening to me during the process of watching. It definitely made a familiar event strange, defamiliarises it (as in Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenjie). Here are some of its basic features.

The children have produced a performance, 15 minutes long, concerning one of the great conflict themes of humanity: human against human or here nature against nature. Their structure is quite clear: Scene 1: Introducing the four elements, introducing the conflict: who’s the strongest?

Scene 2: More competition, giving each other good or bad credits for their dance.

Scene 3: Escalating conflict, they show how they can destroy each other.

Scene 4: Desires and dreams, what each element wants.

Scene 5: Resolution: together can we make this happen. Together we are strong.

They reveal a dramaturgical thinking. They elaborate form clearly: using space in various ways, levels, body parts, form lines, connections, exaggerating their blindness.

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If I revisit aesthetic thinking in the light of the apparent confusion, I am forced to ask: who has made the rules for aesthetics such as being symmetrical, with even rhythm, and fast? In post-modern performance and in radical art you can find this same kind of unfamiliar, touching beauty. You can fill out the gaps with your empathy, with your interpretations of the intentions, the moments of fulfilment.

I was able to identify different discourses (a teacher discourse, a performer discourse and an audience discourse), each one of them pointing in the same direction: this performance is the result of a transgressive, transformative arts education process. The audience must abandon their presumptions about what is aesthetic and artistic, revisit them and look at a strange, unfamiliar beauty, which forms new frames of references for everyone involved.

A Norwegian project with artists in Schools: The Cultural Rucksack In Norway for several years already the state has been supporting groups of artists giving performances and workshops in schools. It is called Den kulturelle ryggsekken, or Den kulturelle nistepakken – referring to two national metaphors, the back-pack and the piece of bread and butter children take with them to school. The Norwegian Inclusive Dance Company4 has for instance produced two dance theatre performances for this cultural rucksack, for children aged 4-8 years old.

One performance Dunderklumpen (A troll) is a gentle story about getting friends. The other one Fisk (Fish) is a fantasy about the creatures living in the sea. This later was performed outdoors by the sea-shore. The idea is that these performances can be connected to workshops with the

4

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children, thus giving them a possibility of enjoying dance as an art form as well as of working in the art form with skilled teacher-artists.

European arts education: then, now and in the future The Czech education philosopher Jan Amos Comenius5 in the 1650s (when he worked as headmaster of a school in Sárospatak in Hungary) suggested that school should be a joyful place where children learnt through play. In his program leaflet Scholae Panssophicae (1650) he demanded four theatre plays every year in school. His speciality was educational theatre, and in Scola ludus (c.1650/1974) he delineated all the knowledge of his time through eight plays, which the children performed throughout the school. His famous statements include: • The one who wants to change what is happening on the stage of the world, firstly must educate man.

• The future sits at the school bench. What they play today becomes serious tomorrow. (p.25) • Our life is a play, the world a theatre, and school must be a preludium to life (p.25) • Schola ludus, the ludic, playful element Comenius writes about how play, a free, creative and orderly activity, is natural for the human being, is authentically human, and is social: Play/acting reinforces a stronger life than any other. All children learn remains more strongly in their minds when they act themselves and especially when they say and perform for many other people, on the stage; and they learn better together with others than they do alone. (p.15)

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Comenius is considered one of the most influential European reform pedagogues, and his notion of the ludic element has been reinforced by many later educational philosophers.

The percentage of obligatory arts teaching hours for 12-14 year olds in European countries and the US shows large variation. The range is from 3% of total teaching time in Turkey and in Belgium to as much as 14% in Spain, with the average being 9% (excluding the use of arts within physical education and reading). Finland is one of the countries in Europe with the lowest amount of time for arts education for 12-14-year old (6%), ranking lower than the US (7%) In a 2001 study Finnish arts education researcher Arja Puurula (2001:17): distinguishes between three prevailing arts education traditions in Europe: 1.

The German and Anglo-Saxon tradition

2.

The Latin tradition

3.

The former Soviet tradition

The German and Anglo-Saxon tradition uses a broad definition of arts subjects. Textile design, handicrafts, needlework, woodwork, creative textiles, technology, drama and dance are included in the arts education curriculum, and of course music and visual art. The subjects are taught separately. The Latin tradition associates arts education with the fine arts comprising just one or two subjects. The former Soviet tradition describes arts education as music and visual arts; special schools cater for gifted children. None of these traditions bodes well for the future, and an important question concerning the future of arts education is what kind of teacher education is needed for the more integrated arts education needed in the future.

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There are some vital networks working to promote arts education. Here are a few of the attempts to place arts education on the political and educational agenda. There have been conferences like A must or amuse – conference results. Arts and Culture in education: Policy and practice in Europe (2002). In Finland there is a conference report from the University of Oulu: Let’s do it together. The future of multidisciplinary arts education (Hyvönen & Lindfors, 2001). There exists a Nordic network Arts, Culture and Education, which meets annually in order to present recent research regarding arts education. UNESCO has organised quite a few conferences on arts, for instance the series that concluded in the provisional Road map, presented at the 1st World Congress on Arts Education, March 2006 in Lisbon.

Ken Robinson has been most influential through the reports he has written: Culture, creativity and the Young, Arts Education in Europe: a survey (1997), and All our futures: creativity, Culture & Education (2001).

This last report presents a strategy for arts education in its widest sense.

Creativity is a central concept, not only present in the arts but also fundamental to the advances in science, mathematics and technology, in politics, in business and all areas of everyday life. The four challenges for education in the future, according to Robinson, are: economical, technological, social, and personal. In the future, he argues, education will be a shared enterprise, local artists will be used as visitors, local enterprises support arts education. The report combines the emotional and humanist theory of arts education with the national economy based view – and an egalitarian view. Elsewhere, (1997:30), he writes that arts do make significant, distinctive, and in some respects unique contributions to learning processes. Art makes comparably important Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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contributions to intellectual development. Some of his main points regarding the influence arts can have can be summed up as follows.

Science and arts are not opposite but complementary to each other. The arts in education support development of skills: emotional, cultural, moral, aesthetic, creative, physical and perceptual development, personal and social development.

Arts, Robinson writes, are not a separate area of a community’s life; they are a pervasive dimension of it. If language is the heart of cultural identity, it tends to beat most quickly in its literary and poetic traditions.

Furthermore he states that religious and moral values are most deeply expressed in music, art and dance; that history, as lived experience of other lives, is often best evoked through music, art and poetry of the day which it was given contemporary form and meaning, (33). Arts education (ie making, and learning about the arts) has central roles to play in cultural education, helping children understand cultural diversity, acknowledging cultural relativity, helping them to understand the evolutionary nature of culture and the process of cultural change.

