Arts in The NEK
- Details
- Created on Thursday, 12 May 2016 14:03
- Written by Tim Laroche
AROUND THE NEK - The art room at the Lyndon Town School is messy and disheveled after a group of students file out.
At the counter near the back left corner of the room, a copy of the Caledonian-Record is splayed out, covered in all sorts of paints and glue. A bucket of dirty rinse water for paintbrushes sits next to a sink, in which there is a water bottle for drinking and a spray bottle for cleaning the tables.
On the wall behind a nearby desk, a corkboard is covered in pieces of construction paper with classroom rules written on them. They are all placed at odd diagonals from one another – even the rules are multicolored here.
A black-and-white paper cube hangs from a string on the ceiling in the middle of the room. The smoke detector occupies it’s own space a few feet away. The ceiling is the only sparse section of the room, as bits of cut construction paper sit in heaps on the tables, and a few stray pieces found their way to the floor.
All around, red, orange and yellow cutouts seem to blanket every surface. At the front of the room, near a projector, these materials are fully assembled into a mask. Such was the subject of today’s lesson for the kindergarteners of Julie Clements’ art class.
“This year for example, I’ve been doing a theme and a medium,” Clements said. “We’ve all been doing African masks, we’re all doing paper collage, a cut color paper collage.”
Clements teaches visual arts at Lyndon Town School in Lyndon, which enrolls more than 500 students. During a recent interview just after noon on a Friday with Clements at LTS’s art room, she explained that she would normally be taking a short break to eat lunch and clean the room at this hour.
Soon, another group of students is scheduled to march into the room and begin their lesson. Again, the subject of this lesson would be the creation of African masks, but the expectations for the project would be different.
“I’ve been scaffolding the expectations of what they are actually going to do or able to do with the project,” Clements said. “For the kindergarteners and first graders and preschoolers, I’ve cut out oval shapes for them and gave them the paper. The second graders had to cut out their own designs – and so I talk more about the actual shapes and designs of the masks. And then the third and fourth graders are working on a larger scale and so they get more choice of what they want for colors and materials. And we talk more about why Africans used masks and what the use was and what they meant.”
Clements says she picks a theme for her classes each year, and all of her students in all of her grade levels – she is the sole art teacher for every grade at LTS – talk about the same sort of topics. For her thematic approach to African masks, she says that she chose the topic because LTS would host a guest performer to speak about tribal dancing later in the school year.
Just a few miles away from LTS though, in the nearby town of Burke, art education is looks very different. Carol Mason has been teaching visual arts at the Burke Town School since 1996. BTS, which enrolls 204 students, – less than half that of LTS – falls behind many of the current trends in art education.
“I use the old fashioned method of having kids gather around a table, no matter how many kids there may be,” Mason said. “I use the old thing with the camera that projects, which is harder. I use lots of resources, whether it’s the old fashioned photocopied ideas, or nowadays it’s the computer. So, I guess, with those two, that’s mainly how I teach everything.”
Unlike Clements – who is new to LTS – Mason is a part-time teacher. And she says she doesn’t receive enough money from the school to run her classes. She spends $500 of her own money each year just on supplies, she says.
Unlike the larger LTS, which has its own kiln and 3D printer, funding is low for BTS. But even Mason considers her lucky in the amount of support she receives from the school compared to many other art programs in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
ISSUES
The cafeteria at the Lyndon Town School buzzed with people for three days in mid-December for the Burklyn Craft Fair.
All along the halls leading to the main craft area, vibrant orange, pink and blue matting paper stood in stark contrast to the white walls of the school.
Susan Gallagher popped out from behind a corner in the kitchen area of the cafeteria. As the president of the Burklyn Arts Council, she seemed to be occupied by a hundred things at once.
Gallagher and the other members of the Burklyn Arts Council and an army of volunteers are busy setting up for their annual Holiday Craft Fair. The fair is one of two main events that the council holds each year to raise money. Their cause: arts in schools.
Gallagher says the group consists primarily of artists who want to support the education for future generations of students.
“Burklyn Arts Council supports the development and the appreciation for the arts in schools and towns in Caledonia North [Supervisory Union,]” Gallagher said.
The group accomplishes this by raising money for the schools through craft fairs and memberships.
“We’ve been doing this since 1974, it worked in different ways in the 46 years. We have two craft fairs per year we do encourage memberships, but they’re a very small source of income. But the fairs are our central source of income.”
