Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 5; September 03

The Role of the Arts in our classrooms

by Lou Spaventa

“I wish there were a better education of the senses in the Western tradition. In the West, education is almost always seen in terms of drilling people into conformity, of repression, of preventing kids from knowing too much about things we do not want them to know about. I'd like education to be a formation of the senses and in particular the sense of sight. Perhaps leading to an education of the body, of movement. We haven't yet developed the sort of education that human beings of the future will want.” Don Cupitt

What is at the core of our teaching in the language classroom? It's the language, isn't it? Therefore, our teaching centers on the verbal, the anecdotal, the sequence of logical order deriving from grammar, and the cultural routines and structure of our stories. Language is the object of study, mediated by human relationships. How do we get where we are going? How do we get this language out into circulation and practice? It's method we're looking at here, isn't it? We present bits of language. We devise practice activities. We arrange for natural-like occasions for production. In this scheme of things, what role is there for the spontaneity of action, the deep but unarticulated response to a visual portrayal, the lifting of the soul through song? In short, art.

I would say that the role of art in our classrooms: the art of physical culture, the plastic arts and the performing arts, is continually being minimized, even as it is acknowledged to be important. Furthermore, when we look at modern education in technologically advanced societies, we see the gradual shaving away of the curriculum in these areas. A history of language teaching professor once made the statement in a class I attended that the ancient Greeks thought of themselves as musicians. I doubt that if one were to make a comment like that about a whole modern nation today anyone would take it as a compliment. Academia celebrates the mind over the body. The intelligent athlete we think of as an example of an exception, not a general rule. The musician and the artist we often conceive of as living in a narrow intellectual environment.

At the same time, most of us who teach are aware of the so-called multiple intelligences first put forth by Howard Gardner (2000). We know that some students learn words better by physically portraying them rather than reading them; thus showing a preference for kinesthetic intelligence. This was proven to me long ago at a Pilgrims' teachers' evening when a colleague demonstrated adverbs by acting them out. We also know that looking deeply at a painting or at a living being in the natural world can occasion a wealth of language, much of which lies just below the verbal surface. Here I remember using a set of slides purchased from the British Museum which I flashed across a canvas screen as music played. I was after getting students to respond to the combination of the visual and the aural. Lately, I have taken my students out into a college garden to sketch and describe plants and flowers. Around the same time period in my teaching life that I was experimenting with art slides in the classroom, I proved to myself that music could be used as a tool for language learning. We all know that music itself is a mnemonic device; it aids memorization almost effortlessly. At Pilgrims, back in the seventies, I produced a teacher resource book for using music in the classroom based on one I had created before when working for the English Teaching Division of the U.S. Government. A few had preceded me in working on music as a language teaching tool, but many followed until sessions on using music became a staple at ESOL conferences.

Yet, in all these cases, the art was being moved from its position as irrelevant to language learning to a small part of the relevant path. It never really was the central issue, the main focus of the class. Music was still principally extracurricular, just like trips to local art museums and pick up football matches.

I feel this was a mistake. What happened in the great energetic push of late twentieth century language teaching pedagogy was that everything became a vehicle for language learning without being appreciated for how its own unique practice could create a deeper and richer instance of learning. To put it another way, we simply added music *, art and physical activity to a pedagogical structure that was already in place. We didn't explore the implications of the art form for pedagogical meaning.

Has anyone done so? The answer is yes, but in fairly defined ways. One example that comes to mind is the efforts of faculty at the Prospect School in Bennington, Vermont which were described in conversation to me by the former director of the school, Pat Carini. Faculty members endeavored to understand their students through collecting their art work in portfolio, and then interpreting the portfolio contents much as one would interpret any work of art for meaning. In this way, decisions were made in the interest of the student. Another example comes from the Steiner Method used in Waldorf Schools, where music and movement are incorporated into the basic curriculum, and indeed, lay the groundwork for future learning. Waldorf schools claim that they endeavor to turn education into an art that develops the whole child.

Then what of the language classroom? How can movement, visual art and music take a central role? First of all, I believe that these three areas need to be reconceived, not as elective activities, fine to do when time permits, but as the foundation of education. Reading, writing and maths come second to them. Only when the student is engaged as an expressive emoting being can there be receptivity for the logical and verbal. The need to use language precisely and accurately proceeds from the imagination and creativity of the student. In my view, we are now producing students whose ability to communicate is truncated from the start by the solipsism of language internalized to create billions of mini-universes. As Caleb Gattegno used to say, “Communication is a miracle.” My point of view is that there would be a greater number of miracles if students were educated au fond in physical and artistic expression.

Don Cupitt, the radical English theologian whose words precede this essay, believes that our understanding and language about God leads to “impossible intellectual difficulties” (2003, 43). Likewise, in intellectualizing our educational pursuits, in relying on the verbal to guide us, we end up without communication and understanding, in an intellectual conundrum. Better to take the risk of emotive expression as the basis for a new language pedagogy. Better to express ourselves before analysis through language.

The search for a such a pedagogy is a small step I wish to take.

[ editorial note: Clement Laroy and David Cranmer , in their book Musical Openings, Pilgrims-Longman, 1995 , have music ( not song) as the fountain from which language later flows, the music transporting the learners into realms and moods in which they really want to speak. ]

References

Batchelor, Stephen (2003). “The Eclectic Cleric: Stephen Batchelor Interviews Don Cupitt,” Tricycle, The Buddhist Review, Fall 2003

Gardner, Howard (2000). Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the Twenty First Century. Basic Books, New York.