Robinson’s survey and conclusions have been taken into account when planning new curriculum frameworks, for instance in Finland.

An essential theme for the future is the extent to which school curricula can respond to the new horizons in the arts beyond the school gates.

There are several attempts to implement arts educational thinking instrumentally, like UNESCO’s arts-in-education approach (AiE): AiE is a pedagogical approach, which uses art as a tool in teaching. This approach does not simply aim to bring art subjects into curricula (arts education) and it is not about teaching art, although artistic skills and art appreciation are Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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also learned in the process. The AiE approach aims to provide students with knowledge and skills in a range of subject areas (such as mathematics, science and heritage education) and, more significantly, it aims to also stimulate cognitive development and to encourage innovative and creative thinking. (UNESCO 2006) There is a general agreement about the importance of arts education.

There is no clear map however for how to implement this knowledge.

There are constant threats that arts education may become even more marginalised. The networks in the field are fairly strong.

Artistic and transformative learning in drama In order to try to take a step deeper into what an artistic learning process might look like, I will report from the field of drama education. Artistic learning processes generate a knowledge which is deeply rooted in the sensuous, a knowledge of the body where feelings and thinking are integrated in a holistic understanding. That’s why it is important that the teacher is able to stage aesthetic learning processes. The aesthetic response

implies

for

the

student

an

active

and

conscious

experimentation with form in order to generate meaning. Through conscious work in the art form of drama the teacher is able to challenge the student to give an active aesthetic response and the students might overcome the need to keep total ownership of their productive response and experience the satisfaction of functioning creatively both as an individual and as a member of a group.

The activity of constructing fiction within a dramatic genre gives an aesthetic frame (the ’rules’ of process drama in this case and an Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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aesthetic distance through work with characters who are fictive constructions), which enables the student to go very close and deep in the exploration of the theme. Through the dialogue about different types of solutions to the dramatic tasks, the students express their understanding and, simultaneously, the negotiation of and experience of different personal solutions to the task develops their understanding. The introduction of meta-language when consciously experimenting with form gives the students the possibility of shifting between analytic reflection and emotional experience. Cinematic techniques such as freeze, still picture, slow motion, montage, and simplification incorporate the media literacy competence of the students, a literacy they have gained in the youth culture outside the formal learning arena at school. The teacher also might explain the serious playfulness as a necessary pre-requisite for aesthetic doubling: you have to devote yourself to the construction of the fiction, you make it conditionally (not for real, ‘for play’ – you bracket the demands of ‘reality’ for a certain amount of time and then you leave it) and you are not obliged to do anything else than to obey the rules of the play. The learning potential of drama is in the aesthetic doubling of role, place, time – and plot.

In drama the use of symbolic representation is at the core of the learning potential of the art form. Through the use of powerful signs a significant dramatic action can be constructed. Pamela Bowell and Brian Heap point out that: Once the drama teacher begins to understand that she has symbolic, iconic and expressive systems of representation at her disposal she can begin to fulfil the requirements of the drama more efficiently by plugging in to the most appropriate signing system. (2001:72) Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Thus a space will be created for what John Dewey (1935) called transformative artistic learning processes. His theory is often referred to as the transformative aesthetic theory (placed beside the expressive and the mimetic aesthetic theories).

An artistic learning process can be described as one where the learner through a transformative process creates new relationships of meaning.

The person gets a new perspective on reality, him- or herself, other people, nature, on life in general. The Finnish researcher Inkeri Sava writes about artistic learning processes as transformative, and her main point is that the learning person through these transformative processes forms a new inner reality. The concept of transformation is according to Sava thought of as a mental process of change within the person concerning interpretation and meaning making.

(1) Every process starts in some immediate sensuous experiences (memories, materials, emotional experiences), which are transformed into reflection.

(2) The impulse is reflected upon individually and in the group – and elaborated, thus giving place for new transformation.

(3) The elaboration takes place in two ways: forming concepts metaphorically

in

the

art

form

and

forming

concepts

theoretically (meta language).

(4) Further work will aim at a developed artistic action through several phases of transformations.

(5) These will be carried out in a certain chosen mode (in our case theatre/drama) using different signs and artefacts. This is a meaning-seeking and meaning-producing action which will lead to increased knowledge about and change in one’s relationship Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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to oneself, other people, nature or society. A change in the understanding, an insight about relationships, a new structure in one’s knowledge. This change will lead to new artistic learning processes. (Sava, 1993:15.)

In order to be able to conduct artistic learning processes the drama teacher needs to know her craft, need to know the main characteristics of a drama poetics. Janek Szatkowski and Niels Lehman (1997) have outlined the key features of a drama poetics using the concept ‘pragmatic dualism’. Their point of departure is that there is a difference between being in the fiction and analysing the fiction. The call the analysis phase ‘logos’ and other experiences like being in fiction, emotional experiences and memories ‘mythos’. Their starting point thus on one hand is literary theory and on the other the piece of art. In a drama group the participants reflecting upon the drama are in logos, but they are making excursions to mythos when remembering. In the aesthetic action during drama sessions or performances the players are in mythos, but make excursions to logos when planning the development of the role. The individual moves in between these two modes, which implies moving in a dynamic space, between different cognitive levels. According to Szatkowski (2001, interview) this kind of dramaturgical thinking is very important: To me it is important to use the art form to offer our participants the chance to create moments of precious significance.

Precious because they are based on senses, and significant because they produce important differences that makes you wonder and reflect. To provide them with tools to do this seems to me to be what the drama teacher should be able to do.

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An artistic learning process in drama is made possible because the participants get the chance to be co-writers of the drama they construct.

The pragmatic dualism might offer the corner stones of a poetic teaching, a space in-between where children and young learners can participate.

Sava’s cognitively oriented model identifies those elements absolutely necessary to give the artistic expressions of oneself and others an interpretation, a meaning. Then aesthetic and ethic are quite close to each other, and merge, because the developed awareness and the increased insight gives an ability to take an ethical responsibility for oneself, others and nature: ‘The aesthetic evaluation and the aesthetic are in a close internal relation; they mean that you surrender to life and they are active life supporting forms of human activity’. (61, my translation). Sava underlines that artistic learning processes contribute to developing mental models at least in two ways: metaphorically through the language of arts and verbally through conceptualisation. The change in artistic learning process makes possible what she calls ‘deeply spiritual human insight’ and she mentions a change of perspective regarding some aspect of human life, life in society and thought.

