Americans for the Arts

Kristen Engebretsen

Back in February, during the winter meeting for the arts education council, we discussed the results of a survey we had completed asking members of Americans for the Arts what type of programming they were interested in for arts education.

Forty-six percent of respondents said that they would be interested in programming related to broader education reform issues, such Common Core State Standards, No Child Left Behind, the achievement gap, student engagement, and state or federal policy.

As the council discussed how we could weave some of this into our programming, we began an interesting conversation about the intersection between the arts and the Common Core.

First off, several council members asked, what is the Common Core State Standards Initiative (or “Common Core” for short)?

Simply put, the Common Core State Standards are the new English Language Arts and Math standards for student learning.

This initiative started as a collaboration between the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. They wanted teachers to have common standards for what was being taught so that a third grade student in California would have the same standards as a third grade student in Massachusetts. Makes sense, right?

In a day and age where we can’t get our elected officials to agree on much with regards to education reform, it seems impressive that 46 and DC have adopted them so far. These new standards are not “federally” mandated, but rather adopted by individual states. However, there was motivation for states to adopt these standards—they had to adopt them in order to be eligible for Race to the Top funds, which offered states millions of dollars in grant money.

The standards are focused on college and career prep, with an emphasis on higher order thinking skills. They dictate what is to be taught, but not how or when. There are two assessment consortia who are designing digital-based and performance-based assessments for students to accompany the new standards.

Jeanne Hoel

Though I'm typically standards-adverse (yet dutiful), I'm looking forward to the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS), specifically to their potential to de-isolate subject areas, including art.

I feel the CCSS reflect the work progressive educators have been doing for years and frame that work elegantly. I believe art educators can be important change agents and looked to as experts in this time of transition to CCSS, but it will require specialized pedagogical and leadership training. In a time of constricting budgets, especially for professional development, I am doubtful if this can happen.

Arts and Standards

In my tenure as a program manager at MOCA, I've witnessed several phases of what I'll call Standards Service. About ten years ago, the pendulum swung hard for museums to make their programs more standards-based or at the very least standards-conversant.

It was important to do so in order to help teachers advocate for art education by showing how their work met Visual and Performing Art Standards (VAPA), as well as those of English, Social Studies, and Science. But often I felt I was paying lip service to a bureaucratic requirement rather than furthering valid educational objectives. Because we were working with wonderfully transgressive contemporary art at MOCA, we were inherently doing big, thinking-based, cross-disciplinary work—something the current standards don't easily accommodate.

I feel differently about the CCSS. At their core lie thinking skills and habits of mind that transcend subject area boundaries and ideally equip students to negotiate growing waves of data and complex decision-making requirements they will face as citizens of global cultures and economies.

Possibilities for Arts and Common Core

Looking specifically at the English Language Arts (ELA) of CCSS, there are elegant and immediate connections to be made. As a means of navigating the new ELA standards, I’ve found it useful to focus first on the Anchor Standards for Reading, Writing, Speaking & Listening, and Language, which are consistent across all grade levels.

The Common Core standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics are driving factors in the educational reforms facing public education today. As an arts educator in the schools, as a teaching artist who provides supplemental instruction with students in and out of school, as a cultural organization working to partner with a school, and/or as an arts education advocate, how can you approach the Common Core standards?

As information swirls around this topic, I am reminded of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I begin by recommending the first rule of galaxy hitchhiking, or in this case, connecting to the Common Core: DON’T PANIC! Here are the reasons why I believe panic is misguided:

1. The Common Core standards, while they expressly contain literacy references across the curriculum, do not replace content standards in other subject areas. Teaching the arts still means teaching to arts standards. Arts standards are set by your state—visit the State Arts Education Policy Database to find your state’s standards.

a. You can also remain up to date on the revision of the National Arts Education Standards—the basis for most state standards—at the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards wiki.

2. The Common Core ELA/Literacy standards are ripe with places of deep connection to the arts. These standards ask for very strong instructional shifts in the teaching of literacy. I encourage you to research these instructional shifts—my favorite way to dig into them is watching the NY State videos done by David Coleman, soon to be head of The College Board

3. Instructional shifts of interest (and relative ease?) to arts educators:

a. Focus on the text in order to answer questions raised in class. Reading and comprehending text is the end goal of these ELA standards. While theatre certainly includes text reading as part of its discipline, all arts areas include texts within the critique and evaluation parts of our disciplines.

b. IF you use a very broad definition of text to include any primary source material, then you can practice the tools of the ELA Common Core standards by closely “reading” or analyzing a painting, a dance, a musical performance. The work we do in the arts—to engage students in critically approaching artistic works—is an almost natural fit with the Common Core ELA standards.