Schools in the area can apply to the council for grants from the council during the school year on a monthly basis. Gallagher says the council budgets between $20,000 and $50,000 each year to support arts in the schools.
“We buy tickets for professional performances, we pay for artists residencies and we sometimes help with school budgets for maybe a school art teacher for a film developer,” Gallagher said. “I remember, years ago, for Lyndon Town School, we bought a marimba.”
With more than 40 volunteers signing up to help put on the fair this year, it seems that the area school have a friend in their local arts council. But in many of the schools in the Caledonia North Supervisory Union, the funding from the Burklyn Arts Council provides a substantial portion of their budget.
Despite the image of an idyllic art room, where children can grow and develop as artists, many of the art rooms in the Northeast Kingdom do not match up with the ideal.
The scene for arts education in the NEK is riddled with a set of unique challenges, but it isn’t the only discipline to encounter periodic setbacks. As one of the disciplines that make up the so-called allied arts – which also include Home Economics, Physical Education, Music, Industrial Arts, and many other fields – visual arts are often underfunded, underutilized, overscheduled, or at times even neglected by school systems.
To be fair, many schools in the NEK are reeling for the basic funding to sustain their other programs, and many art educators and advocates say that the problems that art teachers in the region face are, in many cases, due to the simple reality that schools see the subject as less important than others that they are federally required to offer.
But the circumstances that gave rise to the current educational scene in the NEK are largely factors of broader economic problems facing the region.
THE NORTHEAST KINGDOM
The 177 miles of Interstate-91 that pass through Vermont form one of the major transportation routes of the Northeastern United States. The Vermont extension was built in the 1970s, and it carried all the promise of expanded industry, economy and an efficient passage to many of Vermont’s rural towns.
If one were to drive through Vermont via I-91 -- the largest north-south highway in the state -- one would practically see the northern expansion of industry that overtook the state’s agricultural past.
In the southern regions of the highway, at the crux of the Connecticut River in Brattleboro, just north of the Massachusetts border, a bridge has been under construction for years, and the highway condenses into a tight, single-lane corridor of Jersey barriers and orange traffic cones.
Brattleboro is one of the largest population centers in Vermont, and it is the most populous city along I-91.
Further north, Windsor County flies by with all its rolling pastures and gentle hills. The highway exit signs become more spaced apart at this point, and after the flash of traffic that usually accompanies the junctions into New Hampshire, traffic becomes sparse as well.
In Orange County, the pretty hills give way to the mountains from which the Green Mountain State derives its name.
A far cry from the majestic peaks of Colorado’s Rockies, and far even from the sharp granite cliffs of the White Mountains in New Hampshire – which are visible from many of the Green Mountain’s higher elevations – the Green Mountain range envelops the highway as it meanders through smaller towns and isolated villages.
The mountains here have been beaten-down and weathered from a millennia of harsh weather, and now they fuel a number of weather patterns that give rise to persistent clouds and temperatures that consistently fall below those of the rest of the state.
Further north now, one enters Caledonia County, whose seat and largest city, St. Johnsbury, has a population of just more than 7,600. There, the Victorian styled brick buildings make up the cultural and economic center of a region known simply as the Northeast Kingdom.
The NEK straddles the Canadian border, an area often overlooked by state and federal politicians aside from the flickering national media sensation brought on by tales of an opiate epidemic.
The NEK is the most rural and sparsely populated sub-section of the state, home to a powerful dairy industry and such known tourist havens as the Kingdom Trails and Willoughby Lake.
Most recently, that tourism industry has seen a number of massive blows following the fraud allegations against Q Burke Mountain Resorts owner Ariel Quiros Jr. and developer William Stenger.
And although the building of I-91 brought manufacturing and industry further north in Vermont, in many ways, that growth never fully took hold Caledonia County – an area whose largest employer, Weidmann Electrical Technology in St. Johnsbury employs only about 370 people.
The NEK’s fragile economy took a massive blow during the last recession, and many communities in the area are still reeling from its effects.
Despite the breathtaking natural beauty of the area, and despite the recent uptick of artisanal crafts and food, beer and cheese and cider and other goods, the NEK has a set of unique economic challenges. And many of these economic challenges trickle into the educational system of an area where population density is low and poverty is high.
Statewide too, there are a number of problems that coalesced into a perfect storm of factors that give rise to issues in the educational system.
For one, the number of children in Vermont has steadily fallen in the past few decades.