In conclusion I want to come back to where I started, but now pointing at the future, and I suggest, paraphrasing Michael Lerner (2000), that we should let awe and wonder be the basis of education. This spiritual learning or learning with mindfulness urges the teacher to give the pupils/students possibilities to be present here and now in an attentive way, to be active and reflective. In Australia the Aboriginal dreamtime spirituality perceives human beings as being connected to the earth and to other human beings. This is also characteristic of an arts education with sustainable development and ecological citizenship in focus. Lerner Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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(2000) writes about spiritual education and mindfulness, that both the teacher and learner in the classroom take from the situation an organic connection with life itself; a mind that sees things freshly as if for the first time; compassion for all beings including oneself; a more authentic way of encountering the world; and joy. The students see themselves as connected to others.

In All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture & Education Robinson (2000:14) gives five priorities in order to enhance the overall quality of education: the need to overcome economic and social disadvantages, the creation of greater fairness within the education system, the encouragement of aspiration, economic competitiveness and unlocking the potential of each individual.

When Walter Ong (1988) wrote his famous text on how the shift from an oral cultural tradition to a written culture changed the ways people’s minds worked, he could not have anticipated the rapid change in the relationship between humanity and machine which has happened during the last 20 years. Children and young people today live in a highly aestheticised world. Aesthetics are not only seen as superficial phenomenon of youth culture. Aesthetics are the foundation of culture, the form the thinking basically has (See Welsch, 1997). Today the place of learning thus can be described as an interface, where young people form their identities in a symbiotic relationship to the mobile and the internet. The communication is fast, it is often very poetic, it is full of accessible knowledge, and creative expressions. The virtual, fictive world is very real for young people today, and their artistic competence is developed in the interface, connected to the technology of the virtual age. They are ‘Cyborgs’ as Lars Løvlie (2003:348) calls them, and he Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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writes that young people today form their characters in the interface where their self and the culture meet. This is really a main challenge for education today. The conclusion from a Nordic perspective is: let arts be the basis of education, like a thread bringing awe and wonder into the teaching and learning in and out of school.

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References Aulin-Gråhamn, L., Persson, M. & Thavenius, J. (2004). Skolan och den radikala estetiken. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Bowell, P. & Heap, B. (2001). Planning process drama. London: David Fulton.

Braanaas, N. (2001). Barn, ungdom og teater fra antikken til det nittende århundrede. Trondheim: Tapir.

Courtney, R. (1974). Play, Drama and Thought: The Intellectual Background to Dramatic Education. New York: Drama Book Specialists. 3rd ed.

Dewey, J. (1934/1980) Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Books.

Donelan, K. (2004). ‘Overlapping spheres’ and ‘blurred spaces’: mapping cultural interactions in drama and theatre with young people. Nadie Journal 28 (1).

Drotner, K. (2004). Formation of Otherness: Handling the complexity of late modernity. In A-L. Østern (Ed.). Dramatic Cultures. NERA symposium in Reykjavik 2004. Report No 10 from the Faculty of Education. Vasa: Åbo Akademi University.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Korhonen, P. & Østern, A-L. (toim). (2001). Katarsis. Draama, teatteri ja kasvatus. Jyväskylä: Atena kustannus.

Lerner, M. (2000). Quoted from E. O’Sullivan, A. Morrell, M. A. O’Connor (2001) Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning.

Essays on Theory and Praxis. New York: Palgrave.

Nygaard, J. (1998).Teater som uttrykk for kultur og identitet hos arktiske kulturfolk. Spillerom Nr 1-4.

Nygaard, J (2005). The origins of theatre. Lecture given at Åbo Akademi University, 21.10.05.

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Ong, W. (1988). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: Methuen. First published in 1982.

Puurula, A. (2001). Arts education in Future – some European scenarios and trends compared. In L. Hyvönen & E. Lindfors (eds.) Tehhään yhessä! Taide- ja taitokasvatuksen tulevaisuus. Let’s do it together!

The future of multidisciplinary arts education. Oulu: The Faculty of Education, University of Oulu.

Robinson, K. (2001). All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture & Education.

Department for Education and Employment, England.

Robinson, K. (1997). Culture, Creativity and the Young. Arts education in Europe: a Survey. Council of Europe.

Sava, I. (1993). Taiteellinen oppimisprosessi. In I. Porna & P.Väyrynen: Taiteen perusopetuksen käsikirja. Helsinki: Kunnallisliitto.

Løvlie, L. (2003) Teknokulturell danning. In R. Slagstad, O.Korsgaard, L. Løvlie (Eds.) Dannelsens forvandlinger. Oslo: Pax. Comenius, J. (c.1650) Schola ludus – skulen, eit spel. Scener frå live tog skuleteaterspeli til Comenius, tilrettelagt for framsyning av Milada.

Suttung. (1974).

Szatkowski, J.(1989). Dramaturgiske modeller. Om dramaturgisk tekstanalyse. In E.Exe Christoffersen, T. Kjølner & J. Szatkowski, Dramaturgisk analyse. En antologi. Århus University: Department of dramaturgy, pp.9-90.

Szatkowski, J. (2001). Interview with a Nordic drama researcher, made

by Anna-Lena Østern.

Szatkowski, J. & Lehman, N. (1997). Pragmatic dualism – outlining a poetics for drama education. Lecture given at a Nordic Research design Course at Trondheim University, 7th March 1997.

UNESCO (2006) Arts-in-education. http://www.unescobkk.org/index.php?id=1057. Retrieved 14.4.06).

Welsch, W. (1997). Undoing Aesthetics. London: Sage.

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Wright, S. (2003). Arts, young children, and learning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Ziehe, T. (1985). Ambivalenser og mangfoldighed. Köbenhavn: Politisk revy. Østern, A-L.(2001).Teatterin merkitys kautta aikojen lasten ja nuorten näkökulmasta. In P. Korhonen & A-L. Østern (Eds.) Katarsis – drama, teatteri ja kasvatus, Jyväskylä: Atena. Østern, A-L. (Ed.). (2004). Dramatic Cultures. NERA symposium in Reykjavik 2004. Report No 10 from the Faculty of Education. Vasa: Åbo Akademi University.

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Harmonising or homogenising arts and education?

Perspectives on the arts in Australian schools , outside in and inside outi Robin Pascoe Murdoch University, Western Australia

Author’s biography Robin Pascoe is Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Murdoch University where he coordinates Drama and the Curriculum, Learning through the Arts and Primary Curriculum (The Arts). In 2004-05 he Co-directed the National Review of School Music Education (NRSME) and is currently a member of the team conducting the National Review of Visual Education (NRVE). rpascoe@murdoch.edu.au

Abstract Two National Australian Reviews – the National Review of School Music Education and the National Review of Visual Education: Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication – provide powerful contemporary opportunities to consider the issues facing the arts in Australian schools. This paper reports on and discusses issues and implications of the Music Review (Part One) and in Part Two considers material available in the public domain about the Visual Education Review (still underway at time of writing). In Part Three, implications for other art forms are considered. In the Conclusion, the paper discusses the broad issues of a harmonised not homogenised future for arts education; and, issues of positioning or stance (positionality) for researchers in arts education.

