America Needs You!

Bruce Taylor has been an arts professional for more than thirty years as director, manager, designer, and company labor negotiator for companies such as Seattle Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, the O'Neill Theatre Center, and Pacific Northwest Dance. Concurrently, his avocation is working with teachers and students. He was the originating source of numerous programs for Education at the Met, the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and the Royal Opera House, London. He currently runs his own arts in education company, Arts For Anyone, with schools in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.



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America Needs You!

In the economy of the 21st Century, companies will pay their employees to think and communicate effectively. Throughout the United States school administrators are being told, “Teach your students to think for themselves and communicate with others. Anything else they need to know, we will teach them.” A close friend of mine, a rear admiral in the Navy, says the same thing about what the services look for in their young men and women. He wants sailors who are not afraid to use initiative and think on their feet. The military has mastered instruction - such as how to take apart and put back together the engine for an F-14. They instruct teenagers to do it and do it well. If you want to simply deliver curriculum you even can do it online. But to teach, to develop skills of imagination and communication, you need .......... a teacher. A teacher who is familiar with both areas - some one just like you.

The economy of the 21st. Century rewards innovation and unexpected outcomes, but present educational policy promotes a system and an assessment protocol that focuses on predetermined outcomes. In the words of Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “We’ve got it all wrong.” This country’s educators, children, parents......society itself, desperately needs what Teaching Artists can do. The previous paradigm of the industrial model of education is no longer appropriate to what kids and teachers require .

Why? In the economy of the 21st Century first world societies (e.g. in North America, Europe, Japan, etc.), employers will depend upon those who can imagine, create and communicate. Think of almost any well paying field now or in the future. Law, medicine, management, computer programming, design (media or industrial), popular entertainment (television, film, music), education - the list goes on. Isn’t it true that in each one of these categories you are required to imagine (a need, a product, a goal, an approach), create (a solution, a product, a method, a technique) and then communicate the result to others in a way that they can understand and buy into? Perhaps even be moved by.

Isn’t this what we do every day? Isn’t this what you were trained to do - to create original (i.e. unexpected) outcomes? Well, DUH! But don’t get too excited, because from what I’ve seen out in the field, we haven’t yet made the most of our skills in the critical role of preparing kids to be successful in the economy of the 21st Century.

It is my belief that we need to shift our attention from some of the goals that AIE practitioners have had for the past 30 years. These goals are admirable, but our focus on them has hampered our effectiveness. Since 1973, when I first began work in this field, we have, collectively, reached millions of kids, in thousands of schools. Those kids are today’s parents. If we had been successful, those parents would be demanding schools retain the arts, support the arts in their communities; fill our concert halls, museums, and theatres. Has that happened? No. To cite but two examples of our failure, overall government funding for the arts in this country has declined 40% over the past three years and less than 1% of kids who played an instrument in school ever picked it up again as adults.

Let me point out at the onset that we can still incorporate previous goals into a new paradigm. Our past primary goals have been the following:

An emphasis on the dysfunctional, disabled and disadvantaged, i.e. “special needs.”

Use the arts as implements in a policy of social rectification

Promote self-esteem through the vehicle of artistic self-expression

In our idealism we gravitate towards the marginalized, but in doing so we distance our work from the core majority of student populations. “Enrichment” therefore, has become a euphemism for “non-essential.” Administrators will tell you that only 5 to 10% of the kids in their schools will probably grow up to be corrosive elements in our society, but we imply that the other 90% are also in need of behavior modification when we tie art activities to social reform. And, finally, it is ironic that while knowing full well that making a living as an artist is a never ending journey of rejection and criticism, we promote the arts as an antidote to low self-image!

Again, we can incorporate these good intentions, but within a context more inclusive and less paternalistic. We can base our work on a couple of very basic understandings. To be human is to be artistic. Our capacity to think in the abstract (i.e. to imagine), along with our proficiency to communicate in a wide variety of forms, are central to our very nature. Taken together, these characteristics have enabled the human race to dominate the planet. It is critical to develop these abilities in students because of what will be required of them in the economy of the 21st Century. Along the way we can reintegrate the arts into the body of the core curriculum beyond “celebratory events” such as the class play, winter concert, and hallway exhibition.

