Arts Integration and Lost Connections

As part of my involvement in the school community beyond the bell to bell classroom teaching and related duties, (i.e. correcting, meeting with kids, planning lessons, going to meetings, avoiding meetings, answering emails, updating the website....See blog title) I have been coordinating the Chinese Exchange program. For the sake of full disclosure, I will say that it is a stipended position,  and, also for the record,  I will also say that I happy to do it.

In the fall each year, 10 students from China and their teacher come for about 8 weeks to live with host families, attend classes, see the area and take a big weekend trip to New York City. In the spring, 10 of our students travel to China with one of our teachers for a “similar” experience. As a chaperone for the inaugural trip in 2008, I can tell you this really is a wonderful and unique opportunity. This year, the group from China brought traditional costumes and an iPod full of Chinese music and has been performing dances at our school. Recently I completed paperwork for them to travel to the Middle School to do the same there. This is the first year the visiting group has brought dance to us, and it has been warmly received by the student body and faculty. (Imagine 1000 American high school students sitting silently in the gym during a pre-Homecoming pep rally and respectfully watching a 7 minute Chinese dance then erupting into applause. This impressed me.) All well and good, right? As far as the experience goes, yes. The next step, to bring this experience to a group of students beyond our own hosting school, however, perhaps not so much.

My journey started with the field trip form; it has all kinds of bells and whistles on it relating to payment, transportation, contact information, and the like. At the very top, partially in red and in caps says the following:

“IMPORTANT-Purpose of the Trip. If this trip occurs during school hours, you MUST STATE CLEAR CURRICULUM LEARNING STANDARDS by number and description. If not completed well, this form will be rejected and returned.” {Formatting theirs}

 Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody. Not nohow.

OK. My concern really isn’t about forms (I have filled out plenty in my life and I get their usefulness). Nor is it about the request for a field trip from school having an educational connection per se. It more has to do with how education is defined and viewed.

Being a good girl (and not wanting to not complete the form “well” and then have it “rejected and returned”) I went online to look at the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks to fulfill this important part of the mission.

I looked first in History (being a Social Studies teacher, I guess). The frameworks are in large part a list of facts to learn. Towards the end, there are some frameworks for critical thinking skills-building around said facts and events. As well, there are similar guidelines for the treatment of primary source documents. At the very end there is a list of primary sources and a fine bibliography.

Below is the extent of the frameworks for World History with regard to contemporary China:

“WHII.34 Identify the political and economic upheavals in China after the Chinese Revolution. (H, E)
A. Communist Party attempts to eliminate internal opposition B. the Great Leap Forward and its consequences (famine) C. the Cultural Revolution and its consequences (the terror of the Red Guards and the
expansion of labor camps)
the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration E. China’s economic modernization and its growing involvement in world trade

WHII.13 Identify major developments in Chinese history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (H, E)
China’s explosive population growth between 1750 and 1850 B. Decline of the Manchu dynasty beginning in the late 18th century C. Growing Western influence D. The Opium War E. The Taiping rebellion from 1850 to 1864 F. The Boxer Rebellion G. Sun Yat-Sen and the 1911 nationalist revolution”

For starters, the world history standards are pretty much limited to political history; there is no mention of intellectual history really, or cultural history or the fact that China has many ethnic groups or anything beyond these facts. I also really love the “growing involvement in world trade” line. News flash: we’re into them big time for some serious change plus all the Apple products the school and its teachers uses (this one included) have a major Chinese connection; many of them are manufactured there, for one thing.  Bottom line, there was no curriculum connection to the arts here. So, I turned to the Arts Standards.

Right at the beginning, the “Guiding Principles” for the Massachusetts Arts Curriculum Frameworks stated the following:

“An effective arts curriculum promotes knowledge and understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the arts.”

And the following (directly from the Frameworks pdf file) was also interesting:

“PreK–12 STANDARD 10 Interdisciplinary Connections
Students will apply their knowledge of the arts to the study of English language arts, foreign languages, health, history and social science, mathematics, and science and technology/engineering.”