Introduction: Context for arts education research in Australia Has there been a time when there has been more arts education research activity? Not only are there two Australian National Reviews; the Australia Council has a declared priority for education; State and Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Territory governments have declared commitment to the arts and education through initiatives such as the Western Australian Creative Connections (Department of Culture and the Arts Western Australia January 2005); and, there is healthy research activity through the Australian Research Council (ARC). This reflects an international pattern.

In a recent lecture to students in Learning Through the Arts at Murdoch University, I discussed, for example, Champions of Change (Fiske, 2000), Critical Links (Deasy, 2002), and the recently published Third Space (Arts Education Partnership 2005). In addition, recent UNESCO (2006) initiatives are significant nodes of research and advocacy activity.

The purpose of this paper is to recognise this context and report on the two Australian reviews – the National Review of School Music Education (NRSME) which reported in November 2005 and the National Review of Visual Education: Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication (NRVE) which is in progress as I write (April 2006) and prepare this article for publication (February 2007). The discussion focuses on the implications of these national Reviews, both the broad implications for arts education and questions of my positioning or stanceii (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2004, Pendlebury & Enslin 2001) as a researcher.

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The National Review of School Music Education While the two Reviews overlap in time and share team members, being undertaken under the umbrella of the Centre for Learning Change and Development at Murdoch University, they are separate activities. The National Review of School Music Education reports on how effectively Australian schools are providing music education. The key areas for the Reviewiii were: • The current quality and status of music education in Australian schools; • Examples of effective or best practice in both Australia and overseas; • Key recommendations, priorities and principles arising from the first two aspects. Its findings and recommendations are targeted to a range of stakeholders in music, music education, arts education and education generally.

• The Review, conducted from April 2004 until November 2005, was focused on moving beyond opinion and lobbying to an evidencebased approach. The detailed multi-modal research strategy.

Findings from the Music Review The Report for the Music Review is comprehensive, running to over 280 pages containing rich information about the nature and quality of music in Australian schools but its flavour is found in the Key Messages that open it (see Table 1). The snapshot of music education in Australian schools that emerges from the Review highlights a number of issues.

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The Mapping of State and Territory Music Curriculum documents showed that the music education curriculum policies, syllabi and associated support documents for each State and Territory vary greatly in number, relevance, level of detail, usefulness and currency.

In reporting on

services to support music education in schools, the Review found that successive re-structuring within education systems has led to a reduction in music-dedicated services located either centrally or in districts/regions.

With one or two exceptions, relatively little work has been done to provide Internet, mentoring and networking services to support music in schools.

Table 1. National Review of Music Education: Summary of findings

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The Review also found that State and Territory Departments of Education have a range of partnerships with music organisations such as Musica Viva In Schools and the Symphony Orchestras who, de facto, become important collaborative providers of music services to schools.

These services are most often provided on a user-pays basis and may not be universally available.

Changing contexts for education including competing curriculum priorities and the changing nature of contemporary schools, have contributed to the current situation. The Report also discusses alternative models of providing music services to schools.

In summarising participation and achievement data on music education, the Report commented on the difficulty of providing a complete and accurate portrait of how many students participate in music in Australian schools and summarising their progress and achievement in music.

Within the limits of the information available, the Review commented on the relative lack of growth in numbers of students completing Year 12 music and the poor retention rates for music across the secondary years of schooling. This section of the Report also commented on the limited public accountability for music education in schools. National Annual Reports on Schooling have not reported on music since 1998 and music does not appear in Key Performance Measures.

The National Survey of Schools had two components: a stratified sample of 525 schools (‘Sample Schools’); and an additional sample of 147 schools nominated through the submission process as ‘effective music’

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(‘Music Schools’) were also surveyed to enable comparisons. With a response rate of only 47.6% the findings need to be treated with caution.

The survey responses provide a sketch of music education in schools. In most areas the Sample Schools fall behind the Music Schools in terms of provision of music education. Some schools report active music programs but this is not the case in all schools. A significant minority of schools have no music for students. The National Survey showed that there are students in approximately 900 Australian schools (about 9-10% of schools) that have no music program. In addition to these 900 schools with no music, there is likely to be a significant number of other schools where music education is limited to participation in a range of simple music activities rather than a sustained program. A quality music education – as identified by this Review – provides a music education that focuses on participation and engagement, extension and, ultimately, excellence.

Around 40% of schools perceive that music is not valued by the community, and music is taught by a range of teachers, some without qualifications in music or education. Only a small proportion of schools have designated programs for gifted and talented students as opposed to activities catering for talented students. Similarly, only a small proportion of schools have designated instrumental or vocal programs. Support materials from systems and sectors are not available or relevant to half of the responding teachers and appropriate professional development is not accessible to about 30% of responding teachers. Facilities for teaching music are variable and music is taught in a wide range of school spaces. In schools where music is taught, music specific activities appear to be offered, but the nature and quality of these is not known. A Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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high proportion of music in schools appears to be listening to or responding to music. Music is also integrated with other arts areas and other learning areas in a majority of schools, but the extent is not known.

Use of music specific technologies is low and classical/Western art music is offered less than other types of music. Music is assessed in a variety of ways, including external assessment and informal assessment.

Success of school music programs can be attributed to many factors.

However, common to successful music programs are the dedication, enthusiasm and expertise of music teachers, the practical and enjoyable nature of the teaching programs, the support of school principals and school executive, and endorsement of school music programs by parents and the wider community. These appear to be essential to enable school music programs to flourish. Provision of appropriate resources and collaboration between teachers, students, school executive, parents and the community can considerably enhance music programs in schools.

It was notable that, with two exceptions, all primary schools selected for site visits on the basis of musical excellence had music specialists at the centre of their music programs. However, co-operative programs between high schools and ‘feeder’ primary schools also provided musical expertise on which primary schools could draw in formulating and implementing music programs.

Teacher education, both pre-service and in-service, is a significant issue that emerged through the research undertaken by the Review. Time for music in pre-service programs has in almost all cases been reduced. In many cases, music has been submerged in the Arts Learning Area. As a result teachers emerging from these programs indicate that they lack Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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sufficient knowledge, understanding, skills and accompanying confidence to teach music.