According to Sec. 1 of Act 46, the number of children in Vermont’s Kindergarten through 12th grade system declined from 103,000 during the 1997 fiscal year to 78,000 in the 2012 fiscal year. This represents a 25,000-student, or almost 1/4 reduction in the number of children attending Vermont schools.
The decline in K-12 students in Vermont was not met with the same level of reduction of educational staff, however. According to the Act 46 explanation, this gave rise to a situation in which many schools in the state had few students in attendance.
As a result, the Vermont legislature passed Act 46 in 2015. The bill provided for supervisory union consolidation in many of the small towns in Vermont. These new structures were meant not to close small schools but to consolidate their resources in a way in which students would have greater access to the benefits of larger schools.
However, these reforms were not met with equal anticipation.
Some Vermonters say that the act was a move by the state to take control of the local education systems. Especially in the NEK, many people tend to be at odds with state government – which they say often represents the interests of Montpelier and Burlington disproportionally to the rest of the state.
And in an area where the Second Vermont Republic secession movement has long had some degree of support, state reforms are sometimes met with suspicion.
Fewer students and fewer taxpayers mean that schools have less money. And for a subject that has high material costs, many art teachers find themselves underfunded.
“A lot of art teachers, especially in the north or the rural parts of the state usually share their art space with the music teachers, with the afterschool program,” Clements said. “They don’t have their own art room. Or they have ‘art on a cart’ -- they push a cart of materials around to different classrooms. Or they’re divided between three schools to make up the equivalent of a full-time art teacher.”
Clements says that some of the challenges that art teachers are facing right now are due, in many cases, to seeing a large number of students every day.
“I think the big challenge for art teachers too is that we see all the kids,” Clements said. “I probably have over 400 kids per week that come through this room. On a given day, it could be 200.”
Among the list of other challenges that art teachers in the NEK face include: Limited instructional hours with students – most schools hold art classes once per week. Limited budgets, which result in teachers paying for materials. Loss of job stability – art teachers are often the first positions to be eliminated when budgets are cut. Understaffing, as a result of job cuts, means that most schools only have a single art teacher for multiple grade levels. Lack of professional development opportunities.
WHY IS ART IMPORTANT?
The idea that art would be a prioritized subject has its historical roots. And the pendulum of history has seen art assigned various degrees of importance throughout history.
Education has come a long way since the formal institution of the classical liberal arts in ancient Greece.
The aristocratic class of ancient Greeks considered the liberal arts as the most essential areas of knowledge that a person must know in order to fully participate in a free and open society. And so, the liberal arts were considered the foundation of Greek civic life.
The first institutionalized education system in ancient Greece consisted of two levels of education: a trivium of subjects – grammar, logic and rhetoric – and a more complicated quadrivium of subjects – arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
Since then, the world has seen periods when education for the populace has been downplayed – such as the so-called Dark Ages, during which the church held most information. Much of the world’s knowledge was held away in monasteries.
The feudal lords of Europe used their publics’ lack of education as a means of control.
But, in contrast, during the Enlightenment period, the classical liberal arts in Europe saw resurgence. Education for rich aristocrats gained traction and prominence, ushering in an era widely regarded as the beginnings of free thought and discourse in the Western world.
When institutionalized slavery was practiced in the United States of America, education was power, and slaves were disallowed to learn about the world outside their reach. The slave-turned-writer Frederick Douglass is often attributed as saying that he first broke the bonds of slavery when he learned how to read.
As Douglass became more educated, his will to improve his conditions became so great that he escaped from the bonds of slavery.
After industrialism rolled its way across Europe, causing a mass migration from the country to cities, literacy rates skyrocketed.
A major Reform Bill in England in 1832 gave voting rights, and therefore, political power, to wealthy citizens outside the aristocracy. A series of reforms followed the initial bill, expanding the voting rights of the citizenry further each time. This is one of the conventional markers of the Victorian era in England.
One of the major Victorian literary and social critics and poets, Matthew Arnold, made his biggest contributions to the literary world of the 19th century through his critiques of the pre-Victorian educational systems in England.
In Arnold’s seminal essay, Culture and Society, he writes that the balance of power between the major classes in society – the aristocratic “barbarians,” the middle class “Hellenists” and the peasant “populace” – is fragile, and that improving the conditions for any one class without improving the conditions of the other two classes would cause society to break down.
Arnold’s solution to the potential for societal breakdown is public education for the masses.
