Dec. 08' - Arnold Aprille, The Arts and the 21st Century Curriculum

Summary:

Practice.ie asked Arnold Aprill, the Founding and Creative Director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, to consider the intrinsic value of the Arts with and for children and young people. In the following article, Arnold addresses the role of "Big Ideas', powerful, overarching themes in organizing CAPE's work with schools and communities. CAPE is a network of artists and arts organizations, educators and schools, that are dedicated to school improvement through arts education partnerships.

What’s the Big Idea? The Arts and the 21st Century Curriculum
Arnold Aprill

The international celebrations following Barack Obama’s election as the next President of the United States hopefully signal a new appreciation of our interconnectedness as a species. We need to think beyond local and national interests and recognize that though the planet is not going anywhere, if we don’t change our ways, WE are going somewhere. As the late great comedian George Carlin said, we are going AWAY. A major implication of this fact is that all our education systems need to teach our students to become global thinkers developing a broad range of capacities that our current approaches to teaching and learning simply don’t support. A recent report in the U.S., created by the National Center on Education and the Economy, urgently calls for more creative and critical thinking in our schools. The report is titled “Tough Choices, Tough Times”, and our times and our choices have become significantly tougher since 2007, when the report was first released.

The document recommends pedagogy that scaffolds:

,,,comfort with ideas and abstractions, analysis and synthesis, creativity, innovation, self-discipline, organization, flexibility, ability to work on a team (p. xxv)

As that report states, meaningful 21st Century education depends

“…on a deep vein of creativity that is constantly renewing itself, and on a myriad of people who can imagine how people can use things that have never been available before…”

So how DO we scaffold comfort with ideas and abstractions?
One way for arts educators to do that is to recognize that the arts are not only about virtuosity and skill acquisition, but are also a mode of thought. The arts produce emotional responses, but the arts are also cognitive. The organization I work for, the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) www.capeweb.org organizes its arts education partnerships (collaborations between teachers and artists in which the arts and other academic subjects reinforce each other rather than compete with each other) around Big Ideas.