CHAMPIONS OF CHANGE -+- THE IMPACT OF THE ARTS ON LEARNING ARTS EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP The Arts Education Partnership (formerly known as the Goals 2000 Arts Education Partnership) is a private, nonprofit coalition of more than 100 national education, arts, business, philanthropic and government organizations that demonstrate and promote the essential role of arts education in enabling all students to succeed in school, life and work. The Partnership was formed in 1995 through a cooperative agreement between the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the U.S. Department of Education, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). PRESIDENT'S COMMITTEE ON THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES The President's Committee was created by Presidential Executive Order in 1982 to encourage private sector support and to increase public appreciation of the value of the arts and the humanities, through projects, publications and meetings. Appointed by the President, the Committee comprises leading citizens from the private sector who have an interest in and commit- ment to the humanities and the arts. Its members also include the heads of federal agencies with cultural programs, such as the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U.S. Department of Education, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. CHAMPIONS OF CHANGE THE IMPACT DF THE ARTS ON LEARNING EDITED BY EDWARD B. FISKE + THE ARTS EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP THE PRESIDENT'S CDMMITTEE ON THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES Funded by: THE GE FUND THE JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION Arts Education Partnership *•»»,# . &>> GEFund THE JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MacArthur Foundation Edward B. "Ted" Fiske, the former Education Editor of the New York Times, is an internationally known education correspondent, editor, and lecturer who is widely regarded as one of the nation's leading education writers and observers of school reform. He is perhaps best known as the author of the best-selling Fiske Guide to Colleges (Times Books), an annual publication that is a standard part of the college admissions literature. In 1991, he published Smart Schools, Smart Kids (Simon & Schuster), which former U.S. Secretary of Education T H. Bell called "the most important work on educa- tion to be published since A Nation at Risk" ABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE iv A MESSAGE FROM THE SECRETARY OF EDUCATION vi EXECUTIVE SUMMARY vii INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement In Music and Theater Arts James S. Catterall, Richard Chapleau and John Iwanaga 1 IMAGINATIVE ACTUALITY Learning in the Arts during the Nonschool Hours Shirley Brice Heath with Adelma Roach 19 LEARNING IN AND THROUGH THE ARTS: Curriculum Implications Judith Burton, Robert Horowitz, Hal Abeles 35 CHICAGO ARTS PARTNERSHIPS IN EDUCATION Summary Evaluation James S. Catterall and Lynn Waldorf 47 ARTISTIC TALENT DEVELOPMENT FOR URBAN YOUTH: The Promise and the Challenge Barry Oreck, Susan Baum and Heather McCartney 63 "STAND AND UNFOLD YOURSELF" A Monograph on the Shakespeare & Company Research Study Steve Seidel 79 WHY THE ARTS MATTER IN EDUCATION or Just What Do Children Learn When They Create an Opera Dennie Palmer Wolf 91 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation http://archive.org/details/championsofchangOOfisk CHAMPIONS DF CHANGE PREFACE When young people are involved with the arts, something changes in their lives. We've often witnessed the rapt expres- sions on the faces of such young people. Advocates for the arts often use photographs of smiling faces to document the experience. But in a society that values measurements and uses data-driven analysis to inform decisions about alloca- tion of scarce resources, photographs of smiling faces are not enough to gain or even retain support. Such images alone will not convince skeptics or even neutral decision-makers that something exceptional is happen- ing when and where the arts become part of the lives of young people. Until now, we've known little about the nature of this change, or how to enable the change to occur. To understand these issues in more rigorous terms, we invited leading educational researchers to examine the impact of arts experiences on young people. We developed the Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning initiative in cooperation with The Arts Education Partnership and The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities to explore why and how young people were changed through their arts experiences. We believed that evidence could be collected that would help answer the questions of why positive changes occur and what might be done to replicate them. We expected the work to build on previous research concerning the arts and learning so that similar programs could become even more effective; we also hoped to increase the overall understanding of how the arts can impact learning. We invited the initial Champions of Change researchers to examine well-established models of arts education. We then added research efforts that looked beyond specific programs to larger issues of the arts in American education. Finally, we expanded our concept beyond classrooms and schools to include out-of-school settings. We wanted to better understand the impact of the arts on learning, not just on formal education. The Champions of Change Researchers Over the last few years, seven teams of researchers examined a variety of arts education programs using diverse methodologies: ■ James S. Catterall of the Imagination Project at the University of California at Los Angeles analyzed data on more than 25,000 students from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to determine the relationship of engagement in the arts to student performance and attitudes. He also investigated the impact of intensive involvement in instrumental music and drama/theatre on student achievement. ■ Shirley Brice Heath of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Stanford University, with Adelma Roach, examined after- school programs for youth in poor communities. The researchers were interested in the qualities that made programs in the arts, sports, and community service effective sites for learning and development, and they identified features that made involvement with the arts the most powerful factor to success in and out of school. ■ The Center for Arts Education Research at Teachers College, Columbia University, studied arts education programs within elementary and junior high schools. Researchers Judy Burton, Rob Horowitz, and Hal Abeles created a taxonomy of learning in the arts, and investigated the ways that learning in the arts affected learning across the curriculum and the conditions that made this possible. ■ James Catterall and The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL) evaluated the impact of the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE). The CAPE network of nine neighborhood-based partnerships of 23 local schools, 33 arts organizations, and 11 commu- nity-based organizations has pioneered new ways to integrate the arts with learning across the curriculum. ::::,;:..:.:,::■,,:,■.,,,::,::,, PREFAC ■ Researchers at the National Center for Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut exam- ined the Young Talent Program and other offerings of ArtsConnection, the largest outside provider of arts education programming to the New York City public school system. They also created a model of obstacles, success factors, and outcomes for talent development in the arts. ■ Steve Seidel and researchers from Harvard University's Project Zero examined two education programs of Shakespeare & Company, a profes- sional theatre company based in Lenox, Massachusetts. Researchers investigated the National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare, a high school teacher training program, as well as the Fall Festival of Shakespeare, an annual regional experi- ence that involves teenagers in the study and performance of Shakespeare's works. ■ Dennie Palmer Wolf and researchers from the Performance Assessment Collaboratives for Education (PACE) of Harvard's Graduate School of Education examined the Creating Original Opera program of The Metropolitan Opera Guild. This professional development program trains elementary and secondary school teachers in a process that enables young people to create, perform, and produce an original opera. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research initiative had many champions. We are grateful to them all, and would like to recognize the contributions of several who made this entire collabo- ration possible. First and foremost, we thank the late Ernie Boyer, former president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and former U.S. Commissioner of Education, for encouraging us to work together. This partnership has been a highlight of our professional lives, and we will always remember Ernie as an articulate advocate for the role of the arts in young lives. Throughout the development and implementation of Champions of Change, several individuals provided critical support and counsel. They included Peter Gerber, Vartan Gregorian, Rich Gurin, Ellen Lovell, Margaret Mahoney, Harold Williams, and Jim Wolfensohn. During the research process, we held several sessions to review work in progress and identify questions for the research to be funded. In addition to the artists, educators, and researchers named in this report, we benefited from the involvement of arts and education leaders from across the country. They included Terry Baker, Jim Berk, Bob Bucker, Jessica Davis, Elliott Eisner, Carol Fineberg, Rita Foy, Milton Goldberg, Derek Gordon, Doug Herbert, Sarah Howes, Peter Martinez, Ruth Mitchell, David O'Fallon, David Perkins, Terry Peterson, Jane Remer, Dan Scheinfeld, Josiah Spaulding, Robert Stake, and Louise Stevens. Under the leadership of executive director Dick Deasy, The Arts Education Partnership has been a critical partner for the Champions of Change research initiative. We are also grateful to The President's Committee for the Arts and the Humanities, honorary chair First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and executive director Harriet Mayor Fulbright for their involvement and support since the inception of this ambitious undertaking. Finally, we thank the advisory committees and the boards of our respective institutions whose support made this extraordinary endeavor possible. We believe their significant commitment of resources for Champions of Change will help transform countless young lives for the better through the arts. Jane L. Polin The GE Fund Nick Rabkin The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation DF CHANGE THE SECRETARY OF EDUCATION Washington, D.C. 20202 The ultimate challenge for American education is to place all children on pathways toward success in school and in life. Through engagement with the arts, young people can better begin lifelong journeys of developing their capabilities and contributing to the world around them. The arts teach young people how to learn by giving them the first step: the desire to learn. Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning also shows that the arts can play a vital role in learning how to learn, an essential ability for fostering achievement and growth throughout their lives. American education is changing, and changing for the better. Who teaches, what is taught, where teaching takes place, and how teaching occurs are evolving dramatically in communities across America. And a key factor in changing American education for the better is to increase high quality arts learning in the lives of young Americans. Why is American education in such flux? In simplest terms, the reason is because America is in transition. We are a more diverse society facing daunting demands from global social and technological innovation. The American economy is shifting from a manufacturing-driven engine to a services-driven enterprise. If young Americans are to succeed and to contribute to what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan describes as our "economy of ideas," they will need an education that develops imaginative, flexible and tough-minded thinking. The arts powerfully nurture the ability to think in this manner. Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning provides new and important findings on actual learning experiences involving the arts. The report which follows presents these research findings, complete with ground-breaking quantitative and qualitative data and analysis, as articulated by leading American educational researchers. These researchers investigated the content, process, and results of learning in and through the arts. Perhaps what makes their findings so significant is that they all address ways that our nation's educational goals may be realized though enhanced arts learning. As the researchers discovered, learning in the arts can not only impact how young people learn to think, but also how they feel and behave. The American public is demanding more than ever from our schools, and rightly so. Parents and other caregivers want to equip young people for professionally and personally rewarding careers, and they recognize that to do so we must give them greatly enriched experiences. As these researchers have confirmed, young people can be better prepared for the 21st century through quality learning experiences in and through the arts. aIAc^ Aa^u. ^ilev V Richard Riley Secretary, Department of Education Our mission is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the Nation. A'hk^i DF CHANGE WHAT THE ARTS CHANGE ABOUT THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE As a result of their varied inquiries, the Champions of Change researchers found that learners can attain higher levels of achievement through their engagement with the arts. Moreover, one of the critical research findings is that the learning in and through the arts can help "level the playing field" for youngsters from disadvantaged circumstances. James Catterall's analysis of the Department of Education's NELS:88 database of 25,000 students demonstrates that students with high levels of arts participation outperform "arts-poor" students by virtually every measure. Since arts participation is highly correlated with socioeconomic status, which is the most significant predictor of academic performance, this comes as little surprise. The size and diversity of the NELS database, however, permitted Catterall to find statistical significance in comparisons of high and low arts participants in the lowest socioeconomic segments. This closer look showed that high arts participation makes a more significant difference to students from low-income backgrounds than for high-income students. Catterall also found clear evidence that sustained involvement in particular art forms — music and theater — are highly correlated with success in mathe- matics and reading. These findings are enriched by comparisons of student achievement in 14 high-poverty schools in which the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) has developed innovative arts-integrated curricula. The inspiring turnaround of this large and deeply troubled school district is one of the important education stories of this decade. Schools across Chicago, including all those in this study, have been improving student performance. But, when compared to arts-poor schools in the same neighborhoods, the CAPE schools advanced even more quickly and now boast a significant gap in achievement along many dimensions. Schools are not the only venue in which young people grow, learn, and achieve. Shirley Brice Heath spent a decade studying dozens of after-school programs for disadvantaged youth. These programs were broadly clustered into three categories — sports/academic, community involvement, and the arts. This research shows that the youth in all these programs were doing better in school and in their personal lives than were young people from the same socioeconomic categories, as tracked by NELS:88. To the researchers' surprise, however, the youth in the arts programs were doing the best. Skeptical about this finding, Heath and her colleagues looked more closely at the arts programs and the youth participat- ing in them. Although the youth in the arts programs were actually at greater "risk" than those in the other programs, the researchers found that characteristics particular to the arts made those programs more effective. They now believe that a combination of "roles, risks, and rules" offered in the arts programs had a greater impact on these young lives. Another broad theme emerges from the individual Champions of Change research findings: the arts no longer need to be characterized solely by either their ability to promote learning in specific arts disciplines or by their ability to promote learning in other disciplines. These studies suggest a more dynamic, less either-or model for the arts and overall learning that has more of the appearance of a rotary with entrances and exits than of a linear one-way street. This rotary of learning provides the greater access to higher levels of achievement. "Learning in and Through the Arts" (LITA) and other Champions of Change studies found much evidence that learning in the arts has significant effects on learning in other domains. LITA suggests a dynamic model in which learning in one domain supports and stimulates learning in others, which in turn supports and stimulates learning in a complex web of influence described as a "constellation." LITA and the other researchers provide compelling evidence that student achievement is heightened in an environment with high quality arts education offerings and a school climate supportive of active and productive learning. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Why the Arts Change the Learning Experience When well taught, the arts provide young people with authentic learning experiences that engage their minds, hearts, and bodies. The learning experiences are real and meaningful for them. While learning in other disciplines may often focus on development of a single skill or talent, the arts regularly engage multiple skills and abilities. Engagement in the arts — whether the visual arts, dance, music, theatre or other disciplines — nurtures the development of cognitive, social, and personal competencies. Although the Champions of Change researchers conducted their investigations and presented their findings independently, a remarkable consensus exists among their findings: ■ The arts reach students who are not otherwise being reached. Young people who are disengaged from schools and other community institutions are at the greatest risk of failure or harm. The researchers found that the arts provided a reason, and sometimes the only reason, for being engaged with school or other organizations. These young people would otherwise be left without access to any community of learners. The studies concerning ArtsConnection, CAPE, and learning during non-school hours are of particular significance here. ■ The arts reach students in ways that they are not otherwise being reached. Other recent educational research has produced insights into different styles of learning. This research also addresses examples of young people who were considered classroom failures, perhaps "acting out" because conventional classroom practices were not engaging them. These "problem" students often became the high-achievers in arts learning settings. Success in the arts became a bridge to learning and eventual success in other areas of learning. The ArtsConnection study provides case studies of such students; the "Learning In and Through the Arts" research examines the issue of learner self-perception in great depth. ■ The arts connect students to themselves and each other. Creating an artwork is a personal experience. The student draws upon his or her personal resources to generate the result. By engaging his or her whole person, the student feels invested in ways that are deeper than "knowing the answer." Beyond the individual, Steve Seidel and Dennie Palmer Wolf show how effective arts learning communities are formed and operated. James Catterall also describes how the attitudes of young people toward one another are altered through their arts learning experiences. ■ The arts transform the environment for learning. When the arts become central to the learning environment, schools and other settings become places of discovery. According to the Teachers College research team and those examining the CAPE schools, the very school culture is changed, and the conditions for learning are improved. Figurative walls between classrooms and disciplines are broken down. Teachers are renewed. Even the physical appearance of a school building is transformed through the representations of learning. The Heath research team also found "visible" changes in nonschool settings. ■ The arts provide learning opportunities for the adults in the lives of young people. Those held responsible for the development of children and youth — teachers, parents, and other adults — are rarely given sufficient or significant opportunities for their own continuing education. With adults participating in lifelong learning, young people gain an understanding that learning in any field is a never-ending process. The roles of the adults are also changed — in effective programs, the adults become coaches — active facilitators of learning. Heath and other researchers here describe the altered dynamics between young and less young learners. CHAM PI DNS DF CHANGE ■ The arts provide new challenges for those students already considered successful. Boredom and complacency are barriers to success. For those young people who outgrow their established learning environments, the arts can offer a chance for unlimited challenge. In some situations described in the research, older students may also teach and mentor younger students. In others, young people gain from the experience of working with professional artists. The ArtsConnection researchers in general, and James Catterall in particular, explored the impact of intensive involvement in specific art disciplines. ■ The arts connect learning experiences to the world of real work. The world of adult work has changed, and the arts learning experiences described in the research show remarkable consistency with the evolving workplace. Ideas are what matter, and the ability to generate ideas, to bring ideas to life and to communicate them is what matters to workplace success. Working in a classroom or a studio as an artist, the young person is learning and practicing future workplace behaviors. A company is a company, whether producing an opera or a breakthrough technological service. How the Arts Change the Learning Experience The programs and schools examined by the Champions of Change researchers were selected because they appeared to be models of excellence that were making a real difference to young people. Their research helps us identify the principles and require- ments that make these arts learning models work. By helping to better define the characteristics of effective arts learning programs, the Champions of Change researchers have also done a great service. Education reformers and researchers have learned a great deal about "what works" in recent years. In examining the work of Shakespeare & Company, Steve Seidel cites the general characteristics of "project- based learning" as factors that also support effective arts learning. In Real Learning, Real Work, author Adria Steinberg identifies six elements that are critical to the design of project-based learning: authenticity, academic rigor, applied learning, active exploration, adult relationships, and assessment practices. Seidel also emphasizes that the best assessment of a person's understanding is a product that "puts that under- standing to work." Learning is deepest when learners have the capacity to represent what they have learned, and the multiple disciplines of the arts all provide modes of representation. The quality arts learning experiences described by the Champions of Change researchers regularly contain these project-based learning elements. The best programs display them in great breadth and depth. To be effective, the arts learning experience will also ■ Enable young people to have direct involvement with the arts and artists. Young people become and see themselves as artists. Whether creating art works, as in the Creating Original Opera program, or performing, as in the Fall Festival of Shakespeare program, or perhaps even teaching younger student artists, as in the ArtsConnection program, the students learn various disciplines through hands-on arts experiences. They actively engage with artistic content, materials, and methods. ■ Require significant staff development. The best teachers are life-long students. The teachers involved in the staff development programs examined by the Champions of Change researchers describe life-changing experiences that transform their professional lives. High-impact programs demand both adequate staff preparation and strong administrative support. Well-trained staff and teachers also become leaders for institutional and systemic change. ■ Support extended engagement in the artistic process. Opportunities to achieve artistic and learning excellence cannot be confined to forty-five minute EXECUTIV :».-HlSISMai time periods. Sustained engagement during individual sessions as well as expanded program length support enhanced learning opportunities. These learning experiences are also not limited to place; school is just one of many settings where this learning occurs. Superior results are also associated with the concept of "practice" and the development of a sense of "craft." ■ Encourage self-directed learning. Students learning in and through the arts become their own toughest critics. The students are motivated to learn not just for test results or other performance outcomes, but for the learning experience itself. According the to the ArtsConnection study, these learners develop the capacity to experience "flow," self- regulation, identity, and resilience — qualities regularly associated with personal success. ■ Promote complexity in the learning experience. Students who might otherwise complain of boredom become fully challenged. Unlike other learning experiences that seek right or wrong answers, engage- ment in the arts allows for multiple outcomes. Seidel found that when "refusing to simplify" Shakespeare's challenging texts, students became passionately engaged in learning classic works which high schoolers so often consider boring. Effective learning in the arts is both complex and multi-dimensional. ■ Allow management of risk by the learners. Rather than see themselves as "at-risk," students become managers of risk who can make decisions concerning artistic outcomes and even their lives. The students learn to manage risk through "permission to fail," according to the Shakespeare & Company study, and then take risks "to intensify the quality of their interactions, products, and performances," according to Heath and her colleagues. ■ Engage community leaders and resources. Another recent study, Gaining the Arts Advantage: Lessons from School Districts That Value Arts Education, found that "the single most critical factor in sustaining arts education in (their) schools is the active involvement of influential segments of the community in shaping and implementing the policies and programs of the district." Similarly, effective arts learning out of school also requires the active engagement of the community. The CAPE and Heath studies show a process that attracts and builds on this engagement from parents and other commu- nity members. Policy Implications of the Champions of Change Research The Champions of Change studies examined the messy, often hard-to-define real world of learning, both in and out of schools. As a result, these research findings have immediate relevance for both policy and practice in American education today. For example, if we now know that arts experi- ences help level the educational playing field for disadvantaged students, as revealed by James Catterall, then we need to bring more proven arts learning resources to these students. If arts learning can help energize or re-energize the teaching workforce, as described by Steve Seidel, then we must look to the arts both as a vehicle for preparing entrants to the teaching profession and as a means of supporting its more-experienced members. Looking beyond class- rooms, Shirley Brice Heath found the profound impact the arts can have on learning for youth outside school settings. If this is so, we must expand quality arts learning programs outside of schools as well. In the CAPE model, the researchers find that arts learning can have a defined impact on the academic performance of students in an urban setting. If well- constructed partnerships between school and arts organizations can increase student achievement, then such partnerships must be nurtured and replicated. In another urban program, ArtsConnection researchers define the role of the arts in enabling students to overcome obstacles to success; again, such experiences should be made more widely available. Researcher Dennie Palmer Wolf describes the impact of group HAM PI D N S DF CHANGE versus individual learning generated through a collaborative arts experience. For this approach to grow, a more serious commitment to developing communities of arts learners, rather than just oppor- tunities for "stars," is required. If sustained, integrated, and complex projects, like producing an opera, a Shakespeare production, or a visual arts exhibition, significantly deepen the learning process, as these studies suggest, then school schedules must also be modified to make such experiences possible. The findings of the individual research studies are worthy of the reader's careful review. We owe a great debt to these researchers for their diligence and insights; we can only repay this debt by heeding their words and seeking systemic ways to make the arts a meaningful part of every American child's life. Together, we can make the everyday learning experiences of young Americans less ordinary and more extraordinary. CONCLUSION These Champions of Change studies demonstrate how involvement with the arts provides unparalleled opportunities for learning, enabling young people to reach for and attain higher levels of achievement. The research provides both examples and evidence of why the arts should be more widely recognized for its current and potential contributions to the improve- ment of American education. Similarly, the experiences we offer too many young people outside of school are often limited in their purpose and resulting impact. They provide recreation, but no sense of creation. They provide recess, but no sense of success. Arts learning outside of schools can also enhance the sense of accomplishment and well- being among our young people. This research provides compelling evidence that the arts can and do serve as champions of change in learning. Yet realizing the full potential of learning in and through the arts for all American children will require heroic acts from all segments of our society. With the 21st century now upon us, we, too, must be champions of change; we must meet and exceed the challenge of giving our young people the best possible preparation we can offer them. To do so, we must make involvement with the arts a basic part of their learning experiences. In doing so, we will become champions for our children and their children. Involvement in the Arts and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement In Music and Theater Arts JAMES S. CATTERALL RICHARD CHAPLEAU JOHN IWANAGA The Imagination Project at UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, September 1999 CHAMPIONS DF CHANGE INTRODUCTION This report presents results from our work during the past two years exploring interactions between the arts and human development and achievement. This research enlists the National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS:88)\ a panel study which has followed more than 25,000 students in American secondary schools for 10 years. The work addresses developments for children and adolescents over the period spent between the 8th and 12th grades, i.e. late middle school through high school. The first phase of the work examines involvement in the arts generally — across all disciplines. The second phase examines the potential importance of sustained involvement in a single discipline, here using instru- mental music and the theater arts as case examples. We focus on these two arts disciplines because of related research suggesting links between music and cognitive development and between drama and theater in education and various skill and attitude developments. Our findings, presented in more detail below, can be summarized in three main sets of observations: ( 1 ) Involvement in the arts and academic success. Positive academic developments for children engaged in the arts are seen at each step in the research — between 8th and 10th grade as well as between 10th and 12th grade. The comparative gains for arts-involved youngsters generally become more pronounced over time. Moreover and more important, these patterns also hold for children from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds: 2 (2) Music and mathematics achievement. Students who report consistent high levels of involvement in instrumental music over the middle and high NELS:88 is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics at the Office for Educational Research and Improvement, United States Department of Education. The data and code books are available in various forms on CD Rom media for public use. SES, or socioeconomic status, is a measure of family education level, income, and type of job(s) held by parents. school years show significantly higher levels of mathematics proficiency by grade 12. This observa- tion holds both generally and for low SES students as a subgroup. In addition, absolute differences in measured mathematics proficiency between students consistently involved versus not involved in instrumental music grow significantly over time. (3) Theater arts and human development. Sustained student involvement in theater arts (acting in plays and musicals, participating in drama clubs, and taking acting lessons) associates with a variety of developments for youth: gains in reading profi- ciency, gains in self concept and motivation, and higher levels of empathy and tolerance for others. Our analyses of theater arts were undertaken for low SES youth only. Our presumption was that more advantaged youngsters would be more likely to be involved in theater and drama because of attendance at more affluent schools and because of parental ability to afford theater opportunities in the community or private sectors. We turn first to a brief summary of our initial release of data from this project and then to presenta- tions of some of the important observations from the later research. I. Initial Findings - Involvement in the Arts Generally and Student Academic Outcomes In mid 1997 we released a report of the effects of involvement in the visual and performing arts on student achievement in middle and high school. Published in the Americans for the Arts monograph series as "Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School," 3 this analysis was based on a multi- year survey of more than 25,000 students sponsored by the United States Department of Education. The sample was created to be representative of the nation's population of secondary students. Our study James S. Catterall, Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School. Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts monograph series, No. 9, 1998. INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT offered the first reported analysis of information in the NELS:88 survey about student participation in the arts. We used a definition of "involvement in the arts" that gave students credit for taking arts-related classes in or out of school as well as involvement and leadership in school activities such as theater, band, orchestra, chorus, dance, and the visual arts. Our analyses found substantial and significant differences in achievement and in important attitudes and behaviors between youth highly involved in the arts on the one hand, and those with little or no arts engage- ment on the other hand. In addition — and more signifi- cant from a policy standpoint — the achievement differences between high- and low-arts youth were also significant for economically disadvantaged students. Twenty of the differences we found favoring arts-involved students were significant at the p<.001 level. (This means that the odds of the differences being caused by pure chance were smaller than one in one thousand.) Four differences were significant at the p<.01 level. The only difference not significant was performance on the history geography tests for low SES children. Figure 1 shows some of the key differences we found between students highly involved in the arts and non-involved students, both for all students in the NELS sample and for the low SES quartile respectively. The figure includes both academic measures and also indicators of students' regard for community service and measures of their television watching habits. Figure 1 shows consistently more favorable outcomes for students involved in the arts — higher achievement, staying in school, and better attitudes Figure 1: Comparisons of High Arts vs. Low Arts Students in Grades 8 and 10, All vs Low SES Background Grade 8 Academic Performance All Students Low SES Students High Arts Low Arts High Arts Low Arts Earning mostly As and Bs in English 79.2% 64.2% 64.5% 56.4% Scoring in top 2 quartiles on std. tests 66.8% 42.7% 29.5% 24.5% Dropping out by grade 10 1.4% 4.8% 6.5% 9.4% Bored in school half or most of the time 42.2% 48.9% 41.0% 46.0% Grade 10 Academic Performance Scoring in top 2 quartiles, Grade 10 72.5% 45.0% 41.4% 24.9% Std. Test Composite Scoring in top 2 quartiles in Reading 70.9% 45.1% 43.8% 28.4% Scoring in top 2 quartiles in History, 70.9% 46.3% 41.6% 28.6% Citizenship, Geography Grade 10 Attitudes and Behaviors Consider community service important or 46.6% 33.9% 49.2% 40.7% very important Television watching, weekdays percentage watching 1 hour or less 28.2% 15.1% 16.4% 13.3% percentage watching 3 hours or more 20.6% 34.9% 33.6% 42.0% C HAM PIDNS DF CHANGE about school and community. We also see marked differences in television watching habits, where arts involved youngsters watch considerably less. Both our earlier and present efforts provide evidence that achievement differences favoring young- sters involved in the arts are not simply a matter of parent income and education levels, which do tend to line up with children having more visual and perform- ing arts in their lives. Another result, as we spell out in more detail below, is that consistent involvement in the arts shows up in increased advantages for arts-rich youngsters over time, through 10th grade in our first analyses and through 12th grade in our later studies. Summarizing early results. A case for the importance of the arts in the acade- mic lives of middle and early high schoolers was the primary suggestion of our earlier research. The research did not definitively explain the differences shown, nor was it able to attribute student successes unequivocally to the arts. This caution rises in large part because panel studies are not well suited to unambiguous causal modeling. Nonetheless, the differences were striking, and the chief confounding variable, student family background, was reasonably accounted-for in the work. There are several theoretical rationales for why the arts might matter in the ways suggested. A previ- ous work by the first author explores much of this ground and points to distinct possibilities. 