While we’re at it, we must show non-arts specialist teachers how to integrate artistic fundamentals in their everyday teaching so that our work is not used as an excuse to eliminate routine participation in artistic activity! You don’t use an assembly program to teach science, or a residency to teach math, or after school project to promote social studies. There aren’t very many “teaching-scientists,” or “teaching-mathematicians” peripatetically bouncing from school to school being paid for by the PTA or outside funders, rather than by a line item in the school board’s budget. If we believe that the arts are basic to a child’s education, we have to advocate that they be viewed in the same light as “academics.” And they must be if children are to succeed as adults.

Three qualities drive artistic process: imagination, self-interest, and discovery. To create something we first imagine it. To catalyze self-interest we invest relevance in content - to include a bit of the student’s identity, world view, or belief system. To excite a student’s participation we add the thrill of discovery. These qualities are inherent in the creation of original art work in all genres. Any teacher can do it and you are just the person to show them how. It’s what we’ve been trained to do.

To accomplish this, I suggest a heresy. Perhaps, for the time being, we need to divest ourselves of the Getty Foundation’s Discipline Based Arts Education (DBAE) model. There is not enough room, time, staff, or money to meaningfully teach any art form as a separate discipline in most public school settings, much less all four major ones - Dance, Theatre, Music, and Visual Art. Kids are only in the classroom for 14% of any given year’s time and schools are already overtaxed. The No Child Left Behind act has made the environment even more toxic to our ambitions.

We should think more along the lines of how science is taught. Through elementary and middle school, kids are taught the basics of science generally, not isolating out genetics, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., but to focus on the broader concepts of scientific inquiry. The aim is not to make every kid a scientist, but to provide every student a foundation which could support such an ambition later, while enabling the child to have an overall understanding of his or her physical environment. So it can be with the arts - to better understand their social/human environment. To teach The Arts, collectively, as a discipline.

This means that as an actor you are not teaching Acting 101 or fun-time improvisation, but using your skills as an actor to provide teachers and students with the ability to empathize with literary and historical characters, understand the motivations of people’s behavior, and develop an awareness of the power of language. Or as a musician, rather than teaching notation or meter, you reveal the capacity of music to elicit emotional reaction, reveal elemental characteristics of your own or the composer’s historical period, create aural images, and express what cannot be conveyed by words alone. In any art form, we can demonstrate generative concepts such as metaphor, theme, and structure that go to the very essence of how human beings evolve and communicate with one another.

The artistic process is also the process of making a living. Making a living means more than making money. Drug dealers make money, but how many junkies do you see over forty five? They’re either dead or in jail. Whether we function as parents, spouses, or employees we are constantly engaged in the creative process of “solution-creation.” To reiterate: Isn’t it true that you have to imagine the essential components of a situation, problem, goal or objective? Isn’t it usually required that you have to create (think up) a solution, product, plan, approach or method to address the need? Isn’t also a fact that you are going to have to communicate what you come up with to others in such a way that they understand and buy into it?

Don’t you have to do the same as a director, actor, composer, writer, designer, whatever? Don’t you have to create possible choices, analyze your resources, fit within parameters, rework what you do, and effectively communicate with others (actors, the director, musicians, editors, scene shop/stage hands, etc.) We are used to the process of creating original work because we do it all the time. Teachers have been trained to manufacture reproductions of “the model graduate” by putting student A on an assembly line with curriculum B in school/factory C to produce satisfactory, efficiently measurable test results D. However, to prepare students for their roles in the economy of the 21st Century the educational system will desperately need what we can provide in a new evolving paradigm of education.

Participation in artistic activity must be deeply satisfying and meaningful to teachers and kids’ self-interest. To do this, we will need to stress communication more than expression, to integrate the arts collectively rather than to address each discretely, increase an emphasis on achievement within specific parameters, incorporate a reasonable fear of failure so that students can attain a genuine sense of success, and be willing to criticize sub-standard work or effort as an important tool for inculcating in kids the desire to do better. If anything will do, there is no standard. No standard, no sense of accomplishment. If kids have no sense of accomplishment, there is no commitment to what they’re doing. Participation in the arts has to be more than fun, more than a conduit for expression. Expression is easy, communication much more challenging. Utilizing your imagination is more difficult than simply doing what you’re told. The economy of the 21st. Century will demand much in an ever increasingly competitive global environment. We are uniquely equipped to prepare children for it.