Arts Impacting Achievement

By Kate Thomas

“No time, space barrier.”  This is a phrase my qigong teacher would use to allow us, his students, to transcend our everyday thoughts as we meditated and rearranged our energy fields.  Teaching artists know that when we enter a classroom we will move desks, create work stations on the floor, tape giant images to the wall, create percussive surfaces out of everyday objects, paint walls with fuscia acrylics...  We subconsciously enter the room and think, “how do we rearrange space and time to create art?”  This natural inclination on the part of the artist can alter the environment so fundamentally that everyone is out of step.  What do I do now, the teacher wonders?  “Why are my students out of control when the artists enter the classroom?”  “Why does it always sound so good in the planning session but get messed up when you add kids?”

Artists know that an expanded definition of space and time allows for new thoughts and interactions with materials.  We have learned this in art school.  We have experienced this in our own daily practice with the art form we work in.  Our explorations require us to get up off our feet and redesign the prescribed space.  How can we turn this upside down?  How can we dance on the edge of the room? How can we reach the ceiling with our imaginations?  Kids love this kind of interaction.  They catch the infectious bug of lets try something different.  Let’s reconsider the obvious.  Let’s crack this seed open.  Kids know that almost anything is possible.  Teachers are the keepers of the space.  They know that the scales can tip at any time.  Teachers protect the space so that students are safe to work.  Chaos is a temporary friend to some.

Bringing the energies of student, teacher, artist and environment into one combined effort for arts integration requires enormous suspension of disbelief of the part of all parties.  Amidst this chaos, there is something happening that is opening up students, teachers and artists minds to the possibility, to a new configuration of self.  The seed is nicked for germination.

Dancer Emily Stein says, “The non-verbal nature of the art form means that many student generated questions are, in fact, danced rather than asked.  The idea of setting up a situation and seeing what happens is a big part of the creation of a new dance for me.”

An artist feels comfortable with a different way of questioning and struggling with unknown information.  Everyone struggles together in the classroom to get used to this new way of thinking through the body.  We do this all the time.  We figure out which streets are safe to walk down with our bodies.  We negotiate new friendships in the school yard with our bodies.  As teachers, we sense a student’s

disengagement through our bodies/their bodies. 

When we insert this intelligence into our everyday experience

 in the classroom with art, suddenly we think we don’t know this language.  What has changed?

It’s unsettling when we don’t know an art form.  When we try to intellectualize the artistic experience, we struggle, “this has to make sense.”  We are thrown off by the mess and the confusion.  We are dizzy from the noise and chaos.  All this ruckus.  We have entered a liminal space. 

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner would describe this space as a betwixt and between space.  We are on the threshold of something new.  “A liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, interdeterminacy.  One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation.”

In the case of the classroom, we are no longer in control of the process as we might be with a sit down work sheet.  All of us are off center, teacher, artist and student.  Again, what do we do with this new sort of orientation?  What is our orientation?  Can someone tell me who is driving?  We are steeped in not knowing.  We are microscopic seeds caught in a wind storm.  Where will we land? We are in some kind of journey.  We trust that someone who is leading this artistic experience knows where we will end up.  The principal questions, “How long can this go on? How can we contain this experience in a school setting?”

The artist is confident that what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her or the students.  “Inquiry encourages new and different directions, opens up a project to what students and teachers become interested in and question.  More importantly, it encourages and promotes the digressions and diversions that are key to any artistic process and creative critical thinking,” says visual artist Margy Stover.

We are falling down the rabbit hole.  And we don’t know how our room got to look like this.  We don’t remember our students having so much energy.  We don’t remember if this artist had ever taught in another classroom.

The children’s voices are emerging.  What are they saying?  They are talking on top of each other because they have to say it now.  Kids have metamorphosized their bodies into creatures with wings.  Kids have found new ways to enter their everyday spaces and listen to the walls, feel the cracks in the floor.  What do we do with this new information, with these new sensations?  How will the room go back to being what it was?  How can we work with numbers on the page again?

Our sense of time and space has changed.  We have experienced liminality in a mundane (not boring but familiar) environment.  We have unraveled and journeyed.  Now we have to pack ourselves up and follow our road maps.

Some things have changed forever.  Now we will rearrange our furniture.  Maybe it would be useful to warm up our bodies everyday.  And there is a mural staring at us reminding us of our discovery.  We look at each other with a different sense of knowing.