THE
ROLE OF THE ARTS IN IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION
The
world is undergoing a process of enormous and rapid technological change,
leading to a situation in which our economies are increasingly knowledge-based
and reliant on constant innovation. In order to keep pace with the changes and
meet requirements in the labour market, employees will increasingly need to be creative,
innovative and adaptable, and have advanced communication and social skills.
However, as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) 2005 Education for All Monitoring Report indicates, these
abilities and skills are generally not provided in schools. Education reform
efforts must, therefore, consider ways of incorporating the skills and abilities
that will be required. In order to understand how best to reform our
educational systems and raise the quality of education, certain questions must
be answered:
•
What is the goal of education?
•
What sort of people do we want our education systems to produce?
•
What kinds of skills should they have?
It
is generally agreed that the ultimate goal of education is to create cohesive,
peaceful and prosperous societies. To achieve this, our education systems need
to produce motivated and productive members of society who value tolerance and
social cohesion and are able to contribute positively to their country’s socio-economic
development. Therefore, education systems need to instill in students a sense
of community and an appreciation for cultural diversity; build students’ self-esteem
and confidence; and provide them with the creative, innovative abilities,
flexibility and other skills required for meaningful employment in the modern
workplace. Arts Education is increasingly promoted as a means of bringing the
required abilities and skills into education systems. Learning about the arts
and gaining skills in art forms, ranging from drama and music to crafts, endows
students with a range of proficiencies and with the ability to engage in the
creative process; that is, use imagination, critical thinking, and physical and
mental skills to generate a unique creation. It is argued that by engaging in
this process, students gain self-esteem and confidence in their abilities,
therefore becoming more motivated and productive. There is increasing evidence
that the benefits of art education are multiplied when the arts are used instrumentally
in education. This is the goal of the Arts-in-Education (AIE) approach, through
which the arts are used as tools to educate students about other subjects.
This
approach goes beyond teaching the arts or bringing art subjects into curricula
(arts education), although technical skills and aesthetic appreciation are also
learned in the process. The AIE approach uses the arts to equip students with knowledge
and skills across the curriculum (from mathematics and science to heritage
education) and,most importantly, to stimulate cognitive development and to
encourage innovative and creative thinking.Adherents argue that this
cross-disciplinary approach enables students to make connections and see
therelationships between subject areas, leading to creative insights and
original ideas. The AIE approach is often explained by referring to the concept
of “multiple intelligences”, which postulates that there are many kinds of
“intelligence” and a number of ways of learning. The AIE approach is believed
to stimulate a wider range of types of intelligence than conventional teaching
methods, which tend to rely on verbal and logical thinking (thereby favouring
students with strengths in those kinds of intelligence). By facilitating a
learning approach that involves, for example, kinesthetic, musical and interpersonal
intelligences as well as verbal and logical intelligences, educators can enable
all types of learners to understand the subject matter, making learning easier
for all. The AIE approach does not conflict with or supplant the views of those
who believe art has its own intrinsic value and should be a core subject in
every school (the “art for art’s sake” approach). Both approaches agree that
learning about, and through, the arts, cultivates and stimulates cognitive development,
and that by engaging in art (whether visual, plastic or performing arts)
students develop analytical and interactive abilities and acquire broader, more
creative, innovative, and clearer thought patterns. In addition, there is
general agreement that achievements in the arts build students’ self-esteem and
confidence. Art educators also tend to agree that the arts enable the
development of certain skills that can be applied in other fields. Studies
suggest, for example, that learning about music enhances mathematical skills,
while studying drama builds verbal skills. What AIE adherents see as an
important advantage of the instrumental approach in terms of improving the
quality of education is that by incorporating the arts within, or implementing
it across, all subject-areas, the AIE approach brings the benefits of learning
about the arts to the entire curriculum. Adherents believe another key benefit
of the AIE approach is that using the arts instrumentally in education brings
about active student participation in lessons, making learning more enjoyable,
with the result that students learn more effectively.
In addition, the AIE approach is considered
particularly valuable in schools which lack the human and financial resources
to provide specialized art classes but stillwish to impart the benefits of art
education to students. Because of the links between the arts and culture, the
AIE approach also enables local cultural values and identity to have a central
role in education. When schools draw on members of the community (for example,
local artists and handicraft producers who are invited into schools to share
their skills in traditional music, dance and crafts), and incorporate their
artistic skills and knowledge into lessons, this provides an opportunity for
students to learn about the various art forms that their own culture produces and
compare them with those produced elsewhere, and, in the process, learn about
cultural values. Thus, the AIE approach actively fosters students’
understanding of both their own and other cultures, leading to a greater
appreciation for differing cultural values and ways of being, and thereby
supporting efforts to preserve and promote cultural diversity.
