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Home › Articles › Back to School Headquarters › Advocating for the Arts

Advocating for the Arts

Building Morale, Attendance and Educational Skills With the Arts

Part One

By Kim Byrum Skinner

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Dr. Tobie Sanders, education department chair at Capital University, agrees, crediting art education for providing the building blocks to 'essential meaning making' a basic 'this means or stands for that' understanding that skill is the heart of all reading, writing, representing and symbolizing.

"I value arts in the classrooms so highly," Sanders says. "The key to human communication, of course, is expression, and expression through the arts is such a natural avenue for children. The arts transcend culture, climate, heritage, proficiency testing and economic conditions. The arts are essential 'meaning making.' Opportunities for children to represent what they mean, to amplify their voice and be understood is probably the most important thing in education, and yet, it is undervalued."

Visual literacy allows humans to cultivate cultural meaning and message through such forms as color, style, size and design.

"It includes a wide variety of imagery," Hatfield says. "For example, if you're not really wild about flying, you don't want to get on a plane with a pilot dressed in something that looks like it's from The Music Man. That's why pilots always wear dark blue or black because it's conservative and gives an image of strength. It says, 'Take me seriously.' So, the bottom line is that you learn things in the education of art and music that you don't learn elsewhere in the curriculum, and if you deny that to children, then you're denying them the knowledge and skills, because today's world is global. It's media-liteate. It's high-tech. If you take away those [interpretative] skill sets, they won't be as able to deal with and understand the world."

Sanders emphasizes that the use of symbols and representations to communicate or 'make meaning' forms the very foundation for teaching and learning the transfer of thoughts, feelings or understanding among people that defies conventional boundaries.

"When a child creates a tree with watercolors, or beats a drum and makes a sound like a giant coming or stretches toward the sun [to imitate] the way a seedling grows into a flowering plant, that child is making meaning," Sanders says. "Understanding that thoughts, ideas and abstract concepts can be represented, manipulated, shared and connected is at the heart of the educational process. The child needs to enter the world of symbols in order to read, write and use quantitative reasoning. So even though the arts add to the quality of children's lives on the basis of enhancing aesthetics, participation in the arts makes it possible for children to make use of symbols like numbers, letters and words."

Young children, in particular, learn best during situations in which they're encouraged to move, feel and manipulate, Sanders explains. Multi-sensory experiences deepen a child's understanding, particularly as new concepts are introduced. Enhanced senses strengthen multiple intelligences and, in turn, transfer to greater academic reasoning.

"There's a ton of research to support this," she says, "and it's also common sense."

Sanders points to new educational approaches such as Reggio Emilio that present information on the premise that children have at least 100 languages ways of communicating to represent or make meaning.

"From this perspective, the languages of movement, drama, color, sound, music and pattern, for example, all enrich understanding," says Sanders.

Creative Training
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