4 These are grouped into major categories including the various roles that the arts play in promoting cognitive devel- opment — from specific relations such as the influence of music on perception and comprehension in mathematics to the more general roles of imagery and representation in cognition. The arts serve to broaden access to meaning by offering ways of thinking and ways of representation consistent with the spectrum of intelligences scattered unevenly across our popula- tion — for example, resonating with the multiple and differing intelligences identified by Howard Gardner 4 See Jaye T. Darby and James S. Catterall. The fourth R: The arts and learning. Teachers College Record, (1995). at Harvard. 5 The arts have also shown links to student motivation and engagement in school, attitudes that contribute to academic achievement. 6 Arts activities also can promote community — advancing shared purpose and team spirit required to perform in an ensemble musical group or dramatic production, or to design and paint an urban mural. With community surely comes empathy and general attachment to the larger values of the school and the adult society which high school students will soon join. Readers will note that we do not address here anything having to do with achievement in the arts per se, itself an important domain apart from any connections between the arts and more traditional academic success. The NELS: 88 data base shows a marked absence of indicators of achievement in the arts — a problem that should not go unnoticed as future national longitudinal surveys are planned. Finally, even in the absence of causal attributions yet to be proved, the perspectives we show elicit another reason to promote more involvement in the arts for more youngsters. This is the likely positive peer associa- tions accompanying involvement in the arts. Our analysis of the NELS:88 survey established, for the first time in any comprehensive way, that students involved in the arts are doing better in school than those who are not — for whatever constellation of reasons. Compendia of research on academic achievement going back three decades and more argue that the motivation and success of one's peers has an influence on how a youngster does in school. At very least, even our early comparisons support the contention that rubbing shoulders with 5 See Howard Gardner: Frames of Mind (New York: Basic Books), 1983; and The Arts and Human Development (New York: John Wiley), 1973. 6 See Morrison Institute of Public Policy and The National Endowment for the Arts: Schools, Communities, and the Arts: A Research Compendium. Tempe, AZ: The Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Arizona State University and the National Endowment for the Arts (1995). Especially summary of report on the National Longitudinal Study of Different Ways of Knowing (The Galef Institute, Los Angeles). See also the monograph reporting evaluations of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education/this volume. INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT arts-involved youngsters in the middle and high school years is typically a smart idea when it comes to choosing friends and activities. More Recent Findings Grants to the Imagination Project at UCLA from the GE Fund in September of 1997 and December of 1998 supported extensions of this research. There were three general priorities for the newly-funded work: One priority was to extend the analyses describing developments up to grade 10 through the balance of high school and beyond. We here report results through grade 12. A second priority was to begin to conceptualize involvement in the arts in ways that could capture the potential value of "depth" of involvement. Our earlier work relied on measures of involvement that tended to reward widespread involvement over many artistic pursuits; the most "involved" students in our first study were largely those who attached themselves vigorously to several disciplines. There are good reasons, however, to believe that intensive involvement in a single discipline would act differently than scattered attention to diverse artistic endeavors. This is because different effects are touted for different arts disciplines, and depth of involvement in one might be expected to intensify particular effects. A third priority for the research was to explore possible connections between involvement in music and cognitive development. Much interest has been gener- ated by recent studies in neuroscience linking certain types of music training with positive developments in cognitive functioning. (We refer here especially to various studies of Gordon Shaw, Frances Rauscher, and others over the past 6 years described below.) Our first effort to explore the impact of depth of experience in the arts focused on students who reported sustained involvement in instrumental music, blending priorities two and three. Our second effort was to examine students who reported sustained involvement in the theater arts. The theoretical ratio- nales for inquiry aimed at theatre derive largely from a literature focused on theater in education and drama in the classroom produced mainly over several decades of research and scholarly writing in Great Britain. Extending Analyses of Effects of Involvement in the Arts through Grade 12 Involvement in the Arts as of Grade 12. Before examining outcomes, we first found that levels of student involvement in the arts declined between grades 10 and 12. As of the spring of the senior year, twelfth graders fell off in reported involvement in the arts when compared to grade 10. For example, whereas 22.7 percent of 10th graders reported involvement in band or orchestra and 23.3 percent showed involvement in chorus or choir, fewer than 20 percent showed involve- ment in any school musical group by grade 12, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2 also shows that the percentages of students taking out-of-school classes in music, art, or dance also declined markedly between grades 10 and 12. Especially notable is the drop from more than 1 1 percent to fewer than 3 percent of students taking daily out of school lessons in grade 10 versus grade 12. Figure 2: Percentages of Students Involved in Arts Related Activities Reported in the NELS:88 Data Base, Grade 12 vs. Grade 10. Grade 12 Grade 10 Participates in: School Music Group 19.5% Band or Orchestra 22.7% School Play/Musical 15.0 Chorus or Choir 23.3% Takes out-of-school classes in Music, Art, or Dance: Takes out-of-school classes in Music, Art, or Dance: rarely or never 85.9% rarely or never: 74.2% less than 1/week 4.2 less than 1/week 5.8 1-2 per week 7.4 1-2 per week 8.6 every day or almost 2.5 every day or almost 11.3 C HAMPI a DF CHANGE High- Versus Low- Arts Involvement and General Student Performance. One of our objectives in the latest phase of this research was to extend earlier analyses through grade 12. In Figure 3, we recount key observed differences between high-and low-arts involved students as of grades 8 and 10, and then show differences accruing through grade 12. As seen in Figure 3, performance differences between arts-involved and non-involved students remained about the same across grade levels in nominal terms — showing up typically as 16 to 18 percentage point differences. For example, the percentage of low- arts students scoring in the top half of the standardized test distribution was 47.5 percent in grade 10, while 65.7 percent of high-arts students scored above the test score median — an 18.2 percentage point difference at that grade level. At grade 12, the respective figures are 39.3 and 57.4 percent, an 18.1 percentage point difference. Within the general trends in achievement differ- ences, it can be seen that the relative advantage of involvement in the arts increased appreciably over time. This is shown in the relative sizes of the sub- groups doing well from the arts-involved and non- involved groups respectively, which grow over time. By the 12th grade, the nominal 18 percentage point difference amounts to a 46 percent advantage for the high-arts group where 57.4 percent scored well compared to 39.3 percent from the low-arts group (57.4/39.3 = 1.46 or a 46 percent advantage). Figure 4 shows what the comparative achievement advantages for involvement in the arts look like over Figure 3. Involvement in the Arts and Academic Performance 8th Grade % in each group High Involvement Low Involvement Earning mostly As and Bs in English 82.6% 67.2% Top 2 quartiles on std. tests 67.3% 49.6% Dropping out by grade 10 1.4% 3.7% Bored in school half or most of time 37.9% 45.9% 10th Grade % in each group High Involvement Low Involvement Top 2 quartiles std. tests 65.7% 47.5% Top 2 quartiles Reading 64.7% 45.4% Level 2 (high) Reading Proficiency 61.0% 43.5% Top 2 quartiles History/Geography/Citizenship 62.9% 47.4% 12th Grade % in each group High Involvement Low Involvement Top 2 quartiles std tests 57.4% 39.3% Top 2 quartiles Reading 56.5% 37.7% Level 2 or 3 (high) Reading Proficiency 58.8% 42.9% Top 2 quartiles History/Geography/Citizenship 54.6% 39.7% it:.. tttitti ■..' ,;,, :;,.,. INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT time for all students; all group differences (except the history/geography test for low SES students) are significant at greater than a 99 percent confidence level. Most remain significant at the .999 confidence level. Figure 4. Comparative Advantages in Composite Test Scores, High vs. Low Arts, Grades 8 through 12 0.5 8th 1 0th GRADE LEVEL 12th This general pattern of increasing advantages is replicated for various measures in addition to compos- ite test scores — meaning that high arts youngsters did comparatively better on multiple measures as they passed from grade 8 to grade 12. Socio-Economic Status and Involvement in the Arts As shown in Figure 5 below, we continue to find substantial differences in the family income and education levels between our high arts and low arts groups. The probability of being "high arts" remains almost twice as high for students from economically advantaged families, and the probability of low arts involvement is about twice as high if one comes from an economically disadvantaged family. This is why the following analyses of achievement restricted to low SES students are very important. Not only are achievement issues typically more profound for children from families with less education and fewer economic resources, but high SES children simply have more opportunities to be involved in the arts. When we compare groups of students by arts involvement only, the differences are more likely to be caused by differ- ences in family background than anything else. Figure 5: Probability of High vs. Low Arts Involvement by Student SES Probability of High Arts Involvement High SES Quartile Low SES Quartile Probability of Low Arts Involvement .320 .178 High SES Quartile Low SES Quartile .197 .385 Achievement Differences, Low SES Students Here we begin with our findings concerning grade 8, grade 10, and grade 12 performance differences within the low SES quartile — the fourth of all students at the bottom of the family income and education ladder. This group represents families where parents typically graduated from high school and went no further with their education, as well as families where parents never finished high school. As shown in Figure 6, the patterns shown for low SES students over time bear similarities to those shown for all students. The percentage differences in perfor- mance are smaller in nominal terms — for example 8 to 10 percent lower for test scores. But once again, the relative advantage for arts-involved youngsters increases over the middle and high school years, and especially between grades 10 and 12. Figure 7 on the following page illustrates this pattern for composite standardized test scores where the comparative advantage for high arts, low-SES, youngsters is about 32 percent by grade 12: C HAM PI O N S DF CHANGE Figure 6: Involvement in the Arts and Academic Performance and Attitudes, Low SES Students (Low Parent Education/Income) 8th Grade % in each group High Involvement Low Involvement Top 2 quartiles std tests 37.7% 29.8% Mostly As and Bs in English 71.4% 58.8% Dropping out by grade 10 3.5% 6.5% Bored in school half or most of time 32.9% 40.1% 10th Grade % in each group High Involvement Low Involvement Top 2 quartiles std tests 35.2% 28.1% Top 2 quartiles reading 37.3% 28.7% Level 2 Reading Proficiency 39.6% 29.2% Top 2 quartiles History/Geography/Citizenship 34.8% 30.4% 12th Grade % in each group High Involvement Low Involvement Top 2 quartiles std tests 30.9% 23.4% Top 2 quartiles reading 32.9% 23.6% Top 2 quartiles History/Geography/Citizenship 30.7% 25.2% Level 2 or 3 Reading Proficiency 37.9% 30.4% Figure 7. Comparative Advantages, High vs. Low Arts, Low SES Students, Grades 8-12, Standardized Test Scores 0.35- 0.00 8th 1 0th GRADE LEVEL 12th This concludes our presentation concerning differences between students generally highly involved in the arts as compared to their non-involved peers. The main points of the analysis so far are that arts- involved students do better on many measures, their performance advantages grow over time, and that these two general performance comparisons also hold for low SES children. We will probe these findings in more detail in the discussion concluding this monograph. We turn now to two cases of intensive involvement in specific arts disciplines. ..sif::;: INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT II. Intensive Involvement Within an Arts Discipline. The Cases of Instrumental Music and Drama/Theater. A new strain of our work, and a departure from our first monograph which adopted a more general orientation to involvement in the arts, is a study of youngsters who exhibit very high levels of involvement within a single arts discipline over the secondary school years. Readers may recall that the analyses reported above were built on a conception of involvement defined as "the more involvement in more arts, the higher the student's involvement score." As such, a student who only participated in an orchestra and took music lessons, no matter how intensively, would not have been a high-arts student in our first analyses. Yet intensive involvement in a single discipline should probably be thought to be even more important developmentally than high levels of more diverse involvement in the arts. This is surely true if specific arts act in specific ways on cognition or other develop- ments. That is an assumption we are comfortable making and could defend at some length. In general, the argument is that different art forms involve differ- ent skills and different sorts of human interaction. In short, they impact cognitive and motor processes differently and should be expected to result in different outcomes. We will save a more in-depth discussion of this for another paper. Involvement in Instrumental Music Involvement in Instrumental Music and Cognitive Development in Mathematics. We were interested in exploring involvement in music because of accumu- lated studies over the past 7-8 years suggesting that certain kinds of musical experiences, especially key- board training, seem to produce effects on cognitive functioning in young children. Other potentially important aspects of the musical experience are learning to read music and to associate musical notation with abstract concepts of time, rhythm, and pitch. These experiences at first glance appear to involve forms of mathematical reasoning — the fractional senses of different musical notes (whole notes, half notes, and so on), the relative distances of notes within scales, the perfect doubles and halves in the pitch frequencies of octaves, and even the relations among dynamics within a musical passage. For some musical instruments, such as the piano, there is an associated geometry of music that probably reinforces the spatial-temporal reasoning effects noted by Rauscher et al. For other instruments, such as the strings, there are complex linear geometries associated with pitch that bring spatial reasoning to the production of musical sounds and phrases. What has research on music suggested? While it would appear that the domains of music and mathe- matics are widely divergent, an increasing number of studies focusing on participation in musical activity and cognitive development in mathematics suggest that the two are closely related. An important skill developed while a child begins the study of music is reading musical notation, the symbol system which represents elements of rhythm and pitch, the funda- mental building blocks of music. It is the analysis of music at this basic level which reveals the most obvious connection between music and mathematics (Bahna-James, 1991). Rhythm, here defined as a numerical pattern of beats occurring over time, is represented by a series of notes ranging from whole notes (usually 1 beat per measure) to quarter notes (4 beats per measure) to eighth, sixteenth and even 32nd and 64th notes. Two fundamental mathematical skills are required in order to understand the time meaning represented in a note: the ability to count beats, which allows for an under- standing of the absolute value of a note in a measure, and general fractional or proportional sense, which allows for an understanding of each note type in relation to the other. A second feature depicted by musical notation is pitch or frequency, which denotes the relative tonal distances between notes within scales, chords, and intervals. These relationships in and of themselves are abstract and difficult to conceptualize; the use of musical instruments such as the violin, clarinet, or piano C H AMPI DNS DF CHANGE helps make these tonal relationships concrete. The keyboard in particular has been singled out in research by Rauscher and Shaw (1997) on spatial-temporal reasoning as a form of reasoning ability postulated to directly affect mathematical understanding. The results from their work show that keyboard training is a more effective intervention on spatial-temporal reasoning skills than singing lessons and computer training and suggest that mastering a musical instrument aids in developing mathematical understanding. Initial studies correlating the grades of secondary school students in music theory and math classes (Bahna- James, 1991) as well as teacher evaluation of instrumental and scholastic achievement for elementary school students (Klinedinst, 1991) revealed a variety of significant relationships between mathematics achieve- ment and music performance. These included sight- singing and arithmetic, algebra and geometry; pitch and arithmetic; and finally tonal relationships and arithmetic and algebra. The work by Bahna-James ( 1991) further showed that the correlation between math grades and music theory grades of secondary school students increases when the mathematics being taught is of a more elementary level and the numerical relationships are simple. Some findings provide additional support for the notion that the fundamental components of music are inherently mathematical in nature. Research by Shaw et al. (Boettcher, Hahn & Shaw, 1994; Grandin, Peterson & Shaw, 1998; Graziano, Shaw & Wright, 1997; Rauscher & Shaw, 1997, Rauscher & Shaw, 1998) drawing in part from the seminal work of Chase 8c Simon (1973) on how chess experts process information, has suggested that cognition in music, mathematics and complex games are activities driven by pattern recognition and manipulation, and as such are affected by spatial-temporal reasoning ability. Of particular interest is their study (mentioned above) which focuses on the effect of keyboard training on the spatial-temporal reasoning of young children as measured by a series of object assembly tasks. These assembly tasks require matching, classifying, and recognizing similarities and relationships among displayed objects. Keyboard training alone (rather than training in singing or simple arithmetic through the use of computer games) had a significant effect on chil- dren's ability to classify and recognize similarities and relationships between objects; this provides further evidence for the contention that at the most abstract level, music, like mathematics, requires the ability to recognize patterns and relations. Intensive Music Involvement in NELS:88. We here report our explorations of differences shown by students who were heavily involved in instrumental music throughout the first three panels of the NELS:88 survey — 8th, 10th and 12th grades. We add a word of caution at this point. Some of the studies discussed above were studies of music experiences in their natural state and their associations with spatial-temporal reasoning or mathematics-related learning. These were generally situations where there was no intention in the curriculum to bolster math-related skills; the researchers simply wondered if increased skills related to mathematics were a serendipitous byproduct of the music experience. Other studies were launched with the expressed intention of producing and tracking connections between learning in both the musical and mathematical domains. Both types of studies have found connections between music and mathematics cognition. Our work focuses on apparently serendipitous associations between reported involvement in instrumental music and reports of growth in mathe- matics proficiency for students. The following chart shows one early result of our work. We examined the probability that students in different groups — differing mainly by involvement in instrumental music — would attain the highest levels of mathematics proficiency on the 12th grade tests used in the NELS:88 study. We also differentiated our analyses by family income and education levels, or SES. In Figure 8 below, it can be seen that the overall probability of scoring high in mathematics (that is, the probability of such performance among all 12th grade students) is about 21 percent. These students score at Levels 4 and 5 on the NELS:88 mathematics test, performance levels indicative of strong success through INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Figure 8. Probability of Highest Math Proficiency (Levels 4 or 5), Grade 12, By Group — SES and Consistent High vs. No Involvement in Band/Orchestra High SES, High Music High SES, No Music D O Low SES, High Music O All Students Low SES, No Music 20 30 Probability at least three years of high school mathematics. From this baseline, the comparisons become quite interesting. First, all high SES students in our "high" and "no music" groups do better in mathematics than the average student. Second, within groups, students concentrating in instrumental music do substantially better in mathe- matics than those with no involvement in music. And third, low SES students with high involvement in music do better than the average student at attaining high levels of mathematics proficiency. The performance distribution for extremely low levels of mathematics proficiency, Level 1 and below, is a mirror opposite to the one shown in Figure 8. Do math skills grow over time with involvement in instrumental music? The NELS:88 data base allows for comparisons over time, an important feature in the creation of arguments addressing the causes of observed differ- ences between or among groups of interest. Here we observe how music-involved students compared with their non-music peers as of 8th grade and revisit the exact same students again in grade 12. Figure 9 shows performance level distributions for grade 8 groups of interest, including overall average scores, averages for all low SES students, averages of all low SES students with no music involvement, and low SES students with high involvement in orchestra and/or band. The levels shown refer to successively higher levels of proficiency, and they are scaled by specific skills and knowledge of test takers. (The NELS:88 test used here are criterion-referenced exams, like the tests used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) Their purpose is to gauge skill development against standards of performance and not to place students on some national norm scale. Level 3 would be Figure 9: Math Proficiency Scores at Grade 8, Percentages Scoring at Each Level Math Proficiency Scores v Below 1 Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Average Average-Low SES No Music-Low SES Orch/Band-Low SES N = 14,915 N = 7,052 N = I,2I6 N = 260 15.3 20.8 16.4 10.8 34.7 41.1 42.1 36.9 20.3 17.8 19.7 20.4 19.0 8.6 10.7 21.2 C HAM PI Q N S D F CHAN G E Figure 10. Math Proficiency Scores at Grade 12, Percentages Scoring at Each Level Math Profi cier •' Scores Average Average-Low S E S No Music-Low SES Orch Band-Low SES V N = I4.9!5 N = 7.052 1=1,211 N = 260 Below 1 4.7 6.4 5.3 1.9 Level 1 14.8 20.9 22.8 12.7 Level 2 8.9 10.5 13.1 13.5 Level 3 15.6 14.6 21.1 20.8 Level 4 18.3 10.9 14.5 30.4 Level 5 3.0 .9 1.0 2.7 considered high-performing at grade 8; Levels 4 and 5 would be considered high-performing at grade 12.) In Figure 9, it can be seen that twice as many low SES 8th graders in Band and/or Orchestra score at high levels in mathematics as did low SES 8th graders with no reported involvement in instrumental music — 21.2 percent versus only 10.7 percent For grade 8, the percentages of low SES students who would eventually show consistentiy high involvement in orchestra/band show math scores lower the average student, with about 10.8 percent of music-involved students scoring very low ( below Level 1) and 15.3 percent of all students scoring as poorly. By grade 12, the differentials increas- ingly favor students heavily involved in instrumental music, especially the percentages of students perform- ing at the highest levels (levels 4 and 5). Through summing percentages shown in Figure 10 for students performing at levels 4 and 5, we see that thirty three percent of high-music/low SES students test at high levels of mathematics proficiency. This 33.1 percent should be compared to only 21.3 percent for "all" students, and only 15.5 percent of no-music, low SES students who score at high levels in mathematics by grade 12. A most significant dynamic underlies the data in Figure 10. As of 8th grade, low SES, high-music youngsters perform on a par with the average student — about 21 percent at high math proficiency versus 19 percent for the average student. By 12th grade, the high performing gap between low SES, high-music students and the average student has grown to about 33 percent versus 21 percent. Figure 11 shows how the absolute performance gaps between the low SES students involved in music versus low SES non-music youth have grown consider- ably between grades 8 and 12. Figure 1 1 shows math proficiency developments for low SES youngsters in perspective. In the NELS sample, there were 260 low SES students who qualified Figure 11. Percentages of Students Scoring High Math Proficiency, by involvement level in instrumental music, Low SES 35% r~-. 25% ::~ 'z~ 10% 5% 0% Q Low SES , no music ' Low SES, high music 10.7 Grade 8 Grade 12 Grade and Music Involvement INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT as intensively involved in instrumental music over the span of grades 8 through 12. As of the 8th grade, these 260 students were outperforming the 1,216 low SES students with no music involvement in mathematics; about 20 versus 10 percent scored at the highest levels of the mathematics proficiency scale. By grade 12, these same 260 students were outperforming all low SES no-music students by a considerably larger margin — about 33 percent were at the highest levels of mathematics performance versus only 1 5 percent for their non-music peers. Involvement in Theater We turn here to another exploration of intensive involvement in a single artistic discipline, in this case the theater arts. Our interest in the theater arts grows from a history of scholarship exploring the meaning and importance of theater and drama in education over the past three decades. The central figures are number of prominent university faculty in Great Britain. The United Kingdom has been the setting for a substantial Theater in Education (or TIE) movement during this time. 7 TIE refers to theatrical companies taking up residencies of varying duration at schools, usually bringing produc- tions designed to provoke thought and discussion of important themes, as well as to entertain. There are also numerous devotees of "drama in education" in England, including many of the nation's elementary school teachers. This term refers to the use of drama in the classroom for various purposes — learning about history, conflict resolution, learning about oneself, learning stagecraft, learning acting, and so on. 8 Drama in education is formally recognized as a curricular tool in the current National Curriculum in Britain, although neither drama nor theater are required subjects. University teacher education faculties maintain lecture- ships and even a professorship or two in drama in See Jackson, Tony, Learning Through Theater: new perspectives on theater in education. Second edition. London: Routledge, 1993. See Bolton, Gavin, Drama as Education: an argument for placing drama at the center of the curriculum. Longman, 1984. education, so that teachers in training can learn to use dramatic forms in their future classrooms. Britain also boasts a remarkable individual, Dorothy Heathcote, who has become a legendary teacher trainer through a non- stop series of teacher workshops and residencies that have not slowed for 40 years, even as she enters her mid- 705. Ms. Heathcote advocates that teachers get into roles, along with their students, as they teach. She usually presents her workshops in role to make her points. In surveying what is known about the impact of theater and drama on children, Tony Jackson from the University of Manchester identifies "change of under- standing" as the general purpose. He goes on to emphasize that the changes of understanding can be about both form and content in theater. Children learn about the art form as well as about other ends related to personal or social development. Among the latter, Jackson enumerates learning about, "...group interac- tion, discipline, language usage, self esteem, and movement skills." 9 Heathcote reminds us also that drama provides situations where we can or must put ourselves into the place of another; thus empathy for others is a possible or even likely outcome of the dramatic experience. 10 The strength of evidence for specific impacts of theater and drama claimed by these and other scholars tends to be weak. Drama and theater are complex events with many possible effects. Even if it were feasible to design studies looking for the impact of theater experience on such things as actor self esteem or language facility, objections by artists about taking so narrow a view of the experience would likely interfere. In any event, what we tend most to benefit from is the accumulation of case studies 11 , and the informed observations of senior scholars who have been attached to TIE or drama in education and who have come to 9 Jackson, op. cit, p. 44. 10 O'Neill and Johnson, op.cit. p. 129. 11 Tony Jackson. Learning Through Theater: Essays and Casebooks on Theater in Education. Manchester: Manchester University, 1980. Also Dorothy Heathcote, Drama and Learning, Chapter in O'Neill and Johnson, op.cit. pp. 90-102. C HAM PI D N S DF CHANGE their own understanding through the gradual acquisi- tion of research and professional knowledge. We turn in a moment to our exploration of developments for middle and high-schoolers intensively involved in theater and drama. But we should begin by noting that the theater in education experiences on which we focus are not strictly those of central interest to scholars of drama and theater in education in the UK. The students in our study identified through NELS:88 data as intensively involved in theater are those who have attended a drama class once per week or more as of 8th grade, participated in a drama club as of 8th grade, taken drama coursework in grade 10, and participated in a school play or musical in grades 10 and 12. — or at least most of the above. Officers of these organizations were assigned extra "credit" toward intense involvement. As such, our drama and theater students were not necessarily associated with TIE (formal theater groups in residence on campus) or with drama in education (the use of dramatic forms in the individual class- room for various curricular purposes). These are the kingpins of drama and theater in education in Britain and the experiences generating our hypotheses for this exploration. Our interest centered on whether or not some of the claimed benefits of drama and theater from across the Atlantic show up in the NELS:88 data. Theater and Language Skills. NELS:88 does not contain a measure of spoken language skills, but the data do track the development of reading proficiency over each survey year. We examined the progression of reading skills for two groups of low SES students beginning in grade 8. One group had no involvement in theater, and the other group was highly involved in theater. (This group consisted of the 285 highest theater-involved, low SES students in the entire NELS:88 sample.) The pattern in the reading proficiency data is fairly clear. The involved students outscored the non- involved students as of 8th grade; both groups gain skill as they proceed through high school; and the difference favoring students involved in theater grows steadily to where nearly 20 percent more are reading at high proficiency by grade 12. (The advantage was only 9 percent back in grade 8.) This seems reasonable in that students involved in drama and theater, according to our definition of intensive involvement, Figure 12. Percentages of Students above median academic self concept by grade, Hi Dramatic Arts Involvement vs. no involvement; all low SES 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 47.8 Grade 8 Grade 10 I High Drama j No Drama Grade 12 INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT probably spend time reading and learning lines as actors, and possibly reading to carry out research on characters and their settings. In any case, theater is a language-rich environment and actively engages students with issues of language. Theater and Self Concept. Because the English researchers list self esteem as a corollary of engage- ment with drama and theater, we examined the progression of a general self-concept measure in NELS:88 over grades 8 through 12 and compared our theater-involved to non-involved low SES students. Figure 12 shows that the "high drama" group main- tained a small edge in self concept throughout the longitudinal study. Both groups gain over the four years involved, and a slightly bigger gap favoring those intensively involved in theater opened up by grade 12. (By grade 12, the difference shown in Figure 12 became significant (p<.058)). Involvement in theater and empathy and toler- ance. Dorothy Heathcote reminded us that a dramatic experience is an opportunity to put oneself into another's shoes. This is true when taking on a role; it is also true when, as a character in role, one labors to understand how another character encountered on stage has conceptualized and enacted his or her role, or to comprehend how his or her character is understood by others. Theater is loaded with potential opportuni- ties to interact with students to whom one might not gravitate in the ordinary course of school life, includ- ing students from other economic strata and other racial groups. This holds both for interactions in role and for interactions with other members of the cast as a play or scene or improvisation is developed. We found two indicators related to "tolerance" and "empathy" in NELS:88 and show the results on the following pages. Once again, we are comparing low SES students, one group with no involvement in theater and the other with high involvement over all of the high school years. Race relations. The first indicator is shown in Figure 13. This reflects student responses to the question, "Are students friendly with other racial groups?" Students involved in theater are more likely than all 12th graders to say yes to this question, by 27 percent to 20 percent. This difference may be an effect of involvement in theater. It also may be an artifact of unknown differences in schools attended by students where theater programs are offered. For other unknown reasons, relations among racial groups may be more positive at the schools of our high-theater involvement students. This difference is not statisti- cally significant, in part an artifact of the small low- SES, high-theater sample. A similar perspective is shown in Figure 14 on the following page. Here students at grade 10 were asked if it was OK to make a racist remark. About 40 percent more "no-drama" students felt that making such a remark would be OK, where only about 12 percent of high theater students thought the same, and about 17 percent of no theater students agreed. In this case, the advantage favoring high-theater students is statistically significant (p<.05). Figure 13: Are students friendly with other racial groups? Students in lowest 2 SES quartiles. 