In
addition, through learning about their own culture, how it has changed and how
it relates to other cultures, students are better able to construct their own
sense of personal identity, enhancing their confidence and sense of belonging. Given
the value of the arts in improving the quality of education, and therefore in
fostering social cohesion, peace and prosperity, efforts are being made
worldwide to incorporate the arts with alleducation systems. UNESCO strongly
supports these efforts and in 1999 the Director General launched an
international appeal to Member States to promote arts education and creativity
both at school and in non-formal education settings. In response to this
appeal, UNESCO has sought to give the arts a central place in all educational
programmers and activities (formal and non-formal), with the ultimate goal of mainstreaming
arts education into educational systems worldwide. It is important that
UNESCO’s efforts to mainstream arts education reflect and contribute to
safeguarding the diversity of artistic traditions and perspectives worldwide.
It is therefore necessary to understand how those traditions and perspectives
differ. The arts in Asia, and in the Asia-Pacific region in general, are not so
much “fine arts” as understood in the Western sense of this term (i.e. arts for
the consumption of the upper classes and delivered in purpose-built
institutions such as museums, concert halls, etc.); but are part of living
traditions, with roots in local communities, and are often performed and
consumed by the poorer classes. Traditionally, the arts in most, if not all,
Asian and Pacific cultures were integral to life: form and function were
intertwined, and the arts were not de-contextualized, as they often are in the
North and West. For example, traditionally, objects in daily life were often
not only functional but beautiful and meaningful. Because the arts in the
Asia-Pacific region were traditionally an integral part of daily life, it
follows that in the Asia-Pacific region the arts were the vehicles of knowledge
and the methods of learning all subjects. In addition, the teachers of the arts
in the Asia-Pacific region were traditionally to be found within the community.
Art education was based on the (largely non-formal) master-apprentice
tradition. In recent years in most, if not all, Asia-Pacific societies, there
has been the shared experience of internalization of Western models and
structures of art and of education. In Asia-Pacific countries, as in most
contemporary societies, art has, by and large, become limited to a small subset
of human. Art in the classroom, when it occurs, is a narrow set of activities,
usually consisting of aspects of the visual arts such as drawing and painting.
As a result, more often than not, the creation of art works is dissociated from
life experience and the arts have been separated from other disciplines and do
not have a major role in education. Given the new opportunities and
requirements of the knowledge society, educational systems in the Asia-Pacific
region have had to examine ways and means of adapting.
This process of adaptation implies a
rethinking of the role and uses of the arts in education. Western approaches to
arts instruction usually focus on the teaching of art history, aesthetics and
the learning of artistic skills so the student is able to reproduce artistic
forms in a competent manner. This approach does not, however, enable
Asia-Pacific societies to draw fully on their rich wealth of culture, knowledge
and skills, or contribute to safeguarding and perpetuating the arts and
cultural traditions of the region. It is therefore recommended that the arts be
made a more integral part of education and that an instrumental approach, the
Arts-in-Education approach described above, involving innovative teaching
methods, be brought into the formal education system, while non-formal methods
of life-long learning in, and utilization of, the arts, be further developed in
a systematic manner accessible to the entire population of a country. This
report provides an overview of recent arts education practice and reform in the
Asian region. Thereport begins by presenting the evolving Asian perspective of
the relationship between the arts, cultureand education, and by discussing the
alternatives to conventional perspectives. The following section summarizes the
aims and outcomes of the two recent Asian expert meetings on Arts Education,
held in Hong Kong in 2004 and in New Delhi in 2005, convened within the framework
of a series of UNESCO conferences worldwide. The remainder of the report is
made up of presentations from the two meetings, beginning with papers
describing the benefits of integrating the arts in Asian education, followed by
case-studies illustrating how the arts can be integrated into education and
used instrumentally to achieve educational objectives. The next section is a
collection of examples of teaching, policy and curriculum reform efforts, both
formal and non-formal. The final section of the report focuses on defining the
way forward in terms of efforts to mainstream the arts in Asian education. In this
section, research methods and frameworks are explained and two key initiatives
are introduced: a new school which will put the arts and culture at the center
of curricula and education; and the proposed Arts in Asian Education Observatories,
which will act as clearinghouses of information about the arts in Asian
education and serve as a resource for arts education advocacy in the region.
2.
SUPRAPTIWAHYU SURYANTI IGA BARIKA ROZA PUTRI ALAWIYAH
No comments:
Post a Comment