The purpose of that education, he said, was to acquire “culture” – which he said enables classes of society to overcome the “stock notions” of their time.
Essentially, Arnold made the case that there was a moral and societal benefit to art. His model for education – which was the first system of compulsory public education – put a heavy emphasis on art.
Education, it seems, has been strongly correlated to democratic thought throughout the years. After all, an educated public is capable of governing itself.
But in the ever-changing world of education reform, some subjects have lost prominence.
According to the National Coalition for Arts Standards, the United States had some arts requirement since at least the 1800’s. The system of American education was influenced by the Victorian models of education, and so art played an important role in the education of 19th century Americans.
The same justification provided by Arnold for the inclusion of art into national curricula has had resurgence in recent years, albeit under different terminology.
Under current educational theory, art is vital outlet for creativity and the development of critical thinking skills.
However, despite the theoretical justification for art in education, many school systems find it difficult to implement the subject effectively.
On September 11, 2014, more than 120 educators, advocates and members of the Vermont Agency of Education met for a summit to discuss the problems facing art educators in Vermont.
The findings of their meetings were compiled into a 37 page document detailing their challenges.
One of their major recommendations towards improving art education in Vermont was that the state should reform its Art Alliance.
The Vermont Art Alliance, which disbanded in 2010, attempted to secure funding and professional development for art educators across the state.
The group was funded through grants from the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., which also funded other state Arts Alliance chapters across the country.
But after the Obama Administration cut the federal funding to the Kennedy Center in 2010, the donor organization had insufficient funding to support the state Arts Alliances, and was forced to scale back their monetary support.
Although most other states were able to cover the costs of supporting their Arts Alliances without the Kennedy Center’s support, the Vermont legislature did not fund their chapter, and the group disbanded less than a year later after several months of unpaid work. Vermont is now one of only a few states that does not have a statewide Arts Alliance.
This situation was just another example of the ways in which Vermont’s art education scene is at the whims of a larger federal landscape.
A NATIONAL ISSUE
Art teachers in the NEK are not the only art educators who are facing challenges right now.
“There are a lot of conversations going on in schools of this stuff,” Clements said. “You sit down with any art teacher and you’re probably going to get the same sort of stuff that you’re getting from me and everyone else, because we all feel the same. We all have the same sort of issues as art teachers, at least in this state.”
Recent advents in the areas of public education have seen the fine arts dropped from many curricula. And in many cases, there has been a pushback from the federal government against the fine arts as a core subject in modern education.
Furthermore, the current federal educational climate has seen so-called “non-essential” subjects dropped from large-scale funding in lieu of mathematics and reading.
America’s education system, although is has been recently ranked as one of the best education systems in the world, has been labeled inadequate by many legislators. This oft-repeated statistic is generally seen in reference to the trend of high-stakes, standardized testing.
Nonetheless, the United States ranks as the 9th highest achieving country as measured by NECAP test scores, and the 6th highest achieving country as measured by PIRL test scores.
A number of individual states, many of which are in New England, have test scores well above the national average.
In a few countries though, standardized test scores for students have out-paced those of students in the United States of America. So, in an attempt to “catch up,” many US lawmakers have passed legislation to evaluate students and their schools via a system of tests.
The proliferation of testing has seen the most commonly measured subjects emphasized over their less commonly tested counterparts. And through a series of acts and laws, non-tested subjects, such as the fine arts, have fallen to the wayside.
This means that such subjects as mathematics and reading now constitute the bulk of many schools’ curricula. And so the national educational model – which is oftentimes driven by politicians, rather than developmental psychologists and educators – has dropped a number of subjects.
The federal landscape surrounding arts education has been fraught with a number of problems too. In 2002, when the Bush administration pushed for and passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) – a reauthorization of 1964’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- many schools saw a reduction in teaching hours and resources devoted to the arts.
Although language in NCLB specified that arts education was a “core subject,” and Secretary of Education Rod Paige insisted on the importance of arts education under NCLB throughout his term from 2001 to 2005, – going as far as to pen a letter in 2004, that affirmed the administration’s emphasis on the arts.
Paige wrote in his 2004 letter: “The arts, perhaps more than any other subject, help students to understand themselves and others, whether they lived in the past or are living in the present. President Bush recognizes this important contribution of the arts to every child's education.”
His letter went on to state that despite accusations to the contrary, NCLB is a positive step for arts educators. And any elimination of arts programs in an attempt to comply with NCLB was not the intent of the bill.