30% 25% 20% All Students High Drama Involvement in Drama/Theatre CHAMPIDNS DF CHANGE Figure 14. Percentage of 10th Graders feel it's OK to make Racist Remark 20% 15% 10% All SES I or 2 SES I or 2 High Drama Involvement in Drama/Theatre As with the data bearing on students "getting along" with others of different races (Figure 13), what is shown in Figure 14 may indicate an effect of involvement in theater and it may also be influenced by unknown school differences. Discussion The kinds of comparisons and analyses shown above are sure to provoke several kinds of questions surrounding the meaning of the data and the approach we took to examining and displaying the figures. In this concluding section, we attempt to anticipate some of these questions and also to suggest the implications of what we report. Are our conceptions of the arts too concerned with non-arts outcomes? The purpose of this research was to examine some of the non-arts outcomes of engagement in the arts. Because we chose this purpose does not mean that we do not recognize or value the myriad goals that education in and involvement in the arts serve. Certainly involvement in the broad spec- trum of arts captured in our more general assessment will mean many things to students that we did not set out to capture. Not the least of these are skills in the various arts themselves, competencies as critics of art forms, aesthetic awarenesses, cultural understandings, appreciations valuable in their own right, and new- found powers and joys to see and express. Our analysis of involvement in instrumental music captured a sense of this activity that is clearly not an intentional part of music instruction or participation for many. It just happens that research is suggesting links between music and mathematics reasoning that we took the opportunity to explore. A larger case for instrumentality connected to theater and drama has been articulated in the writings and research of English scholars, and we explored a handful of such possibilities through NELS:88 data. So yes, this analysis is concerned with non-arts outcomes of the arts in education. For now, we save research on the arts-related goals of arts education and participation in the arts for other scholars and to us, for a future date. What can be said about causation in this analysis? Establishing causation in education and social science research is difficult. The essential question that should be aimed at this type of work is what evidence supports contentions that involvement in the arts, or music, or theater "caused" the differences in groups reported above. Any convictions that causation is involved depend mainly on three elements of the research — sound theory, supportive evidence, and ruling out rival explanations. First is the presence of a sound theory consistent with explanations that the arts should matter. In the case of all three of our analyses, we built our instincts around previous research suggestive of causal propositions. The strength of the case is perhaps most developed in the instance of music and mathematics-related cognitive development. Incidental benefits of theater have been argued and studied in the UK for decades. The general effects of broad involvement in the arts are supported most by research that has shown that children are more INVOLVEMENT IN THE i\ Q- 30 Expression Risk Taking ] High-Arts Group Q Low-Arts Group Imagination CHAMPIDNS DF CHAN GE risks in their thinking as they try out new and unex- plored arenas of learning. We also speculated that the arts, by their very nature, require a great deal of collaboration and cooperation in their creation. Even the visual arts, usually thought of as solitary activities, can involve youngsters in collaborative enterprises such as painting murals and scenery, producing books, and organizing exhibitions. Pupils involved in arts learning come to know first-hand what it means to share and learn from each other. Unlike other school subjects, the arts present a public face to learning. Paintings can be seen, music heard, and dance and drama experienced by everyone. Learning in the arts inevitably involves some measure of willingness to perform or display publicly, to reveal accomplishments, to garner appreciation, and to learn from the critiques of others. Arts Involvement and Perceptions of Self as Learner The data revealed some interesting differences in the children's own perceptions of themselves as learners. High-arts youngsters were far more likely than their low-arts counterparts to think of them- selves as competent in academics. They were also far more likely to believe that they did well in school in general, particularly in language and mathematics. (See Figure 3) As with other findings, these results were vali- dated by our observations of classrooms and in conversations with teachers and administrators. They confirmed that youngsters exposed to strong arts education acquire a sense of confidence in themselves that radiates beyond the studios and performance spaces. (See Figure 4) One might also speculate that the kind of persistence that it takes to be successful in the arts, particularly in the processes and organization required to represent thoughts and ideas, would have general cross-curriculum relevance. Arts Involvement and School Climate Administrators and teachers in high-arts schools attributed many positive features of their in-school climate to the arts. We found that schools with strong arts programs had supportive administrators who played a central role in ensuring the continuity and depth of provision. They encouraged teachers to take risks, learn new skills, and broaden their curriculum. Figure 3: Arts Involvement and Perceptions of Self as Learner 50 15 Academic Self-Concept General School Self-Concept Reading Self-Concept Math Self-Concept ] High-Arts Group j Low-Arts Group LEARNING IN AND THROUGH THE ARTS Figure 4: SDQ-I (Self-Concept) Scores Compared to The Number of Years of In-School Arts SDQ-I Scores High-Arts Group Low-Arts Group Physical Ability S-C 29.65% 20.08% Physical Appearance S-C 27.40% 24.31% Peer Relations S-C 29.45% 23.26% Parent Relations S-C 35.17% 24.31% General Self-Concept 36.81% 27.48% Reading S-C 40.49% 20.08% Mathematics S-C 29.86% 15.43% General School S-C 35.79% 18.60% Total Non-Academic S-C 33.33% 24.31% Total Academic S-C 41.10% 17.76% Total S-C 34.15% 17.97% Similarly, we found specialist arts teachers who were confident in their pedagogy and practice, knowledge- able about pupils' abilities and personalities, innovative in their approaches to learning, and who also enjoyed collaborating with other arts specialists and teachers of other subjects. The findings of our study show that children in arts-rich schools are more likely than children in low- arts schools to have good rapport with their teachers. (See Figure 5) In a similar vein, the results show that teachers in arts-rich schools demonstrate more interest in their work and are more likely to become involved in professional development experiences. These teachers work in schools that favor change and experimentation. They also are more likely to be innovative in their teaching. The data on teacher affiliation show that such teachers tend to have good working relationships with other teachers in their school. In the high-arts settings, we found consider- able flexibility in curriculum design, with less empha- sis on conformity, formalization, or centralization. Finally, it should be noted that when we exam- ined our school sample for socio-economic status, we discovered that the results of our study were more firmly tied to rich arts provision than to high economic status. A great deal of data came from our interviews with specialist teachers in language, science, and mathemat- ics, as well as from our observations in classrooms and attendance at exhibitions and performances. While Figure 5: Arts Involvement and School Climate 100 38 38 Teacher Affiliation Student Support Professional Interest Innovative Teachers ' High-Arts Group J Low-Arts Group C HAM PI D N S DF CHANGE some of these data came from conversations and visits to our preliminary 28 schools, most of it came from our case studies in the four schools where we spent continuous time. These data were carefully coded according to their frequency across the entire sample, across each school, and in terms of their quality. These findings allowed us to expand on, and in many cases, clarify the meaning of our quantitative findings. Specific Dimensions of Ability We found in schools with high-arts provision that teachers spoke of the effects of arts learning along five specific dimensions of ability. These were the ability to: ■ Express ideas and feelings openly and thoughtfully; ■ Form relationships among different items of experience and layer them in thinking through an idea or problem; ■ Conceive or imagine different vantage points of an idea or problem and to work towards a resolution; ■ Construct and organize thoughts and ideas into meaningful units or wholes; and ■ Focus perception on an item or items of experi- ence, and sustain this focus over a period of time. Arts Competencies and Other Disciplines Taken together, our cumulative data offer a very evocative, complex, and multi-dimensional picture of arts learning. As we looked more closely at these data a consistent factor emerged, namely, that the appearance of arts competencies in other disciplines was found in contexts where, for example: ■ There was a need for pupils to figure out or elaborate on ideas on their own; ■ There was a need to structure and organize thinking in light of different kinds of experiences; ■ Knowledge needed to be tested or demonstrated in new and original ways; and ■ Learning involved task persistence, ownership, empathy, and collaboration with others. For instance, these competencies were called upon when a theory in science could be understood more fully through the construction of a three dimensional mobile; or when a mathematical problem could be approached more easily through a closely observed drawing of a shell; or when a Pythagorean theorem became clear through the creation of a drama con- fronting social class; or when a moral dilemma could be focused more fully through the creation of an opera. In subjects such as science, mathematics, and language, invitations to accommodate conflicting ideas, to formulate new and better ways of representing thoughts, and to take risks and leaps call forth a complex of cognitive and creative capacities. These capacities are typical of arts learning. Indeed, what is particularly interesting about this grouping of responses is that it reveals a rich interweaving of intuitive, practi- cal, and logical forms of thought at work advancing the range and depth of children's thinking. This kind of mix of intuitive and logical thinking is, of course, highly typical of most creative artists, scientists, and thinkers in general. At a more mundane level, it also characterizes how we deal with the challenges of everyday living! Relationship of Arts Learning to Other School Disciplines A number of recent studies have investigated the effects of learning in the arts upon other subjects. 5 Not only have the results of these investigations been unclear but they have been much in dispute. On the one hand, it has been argued that learning in the arts is context bound, specific and important in and of itself. 6 On the other hand, it has been suggested that learning in the arts is more general and plays a critical role in serving and supporting other disciplines. 7 Based on our findings we wish to offer another interpretation of the relationship between learning in the arts and in other 5 See Catterall, 1998; Luftig, 1994; Moore and Caldwell, 1993; Redfield, 1990. 6 See Eisner, 1998. 7 See Perkins, 1994; Perkins, 1989. LEARNING IN AND THROUGH THE ARTS subjects. But first, we need to complete the picture of arts learning that emerged from our study. In essence, our study reveals that learning in the arts is complex and multi-dimensional. We found a set of cognitive competencies — including elaborative and creative thinking, fluency, originality, focused percep- tion, and imagination — which grouped to form constellations in particular instructional contexts. These contexts elicit the ability to take multiple perspectives, to layer relationships, and to construct and express meaning in unified forms of representation. In our study, we have come to call these competen- cies "habits of mind" rather than higher order thinking, as is more usual. We believe that this term captures more fully the flexible interweaving of intuitive, practical, and logical modes of thought that character- izes arts learning. These habits of mind are accompanied by an array of personal dispositions such as risk taking, task persistence, ownership of learning, and perceptions of academic accomplishment in school. Since these habits of mind and dispositions are prevalent in schools where children have studied the arts continuously over time and have experienced learning in several arts, we argue that they are typical of arts learning itself. As we have seen, this learning is not only character- istic of the arts but, in arts-rich schools, certain features of it are evident in other subject disciplines when specific task demands call them into being. Thus, we suggest that the relationship between arts learning and learning in other disciplines may not be as unidirec- tional — from the arts to other disciplines — as other studies have implied. Rather, the relationship may be more dynamic and interactive than is usually acknowl- edged. In other words we question whether transfer — or a one to one correspondence whereby one discipline serves another — is the only, or even an appropriate, way to conceptualize the relationship across disciplines. The unidirectional model is much too simplistic and ill serves the complexity of thinking involved in learning. We speculate that the presence of habits of mind that emerge in both arts learning and learning in other subjects consists of a dialectic involving the cumulative effects of participating disciplines. For instance, we observed a classroom where the study of Vietnamese art, music, and literature was combined with reading letters from soldiers who served in the war. This combination of learning activities created a context for a visit to the Vietnam War Memorial, and a subsequent discussion of the conflict between personal commitment, culture, and national loyalty, which unfolded in a group-authored play. In this example, the movement back-and-forth across disciplinary boundaries led to the accumulation of knowledge in a variety of disciplines. Even more importantly, however, it allowed for a measure of critical reflection on and within each discipline. What this example reveals is something akin to a continuous, ongoing conversation — a language exchange, in which reciprocity acts as a pre-requisite for new learning and the construction of meaning. When well grounded in the kind of learning we observed, the arts develop children's minds in powerful ways. In arts learning young people become adept at dealing with high levels of ambivalence and uncer- tainty, and they become accustomed to discovering internal coherence among conflicting experiences. Since young people live in worlds that present them with different beliefs, moralities, and cultures, schools should be the place where learning fosters the reconcil- iation of apparent differences. In arts-rich schools, where conversations take place across the disciplinary boundaries, young people learn that mathematics might challenge the arts to examine relationships among objects in ways that extend their conceptions of number. Similarly, in the back-and forth between science and art, pupils learn that close observation and investigation of natural phenomena can proceed either according to prescribed theories or according to personal perceptions — and that both types of investigations offer fresh under- standing of the same phenomena. The transmission of feelings and meaning captured in language learning offers a challenge to the arts to discover how such experiences assume new and different layers of MBZZW. £1 ^ isiiBlB1 ^ DF CHANGE interpretation if encoded in images, movement, or musical sound. In such cross-disciplinary conversations involving the arts, young people are given permission to go beyond what they already know and to move towards new horizons for their learning. Educational Implications of the Study The results of our study offer empirical evidence that learning in arts-rich schools is complex and that it is most successful when supported by a rich, continuous, and sequenced curriculum. We also have clear empirical evidence that children, in what we have called the low-arts schools, are less able to extend their thinking. It appears that a narrowly conceived curricu- lum, in which the arts are either not offered or are offered in limited and sporadic amounts, exerts a negative effect on the development of critical cognitive competencies and personal dispositions. This conclu- sion brings to mind our original experience in choosing school sites for our study. In the many schools we visited, arts provision was almost uni- formly inconsistent and sporadic. Arts-rich schools offer a picture of a curriculum that is neither formalized nor centralized, but rather is open and flexible. Within these schools it was clear that teachers thought about, and accepted, a variety of different ways for pupils to be creative, to exercise skills and to think through problems, and exercise imagination in the construction of paintings, musical compositions, choreography, and plays. This suggests that a flexible curriculum which paces in-depth arts experiences to a sensitive appreciation of developmen- tal needs leads to learning that combines the kind of persistence and confidence necessary for academic accomplishment. Taking our cue from the arts- rich schools in this study, we might envision an ideal curriculum as one that offers in-depth, carefully sequenced teaching in several art forms for the entire span of young peoples' schooling. Teaching would be carried out by properly educated specialist teachers who are both committed to their own art forms and knowledgeable about the socio-cultural background and development of the young people they teach. An ideal curriculum would enable arts teachers to collaborate with each other, with teachers from other disciplines, and with visiting artists and other arts providers. This kind of curricu- lum requires careful planning. Teachers need the time to collaborate in disciplinary and cross-disciplinary groups in order to research and frame the learning to which they will contribute. They will also need administrative support in arranging the daily time- table so that pupils have long stretches of time in which to research and try out ideas and to stretch their thinking as far as it will go — both within and across disciplines. As part of this extended time for learning, pupils need to be able to use cultural institutions — art, science, and natural history museums, botanical gardens, concert halls, and so forth — much as they would use a library for research purposes. The arts- rich schools in our study were characterized by a flexibility, knowledge, and openness in the way that teachers planned and delivered instruction. One can only imagine what they might have accomplished, had they been able to restructure their school days in support of even greater expectations for learning. One unexpected outcome of our study under-cuts the debate about whether or not the arts are core or ancillary to learning across the curriculum. Our findings led us to the conclusion that, all things being equal, the arts are neither ancillary nor core but rather that they are participants in the development of critical ways of thinking and learning. In schools with rich arts provision this argument can be sustained on the basis of the constellation of capacities that are nurtured in arts learning and that characterize the dialectical relationship between the arts and other subjects. By contrast, in schools with a paucity of arts provision the arts may well be considered ancillary because they do not have the capacity to promote the ways of thinking that, by interacting dynamically with other subject domains, offer children generative and complex LEARNING IN AND THROUGH THE ARTS learning. If schools hope to offer a curriculum of study designed to help children develop as productive thinkers and citizens — and sometimes as artists — then they must not force them into narrow channels by depriving them of the kind of learning challenges that develop the richness of their minds. Policy Implications of the Study Given the findings presented here, schools should develop and offer to their pupils a critical mass of arts subjects in visual arts, music, dance, and drama. Within this provision young people must be allowed to study as fully as possible across the arts disciplines. Our results show very clearly that the habits of mind and personal dispositions needed for academic success were nurtured in high-arts schools where young people had pursued several arts over a duration of time. There was a negative correlation between schools with a paucity of arts instruction and all cognitive and personal dimensions of our study. Thus, schools interested in nurturing complex minds should provide a critical mass of arts instruction