As we wrap up our Blog Salon for this week, I wanted to provide three types of summaries:

First, here are two resources where you can find out more information about the Common Core:

1. A list of Common Core resources from our website
2. A list of Common Core resources on the Arts Education Partnership website

Second, here is a Wordle of the most commonly used in our Blog Salon posts:

The largest words are used the most common, but I love some of the smaller words, such as collaborate, opportunities, processes, and creativity. With this image, the finer details make all of the difference. (If you click on the image, you'll be able to zoom in on the version that opens in a new window.)

As Common Core begins implementation, I’m sure that similarly, the devil will be in the details, in terms of how successful each district and school are in utilizing this opportunity to its full potential.

And third, I hope that you watch the following seven minute video in its entirety, because I think this quote from David Coleman, one of the authors of the Common Core, summarizes how I feel about the possibility of Common Core to “return elementary teachers to their rightful role as guides to the world.”

Sarah Zuckerman

“To succeed today and in the future, America’s children will need to be inventive, resourceful, and imaginative. The best way to foster that creativity is through arts education,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in Re-Investing Through Arts Education:Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools.

The nation has deemed that learning in and through the arts is critical for the success of all students. This positions arts educators to take a leadership role in implementing what the Common Core means for learning. The arts are different than other subjects; this is what fosters innovative, creative, and critical thinkers. The Common Core opens a door for leadership, an opportunity for the best arts educators to model what teaching and learning should look like across the curriculum…are we ready for the challenge?

What do the arts do, exactly? How does this align with the Common Core?

How the arts progress student learning is too complex for one blog entry. However, I would like to draw attention to a few ways that arts-based learning models the English Language Arts/Literacy instructional shifts of the new standards.

1.  Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction
In arts classrooms that employ reading across the curriculum, this happens quite naturally. Whether we are reading a critique of an artist’s work or reading about the cultural context of a genre of work, art history, aesthetics, and critique all are grounded in content-rich nonfiction. Content-rich nonfiction media in the arts abound for every age from preschool to adult.

2.  Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational
The way a careful observer draws on evidence to interpret an image or production parallels the processes employed when a strong reader makes meaning from a text. Arts teachers require students to find evidence for their interpretations by asking, “What in the work made you say that?”, part of the visual thinking strategy used by many teachers. This focus on evidence is the basis of learning how to view art or performance, as it is learning how to read a text.

3.  Regular practice with complex text and its academic language
In an art museum there is no "Third Grade Gallery" or "High School Wing," nor do we only show children theatre performances limited by reading level. To quote Steve Seidel, head of the Arts in Education Program at Harvard Graduate School of Education, “The very notion of theatre, of rehearsal, is the close examination of a text.” In the arts, students routinely confront images, lines in a script, etc., that need much more than a glance (or quick read) to understand. The arts train students to make meaning of complex works, the same ability that higher levels of text complexity demand. With the right scaffolding and time allotment, such work becomes accessible to all learners.

David Coleman

David Coleman, an architect of the Common Core State Standards and incoming president of The College Board, sent the following to Kristen Engebretsen in reaction to last week's arts education blog salon on the common core:

I am so glad that the arts community has gotten the message that the arts have a central and essential role in achieving the finest aspects of the common core. So many of the blog posts are so thoughtful and imaginative about the possibilities. They were a delight to read.

Let me review a few critical points that many have already grasped:

1. Knowledge. Building knowledge through reading, writing, listening, and speaking is essential to literacy. As has been noted, the standards say explicitly that knowledge includes coherent knowledge about science, history, and the arts. So I hope the arts community is investing in finding remarkable high quality source material to learn about the arts. Remember that source texts should meet the text complexity requirements of the standards at each grade level and the selection of texts should be designed to build coherent knowledge within grades and across grades. There should be an influx of wonderful source materials to explore the arts. And now they can be shared across states and classrooms.

2. Observation. The arts have a great advantage in that they place a priority on the careful observation that reading requires. No one looks at a great work of art once; likewise, any great piece of writing deserves careful consideration and reconsideration. The arts can train students to look and look again; to listen and listen until one really hears. CS Lewis, himself a gifted author and reader of literature, writes this about looking at a painting or reading a book carefully: “We must look, and go on looking, until we have seen exactly what is there…the first demand any work of art makes on us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.” Henry James says the finest writer and reader is one “on whom nothing is lost.”

3. Evidence and Choices. A key idea of the standards is to base analysis of works of art and of writing in evidence. The standards require that analysis includes the ability to cite that evidence as the basis of understanding. Of course, we draw on sources of evidence outside of a text and a work of art, but the standards insist that students come to grips with evidence from the specific work of art or text they encounter.Part of what this kind of close attention includes is noticing and analyzing the choices artists make—choices such as what is the object of a painting, to how it is treated, to color, to light to all the choices that accumulate to make  a work of art. Good readers examine the choices writers make—their choice of specific words and broader choices—of how to order events and develop characters—of what to say—all these choices are examined by a careful reader.