The Impoverishment of Standardised Learning 

In today’s educational climate, with its intense focus on raising standardised test scores, it seems like we have lost sight of nurturing the extensive human potentials of both our students and teachers. There is an ongoing fixation with individualised student-centred approaches, along with drilling basic competencies in reading, writing and maths. Approaches are increasingly narrowed to “teach to the test” to accommodate these high-stakes metrics.  The need to develop foundational skills is necessary, although rigid, utilitarian approaches can be ideological and problematic in many ways .

This includes the risk of depleting our capacities for original creative thinking, empathetic cross-cultural understanding, ethical reasoning and collaborative problem-solving. We fail to cultivate the diverse cognitive, emotional and social capabilities if education becomes transactional.

Human beings can’t truly flourish and thrive if it’s just about prescribed knowledge, regurgitated on exams or for tests,

Different ways of knowing

Current education approaches may allow students to complete well on tests (although various indicators suggest otherwise such as recent NAPLAN results), but it is not clear how it serves students to envision innovative solutions to complex issues or what Eisner alludes to as being able to  reconcile competing perspectives. The unprecedented socio-ecological challenges we face as a global society – from climate crises to technological disruption, systemic injustices and societal fragmentation – demand different  ways of knowing, being and doing that many of our current precision education approaches neglect.  Moving from individualised notions of education we need collaborative leaders able to synthesize insights across domains, embrace diverse worldviews and to ethically co-create inclusive, transformative possibilities. 

The Generative Power of Learning In and Through the Arts 

This is where facets of arts education across all levels of schooling provides powerful pathways for societal progress and human flourishing. An ever growing body of research reveals that learning in and through the arts awakens the full spectrum of human ways of knowing, exploration mindsets and personal growth preparing young people for success, both in school and in life while also enriching individual and community wellbeing.  Learning in the arts involves direct engagement with arts practices, developing skills and techniques in specific art forms, whereas learning through the arts involves using artistic methods as tools to understand and explore other academic subjects or concepts. 

Authentic self-expression

There is Ample evidence  to  support both intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts. That has been documented – for example Ewing’s arguments in   The Arts and Australian education: Realising potential ,  as well as the repository provided by the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE). And more, recently in the UK by National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) and The benefits of Art, Craft and Design education in schools A Rapid Evidence Review by Pat Thomson and Liam Maloy.   Within this evidence we continue to see how the arts through participatory inquiry and hands-on creation processes promote imaginative visioning, authentic self-expression, interpretive depth, cross-cultural understanding, empathy, and the persevering practice of manifesting new ideas into realised form. We also saw the power of the arts during the peak of the COVID wave .

Crucial experience

Engaging in arts practices and processes also nurtures innovative confidence in students, empowering them to develop unique perspectives and collaborative abilities. Students gain crucial experience exploring real-world complexity through multiple creative lenses, as well as synthesizing original interpretations that honour and amplify their authentic voices, visions and cultural identities. 

Unlike standardised testing environments that encourage regurgitation of prescribed “right” answers, collaborative and individual artmaking allows diverse individuals and communities to experience firsthand how engaging differing viewpoints through dialogue, cooperative creation and respectful exchange can generate multiple and new understandings and possibilities that transcend any single worldview. 

Promoting Teacher Agency to Guide Expressive Flourishing 

Teaching we know is an increasingly complex task. There are many imposed requirements that can impact how we might imagine the role of educators in adopting teaching approaches that are linked to learning in and through the arts.  It is also not clear in current education systems if we are encouraging or intentionally nurturing teachers’ own capacities to be creative and design immersive experiences that awaken students’ expressive capacities, intrinsic motivations and unique potentials to unveil new possibilities.

We know it is it possible for teachers through their facilitation of exploratory creative practice, that they can model the vital human dispositions that involve what Maxine Greene refers to as wide-awakeness or  what Biesta refer to as engaging in a conversation with the world. Though the arts we can support teachers to adopt practices like open-mindedness, ethical reasoning, self-actualization and comfort with ambiguity that become classroom norms.

Similarly with the current trend for teachers to work with colleagues as a member of a professional learning community (PLC), are they able to work cooperatively to design innovative, arts-integrated lessons to awaken students’ imaginative visioning abilities, critical consciousness, changemaking impulses and self-actualizing identities as bold co-creators of more beautiful realities.

Overcoming Barriers to an Arts-Driven Future 

Of course, such a radical shift that I’ve alluded to here, as have others before me, faces considerable systemic barriers in the form of ingrained institutional inertia, standardised testing regimes, and entrenched industrial mindsets around education’s purposes. Adopting arts-driven, creative inquiry-based teaching approaches will no doubt provoke fears and resistance from those invested in existing power structures and conventional teaching philosophies.

Dan Harris in a previous post in this blog has  spoken about the tensions between arts policy and education policy. However, as intensifying social and ecological pressures converge into existential crises, the vital necessity for human flourishing will only grow more urgently apparent. We know that intentionally integrating the arts provides an inclusive, expressive pathway for focusing on key aspects of education as well as promoting basic competencies. 

Collaborative wisdom

When prioritised, arts education provides the vital spark illuminating a way to both cultivate students’ and teachers’ expressive talents, ethical vision and skills for imaginatively co-creating new sustainable systems and worlds.

There are options here to nurture the collaborative wisdom so urgently needed to navigate our era’s unprecedented planetary tests and initiate long overdue systemic transformations. Yet the evidence related to the power of arts education seems to be ignored or sidelined and instead the focus of education remains on testing.  

Mark Selkrig is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. His research and scholarly work focus on the changing nature of educators’ work, their identities and lived experiences of these events. He has been the recipient of awards for publications in this field and acknowledged for his leadership, outstanding work and advocacy for arts development and education. Mark is on Twitter @markselkrig and LinkedIn.