Similarly, the Review identified deficits (often self diagnosed) in music teaching amongst large numbers of teachers, particularly generalist classroom teachers currently teaching in primary and middle schools.

The Report calls for both increased professional development for generalist teachers and the alleviation of this problem by appointment of specialist music teachers in primary and middle schools.

Associated with teacher education, though often considered separately, is tertiary music education in conservatories and Schools of Music. Many who study to be musicians become teachers, sometimes in schools. The inclusion of music pedagogy in tertiary music programs needs to be specifically addressed.

Overall, the Review provided a variety of perspectives on the concept of a quality music education. Key factors that contribute to a quality music education include: • Participation, equity and engagement; • Student achievement of music learning outcomes; • Teacher knowledge, understanding and skills; • Curriculum articulation; • Support for teachers and students including that provided by Principals, systems and sectors; • Parental and community support; • Partnerships with music organisations.

In addition, the Review outlined issues, challenges and opportunities that were shaped into a number of recommendations at two levels. The Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Overarching

Recommendations

(Table

2)

focused

on

broad,

philosophical commitments about music education in schools.

Table 2. National Review of Music Education: Overarching recommendations

Where appropriate, specific key stakeholders have been nominated to initiate and sustain action. While there are legitimate concerns to be had about the status and state of music education in many Australian schools, the Review has also identified genuine opportunities and positive aspects about school music and woven them through these recommendations. Taken as an implementation package, action on these recommendations will contribute to enhancing the quality and status of music in Australian schools.

National Review of Visual Education: Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication The second review, the national review of education in Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication, is known as the National Review of Visual Education (NRVE) and overlaps the Music Review in time. It Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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springs from concerns about the role of visual education in Australian schools.

The Review is predicated on the idea that visual literacy/capability is a fundamental skill, increasingly as important as language and numeracy.

It is seen as vital for everyone in the community to have the skills necessary to effectively read and interpret information presented through modern visual mediums, including computer systems, video phones, television, advertising and film, to name a few. The Review will consider both ‘making the visual’ and ‘reading the visual’ as essential components of this active participation.

The Aims of the Visual Education Reviewiv The scope of the Review is limited to Australian Schools and teacher education programs. The key areas of focus are: • notions of visual literacy/capability and its place in education; • curriculum in visual education; • teaching of visual education; • teacher education in visual education.

To envision the future of visual education the Review is considering: • What are emerging imperatives in the area of visual education?

• What are the characteristics of high quality visual education?

• How do we achieve equitable and high quality visual education for young people in Australia?

• In what ways will we know if we have been successful?

To begin to address these questions we first need to map the territory.

This is the role of the Discussion Paper.

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Visual Education Discussion Paperv It is not the intention of this paper to re-state the issues in the Discussion Paper but to highlight some significant issues about visual education for a shifting society.

In providing a working definition for Visual Education, the Discussion Paper provides both comfort and challenge to some of the orthodox positions of the field.

In the context of the Review, the term visual education is used in two ways. First, in a broadly inclusive way to encompass the areas nominated in the Review’s title: Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication.

Secondly, to mean the educative

processes by which individuals develop visual competency/capacity in order to participate effectively in contemporary society. (1) In taking an inclusive yet broader approach to defining the field, the Review recognises the changes in practice, contemporary society and technology that promote multi-modal thinking and communication. The aesthetic and generative nature of visual capacity/capability (increasingly referred to in popular circles as visual literacy) is driving a changing conceptualisation of the field. The working definition is inclusive of the role of visual arts, craft, design and visual communication education but also recognises that claims are made on the territory by other areas such as the Viewing strands in English; design in Technology and Enterprise; and, multi-media, information and communications technology studies.

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One of the first issues raised in the Discussion Paper is how to meet the challenge which the emergence of new visual technologies and related multi-modal forms is having on visual culture and therefore on the way our society sees, perceives, makes and communicates meaning. Visual technologies have penetrated deeply into our everyday and working lives – so much so that in any work or leisure environment, the regular use of visual modes of communication (such as websites, PowerPoint© presentations, digital cameras and mobile phones) is dominant.

Computers and other visual technologies have changed both what we know and how we come to know. We learn through visual technologies that merge virtual worlds and reality in ever more seamless ways and our thinking about the world is transformed. In every way, it is evident that ‘the world as a text has been replaced by the world as a picture’ (Mirzoeff 1998, 2002).

The character of the (visual) world is transforming and enlarging. So too are the opportunities and the demand for those skills and capacities that enable people to function within mediated, graphic and performative environments. This refers not only to technical skills but, importantly, to the capacity to conceive, think and structure information, knowledge, experience and understandings in a visually oriented world. The demand for these skills and capabilities is matched by an increasing democraticised access to the visual. The vocational implications are significant. As a result, the Discussion Paper raises important questions such as: what learning environments, pedagogy and curriculum policies and practices support this capacity-building for all students?

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An increasing reliance on visual images to express, entertain, inform, and to communicate in a global environment across cultures and contexts highlights the need for visual education that promotes sophisticated levels of aesthetic and ethical judgement. The digitised production of high quality multi-modal images has made music, movies and the graphic arts accessible to young people who possess what might be considered only vernacular levels of artistic facility in these disciplines.

A second significant area argued for in the Discussion Paper is reclaiming the visual for the aesthetic. The Discussion Paper observes that digital technology popularises, some would claim democratises, artistic competency. However, as many observers are aware, the level of aesthetic competency has not kept pace. Young employees across many fields are required to capture images and design presentations in which the technology is sophisticated and the technical skill used is high - but the ethical, aesthetic and communicative judgement could be considered to be correspondingly banal (Stankiewicz, 2004). So the question is posed by the Review: how might visual education address this need for the aesthetic and generative to be at the heart of visual literacy? As noted in the working definition, it is possible even to ask if the development of these aesthetic capacities is solely the work of visual arts and design education as traditionally conceived, or can these capacities be developed satisfactorily outside the context of established arts and design practices?

As the capacity to negotiate the mediated visual world becomes increasingly regarded as a critical functioning skill – like literacy and Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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numeracy - visual art educators need to ask: how will visual arts education structure itself so as to address the general need for a visually competent society - whilst at the same time clarifying and addressing its other, unique and important contributions to life?

Further, in the process of negotiating the relationship between the instrumental values of visual arts education and those that are intrinsic, what will be the position of visual arts about visual literacy, visual culture, aesthetic competency, identity, ethical understandings and visual intelligence? In particular, how are the cornerstones of visual arts education such as praxis, and thinking - creative, imaginative, expressive, innovative and critical - in making and viewing; and the ontological aspects of being and becoming through praxis, being positioned within the discourse of visual education that is emerging? Why should we value praxis as a way of knowing? Is there a role for visual arts, as a critical and generative practice, to facilitate the development of personal creative space in an increasingly generic curriculum? For most visual arts practitioners and educators, these are critical questions – and similar questions can be asked of the other disciplines.