Where is the interdisciplinary connection beginning in the History Frameworks? There is none. But right there at the beginning of the history frameworks, there is this:

“Our call for schools to purposely impart to their students the learning necessary for an informed, reasoned allegiance to the ideals of a free society rests on three convictions:

First, that democracy is the worthiest form of human governance ever conceived.

Second, that we cannot take democracy’s survival or its spread or its perfection in practice for granted. Indeed, we believe that the great central drama of modern history has been and continues to be the struggle to establish, preserve, and extend democracy at home and abroad. We know that very much still needs doing to achieve justice and civility in our own society. Abroad, we note that only one-third of the world’s people live under conditions that can be described as free.

Third, we are convinced that democracy’s survival depends upon our transmitting to each new generation the political vision of liberty and equality that unites us as Americans. It also depends on a deep loyalty to the political institutions our founders put together to fulfill that vision.”

In a never ending battle for Truth! Justice! And The American Way!

So, the priority of the history curriculum is to teach our students to look at the world Superman defended, and through his X-Ray vision, all-knowing eyes, but the arts curriculum's purpose is to see how arts are part of all the other disciplines.  This is interesting both in terms of the particular mission of each as well as what it says about how the authors experience the world perhaps: left brain v whole brain? This might be a stretch, but maybe not.

As I would ask my own students, then: So What? What’s The Big Deal? The Big Deal is that while “facts” and events are certainly important in terms of understanding History, History is not just comprised of lists of casts of characters, dates, battles, and documents. And kids WILL fall asleep if that’s all you use in a Social Studies classroom. There is a wider world, a world that people have created and continue to create in other ways. Enter the arts and the technology created and used by them. The arts have been there through history and will continue to be. They should NOT be "extra", nor should they have to defend their worth by including their reference to other disciplines. They have value in and of themselves. And whether it is about defending their place in education or not,  Massachusetts Frameworks Arts authors have the vision to see their connection to other “disciplines”. Moreover,  students are connected to them. Even kids who are not enrolled in art or music courses draw on their notebooks, walk around listening to music, and consume arts and media. The other day, a student in my World Religion class identified music as one of the forces in the universe she most bonds with: it helps her focus, it changes her mood, she said. It is a way for her to connect with her peers. (I wager many of us might say many of the same things.) And, by the way, this student is the very type of student that public education and its critics are always crying out for us to reach.

But other disciples don’t always look to the arts or incorporate them. The Massachusetts History Frameworks doesn't, particularly. How limited. What kind of message does this send? What kind of world does it want us to teach our students about or prepare them for? Not one the arts sees. Fill in the blanks here: arts should be in the public schools, not cut, not extra, not relegated to after school or marginalized any other way. It should be enough that the kids from the Middle School get to see Chinese kids performing a Chinese dance because it’s different from what we do in America on so many levels, it's interesting, and because, yes, it shows discipline and focus and a myriad of other skills we want our students to possess.

Fortunately for me, and to be fair, I am sure, in my district they will get to have this experience. (If I filled out the form “well.”) Further, I would also like to point out the following: “even” the AP European History curriculum nods at the arts, though the bias is towards the visual arts and there are “key paintings”. (Not enough Durer in my humble opinion, even; they lean heavily on the Usual Suspects: you can name them, I bet.) Also, at my school, I have several colleagues who skillfully incorporate the arts into their teachings, and this is something my department head certainly more than marginally supports. This is both encouraging and positively challenging in terms of my own professional development; and, I will reiterate, the students can’t get enough of it.

Going to China, having Chinese people come here. It’s all good. Everybody is learning a whole lot. And some of it’s not on a list! This can’t mean it doesn’t "count", that it is not a valuable part of being "educated" or even "good citizens," whoever they are. In the end, no one will really care or even remember too much about about the rise and the fall of the Ottoman empire, except some of us, and that’s more than OK.