over the duration of young peoples' school lives. We need to stress that while arts learning is unique, in participation with other disciplines, it serves the cause of promoting the intellectual development of young people. The double face of arts learning — its simultaneous openness and closedness — gives it a special role in the curriculum. Educational policy, therefore, needs to bear in mind that in the best possible world neither arts learning nor learning in other subjects is sufficient unto itself. As is clear from our study, just because school subjects are different does not mean they are precluded from being able to work together beneficially. The Need for Well Educated Teachers This study found that teachers in the high-arts schools were more open, flexible, knowledgeable, and engaged in their own ongoing learning than were teachers in the low-arts schools. It seems clear that if we want to develop complex arts instruction, with all that it implies for pupils' learning and development, then we need a school arts policy that calls for a more rigorous and ongoing education for teachers. We need teachers who — through their own experiences in the arts — are complex, reflective thinkers and practitioners, knowledgeable about the young people they teach and the cultures that define them. Arts teachers need to be able to balance teaching both in and across their disciplines, which implies the ability to be collaborative and aware of possibilities for learning beyond their own specializations. CONCLUSIONS Arts learning, involving as its does the construc- tion, interweaving, and interpretation of personal and socio-cultural meaning, calls upon a constellation of capacities and dispositions which are layered and unified in the construction of forms we call paintings, poems, musical compositions, and dances. Many of these same competencies and dispositions extend to other subject domains where they coalesce in equally distinctive forms — mathematical, scientific, linguis- tic — as pupils organize different kinds of meaning, insight, and understanding. What is critical is not that capacities and disposi- tions transfer from the arts to other subject areas, as has often been argued, but that they are exercised broadly across different knowledge domains. Given this interpretation, no subject has prior rights over any other subject, for to diminish one is to diminish the possibility and promise of them all. If the arts are to help define our path to the future, they need to be become curriculum partners with other subject disciplines in ways that will allow them to contribute their own distinctive richness and complexity to the learning process as a whole. C HAM PIDNS DF CHANGE REFERENCES Catterall, J. S. ( 1998). Does experience in the arts boost academic achievement? A response to Eisner. Art Education, 51 (4) 6-8. Eisner, E. W. (1998). Does experience in the arts boost academic achievement? Art Education, 51 (1) 7-15. Luftig, R. L. The Schooled Mind: Do the Arts Make a Difference? An Empirical Evaluation of the Hamilton Fairfield SPECTRA+ Program, 1992-93. Center for Human Development, Learning, and Teaching, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1994. Marsh, H. W., Byrne, B. M., 8c Shavelson, R. (1988). A multifaceted academic self-concept: Its hierarchical structure and its relation to academic achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 366-380. Moore, B.H. and Caldwell, H. (1993). Drama and drawing for narrative writing in primary grades. Journal of Educational Research, 8 (2), 100-110. Perkins, D. N. (1994). The intelligent eye: Learning by looking at art. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for Education in the Arts. Perkins, D. N. 8c Salomon, G. (1989). Are cognitive skills context bound? Educational Researcher. 18(1) 16-25. Redfield, D. L. (1990). Evaluating the broad educational impact of an arts education program: the case of the Music Center of Los Angeles County's artists-in-residence program. Los Angeles, Center for the Study of Evaluation, UCLA Graduate School of Education. Rentoul, J., & Fraser, B. J. (1983). Development of a School- Level Environment Questionnaire. The Journal of Educational Administration, XXI ( 1 ), 21-39. Shavelson, R. J., Hubner, J. J., 8c Stanton, G. C. (1976). Self- Concept: Validation of Construct Interpretations. Review of Educational Research, 46 (3), 407-441. Torrance, E.P., Ball, O.E. 8c Safter, H. T. (1992). Torrance tests of creative thinking: streamlined scoring guide tofiguralA and B. Bensenville, IL: Scholastic Testing Service. Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education Summary Evaluation PROFESSDR JAMES S. CATTERALL Principal Investigator MS. LYNN WALDORF Coordinator and Field Researcher Imagination Project at UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521 1 C HAM PI D N S DF CHANGE INTRODUCTION The Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), was founded in 1992 amidst a small upsurge of interest and funding availability for the arts in the Chicago Public Schools. The Chicago School Board had begun providing for a half-time art or music teacher in schools long accustomed to having none, and newfound flexibility in federal programs brought another half of an arts teaching position to many schools. With the support of Chicago foundations and corporations, including the MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, the Polk Bros. Foundation, and Marshall Fields Inc., CAPE sought to build on this important arts revival through the creation of a program that would bring local artists and arts agencies into partnerships with teachers at all grade levels. These teacher-artist partnerships were charged with planning integrated instruction, joining instruction in an art form such as painting or music with specific instructional goals in other academic subjects such as reading or science. Small clusters of schools were invited to apply for grants that would support stipends for artist participants and assist with the support of coordinators. Sixty-four partnership proposals were submitted, of which fourteen were funded for initial planning, and the program was launched. When fully implemented, CAPE involved twelve clusters containing 37 schools and representing 53 professional arts organizations and 27 community organizations. Twenty schools remained active in the network throughout the six initial years of the program. Assessment in Multiple Chapters. With a grant from the GE Fund, CAPE made a substantial commit- ment to assessment stretching from the first planning period, comprising the 1993-94 school year, to what CAPE referred to then as its implementation years, particularly 1995-1998. The North Central Regional Laboratory (NCREL) contracted with CAPE to provide 1 Also assisting with this evaluation were research assistants Rebecca Catterall, Karen DeMoss, Kevin Pease, Kelly Stokes, and Ted Williams. evaluation services throughout this time and has produced several interim reports and one final report. 2 The Imagination Project at UCLA, under the direction of UCLA Professor James S. Catterall, was contracted to explore a specific set of evaluation-related questions during the 1998-99 school year. Synopsis. The purpose of this monograph is to highlight the development of CAPE and its effects through the multiple inquiry lenses trained on the program over its first six years. The story is one of development and learning by school communities, teachers, and artists as they became increasingly and more deeply involved in arts- integrated instruction. It is also a story of increasingly tangible and measurable effects on student learning as the program matured. I. THE NCREL EVALUATION The major phases of NCREL's evaluation work were: ( 1 ) exploring the planning years to see what activities were taking place, where things worked well, and where things seemed to need improvement, (2) gauging the impact of the program on artists, teachers, classrooms, and students during implementation, and (3) measuring support from school and community based groups. NCREL's data collection activities concluded in spring of 1998, and their final report was issued in spring of 1999. Both NCREL and the Imagination Project collected data on student achievement in reading and mathemat- ics. NCREL examined data from 1992 through 1998 on a national basic skills test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, or ITBS. NCREL's analysis focused on the percentages of students performing at or above grade-level on tests administered between 1991 and 1998. The IP examined ITBS data and TAP test data from 1992 through 1998. The IP evaluation produced various comparisons between CAPE and non-CAPE schools, including high 2 Our primary source for this information is "The Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, CAPE, A Comprehensive Summary of Evaluation Findings." Oak Brook, IL: NCREL. Matthew Hanson, Blase Masini, Allison Cronmeu/April, 1999. We do not emphasize in this 1999 summary NCREL's very early findings regarding CAPE's planning years, 1993 and 1994. CHICAGO ARTS PARTNERSHIPS IN EDUCATION poverty schools only (about three-fourths of all sample schools). The IP also analyzed scores from the Illinois Goals Assessment Program (IGAP) test, a set of exams recently constructed to reflect state standards in several subjects and grade levels. NCREL used large-scale surveys of teachers and students at particular junctures in an attempt to attain a generalizable portrait of the program and an overall view of CAPE classroom practices. The IP evaluation for 1998-99 was less concerned with generalizations about CAPE except in the case of student achievement effects. Rather than trying to produce descriptions of typical or average classroom practices, the IP study also focused attention on best integrated curricular practices by probing selected artist-teacher pairs, their class- rooms, and their integrated lessons. The CAPE Board was interested at this point in the art of the possible — when things went well, what did this look like, why did it work, and what were the effects? II. BRIEF SUMMARY OF NCREL FINDINGS-1 993-1 998 3 Following are an overview and some highlights of NCREL's evaluations of the various impacts of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education. NCREL 3 Issued in April 1999 and referenced in footnote 1. reports four main categories of effects: impacts on the classroom, effects on teachers and artists, impact on students, and support from school and community- based groups. CAPE Impact on the Classroom. NCREL reports various impacts of CAPE on classrooms, the most important of which seems to come from its 1997-98 survey of teachers addressing instruction and curriculum. This was the last year of NCREL's evaluation and the most "mature" year of the CAPE program to come under NCREL's scrutiny. Here is what they reported: Extensive integration of CAPE into schools: More than 90 percent of teachers reported moderate (57%) or extensive (36%) integration of the CAPE program into their schools. Most teachers involved in developing arts- integrated units. Fifty-four percent of teachers reported having developed one integrated unit and 24 percent reported having created four to five units. A unit here means working with an artist to develop an instruc- tional sequence incorporating the art form with an academic teaching objective. The typical unit according to this survey was designed to last from four to six weeks. Seventy one percent of teachers in the 1998 Figure 1. Proportion of Time Instruction Focused on Specific Areas of the Arts — Spring 1998 (N=107) 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Visual Arts Theatre Music Dance Other Source: NCREL 1999 Final CAPE Evaluation Report, p. 14 *i M IT-lal DF CHANGE NCREL survey reported teaching their units from one to three times. Which art disciplines are enlisted? The NCREL survey analyzed which art forms proved the most popular with teachers under CAPE. Figure 1 shows that the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics) clearly lead the way, with 41 percent of program teaching time devoted to these art forms. Theater attracts a quarter of all CAPE program instructional time, music 19 percent, and dance 9 percent. Which academic subjects are integrated? The teacher survey also provided estimates of which subjects teachers and artists chose to focus on for their interdisciplinary units. Reading proved most popular, followed by social studies. Science was less than moderately integrated in CAPE units, and mathemat- ics was least frequently chosen, as shown in Figure 2. (The numbers 1 through 4 in Figure 2 were assigned to calculate average levels of integration across responding teachers. The average scores are shown atop each column.) Teacher perceptions of school context. NCREL used district-wide teacher and student surveys to probe developments at CAPE schools. On teacher survey scales for school climate, quality of relation- ships with parents, professional development, instruc- tional practices, and relationships with the commu- nity, CAPE schools outscored non-CAPE schools in every case, although the differences were small and not statistically significant. We have seen similar patterns in other evaluation work and offer the following observation. When a school outperforms others on a long string of measures, the chances increase that some true differences exist. If the differences are attributed to random chance, as they are with statistical non-significance, the odds of five positive results in a row diminish to 1 in 64. Although we cannot say anything about which specific factors contribute to this difference , we conclude that these data show small differences in school context favoring CAPE schools. Impact on Teachers and Artists NCREL watched teachers and artists over four years through nearly all of their evaluation lenses: regular surveys, classroom observations, interviews, focus groups, document review, and case studies. The main reported CAPE impacts on teachers include the following: Figure 2. Arts Integration in Four Subject Areas According to CAPE Teachers and Artists — Spring 1998 (N=l 18) Very Integrated Moderately Integrated 3 Somewhat Integrated 2 Not Integrated Reading Social Studies Science Math Source: NCREL 1999 Final CAPE Evaluation Report, p. 15. CHICAGO ARTS PARTNERSHIPS IN EDUCATION High levels of teacher-artist collaboration in both preparation and instruction. In the 1998 teacher survey, 91 percent of teachers claimed to engage in such collaboration. NCREL noted a significant shift from teachers teaching arts skills toward devoting increased time to integrating the arts with academics between 1995 and 1998. Artists consistently devoted about half their time to arts instruction and half their time to integration activities. Extensive buy-in by participating teachers. As we noted above when discussing impact on classrooms, there were very high levels of participation by CAPE teachers. Most created and implemented teaching units with participating artists, and most used them multiple times. Nearly a fourth of all CAPE teachers created 4 or 5 different units. CAPE professional development workshops. CAPE offered 11 workshops in 1997-98. On the one hand, teachers claimed that the professional develop- ment offerings were valuable; on the other hand, the typical teacher attended only one to three of the 1 1 sessions. We do not have data from other years. The participation reported for 1997-98 points to the substantial time issues facing participating teachers. Among these issues was the fact that teachers and artists often work on quite different schedules. Another is that the job of teaching is very time demanding, especially when teachers devote after- school hours to extracurricular activities, evaluating homework and tests, and lesson planning. (These issues exist in the general context of the challenges to scheduling effective professional development in large urban school systems). Impact on Students NCREL reported student effects in three areas: Positive student attitudes about arts-integrated instruction. NCREL reported that, according to a student survey, students had generally positive opin- ions about arts-integrated instruction. When asked if they enjoyed lessons in the arts and if these lessons made learning fun, 94 percent of elementary school children, 50 percent of middle school youngsters, and 86 percent of high school students answered yes. No differences in student motivation scales. The student survey allowed the construction of measures of student achievement motivation, including acade- mic engagement, liking school, self-efficacy, and press for academic achievement. While CAPE students slightly outscored non-CAPE students on all but the academic engagement scale, none of the differences were statistically significant. Emerging positive trends in ITBS Scores. NCREL compared the reading and math scores of 17 CAPE schools with a sample of 17 non-CAPE schools chosen to replicate the CAPE schools on measures of student demographics and past performance. Using the percentages of students scoring above grade level as an indicator, NCREL reported that the gap favoring CAPE schools began to widen during test years 1996 and 1997. The difference was not yet statistically significant. As discussed below, when 1998 data are included, the differences favoring CAPE in several important comparisons become significant for both the ITBS test and for the Illinois state IGAP test. Support from School and Community-Based Groups NCREL's main test of the degree to which CAPE was supported by school and community groups was a survey of artists and teachers conducted in 1997-98. Teachers and artists were asked to rate on a four-point scale how supportive of CAPE various institutions seemed to be. As seen in Figure 3, support for CAPE varied considerably depending on who is under considera- tion. School principals were considered highly supportive of CAPE. It is difficult to launch any initiative, much less one that aims at whole school change, if the principal is not supportive. The arts organizations are also highly supportive. This may be expected because CAPE brought work opportunities to the arts community, but these organizations would not remain supportive in the absence of a program C H AMP! DNS DF CHANGE Figure 3. Teachers' and Artists' Ratings of School and Community-Based Support for CAPE (N=125) Principal Arts Organizations Community Organizations LSC Non-arts Community Non-CAPE Teachers None Extensive LSC indicates Local School Council that they felt was meaningful and well-run. CAPE seems to have garnered the blessings of community organizations. Local school site councils rank as supportive, though less so than the organizations just listed — perhaps because the councils have purview over many programs and constantly juggle competing demands of running a school. The non-arts commu- nity is seen as somewhat supportive of CAPE, with non-CAPE teachers ranking lowest among this group. This bears witness to the fact that CAPE did not take hold among all teachers in all schools. Some schools had high percentages of participating teachers, and some had many fewer. The IP evaluation reported below addresses this issue. NCREL's Conclusions NCREL reports made important observations over the five years of work and offered several recommenda- tions in their final report. Interim observations included: 1 ) Positive changes in school climate resulted because of CAPE, based on school community surveys. Climate includes qualities such as principal leadership, focus on instruction, positive col- leagueship, and widespread participation in important decisions. 