A further critical factor identified in the Discussion Paper is the role of the teacher (and, therefore, teacher education) in effective visual education.

As technology introduces new forms of visual expression and new understandings about constructions of knowledge, practice, meaning and aesthetics, teachers confront increasing challenges. There are new technological skills, epistemologies and paradigms required of them.

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needs to be reformed. Visual education needs to be embedded in the primary school curriculum where, for the most part, generalist primary teachers are required to address all areas of the curriculum. Yet, the observation made in the Senate report Arts Education (Commonwealth of Australia 1995), that generalist primary teachers were, in the main, ill equipped to teach the arts still pertains (1995:42). These deficits are well-recognised by many teachers and attributed to negligible experience in the arts in most teachers’ own education, combined with little opportunity within teacher-education courses to redress this. Besides, whilst technical and process skills can be relatively easily taught, the more pressing and complex matters concerning aesthetic sensibility, visual thinking, meaning-making and the like, require extended periods of engagement in arts and design practices.

A radical rethink about the way learning opportunities are delivered in schools is required. The Discussion Paper considers some possibilities: stronger links between pre-service and ongoing professional learning; specialist teachers for primary schools; practical and sustainable partnership models to allow better access to specialised skills and resources (as identified in the National Review of School Music Education Report (2006)).

The Discussion Paper argues that investment in teachers’ ongoing education is integral to visual education for the future. Significant challenges include addressing the issues of keeping pace with change; maintaining educators’ passion; and, enabling forms of recognition within schools and systems that support not only individual promotion but growth of the profession. Supporting emerging teachers as life-long Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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learners – to grow as teachers, to maintain their passion and to advance to mentoring and/or senior positions in the profession is also highlighted.

Issues of generational renewal are raised. Teachers are the key to quality visual education in these times.

Implications for arts educators From the raft of issues that these Reviews raise, this paper will now discuss the need for action from the Reviews; the urgent need for teachers and others to reflect on their arts education practice and, therefore on the way they conceptualise that practice; and the need for further research in the field including, as necessary, further Reviews.

It is often reported that there is increasingly a mood of cynicism amongst educators and arts educators are not immune from it. One of the oftenasked (though not quoted) questions the NRSME team received was: but will anything change as a result of the Review? It is a fair question.

There were a large number of recommendations from the National Review of School Music Education (and it can be confidently expected that there will be quite a number from the National Review of Visual Education). One of the strategies used in writing the Report of the NRSME was to make the recommendations specific and detailed and carefully targeted to particular stakeholders. At an immediate level the recommendations have financial consequences but more significantly they represent a call to changes in attitudes and values. They are about shifting cultures of neglect and low status and have a long trajectory of reform built into them. Such reform concepts are difficult in short-term political cycles and shifts in Ministerial portfolios. Even for teachers

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working to the deadline of their next class, it is sometimes easier to focus on the immediate and to pay less attention to the ‘big picture’.

The danger for any Review is that the Report is scanned, given a cursory nod and then largely forgotten. The commissioning and completion of these Reviews is only the first step towards cycles of change and improvement of Australian music and visual education.

The first implication then for arts educators is that a Review is part of a process – and the real work for arts educators (not Review team members) is to follow up the political process again and again. Arts educators need stamina and perseverance and persistence. There are associated risks such as fatigue and generational shifts but the long picture is of the long march not the sprint.

A need for reflection The National Review of School Music Education has provided the music education community with an opportunity for collective reflection.

Hopefully, Visual Educators will similarly find this reflective space too.

Teaching and research consist of patterns of action and reflection, so simply yet effectively encapsulated in the Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum/Nga Toi (New Zealand Ministry of Education 2000). Each teacher, principal, school community, system, teacher education faculty and parent needs to review current practice against the Guidelines for Effective Practice included in the National Review of School Music Education. It is expected that similar guidelines would be an integral part of the National Review of Visual Education Report.

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These Guidelines were designed to help inform judgments by the Review team, but were also redeveloped to provide systems and sectors with a basis for making judgments on the overall health of school music education. As well, they provide tools for individual schools and teachers to review the health of their own programs. And, they provide parents, communities, music organisations and others a guide for reviewing their contributions to school music.

These Guidelines are based on two broad assumptions: that every Australian child is capable of learning music; and, that every Australian school is capable of supporting effective learning in music.

These assumptions reinforce a commitment to music as an integral part of a broad, comprehensive and balanced education that prepares students to participate in the emerging society in which they live. These assumptions recognise that while some students will make a specialised study of music, the majority of students learn music as part of a general education. Taken as a whole the Guidelines enable us to answer the following questions: How will we know if, and how well, students are learning music? How will we know if Australian schools are maximising that music learning? They are, by definition, standards for music education. These standards are dependent on all components being achieved – not just some. The Guidelines build on existing State/Territory and other curriculum statements and are not designed to replace them.

A feature of these Guidelines is the blending of a focus on student learning (outcomes) and a focus on inputs (what teachers, schools Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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administrators and others do to enable and support student learning outcomes). They are designed to raise expectations across Australian schools and encourage a more inclusive and effective education in music. They are not designed to be overly prescriptive but to provide general principles to guide reflection. They are not to be used as a simple checklist. The focus for school administrators, teachers and the community needs to be on actively using these Guidelines to review and reflect on music education in a process of continuing improvement. One feature of the Guidelines is the inclusion of reflective questions for key stakeholders.

The Review identified the need for these Guidelines to be used dynamically and as a tool for review and reflection rather than for summative judgments. Their use needs to be focused on continuing improvement.

The challenge for arts educators now is to enter into active, dynamic reflection on action. The purpose of this reflection is ultimately to review the way they conceptualise their practice, theorise it and carry it forward with contemporary understanding.

A need for further Research and Reviews The history and hegemony of arts education in Australia is reflected in the pattern of the establishment of these Reviews. Both music and visual arts education have dominant control; in some education systems this dominant role is even institutionalised. Interestingly, many of those included in the NRSME did not see this dominant positioning. They

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frequently characterised themselves as powerless, with low status and often ‘victims’ of a neglectful system. Yet, in the popular views of the arts in schools evident in the Australian community, there is more value placed on music and visual arts than on other arts forms.

