Dear Arts Educators, Your Faith in “Creativity” hath Forsaken You: An Arts Education Response to the 2011 State of the Union Address

If you and your friends hung around the TV watching the 2011 State of the Union Address planning to yell “DRINK!” and knock one back every time Barack Obama said “arts,” it’s likely you went to bed sober. However, if your prompt to clink glasses was either the word “education” or “innovation,” you were probably hung-over the next day.

With all the talk of “belt tightening” across the government leading up to the 2011 State of the Union Address, I don’t think anyone in the arts sector really had high hopes of the president calling for increased funding of the NEA.

What’s curious though, is that with such a focus on innovation and education in his speech, many people in the cultural sector may have wondered why the president didn’t place an emphasis on the importance of arts teaching and learning.

Enhancing innovative (mentioned eleven times) and inventive (mentioned six times) thinking is what arts education is all about, right?

Wrong.

For the past couple of decades the field of arts education has banked on the use of the word “creativity” (only mentioned once) as its primary benefit to students. This is problematic because the word creativity is an ambiguous term that can mean both everything and nothing all at once. It is no surprise that Obama therefore called for a greater investment in the more concrete notion of innovation over creativity.

It should also be no surprise that the president did not highlight arts teaching and learning as an avenue to such innovation—after all, that’s not how arts education markets itself. More importantly though, arts education has done a poor job of proving how it can achieve the sort of innovation that Obama is calling for in this, “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

Is this "the Sputnik moment of our generation…" really?

With so much Space Race language in Obama’s speech, it follows suit that the president has made it his priority to “prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.” In the past, when such an emphasis has been placed on STEM subjects, arts teaching and learning has suffered.

But I don’t believe history is repeating itself in quite the same way.

It would be too easy for arts education professionals to sit at home with their heads in their hands feeling further victimized, further marginalized and ultimately snubbed by Obama’s prioritizing of STEM subjects over arts education. “Here we go again…” they might say—with a defeated sigh.

Instead, I’m calling on arts educators to take responsibility for the president’s dismissal of the importance of arts teaching and learning.

In order for arts education to be taken seriously in the decades ahead, it must reinvent itself to meet the needs of students living in an increasingly more plugged-in, globalized, and media saturated world. Aside from isolated efforts to incorporate media arts into the curriculum, the popular notion of traditional arts education is, well—pretty traditional.

The recent anthology 20UNDER40: Re-Inventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21^st Century takes the first steps towards challenging these traditions. In her essay “Handprint Turkeys and the Cotton Ball Snowman: Is There Hope for an Artful America?” Boston Children’s Museum educator and program designer Bridget Matros argues that we need to provide children with less structured, more exploratory experiences with materials during early childhood to plant the first seeds of innovative thinking. Meanwhile, Indiana University learning sciences professor Kylie Peppler describes how “creative coding” can serve as the new fundamentals of student learning. Fulbright Scholar Jennifer Groff further provides us with a look at student potential through the lens of neuroscience in her discussion of how modern technologies and video games can be fused with arts education to diversify and enhance student cognition. And Bronx River Arts Center’s Rebecca Potts suggests that a fusion of the arts and the sciences (beyond the now historic notion of traditional arts-integration) to create a “fourth culture” is the key to addressing such momentous issues as global warming and climate change.

What Matros, Peppler, Groff, and Potts advocate for are new approaches to arts teaching and learning that will benefit students by equipping them with the skills and cultural acumen necessary to be more innovative and successful in the decades ahead. Without the variety of paradigm-shifting overhaul that these authors suggest, it is my belief that the field of arts education will continue to fall under the radar of Obama’s education agenda. As the 20UNDER40 authors exhibit, innovators in the field are out there, but the barriers to their innovation must be overcome.

Clearly, the 2011 State of The Union Address should stand as a wake up call to the field of arts education. Not only does arts teaching and learning need to re-brand itself to shake off its wishy-washy focus on creativity, it also needs to re-invent itself to be more novel and useful to students—and to country.

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