2) Significant progress was seen in getting the support of school principals for CAPE. 3) CAPE succeeded in getting teachers and artists to collaborate, with more success in co-planning than in truly co-teaching. 4) Teachers believe that an arts integrated curricu- lum has learning, attitudinal, and social benefits for children. NCREL's final recommendations to CAPE included the following: 1 ) Commit to arts integration as the mission of the program. 2) Establish criteria for assessing the quality of arts integrated units. 3) Establish a standards-based student assessment system. Determine what is to be learned and how what is learned should be measured and reported. 4) Find ways that teachers and artists can have more time to plan and work together. 5) Provide added resources to teachers. 6) Maintain and enhance CAPE's position in school communities and their reform agendas. CHICAGO ARTS PARTNERSHIPS IN EDUCATION III. THE IMAGINATION PROJECT'S 1998-99 EVALUATION OF CAPE During the summer of 1998, members of the Imagination Project team, CAPE Director Arnold Aprill, CAPE staff and consultants, and the CAPE Board engaged in discussions and correspondence regarding high priority targets for another year of program assessment. The following areas became the 1998-99 priorities: Student Outcomes 1 ) Student Achievement. What can a finer examina- tion of test scores in CAPE and non-CAPE schools tell us about the possible impact of CAPE on student achievement? As part of this query, what did the newly available 1998 and 1999 test scores add to what NCREL had reported? 2) Workplace and life skills. We asked teachers to report on students' development of certain skills and behaviors thought to be necessary for successful performance in the 21st Century work force. Curriculum 3) Nature of best practices. What do some of the best practices spawned by CAPE look like, and what makes them tick? Here we would turn our lenses to examples of integrated curricula through interviews, classroom observations, and review of lesson plans to find examples worth bringing to light. Nominated teachers and artists helped us with this question. Conditions for Growth 4) What helps an arts-integrated curriculum grow within a school? What sort of contagion-by- enthusiasm was happening? How do artist-teacher relationships develop over time and under what conditions? What incentives work, and which do not? Teachers, artists, and large samples of school principals and CAPE coordinators were our sources of insight on this question. Partnerships 5) What school, partnership, community, or policy contexts tend to support or impede achieving the goals of CAPE? Here we were especially interested in school principals and partnership coordinators and their ability to encourage CAPE programs. We now turn to brief presentations of our analyses and results in each of the above areas. Student Achievement For the 1998-99 evaluation, we performed a total of 52 test score analyses of CAPE and comparison schools. CAPE schools were compared to other Chicago Public schools in our analyses in a variety of ways. Some used all Chicago schools for comparison, and some used selected comparison schools. Some compar- isons enlisted all children, and others focused on high poverty schools. Other relevant background informa- tion included the following: 1 ) We did comparisons at every tested grade level: 3, 6,8,9, 10, and 11. 2) Half of the comparisons involved all CAPE schools versus all Chicago Public Schools at these grade levels. 3 ) Another half of the comparisons involved only high poverty schools (schools in which pupil free lunch qualification exceeds 75 percent). This had the effect of reducing school samples by about one-fourth. 4) We also compared CAPE schools to a set of matched schools identified by NCREL. We did this for all CAPE and matched schools and also for the high poverty schools within this group. 5) At grades 3 and 6, both the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) and the Illinois Goals Assessment Program (IGAP) are given. At grade 8, only the CHAMPIDNS DF CHANGE IGAP; at grade 9, the Test of Achievement and Proficiency (TAP) is given. 6) At grade 10, the IGAP is given; and at grade 11, the TAP. 7) Each test typically reports percentages of students above norm (AB), and an average grade equivalent score (GE) or a raw score (RAW) that corresponds to the number of questions answered correctly. 8) The final result is 52 separate comparisons, each showing a grade level, specific test, poverty level high or low, and two sets of comparative scores. The latter date from 1992 to 1998 (in the case of ITBS) or from 1993 to 1997 (in the case of IGAP, which began in 1993 and for which we did not have 1998 scores). The pages immediately following show three sample test score comparisons that are important to understanding how CAPE seems to impact student achievement in reading and mathematics. We note that in none of our 52 comparisons did non-CAPE schools out-perform CAPE schools. Thus, what is needed to show that CAPE is effective in raising student achievement, is evidence that the already existing gaps favoring CAPE schools increased over time. For making such judgements, in our more complete analyses in the full evaluation report, we identify three critical conditions: (1) Cases where the differences between CAPE and non-CAPE schools became more significant over time, (2) CASES where the CAPE advantage was larger in the implementation years than in the planning years, and (3) cases where CAPE schools have experienced performance growth since the planning years. A global assessment of CAPE student achievement effects. A very strong case can be made for CAPE program effects in reading and math at the 6th grade level, and a moderate case can be made for CAPE program effects in reading and math at the 3rd grade level. The middle and high school years consistently show test score improvements since the planning years, and the high school grades tend to show larger advan- tages for CAPE schools in the implementation years (post- 1995) than in the planning years (1993 and 1994). The small number of CAPE high schools prevents some dramatic gains from showing up as statistically significant, although gains such as those described in the example shown below seem meaningful. These differences are not as large or significant as those at the elementary level. Overall, we found 25 reading test comparisons out of 40 in grades K-8 where CAPE schools increased their lead over comparison schools and/or increased the significance of positive performance differences. For grades 9-11 in reading, the corresponding figure is 7 out of 12 tests. The corresponding figures for mathematics were 16 out of 40 tests in K-8 and 8 out of 12 tests in 9-11 We turn now to examples where CAPE impacts on achievement seem most substantial. Our first example is shown in Figure 4. This graph shows the percentage of 6th grade children in CAPE and all Chicago Public Schools performing at or above grade level in mathematics seven different years. Prior to CAPE, CPS schools averaged about 28 Figure 4. CAPE vs. All Chicago Elementary Schools, Grade 6 ITBS Math, Percent above grade level, 1992-1998 70 > _ 01 ■D [fl oo 40 — — AMPIDNS DF CHANGE for friendships and a source of confidence for students entering new schools and new situations. Performances were a source of immense pride for students, families, and whole communities. For many, classes at studios and trips to theaters were unusual experiences outside of their immediate neighborhoods and provided a glimpse of the larger professional world of the arts and culture. Ultimately the skills and discipline students gained, the bonds they formed with peers and adults, and the rewards they received through instruction and perform- ing fueled their talent development journey and helped most achieve success both in and outside of school. These 23 young people and the more than 2,000 Young Talent Program graduates were fortunate enough to discover and have the chance to develop their artistic talents. Unfortunately, they come from just 10 schools out of over 1,000 schools in New York City. REFERENCES Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Baum, S., Owen, S., & Oreck, B. (1996). Talent beyond words: Identification of potential talent in dance and music in elementary students. Gifted Child Quarterly, 40, 93-101. Baum, S., Owen, S., & Oreck, B. (1997). Transferring individ- ual self-regulation processes from the arts to academics. Arts Education Policy Review, 98, 32-39. Baum, S., Renzulli, J., & Hebert, T. (1995). The prism metaphor: A new paradigm for reversing underachievement. Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut, The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Beardslee, W. R. (1989). The role of self-understanding in resilient individuals: The development of a perspective. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 59, 266-278. Bloom, B. (Ed.). (1985). Developing talent in young people. New York: Ballantine Books. Bruer, J. T. (1993). The mind's journey from novice to expert. American Educator, Summer, 6-46. Csikzentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experiences. New York: Harper & Row. Csikzentmihalyi, M., Rathunde, K., & Whalen, S. (1993). Talented teenagers. New York: Cambridge University Press. Csikzentmihalyi, M., & Robinson, R. (1986). Culture, time, and the development of talent. In R. ). Sternberg, & J. E. Davidson (Eds.), Conceptions of giftedness (pp. 264-284). New York: Cambridge University Press. Emerick, L. (1992). Academic underachievement among the gifted: Students' perception of factors that reverse the pattern. Gifted Child Quarterly, 42, 140-146. Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society. New York: W. W. Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: W. W. Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1980). Identity and the life cycle. New York: W. W. Norton. Feldman, D. (1986). Nature's gambit. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Ford, D. (1994). Nurturing resilience in gifted Black youth. Roeper Review, 17(2), 80-84. Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: Theory into practice. New York: Basic Books. Hebert, T. (1993). An ethnographic description of the high school experiences of high ability males in an urban environ- ment. Unpublished dissertation, Storrs CT: University of Connecticut. Moon, S. M. (1991). Case study research in gifted education. In N. Buchanan, & J. F. Feldhusen (Eds.), Conducting research and evaluation in gifted education (pp 157-178). New York: Teachers College Press. Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem-solving. New York: Prentice Hall. Reilly, J. (1992). Mentorship: The essential guide for schools and business. Dayton: Ohio Psychology Press. Richert, S. E. (1992). Equitable identification of students with gifted potential. ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED366159. Rutter, M. (1987). Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57, 316-331. Talent Beyond Words. (1993). Report to the United States Department of Education Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Program. New York: ArtsConnection. Zimmerman, B. (1996). Acquisition of self- regulatory skill: From theory and research to academic practice. In R. Bernhardt, C. Hedley, G. Cattaro 8c V. Svolopoulos (Eds.), Curriculum leadership: Redefining schools in the 21st Century. New York: Fordham University. "STAND AND UNFOLD YOURSELF" A Monograph on the Shakespeare & Company Research Study STEVE SEIDEL Harvard Project Zero from a report produced by the staff of the Shakespeare & Company Research Study 1 CHAM PI D N S D F CHANGE INTRODUCTION For twenty years, Shakespeare & Company, a classical professional theater company in Lenox, Massachusetts, has been committed to three simultaneous purposes: producing the plays of William Shakespeare as well as a repertory of other works, including new plays; professionally training actors; and teaching Shakespeare at elementary, secondary and undergraduate levels. The Company's ways of teaching Shakespeare evolved from their distinctive approach to rehearsal, performance, and their training of actors. This approach stands in stark contrast to traditional teaching in our public schools. A team at Harvard Project Zero began research in 1995 in order to better understand learning and teaching in two of the Company's numerous education programs: The Fall Festival of Shakespeare and The National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare. Specifically, the team's purpose was to identify what the participants were learning and the principles, structures, and pedagogy at the founda- tion of those learning experiences. The study began in July, 1995 and continued through two seasons of The National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare and The Fall Festival of Shakespeare. Project Zero staff visited these school programs, observed sessions, attended student perfor- mances, interviewed teacher and student participants, reviewed written materials, and talked with program faculty and administrators. The central questions of this study were: ■ Why do these programs work so well? ■ What is it participants are actually learning? ■ What is critical to the success of these programs? The research team produced an extensive report of findings in 1998. This monograph is drawn from that report. "Stand and Unfold Yourself" The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark begins with these lines. Scene 1 . Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle. Francisco is at his post. Enter to him Bernardo. Bernardo: Who's there? Francisco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself. In a rehearsal of Hamlet conducted by one of the teaching artists from Shakespeare & Company, these lines, seemingly inconsequential, are examined as deeply and closely for possible meanings as any of the most famous lines from this play. Almost magically, as each line, phrase, and word is considered, meanings resonate both within the context of the play and in the context of the rehearsal. "Stand and unfold yourself" has come to epitomize the work of Shakespeare & Company's education programs. First, that work is physical: it is about standing up. But it goes further. The work is also about "unfolding" and opening oneself — to the highest level 1 The study has been conducted by a team of researchers from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education: Barbara Andrews, Ellen Doris, Dawn Ellis, Jenna Moskowitz, Carol Philips, Shree Ram, Jennie Treeger. Steve Seidel is Principal Investigator. Sara Hendren and Denise Simon provided editorial assistance for the writing of this monograph. Kevin Coleman is Director of Education at Shakespeare & Company. Mary Hartman is Director of Education Programs at Shakespeare & Company. Tina Packer is Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company. Dennis Krausnick is Director of Training at Shakespeare & Company. Christopher Sink is Managing Director of Shakespeare & Company. This study has been generously supported by the GE Fund and other sources. Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education 321 Longfellow Hall, Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138 phone: 617-495-4342; fax: 617-495-9709; email: steve_seidel@pz.harvard.edu URL: http://pzweb.harvard.edu qaiiWit?i»Mijgn«»»i of literacy, to Shakespeare's language, to the ideas and meanings contained in his words, to other people. At the same time, it is about standing and embodying the work. It is about revealing oneself — taking risks, and accepting and embracing the vulnerability inherent in those risks. It is about moving away from a sleepy, protective posture of being folded up, or folded into oneself, and moving toward a tall, open, awake, and graceful stance. OVERVIEW Since 1978, Shakespeare & Company has main- tained an education program dedicated to working with students and teachers in elementary, middle, high schools, and universities. This education program has developed simultaneously with the Company's approaches to rehearsal, their performance aesthetic, and their distinctive actor training program. 2 Many of these foundational ideas are captured, albeit briefly, in the 1996 mission statement of the education programs. It begins with the charge "to bring the classical poetry and plays of Shakespeare alive and into the lives of as many students and teachers as possible." 3 The Fall Festival of Shakespeare has grown over the past 1 1 years into an annual project involving ten schools, approximately 40 artist-teachers and other Company members, and over 400 young people. The demand from students and schools wanting to partici- pate continues to increase, and in 1999, the Company initiated a Spring Festival of Shakespeare in the eastern part of Massachusetts. The National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare was a month-long intensive institute for approximately twenty high school litera- ture teachers, though teachers of other subject areas All of the aspects of the Company's work have evolved with and through the work of the Company's founders: Kristin Linklater, Dennis Krausnick, and Tina Packer. Linklater 's approach to voice training for actors, which has an international reputation, and Packer's ideas about the function of theater were the original impetus for the creation of the Company. Coleman, K., Hartman, M., and Lee, L. (1996). The Mission Statement of the Shakespeare & Company Education Programs. Internal Document. Lenox, MA; Shakespeare & Company. also participated. A recent follow-up study of partici- pants and the influence of their Institute experience on their teaching 2.2-3.5 years later reveals that benefits "continued or increased in the areas of teaching Shakespeare, teaching other texts, educational philoso- phy, and relationships with students (Philips, 1999)." 4 During the twenty years since their establishment, there has been steady growth in the Company's educational programs, as measured in both the range of programs offered and the demand for them. These programs are a major commitment for the Company, and command a budget roughly equal to that of their entire performance season. Today, Shakespeare & Company's education programs have a budget of approximately $700,000. Schools and school districts return year after year to request the Company's programs. Students in the high schools that are part of The Fall Festival of Shakespeare usually choose to participate for three or four years. Many of the artists working as staff/faculty in the education programs stay on for many years despite the uncertain and sporadic nature of work in arts education. Few arts education partnerships between arts organizations and schools have the benefit of two decades of continuous work and evolution. This study was an opportunity to explore the workings of a mature, developed, and highly successful arts educa- tion partnership. Why Worry About Studying Shakespeare? Several factors in American public education suggest the special relevance of Shakespeare & Company's educational programs. First, the plays of William Shakespeare are at the core of our high school literature curriculum, perhaps the only literature to occupy a place in the curriculum of virtually every high school in the country. At some point, nearly every graduate of an American high school will have been expected to read at least one of Shakespeare's plays. 