In addition to more detailed research on music and visual education there is a need for the gaps in arts education research that have been left following the current focus on music and visual education. It is ten years since the Senate Report on Arts Education (Commonwealth of Australia 1995) and its strongly critical comments on the ‘cycles of neglect’. There is therefore a pressing need for similar reviews of dance, drama and media education. It is not enough to consider what might constitute an effective arts education for all Australian students through focusing only on Music and Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication Education. The case can be made for reviewing all of the art forms in their own right. This is not merely based on a ‘me-too’ argument. Many of the impelling forces for the Music and Visual Education Reviews impinge on the delivery and quality of dance, drama and media education in Australian schools as well (and a case can be made for including Literature too).

While each Review considers the past as a way of understanding the present, there is also opportunity for the research teams to look forward to the future and consider arts education in its broadest sense in the context of a culture that reflects diversity, hybridity and the increasing attention to the importance of the arts.

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In addition to reporting on these Reviews, the purpose of this paper is to reflect on some broad implications for arts education and research in arts education.

Harmonising not homogenising arts and education One of the clear issues still facing arts educators is how best to conceptualise the field. The concept of an Arts Learning Area continues to be a point of polarising contention. The calling of these two Reviews and, in large measure the positive and overwhelming response to them, is in part driven by a fear of loss of specific identity amongst music and visual educators arising from the Arts Learning Area construct. And, I suspect, similar views can be found amongst educators in the other art forms. This loss of the label music and the replacement with the term the Arts was a recurrent theme of submissions, focus groups, and interviews through the National Review of School Music Education. Similarly voiced concerns are raised amongst visual educators. This ‘protectionism’ of territory is understandable at one level. In the Realpolitik of schools, systems, power and budgets, these are real considerations. It is now, in 2006, eighteen years since the articulation of the Arts as one of eight key learning areas in the Hobart Declaration (MCETYA 1988). The sometimes-glacial change of school systems is still coming to terms with the implications of constructing an Arts Learning Area. Similar concerns were voiced during the Senate inquiry on Arts Education (1995) and seem not to have been addressed effectively by schools, systems or curriculum authorities. It is perhaps useful to consider that similar concerns are identified amongst discipline specific proponents of other learning areas such as History and Geography in the Society and Environment Learning Area.

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To my mind – and given my experience working both with a school system and in teacher education – the arts learning area construct has been in some cases misinterpreted. The structure of many, if not most, curriculum

documents

consistently

emphasise

as

an

essential

substructure of the integrity of each of the art forms. For example, the Western Australian Curriculum Framework (Curriculum Council of Western Australia 1998) states: The scope of the arts forms describes the essential activities, elements, skills, processes and contexts of dance, drama, media, music and visual arts that are considered necessary to demonstrate achievement of the outcomes of The Arts Learning Area Statement (1998:59).

In other words, in order for students to achieve the identified outcomes, their participation in dance, drama, media, music and visual arts is required and indispensable. This is further reinforced in the definition of the Arts learning area: The Arts Learning Area Statement focuses student learning on aesthetic understanding and arts practice developed through the art forms of dance, drama, media, music and visual arts, experienced singly or in combinations. Although these five forms may be used in interrelated ways, each has unique language, techniques and conventions (1998:51).

The use of language in a statement like this is deliberate; the positioning of and in listing the art forms is clear indicator or the intention of the curriculum. All are necessary and, furthermore, not just on their own but also in combinations. In addition, the unique nature of each art form is identified. Similarly, in the development of A Statement on the Arts in Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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Australian Schools (Curriculum Corporation 1994) this issue was debated and the structure of that document articulates the primacy of the art forms as curriculum organisers.

This curriculum intention has not been followed through and is not always realised in schools. There is some validity in the arguments of those who argue for a loss of identity in the move towards an Arts Learning Area model. The particular expediency that has operated in some schools (and school systems) that any of the arts will substitute for any of the others is a misinterpretation of the intention of the arts learning area construct. Perhaps what was witnessed was a failure to effectively articulate the concept and to provide the necessary professional learning about it for school and system administrators. But there may also be examples of reluctance to change, maintenance of comfort zones as well as power elite status and a failure to responding to the evident change in practice in the arts outside of schools.

In my work I have argued for a clearly articulated relationship between the unique aspects of each art form and those that bring them together.

This duality is deeply imbued into the design of curriculum we use in our teacher education programs at Murdoch University and in the professional development workshops that I run. I am not interested in some watered-down approach; but I do work with fully-fledged arts integrated learning opportunities that recognise the uniqueness of each art form but also the potential for greater coherence and meaning making when learning is enriched by more than one art form. Simplistic, superficial activities-based models that expediently link arts forms without

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an underpinning structure do a disservice to arts education as a whole.

Yet so too, can blinkered adherence to a singular arts form view.

In more recent times there are many who find the Essential Learnings trend (e.g. (Tasmanian Education Department 2004; Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority 2005) a further cause for concern, fearing a further downgrading of art form specific learning. But a closer examination of these Essential Learnings curriculum documents shows care has been taken to avoid making arts education a careless ‘muesli’ of the art forms.

The Arts domain encompasses a diverse and ever-changing range of disciplines and forms … Schools use the arts disciplines of Art, Dance, Drama, Media, Music and Visual Communication to plan programs. These programs reflect the cultural diversity of students and school communities and the vast growth in information and communications technology that has made arts forms increasingly visible. (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority 2005) In the sometimes knee-jerk and defensive reactions of those who carry the torch for specific art forms, the potential and strength of the Essential Learnings movement could be easily overlooked. The power of placing the concept of arts languages in the Communication strand of the Tasmanian Essential Learnings (Tasmanian Education Department 2004) should not be lightly dismissed. Not only is a key concept articulated and embedded, there is a parity of recognition through being placed in association with literacy, numeracy and information literacy.

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The relevant curriculum message – somehow getting lost in the din – is that each of the art forms has integrity within a broader understanding of the arts as a whole field. Even as we move towards hybridity and multimodal expression that challenge some of the articles of established practice, there are still fundamental and specific aspects of each of the arts – I prefer to call them the languages of the arts. Therefore I argue for a two-pronged approach: • Strengthening the art form specific • Addressing the gaps in the articulation and implementation of the Arts Learning Area model It is essential that our collective approach to the arts and education focus on harmonising rather than homogenising them.

Questions of positionality – as an arts educator and as a researcher of arts education One of the interesting aspects of this research has been the multiple perspectives brought to it by the diverse experiences of the team members and the multiple points of view required of each researcher. At a personal level this work draws me to reflect on my own positioning as both arts educator and researcher.

