Nick Rabkin

Student performance at UNESCO conference on arts education (2006) Lisbon, Portugal (Photo: Nick Rabkin)

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) hosted the first world conference on arts education in Lisbon, Portugal in early March, 2006. The first. UNESCO was apparently surprised and overwhelmed by the depth of interest—1,200 delegates from nearly 100 nations attended. One African delegate unable to get government support for his trip sold his car to get to Lisbon. The Lisbon meeting dramatically demonstrated the deep and global breadth of arts educators’ commitment to expanding the role of the arts in education. The world is full of us. The frisson generated by meeting colleagues from every continent made the Lisbon experience memorable.

The group in Lisbon was buoyed by tales of remarkable success and promise. But it was also sobered by stories of inflexible schedules and classroom practices, pervasive testing, and muddled bureaucracy, all of which present obstacles to education everywhere. UNESCO’s recognition of the importance of the arts is significant, but policymakers around the world clearly do not share it. A new case for the place of arts in education needs to be built, and the project requires a global effort.

One Lisbon keynoter, Sir Ken Robinson, explained why resistance to arts education is so pervasive. When public education systems were introduced in the 19th century, the intellectual demands of an industrial world required the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy, a bit of national history, and some appreciation for science and technology. The arts were not then understood as academic or essential. The world has changed a great deal since then, but education has, in many respects, lagged. Robinson argued that global changes that we associate with the transition from an industrial to an information and knowledge-based economy have created real demand for new kinds of intelligence, higher levels of creativity, and cross-cultural understanding. The arts have a central role to play if education is to rise to those standards.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio followed Robinson’s address with a warning: What makes humans unique biologically is the capacity to combine thinking and feeling. Damasio explained that the pace of life and change in the post-industrial world deepens the divide between thinking and feeling, and leaves little time for reflection that produces deep understanding. Failure to teach the arts is a symptom of this problem. But it also deepens it, because the arts are ways of developing that human capacity to think and feel together. But doesn’t this burden the arts (and arts educators) with responsibilities that other subjects don’t have? Why can’t we just teach the arts for arts’ sake? Had Damasio been asked that question I believe he would have answered that all subjects should be taught both for their own sake and as tools for understanding, analysis, expression, communication, and for making meaning of the world. Science can be done for the sheer pleasure of uncovering the mysteries of nature, but it can also cure diseases. No one would suggest that we teach science without attention to its practical uses. All subjects carry the same burden.

Advocates of arts education, from Dewey to Eisner, have often made Damasio’s point—that education and humans are incomplete without the arts—minus the scientific rationale. The implication of the Lisbon meeting is that education itself needs to be fundamentally rethought—or reframed—to borrow a term from cognitive linguists. Building a new case for the arts requires building a new vision for education that is responsive to the needs of the world in the 21st century.

The case needs to be built on multiple levels:
• From the ground up, based on compelling narratives and the documentation of success in practice, often in the most difficult of circumstances;
• From research that analyzes successes and translates them into the numbers and graphs conveying scholarly authority;
• From theory that draws on the new sciences of learning and the brain and makes clear why arts learning and practice is so deeply generative and cognitive.

This summer, the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, Chicago began circulating a draft “concept paper” for another international conference on arts education. South Korea has offered to host a second UNESCO conference in 2010, but we felt that the momentum of Lisbon was precious and that there was danger of losing it with a four-year wait. The working title for the conference we propose is Reframing Education: An International Conference on Learning and the Arts. It is tentatively planned for the summer of 2008 in Chicago. We hope the conference will:
• Bridge boundaries between practice, research, theory, and policy that so often limit knowledge and inhibit change;
• Acknowledge the perspectives and wisdom of practitioners—often the initiators of new approaches to arts education—as the equal of scholars, researchers, and policymakers;
• Balance school and non-school arts education as a necessary and complementary dimension of quality arts education;
• Be a process of active inquiry into meaningful questions, leading to useful products and ideas;
• Demonstrate the power of the arts to leverage learning by showcasing and explicating remarkable student work from around the world;

The principle objective of Reframing Education will be to gather an international learning community—a network of practitioners, researchers, scholars, and policymakers—devoted to building the case for a new perspective on education and the place of the arts within it. That community should engage people beyond the parochial world of arts education. It is vital that the conference build on the nexus between the arts, cognition, and neuroscience that was discussed at the Lisbon conference, and that it also engage leaders from the business community because of the enormous influence business has in education policy.