“As I travel the country, I often hear that arts education programs are endangered because of No Child Left Behind. This message was echoed in a recent series of teacher roundtables sponsored by the Department of Education. It is both disturbing and just plain wrong.
It's disturbing not just because arts programs are being diminished or eliminated, but because NCLB is being interpreted so narrowly as to be considered the reason for these actions. The truth is that NCLB included the arts as a core academic subject because of their importance to a child's education. No Child Left Behind expects teachers of the arts to be highly qualified, just as it does teachers of English, math, science, and history.”
But many education advocates criticized NCLB’s lack of any definition for the subject.
Whereas, in math and reading, NCLB included strict provisions for students to meet goals of “adequate yearly progress,” which would be evaluated through a series of high-stakes tests, the arts included no such testing.
Schools and teachers were to be evaluated through the test scores of their students, and, under NCLB, states could step in at schools that continually underperformed.
Seeing that schools were evaluated by the test scores of their students, NCLB created an incentive for teachers and schools to “teach to the test.” That meant that subjects and specific facts that might appear on the standardized tests would be the focus of instruction, but, on the inverse, subjects that did not appear on the tests were assigned less importance.
To make matters worse, NCLB provided for a number of monetary incentives that would be allocated to higher performing schools, but the inverse was also true. Schools that did not garner high test scores could have their budgets cut under the bill.
In many schools systems throughout the country, teachers were afraid for their jobs, and schools were scrambling to raise test scores in an attempt to retain their federal funding. So, nationwide, instructional time became increasingly devoted primarily to subjects that would be tested, such as math and reading.
Despite the “core subject” designation of the arts, and despite Paige’s public comments on their importance, many schools cut instructional hours for the arts in an attempt to allocate that time to the test subjects that would determine their budgets.
Many arts education programs fell to the wayside.
In other disciplines that were not the primary subjects of high-stakes testing, such as history and science, instructional hours also experienced a drop-off. For instance, many schools were forced to cut their social and physical science programs.
But initiatives from the Obama administration have seen resurgence in interest for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
In more recent years, STEM subjects have been steadily gaining ground, heralded by advocates and the Obama administration as key areas in which the United States can improve to take higher rankings in international competitiveness scales.
The growing interest in STEM education is due in part to the disproportionally higher starting incomes and the market demand that jobs in the fields are currently enjoying. Engineering, computer science and petroleum science are all currently some of the highest demand jobs in the US. But, according to a 2010 report by the Vermont Arts Council entitled Economic Footprint of The Arts, careers in the arts generated more than $300 million in revenue, employed almost 7,000 people and generated $19 million in taxes for Vermont in 2009.
However, in some education circles, the arts are gaining traction again.
Recent research into the value of the arts has warranted their inclusion alongside the STEM subjects in what are now being called STEAM subjects – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. Advocates argue that the creative elements of the arts lend themselves to complementing and improving other areas of education.
Much in the same way that Arnold argued for art as part of compulsory education in the 1860’s, STEAM advocates argue that the inclusion of art in the STEM model develops critical thinking skills and creative problem solving.
However, even among national advocacy groups for the arts, there is a divide between educators who see the arts as a complimentary subject and educators who see the arts as having intrinsic value.
During the heyday of NCLB, many schools that did not cut out their arts programs entirely implemented them into other subjects. Schools were teaching mathematics through music, reading through visual arts. Although many of the integrated programs did have their merits, some educators argue that they also delegated the arts to secondary importance.
On the other side of the argument, a number of advocates cited statistics [find statistics] that an education in the arts was correlated to improved test scores in mathematics and reading. Students who scored higher in the arts also tended to score higher in such key concepts as pattern recognition and literacy.
Others educators say that the data painted a different picture though; schools that had more money and resources to offer art programs often were in areas in which students came from higher-income families. The link between arts and better test scores was only a correlation, whereas the link between economic prosperity and better test scores was one of causation.
For instance, in such private academies at St. Johnsbury Academy, which has a far greater budget than either Burke Town School or Lyndon Town School, the arts programs have much better funding, and their students regularly go on to achieve highly in the arts duirng and after their time in secondary education.
THE CURRENT ARTS LANDSCAPE
President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into effect on December 10, 2015. The ESSA reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and replaced NCLB.
