Read and Reflect week 12

Read and Reflect Week 12

Immediately while reading “why do we teach arts in the schools?”  I am troubled by the need to connect test scores to the arts.  While I agree that the arts likely do facilitate the kind of learning which improves test scores, is that really the point?  Are we going to let this huge bureaucratic entity “standardized testing” determine the value of creative intelligence? The scores in and of themselves are a “bonus” but should not be why we keep art.

I applaud what Housen has done with her research. By infiltrating other disciplines with VTS, she has made what we do in the classroom more tangible for academic teachers. When they “see” the value, then the arts have more advocates.

Art is an expression of intelligence.  Profound, layered, meaningful, personal intelligence. (All of which embody the “Habits” of the mind”) This intelligence is whole.  Not segmented.  It traverse’s all disciplines. VTS makes that accessible for educators who otherwise imagine themselves (falsely) non artists.

When I read Art for Our Sake I felt it broke down in simple language, a lot of what matters, but is so difficult to measure. There were plenty of things that somewhat paralleled the Habits of Mind, which they called studio habits of the mind.  These are the things of course, which can not be assessed by coloring in bubbles on a sheet of paper.

The Winner/Hetland article focuses on two special schools which emphasize the arts.  I would have liked to have seen a broader study where they also observed schools in the inner city, and rural areas where the population of staff and student is quite different.  While I agree with a lot of what they observed as being paramount, they observed it in ideal settings.

It would be interesting to do a similar observation also at an expeditionary learning school.

So in conclusion, there are things I agree with in both , and together they sort of make a full article  :)