In addition to the case for arts education, the conference will also attend to questions that are loosely arranged into three themes:

Size matters:
Education in the arts begins in infancy, when parents first sing and read to children. But organized arts education is not nearly so inclusive. Most children do not have access to the best arts education programs. Can we imagine a system that provides quality arts education to all children without denaturing the arts? Is it possible to distill the “active ingredients” in these initiatives for use at a large scale? What can be learned from efforts to “scale up” quality instruction in other subjects? How do arts educators need to change if they are responsible for teaching the arts to all children, rather than just those who show talent early or choose to study the arts?

Mind gains:
Developments in neuroscience and cognitive science suggest deep connections between the arts and cognition. These new scientific discoveries have shown the idea of mind-body duality, long the foundation of our understanding of thought and learning, to be fundamentally flawed. They show that brain and body comprise a single, integrated system and that most thought occurs on an unconscious level, that abstract thought requires the use of metaphor, and that feeling and emotion are essential components of thought. This emerging conception of cognition implicates the arts in learning far more deeply than we might have imagined just a decade ago, but the dialogue between arts educators, education researchers, and cognitive scientists has barely begun. How do we build on it?

Why the arts? Toward an evidence-based agenda:
Arts educators have been among the first to recognize that concepts, skills, processes, and habits of mind cultivated in arts learning are closely related to learning in other domains. It seems reasonable that these relationships may be at the root of the strong correlations reported between arts learning and student academic success and development. Indeed, in some sophisticated initiatives educators are intentionally designing curricula and pedagogy to activate relationships and deepen learning in the arts and other domains. They are “teaching for transfer.” There is an enormous opportunity to develop generative relationships between researchers and practitioners through efforts to understand the processes of instruction and learning and to document the effects of instruction in both domains.

As long as standardized tests are the coin of the educational realm, it may be a mistake to write off the connections between arts education and conventional measures of achievement. By the same token, if research is narrowly focused on the development of particular student skills it is easy to overlook the multiple levels on which the arts work. So it is undoubtedly vital for research also to take a broad view. How does robust arts instruction affect school cultures? What are the most effective ways to develop teachers’ and artists’ new instructional capacities? In what ways do the arts contribute to a student’s sense of identity, agency, and efficacy?

In many ways the arts are at odds with worldwide trends that narrowly focus assessment on high-stakes tests and punitive accountability. Arts educators know that the arts are discounted in this environment because they are not tested, and they often complain that the arts cannot be tested. And yet so many poorly performing students have found pathways to engagement and better performance—in school and in life—through the arts. Research implicating the arts in improved student performance and positive social and emotional development is starting to accumulate and attract attention from the broader education research and policy communities. This is a moment when a comprehensive and strategic agenda for research and assessment in arts education could make a great deal of difference, and Reframing Education will take steps to develop an agenda that builds a new nexus between the understanding the biology of learning and how it relates to research and assessment of high quality arts education practice.

Reframing Education will be a distinctive event in three important ways:

• Building an international learning community
The development of an international network of practitioners, policymakers, researchers, scientists, and advocates dedicated to advancing the work of arts education programs that are transforming lives across the globe is the highest priority. The network will expand its understanding of these programs, improve their quality, and seek ways to make quality arts education available to all young people.

• Residuals
The planning teams will be charged with developing ideas for residuals—position papers and reports, work agendas, strategic plans, further convening—that will make Reframing Education matter to those who do not attend and for years to come.

If you are interested in Reframing Education and would like to be involved in the effort to plan it, contact the Center for Arts Policy at artspolicy@colum.edu.

Nick Rabkin is Executive Director of the Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, Chicago, the largest arts, media, and communications college in the country. He was the Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs in Chicago, the Senior Program Officer for the Arts at the MacArthur Foundation, and a founding board member of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education. The Chicago Center for Arts Policy is focused on policy and research on the ways that the arts can contribute to education and community-building, and on how the arts “system” works. Rabkin is the co-author and co-editor of Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century, and has written on arts education for the Washington Post, Education Week, and Educational Leadership.