On page 807 of ESSA, the act includes a definition of a “well-rounded education,” which the act states as one of the primary goals of educators. Supporters of the ESSA have heralded the inclusion of arts as part of a “well-rounded education” as being a step towards further federal support for the arts.
However, it should be noted that in earlier drafts of ESSA, “well-rounded education” was referred to as “core subjects.” In an attempt to garner bipartisan support for the act, the writers strayed from the “core” language to avoid being connected with the Common Core Standards, another educational reform from the Obama administration that has divided educators and legislators.
In NCLB, the arts were listed as core subjects, but encountered little federal support. But with only a few months since the passing of ESSA, not enough time has passed to see the full effect of the new legislation.
A key difference between ESSA and NCLB though is that music has been listed as a separate subject under the new legislation, whereas, under NCLB, it was included under the “arts” designation.
But an even more important difference between the two acts is that ESSA is not intended to penalize schools for low performance on standardized tests – a change that educators hope will result in an opportunity to teach subjects that are not commonly tested.
However, art teachers in the NEK don’t see ESSA as a panacea to all of the ills wrought by NCLB.
“Some people have been telling me it’s some of the same as the No Child Left Behind,” Clements said. “There’s going to be some of the same recycled ideas. People are going to start realizing that students aren’t achieving that well academically and that we’re giving them all these policies and procedures of computers and technologies. And they’re going to realize that they aren’t really that successful. And then they’re going to say ‘we need to start giving these kids some more hands-on things to do.”
But other recent pieces of educational legislation have garnered greater support from art educators in the NEK.
On February 17, 2016, Chris Case from the Vermont Agency of Education issued a proposal to the Vermont Department of Education regarding the viability of adopting new National Core Art Standards.
Clements joins the Vermont Arts Council in support of the new NCAS standards.
“I like them because I think that they are to me the first time they talk not as much about skill building but about the thinking that goes behind art education,” Clements said. “How do you think like an artist? How do you do your work, how do you plan your work? And that’s been sort of a push that I’ve started this year, getting kids to think about how do I think and see and work and getting that habits of mind of an artist.”
The NCAS website explains the goal of any sort of federal educational standards as such:
“The central purposes of education standards are to identify the learning that we want for all of our students and to drive improvement in the system that delivers that learning. Standards, therefore, should embody the key concepts, processes and traditions of study in each subject area, and articulate the aspirations of those invested in our schools—students, teachers, administrators, and the community at large.”
Essentially, the standards provide a framework of expectations that individual educators can then overlay their curricula.
The NCAS are separated into four broad models, each of which containing smaller anchor standards. The actual curricula, in accordance with NCAS, would work within the framework of the anchor standards to achieve the more abstract models of teaching.
For instance, in the NCAS’s current form, the models of teaching are such: Creating, Performing, Responding and Connecting.
The first educational model in the series, Creating, is meant to foster “Conceiving and developing new artistic ideas and work.” The second model, Performing, consists of the act of “Interpreting and sharing artistic work.” The third model, Responding, promotes “Understanding and evaluating how the arts convey meaning.” And the fourth and final model, Connecting, involves “Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context.”
Under the NCAS, teachers would structure their curricula to meet each of the models outlined in the framework of the standards. The specific lesson plans can be modified and changed as need be, but the essential components remain the same: each unit or project should involve a creative aspect, a presentation of work, an evaluation of the work and the work of one’s peers, and a connection to other subjects, projects and ideas.
Art educators and advocates who support the NCAS cite their renewed focused on abstracting the educational process for art away from concrete skills like painting and drawing. Instead, the new standards are meant to increase the focus on teaching broader skills – such as, analytical thinking and visual problem solving.
“Are artists skills, intellectual skills? I truthfully find it kind of frustrating to teach art skills, especially to the younger kids,” Clements said. “Because they struggle. For a lot of kids, drawing is something they struggle with. Painting is something they struggle with. And they tend to be dissatisfied with what they do. So I’m trying to work more about the process of art, artists, why artists do what they do, what do the kids think about the art – you know, sort of arts culture and history. It’s always evolving. Everything I do, and I think most art teachers do, is always this constant evolution of thinking and working and developing ideas.”
CONSEQUENCES
The mess of conflicting federal rules and regulations, the current climate of high-stakes testing, and the economic factors of the region have contributed to a set of circumstances in which art teachers in the NEK are struggling.
But when teachers struggle, it is the students who bear the brunt of the of consequences.