Although my work in education has been broadly in the arts as a learning area since 1990, I am aware of my identified field of expertise in drama education. I am led to wonder: As a researcher on music and visual education, am I an outsider looking in? At what point do I stop calling myself a ‘drama educator’ (if ever that limiting label was applicable)? And

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when can I call myself a ‘drama educator’? Or, a ‘visual educator? Or, simply, an arts educator’?

And what is the positionality of the teacher who has a broad responsibility for all learning areas? In other words, what is the usefulness – and I believe there is some – of specialist knowledge and point of view? What is the essential value of the generalist teacher? As I work with students in an Initial Teacher Education program, I am also aware of the need for these teachers at the beginning of their careers to share a broadly inclusive view of the arts in education. They need to understand what is shared across the arts – capacity for play, creativity, imagination, collaboration, individual and personal challenge – as well as what is uniquely significant about specific arts forms, what elsewhere has been focused as arts languages (NAAE National (Australian) Affiliation of Arts Educators 1998; 2003 2nd Ed.).

With my students and in the professional development I have run, I am fond of using the perceptual puzzles or tricks that require the viewer to shift perspectives. In that light then, there are times when we need to see the issues of the arts in education from the broad and inclusive arts perspective; by the same token, sometimes we need to see the topic through a more narrow art form specific perspective. What matters is that we can shift from perspective to perspective as the need arises. And, that we can see all of the possibilities, not just some of them. This simple truth has been brought home to me again and again through working on both these Reviews. As essential as it is to have the ‘one-eyed’ enthusiast and lobbyist, it is equally important to have the capacity to step back and consider all the positions.

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Finally, as a researcher in arts and education, I am confronted with choices (just as every artist must make choices). At what moment am I no longer the teacher artist/artist teacher? At what point am I the researcher? Can these roles ever be satisfactorily or desirably separated? Or, to put it another way, how can these roles be harmonised not homogenised?

I don’t have a simple answer for these questions but move backwards and forwards across perspectives, articulating and balancing my perception of them, trying to avoid muddying them into a soup, yet seeking the ‘harmony of the spheres’ and trying not to hit too many ‘bum notes.

In writing this paper I acknowledge the work of the other team members of National Review of School Music Education: Samuel Leong, Judy MacCallum, Kathryn Marsh, Elizabeth MacKinley, Terry Church and Anne Winterton National Review of Visual Education: Peter Wright, Judy MacCallum, Neil Brown, Kathryn Grushka, Judith Dinham, Terry Church and Anne Winterton

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References Arts Education Partnership. (2005). Third Space: When Learning Matters.

Retrieved 10 April 2006, http://www.aep-arts.org/TSreadreport.htm.

Commonwealth of Australia (1995). Arts Education. Canberra, Senate Environment: Communications and the Arts References Committee.

Curriculum Corporation (1994). A Statement on the Arts for Australian Schools. Carlton, Australia: Curriculum Corporation/MYCETYA. Curriculum Council of Western Australia (1998). Curriculum Framework, Perth: Curriculum Council of Western Australia.

Deasy, R. J. (2002) Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development. R. J. Deasy (Ed.) Washington, D.C.: Arts Education Partnership.

Department of Culture and the Arts Western Australia. (2005). Creative Connections, An Arts in Education Partnership Framework 2005 2007.

Retrieved 13 April 2006, http://artsedge.dca.wa.gov.au/documents/Creative_Connectionsfinal. pdf.

Fiske, E. B. (2000). Champions of Change The Impact of the Arts on Learning. Washington D.C.:Arts Education Partnership.

Hesse-Biber, S.,& Leavy, P. E. (2004). Approaches to Qualitative Research: A Reader on Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.

MCETYA. (1988). ‘The Hobart Declaration.’ Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, http://www.mceetya.edu.au/hobdec.htm.

Mirzoeff, N. E. (1998, 2002). The Visual Culture Reader (1st & 2nd eds.).

London: Routledge.

NAAE National Affiliation of Arts Educators (2003 (2nd ed.). More Than Words Can Say. Canberra, Australia: NAAE www.ausdance.org.au.

National Review of Music, Executive Summary Journal of Artistic and Creative Education ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Retrieved 20 August, 2006 <http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/ C9AFAE54-6D72-44CC-A3463CAF235CB268/8944/ music_review_reportFINAL.pdf> New Zealand Ministry of Education (2000). The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum/Nga Toi. Wellington New Zealand: Ministry of Education/Learning Media Limited.

Pendlebury, S., & Enslin, P. (2001). Representation, Identification and Trust: Towards an Ethics of Educational Research. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35 (3): 361–370.

Stankiewicz, M. A. (2004). Notions of Technology and Visual Literacy.

Studies in Art Education 46(1): 88-91.

Stevens, R. (2003). Trends in School Music Education Provision in Australia. Sydney: The Music Council of Australia in collaboration with the Australian Society for Music Education and the Australian Music Association.

Tasmanian Education Department. (2004). Essential Learnings Framework. fwww.education.tas.edu.au/ocll/outcomeschart.pdf.

UNESCO. (2006). World Summit on Arts and Education. Retrieved 1 April 2006, http://www.portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.phpURL_ID29744&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.htm.

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. (2005). Victorian Essential Learning Standards: Discipline-based Learning The Arts, fhttp://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/essential/discipline/arts/index.html.

Notes i

This paper refers to the National (Australian) Review of Music Education: a) “This material was supported by funding from the Australian Government Department of Education, Training and Science under the Quality Outcomes Programme.”

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b) “The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Australian Government Department of Education, Training and Science.”

This paper also refers to the National Review of Visual Education, which is supported by funding from the Australian Government Department of Education, Training and Science and the Australia Council for the Arts. This paper was originally written for and delivered at Dialogues and Differences: Beyond the Generic, Beyond the Differences, April 2006. During 2006 the work of the National Review of Visual Education continued with the Review Team completing its work in November 2006; the funding partners are undertaking ongoing work. As this Review is continuing at the time of preparing for publication, the paper includes only material from the public domain. ii

The term positionality, sometimes called ‘Standpoint Epistemology”, is used in qualitative research literature to refer to the ways that researchers view their own positioning or stance in the processes of research. It can also be used as a criteria for quality in qualitative research. iii

The Report is published at: www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/profiles/school_mus ic_education.htm iv

The material included in this section is drawn from the website for the National Review of Visual Education: Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication: www.visualeducationreview.edu.au v

The full Discussion Paper, a summary guide and points for strategic discussion are all available on the Review’s website http://www.visualeducationreview.edu.au/. As this Review is still underway as this article is being prepared for publication, it is not yet possible here to discuss findings. Therefore, this paper focuses on material in the public domain through discussing issues raised in the Review’s Discussion Paper.

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