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What will this new approach look like?

From The Arts and the 21st Century Curriculum by Arnold Aprille

What will this new approach look like?

New inter-cultural global communications systems are creating whole new “languages” (young people are adept, unlike their elders, at multi-tasking and at composing and “reading” multi-media messages), and our young people are growing up in a world full of massive shifts in world populations. Old identities are morphing, the U.S. is rapidly become a bilingual nation, and all the clichés about moving from an industrial economy to an information economy will require a “whole new mind”, to use business writer Daniel Pink’s phrase.

Access to information on the internet and students’ access to new tools for composing, producing, and distributing films, texts, images, music, blogs, podcasts, websites, etc. will shift all education toward increasingly student centered learning, more project based learning, greater need for “soft” 21st century learning skills (“comfort with ideas and abstractions, analysis and synthesis, creativity, innovation, self-discipline, organization, flexibility, ability to work on a team”), more cross-disciplinary learning, more differentiated instruction, more inter-age work, more connections between life inside and outside schools, more attention to early childhood and to young adult education, and more “real world” tasks.Rapidly changing technologies will call for “just–in-time” learning and flexibility in dealing with technologies that become obsolete before they are perfected.

All this argues for an increasingly integrated curriculum – not just between the arts and other subjects, but between all other content areas as well. New technologies will also support more comprehensive curriculum in the performing arts – moving beyond performing into composing, directing, choreographing, and playwriting.

Another change in the terrain of arts education will be the on-going creation of new classics and new canons. Popular and “outsider” arts are now considered legitimate subjects for arts learning. Students study quilting. There is a classic Jazz program at Lincoln Center in New York City. Film study has become a regular subject in many high schools. Middle-schoolers study computer game design. Most of this was unimaginable twenty years ago.

So let us welcome ourselves into the 21st century! For a navigation map of this brave new world, check out the KnowledgeWorks Foundation Map of Future Forces Affecting Education http://www.kwfdn.org/map/