The current climate of high-stakes testing and an overreliance on technology has given rise to a situation in which students may be losing creativity, arts advocates say. And art teachers are perhaps more keenly aware than any other group to the effects of this growing problem.
“They’re just overstimulated,” Clements said.
For art teachers, who have reason to fear for their jobs more than ever before, a lack of creativity in their students has become a major problem.
“It’s a frustration we have,” Clements said. “My theory is that kids are so connected to the computer and images that are created that they have no imagination, no creativity no sort of original thoughts. I get frustrated because every time I assign some sort of project they want to do something from a video game, they want to do something from anime, that’s it. That’s their scope of visual vocabulary, and it drives us all crazy.”
However, even though the use of technology has become a factor in the perceived loss of creativity in the classroom, not all teachers, even within the NEK seem to agree on how they can technology effectively.
“I have other conversation with visual arts teachers and they’re like ‘no computers in my class, I’m not doing any digital work.’ And I go back and forth on it,” Clements said. “I think we have an opportunity to meet kids where they are at, which is a digital age in a digital world. So you can’t just say ‘it’s not important, it’s not valuable,’ and you can’t not validate it for these kids.”
School administrators are pushing art teachers to include more work with technology and computers in the classroom, Clements says, but this trend is not specific to just the art room.
Lyndon Town School, for instance, has started an initiative in which all students have a tablet device to use in the classroom. And technology has been implemented into many components of the curriculum.
However, at Burke Town School, Mason has resisted the temptation to use technology in her teaching, in part due to the budget restrictions that accompany a smaller school.
But despite the ways in which technology has made arts education more difficult, teachers, like Clements -- who says she will probably continue to teach for another 15 to 20 years before she retires -- say that technology in the art room may be their saving grace.
THE FUTURE OF ARTS EDUCATION
Clements says that she thinks the future of arts education has its beginnings in the growing maker-space movement.
“It’s the idea where you have a space,” Clements said. “You have technology and tools where kids can make and create and design things. You have power tools, you have saws, you have tools, you have 3D printers, you have all of this stuff for kids that when they have an idea they can make it happen. “
Currently, the Burlington Generator maker-space in Burlington, which has a number of resources for artists to use to build and design their projects, has proven to be a successful model.
The Burlington Generator was founded in 2013 by a group of 11 board members who wanted to create an all-inclusive art space. In 2014, the group opened a pop-up shop in Burlington, and their business has since grown into a fully-functional workshop with 152 members.
The Burlington Generator’s website lists its purpose as: “Generator aims to be a community of collaboration among artists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to foster a fertile environment for innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. We exist at the intersection of art and technology and offer our community a full suite of tools, workspaces, and education opportunities.”
The maker-space movement merges many of the disciplines in the allied arts into a single, all-inclusive medium.
Clements says that although the all-inclusive maker-spaces may represent the future of allied arts education – and many schools are implementing them in more affluent areas of the country – most educators have not found a way to effectively use them yet.
“I think people are making these maker-spaces but aren’t really sure how to use them,” Clements said. “And kids are not using those skills to make stuff. “
According to Kristin Fontichiaro’s article entitled, “Sustaining a Makerspace,” which appeared in the February 2016 edition of Teacher Library, the makerspace movement, in its present form, contains numerous challenges that educators will have to overcome if they implement it more widely.
For one, she says, many educators attempt to implement these new makerspaces without planning their curriculums around the tools available to them. As a result, educators often do not fully integrate the new materials into their classrooms.
And after years of deemphasized allied arts programs, Clements says, students who do have access to makerspaces may not even have the tactile skills necessary to properly implement them into the curriculum.
“They don’t know how to use saws. They don’t know how to screw something in. They don’t know how to do that building stuff, which they are not getting anymore. They’re not sewing; they’re not fabricating stuff.,” Clements said. “They’re not learning how to put it all together unless they are doing that in the art room.”
RESOLUTIONS
As it seems, public education, and especially arts education, sits at an uncertain crossroads.
Despite lobbying and activism at both state and national levels, arts education faces major structural problems in the NEK. And while art educators may be the most hyper-aware of the issues right now, the shifting emphases on visual literacy and creativity will almost surely affect students in the future.
As the year draws closer to an end in Clements classroom at LTS, students will likely dream of summer plans, family vacations and relaxing evenings home from school.
But for those -- like Clements, like Mason, like Gallagher – who have made art education their lives’ work. The end of the academic year is a new beginning, a hopeful reminder that next year might provide some solution.