Memo # 2: Self-Expression & Confidence

Performing Arts In The Classroom

            I am struggling to find a balance with the number of texts on my subject matter I have uncovered. What really interests me are the books I found at the library that talk about this very subject that are dated between 1947 and 1974. Even then they were advocating for what the arts were fundamental in developing perception through working with the arts and encourage students to move away from what the watch on the TV and actually perform similar things themselves. But in order to really to guide myself on a steady and thesis based path, I have to limit myself to the number of books so I can truly dig in. Hopefully I can go back to them and splice them into my research. I will be focusing on what I discover in Why Our High Schools Need The Arts by Jessica Hoffman Davis, Strong Arts, Strong Schools: The Promising Potential and Shortsighted Disregard of the Arts in American Schooling by Charles Fowler and Herbert Kohn’s The Muses Go To School: Inspiring Stories About The Importance Of Arts In Education. I will look up organizations in Rhode Island and in the country that implement the arts and showcase the results. I will also sprinkle in some of Sir Ken Robinson and Eric Booth’s expertise as well as share visual aids.

 

            My thesis is how the performing arts can help students with their self-expression/confidence, compassion/empathy and connection/understanding. Through these boosters, the students will be able to engage writing assignments more fluidly and passionately. The arts not only create strong and capable human beings but also emotional and perceptive writers. “The arts provide multiple ways to experience understand and express the world and our relationship to it. They are one of the fundamental repositories of human wisdom. They educate and the imagination and develop originality. They represent significant ways for students to discern, express, communicate, figure out and understand the human universe” (Fowler, 4). In this memo I would like to explore how arts programs have helped increase students’ academics while focusing on self-expression and confidence.

Through a suggestion, I have found an arts charter school in Providence called Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts (TAPA). As you go to the homepage you are greeting with a ten-minute video of teachers and students who tell you what the school has to offer. I couldn’t help the tears of joy or chills on the skin when I witnessed what these students create and how they feel about learning. This is a charter 7-12 school in Providence. What excited me the most about it is that it is free and anyone is allowed to apply if they are a Providence resident. Admission is through a lottery so it is not based on talent, only passion and interest. The school has to hot all the academic standards of other schools through Math, Science, History, Humanities, Languages and Reading & Writing (English). However the arts are also considered an essential part of the curriculum. Their goal is to “create classrooms where the arts are, at very least, a catalyst for the other academic subjects, if not fundamentally interconnected or indispensable.” They use connections within all academic and arts subjects in order to cross learn the lessons. They show how everything is influential and connected. I can’t think of anything better than that.

In 7^th and 8^th grade the students explore all four of the performing arts; Film, Theatre, Dance, Music learning the basics of all of them as they feel their way around in them. Then once they reach 9^th grade, they choose one to focus on and hone the skills in that disciple. One girl in the video spoke about how she wants to be a part time dance teacher, part time journalist when she grows up. She writes lots of poetry and creative writing would like to incorporate that into her journalism. She shows here how she has learned to connect creative ways of writing into journalism. Another student speaks of how he wants to be a film star and a scientist and how cool it would be if he could do both. This school makes me believe he can. The teachers say that state testing has skyrocketed in Math and Reading because the students are actually interested in what they are doing. He believes that they have given them a reason to learn through the arts implementation. In the lessons, students are hands on. They are doing, not memorizing. They are relating the content to real world learning in order to see why these subjects matter. This pyramid below shows how they base all of their classes. They attempt to use the top tier most of the time but state that they only use the bottom tier 10-20% of the time. Again, showing how everything the students learn is connected.

 

In Strong Arts Strong Schools, Fowler shows how a SPECTRA (Schools, Parents, Educators, Children, Teachers Rediscover the Arts) program in Ohio helps to improve the students learning, just as TAPS does. SPECTRA have made sure that the curriculum has dedicated an hour each day to the arts. Just like TAPS, reading and math scores have gone up but so has attendance and good behaviour. In Why Our High Schools Need the Arts, Davis shows us how the Craftsman’s Guild, a professional training mentor after school program in Pittsburgh helps students feel inspired and encouraged so well that 96% of the students that attend the program graduates high school and 85% goes on to college while students who only attend their regular high school classes have a 64% graduation rate, making for an even lowered college route percentage. “The arts awakens possibilities in student thinking that liberate heart and mind and most importantly assert one’s personal potential, agency or power” (Davis, 22).

Rosie Perez, an actress and chair of Urban Arts in New York City which reaches 12,000 students in over sixty schools through arts programing, was an angry child who fought and never showed emotion. This is why she loved ceramics where she could pound out her anger in the clay. She wanted to play the clarinet but couldn’t afford one so the teacher encouraged her to play air clarinet until the snickers from classmates bothered her enough to give it up entirely. She almost missed a school trip to a Broadway show because she was too poor to buy a nice outfit. It was an experience which brought her to tears and changed her life. This strong, stubborn girl who never let her guard down didn’t care that she was crying in public because she was so moved by what she saw that day. After that day she wanted more out of school so she started to really enjoy her English and Social Studies classes where she could read and hear stories out loud like the one she saw that day on Broadway that so mesmerized her. She says the arts “allow you to become a critical thinker and use the right side of your brain. When that happens, you’re more inclined to be a reader because you want to absorb the drama. Your imagination is stimulated and it works so much better” (Kohl, 7). She started to become more comfortable in her skin by accepting her corniness through these experiences.

 

A music teacher in Why Our High Schools Need the Arts says “Self-Esteem, a critical part of teenage development, can be addressed through the study of music. Measurable and concrete goals are achieved through hard work, audience reaction/approval, and personal/individual achievements versus competing in the classroom” (Davis, 23). Another teacher recalls a student he had who was a foster child of a violent home. He said he always wanted to perform but that peers would taunt him about it. Encouraged by this teacher to pursue it, the student blossomed. In making his fellow students laugh, he build up confidence to make friends which built up an emotional strength to push on in school. 

“The arts offer students the opportunity to create something new and in that act of making not only to think beyond the boundaries and the lines but also to acknowledge one’s power to do so” (Davis, 21). Students feel empowered through the arts as they create and express who they are and what they believe. “Adolescents and their powerful emotions and self-discoveries are in sync with the anti-standardization of the arts” (Davis, 45). If they aren’t allowed to communicate in a way they feel safe with, which often they feel can be hidden in an art through words and/or movement and then they will feel silenced which will diminish their confidence. The arts help many students give life to their voice. This is why the arts are a key component to students’ self-expression and confidence!

 

Works Cited:

Davis, Jessica Hoffmann. Why Our High Schools Need the Arts. New York: Teachers College, 2012. Print.

Fowler, Charles. Strong Arts, Strong Schools: The Promising Potential and Shortsighted Disregard of the Arts in American Schooling. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Kohl, Herbert R., and Tom Oppenheim. The Muses Go to School: Inspiring Stories about the Importance of Arts in Education. New York: New, 2012. Print.

 

Picture Links:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/bdfb29169b6d974ed35ed477755b0882/tumblr_mi2np11XZG1rpfygno1_1280.jpg

http://www.trinityacademyfortheperformingarts.org/images/pyramid.jpg

http://www.5minutesformom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/thrive-art-build-confidence.jpg

http://coffeecatharsisandchakras.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/self-expression.jpg