4 Philips, C. (1999). Teachers' Voices: A Case Study of Professional Development Associated with the National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare. Unpublished document. CHAMPIDNS DF CHANGE It would be hard to make this claim of any other author or specific body of work. The team found no significant research investigat- ing the success of most high schools in introducing students to these plays in ways that promote deep understanding and a long-term relationship between the students and Shakespeare's work. It certainly appears that the overwhelming majority of high school students have little deep engagement with the plays while in high school: indeed, most students find Shakespeare's work irrelevant and inaccessible. They leave high school with little understanding of Shakespeare's accomplishments or their own capacities to enter into those plays, as readers or audience, and to draw meaning and pleasure from them. This is not true, however, of the nearly 800 hundred students who participated in this study. On the contrary, they reported with virtual unanimity that they developed a strong sense of their own capacities to understand and engage deeply with Shakespeare's plays. Bringing Students to the Highest Levels of Literacy Considerable documentation, not least the notori- ously poor results of far too many public school students on standardized tests of reading skills, indi- cates that there is reason to worry that our high school students are not graduating as confident readers. There is little reason for optimism that many students are accomplished in understanding difficult texts, whether they be from the world's literature or from a physics text. Presently, our schools struggle to make sure all students master the levels of literacy involved in only basic decoding of texts. By contrast, reading, enjoying, and understanding any of Shakespeare's plays is a task that could easily be considered a hallmark of the highest levels of literacy. How, then, is it that Shakespeare & Company's programs work so well to help various levels of readers enter the difficult and even cryptic language of Shakespeare? One high school student who participated in the Fall Festival of Shakespeare provided a useful perspective on the use of rehearsal techniques in studying Shakespeare. "In school we're just reading over the book: reading it to get to the next chapter, never with feeling in it or gratification. When I walked out of classes reading Shakespeare, I used to be confused as to what it was about. After you walk away from these rehearsals, you can really understand the scenes because of the many techniques used to go over the various interpretations of the text." Another student from a different high school remarked, "When Shakespeare & Company makes us go through things word by word if we don't understand them, it is weird how much you learn, and what doesn't leave your head." Many participants also noted that their experience as active readers of complex texts in these programs was relevant well beyond the specific work they did with Shakespeare's plays — in entering math and physics texts as well as approaching other literature. One student described the text of these plays as a puzzle to "frag- ment, take apart, and fit together again." The serious attention Shakespeare & Company gives to the imagi- native, emotional, and intellectual responses of students to these complex texts is the foundation of a pedagogy that embraces the most difficult texts as challenges well within the capacity of typical adolescents. Refusing to Simplify Tina Packer, the Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company, once reminded a group she was addressing that "words are older than we are." The respect for words — the worlds of meaning they contain — and a desire not to diminish or simplify those words drives the Company's approach to exploring complex texts. This respect for complexity is, perhaps, the deceptively simple core of a pedagogy. The texts they work with are so complex that most teachers feel compelled to simplify them in order for them to be understood or appreciated. In every aspect of their pedagogy, the Shakespeare & Company artist-teachers guide their students away from the idea that there is one "right" interpretation of Shakespeare's meaning or one "right" way to play a 'STAND AND UNFOLD YOURSELF character or scene. Through the many exercises they've designed and their carefully considered patterns of questioning, they turn their students back toward themselves as the source of their own understandings. They want their students to locate their understandings in what sense and meaning the text has for them "in this moment" and not in some notion of what they think the text "should" mean. Throughout the interviews conducted for this study, students articulated their own perceptions of the complexity of Shakespeare's language and plays. One high school student, discussing how Shakespeare developed multiple facets to his characters, stated that these characters "all seem real in terms of what they are doing, and they have their own issues. Because every- thing [about the characters] is complex and real, totally filled to the brim with emotion." Another student noted, "If you really read through all of the [plays], you come across all of life's major issues and problems." And another student suggested, "If you really look at what it says, it tells you everything. If you just take it for what you are saying, and not explore its whole worth, then that's not true to Shakespeare." Mary Hartman, Director of Education Programs, agrees: "It is through the language that all these categories of experience (physical, imaginative, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic) are integrated. We respect the complexity, but it is the specific attention to the words that focuses thoughts and gives thinking its energy." Neither the words nor our relationship to them — our sense of their meanings — is straightforward or simple. Hartman suggests that the richness of Shakespeare's language is, quite possibly, a reflection of the role of language in Elizabethan culture. "Shakespeare was writing in a time that may have been more linguistically rich than ours and, in turn, may have inspired a richer experience of language." She notes that Shakespeare used no stage directions in his plays and that his theaters had virtually no scenery. "Everything had to be communicated through the language — setting, character, action, emotions, the story." "What keeps it complex, moment by moment, is that it is poetry." Kevin Coleman, Director of Education insists. "The individual words keep it complex. The complexity is inherent in the text moment by moment, word by word." Coleman notes that language functions quite differently in our contemporary American culture. "The language we are most familiar with tries to pin things down. This is why we feel it is so important to work with poetic language: poetic language versus scientific language, or even hopeless language or slang. Poetic language is expansive and opens up. Scientific language reduces. In our over-emphasis on science and math in schools, in our love affair with technology, we have left our imaginations impoverished." Coleman's deep concern resonates, especially in the context of the approach to reading Shakespeare taken in many American classrooms, where reading the play may be an assignment, but there is little hope that students, in fact, will do it. Instead, teachers bring videos to class, and the video format becomes the method of sharing the play — an uneasy truce between our desire for students to experience the plays and our confusion over how to help them actually enter the text directly. As Lisa Schneier, a high school Language Arts teacher, suggests, "[W]e organize subject matter into a neat series of steps which assumes a profound unifor- mity among students. We sand away at the interesting edges of subject matter until it is so free from its natural complexities, so neat, that there is not a crevice left as an opening. All that is left is to hand it to them, scrubbed and smooth, so that they can view it as outsiders (Schneier, quoted in Duckworth, 1990). 5 Teaching and Learning for Understanding The Company's approach to teaching Shakespeare is also an elegant exemplar of teaching for deep understanding. As such, it deserves consideration from any teacher seriously committed to exploring pedagogy built on the ideas put forth by Perkins, Gardner, Duckworth, E. (1991). Twenty-four, Forty- two, I Love You: Keeping it Complex. Harvard Education Review. 61:1, 1-24. _ C HAMPID N S DF CHANGE Perrone and their colleagues in the Teaching for Understanding Project (Wiske, 1998). 6 According to these authors, understanding can only truly be assessed, and, for that matter, even achieved, through perfor- mance. Perkins ( 1998, p. 41) argues, "First, to gauge a person's understanding at a given time, ask the person to do something that puts the understanding to work — explaining, solving a problem, building an argument, constructing a product. Second, what learners do in response not only shows their level of current under- standing but very likely advances it. By working through their understanding in response to a particular challenge, they come to understand better." 7 In the pedagogy of the Fall Festival of Shakespeare, the performance of understanding is literal and, in a sense, high stakes — there will be several hundred people out in the auditorium watching. Of course, the purpose of the Festival performances is not critical judgment, but the sharing of the experience of Shakespeare's great works. However, these performances are not simply school-room exercises: they are authentic acts of communication, culture and community. When they are successful, they are demonstrations of deep under- standing that make the complex and difficult world of Shakespeare's texts lucid, vibrant, relevant and moving to everyone in the auditorium. Moving toward Authentic Projects in the Literature Curriculum One of our concerns in this study was to examine just how the Company's education programs represent alternatives to contemporary schooling and in what ways they reflect elements of the last decades of education reform in America. As one of the oldest and most fully developed of the educational theater programs in the country, Shakespeare & Company offers lessons for other reformers and alternatives to 6 Wiske, M. S. (1998). Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Perkins, D. (1998). The Intelligent Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for Education in the Arts. traditional schooling. One perspective on the Company's work in schools relates to project-based learning, in this case in the literature curriculum. Project-based learning has roots in the philosophy of John Dewey and the educational experiments pioneered by William Kirkpatrick, Dewey's contempo- rary and colleague from Teachers College in New York City. Dewey, Kirkpatrick, and countless others since, including many at Project Zero, have found in project- based learning an alternative to the desk-bound, transmission-based approach of most traditional classrooms. With projects, students get to work on solving authentic problems, working in groups, using the materials and methods of the professions, and creating products or performances. In a framework for considering the "rigor and relevance" of project-based learning, Steinberg (1998) 8 identifies six elements-authenticity, academic rigor, applied learning, active exploration, adult relationships, assessment practices-that she argues are critical to the design of powerful projects. In brief, this study revealed significant evidence that Shakespeare & Company's work points to an affirmative answer to each of the questions stated below, suggesting that their work stands as an important model of rigorous project-based learning. Authenticity ■ Is it a problem or question that might actually be tackled by an adult at work or in the community? Academic rigor ■ Does it challenge students to use methods of inquiry central to one or more disciplines? (e.g., to think like a scientist) Applied learning ■ Does the project lead students to acquire and use competencies expected in high performance work organizations (e.g. teamwork, appropriate use of technology, problem-solving, communications)? 8 Steinberg, A. (1998). Real Learning, Real Work: School-To-Work as High School Reform. New York: Routledge. "stand and unfold yourself" Active exploration ■ Are students expected to communicate what they are learning through presentations and performances? Adult relationships ■ Do students have an opportunity to work closely with at least one adult with relevant expertise and experience? Assessment practices ■ Do students reflect regularly on their learning, using clear project criteria that they have helped to set and do adults from outside the classroom help students develop a sense of the real world stan- dards for this type of work (1998)? Learning in Four Realms at Once Participants in the Fall Festival of Shakespeare and the National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare identi- fied four major realms of learning they experienced in these programs: ■ learning about Shakespeare and his language, and ways of reading the text of his plays ■ learning about acting ■ learning about working in creative communities ■ learning about oneself: linking self-knowledge to social and intellectual development. The diagram below suggests the way in which these realms of learning emanate from the many experiences participants had with each other and the artist-teachers in workshops, rehearsals and performances. Not LEARNING IN FOUR REALMS AT ONCE CREATIVE COMMUNITIES ""■ S=J~W „ ■-■■igiaiili DF CHANGE surprisingly, the research revealed that the realms overlap and interconnect. Specific aspects of these realms are delineated in greater detail in the following four sections. Learning About Shakespeare and His Language ". . . and there was this unfolding, this flowering. . . " A 1995 National Institute participant describing her experience exploring a passage from Much Ado About Nothing ■ Shakespeare's plays are engaging, powerful, funny, moving, provocative, and full of personal relevance. His work, upon careful and active reading and explora- tion, is "universal and timeless;" Shakespeare is not, as many previously thought, a "dusty, old dead guy." ■ Reading Shakespeare's plays is an active process of interpretation, and the plays themselves are open to divergent interpretations. Indeed, it is in exploring divergent interpretations that the complexity and richness of the plays becomes most apparent. ■ Shakespeare's language is full of ambiguity and multiple meanings — a reflection of human experience. ■ When reading Shakespeare, one can build the confidence as well as strategies for reading many other kinds of complex texts (mathematical theorems, for example), but most especially poetry and drama. Learning About Acting "Shakespeare wrote plays; actors were called players; they played in a playhouse. Play is meeting him on his terms. He wrote this stuff to be played." Kevin Coleman ■ Acting, or embodying the language, is a very effective way to understand what is happening in a dramatic text. ■ Interpretations and understandings of a text are not static and, in fact, can evolve and change frequently. Further, one can adopt a disposition to seek out deeper understandings through active engagement with the interpretations of others and a resistance to settling on a single interpretation. ■ Acting requires making sense of language on multiple levels (narrative, psychological, emotional). ■ That acting requires embodying a text and, therefore, involves the body, voice, feelings, text, action, movement, self-awareness, and awareness of others. ■ That one's imagination is an essential tool in visualiz- ing and, in turn, understanding a dramatic text. Learning About Working in Creative Communities "Everyone counts." Kevin Coleman ■ A strong sense of community can be developed with people who share a common interest in Shakespeare by struggling together to make sense of his plays, especially through the challenging approach of acting the texts. ■ Each individual has an important contribution to make to the work of the group. ■ Rules, high expectations, and discipline are an important element of the life of a creative community. ■ Inclusion is a powerful and positive principle, espe- cially as it validates one's own presence in a group. ■ In a challenging collective project, each individual may well be pushed beyond his or her sense of personal limits. In this collective effort, each person deserves support and attention from the group, and the ultimate success of the group's effort is depen- dent on providing that support and attention. ■ By suspending judgment and fostering open communication, especially about feelings and conflicting ideas, it can be easier to keep an open mind to other viewpoints and new perspectives. "stand and unfold yourself" Learning About Oneself as a Learner "I have opened myself up to risks, rejections, and criticisms; life is sweeter." 1995 National Institute participant ■ Knowing and trusting one's ideas and feelings and keeping one's mind open to diverse and contradic- tory ideas is integrally linked to personal growth and intellectual development. ■ Learning about other people's ideas, feelings, and experiences (including characters in plays) pro- vides perspectives that support coming to deeper self-knowledge and awareness. ■ Treating oneself well, and being treated well by others- with kindness and generosity-increases the likelihood of and willingness to take risks. ■ One can take approaches to problem-solving that were used effectively in rehearsal and adapt and use them in other areas of life. ■ Producing and performing plays, just as most vocations, require managing limited time, multiple responsibilities, and competing demands. How Can Artmaking Inform Teaching? Through extensive interviews and conversations with the faculty and directors of the Company's education programs, it became clear that the princi- ples underlying their program design and pedagogy came significantly from their own work, as individuals and as a company, in making theater. This is not surprising. Their work as artist-teachers in schools is constantly juxtaposed with the demands of preparing and mounting a season of performances. They move seamlessly, if not effortlessly, from acting to directing to training professional actors to teaching adolescents or adults to managing and administrating — some- times all in a single week or even a single day. Listed below are the principles that drive the practices of Shakespeare & Company's education programs. These principles are extracted from inter- views with Company administrators and the artist- teachers, and discerned from extensive observations of rehearsals, classes, workshops, and performances. ■ Shakespeare's plays articulate virtually every significant aspect of human nature, human relations and emotional experience. ■ Studying Shakespeare can and should be, simulta- neously, an investigation into the complexity of human relations, the capacity of language (written and performed) to express a very broad range of human experience, and the glory and pleasure of classic narratives and dramas. ■ Studying Shakespeare's plays is an enterprise of extraordinary complexity and, fundamentally, an interpretive process — a process in which each reader/actor must make personal sense of the texts. ■ Acting the plays is a way of arriving at insights, making connections, and developing appreciation and understandings of Shakespeare that are not readily available through lecture, formal discourse, or silent reading. ■ Acting is a process that, though extremely demand- ing, can be learned by anyone. ■ The deepest understanding is dependent on the learner subjectively valuing the experience (of reading, acting, engaging with the text) as it is happening within and for oneself. Such under- standing should not be seen in relation to an external reward (a grade, a teacher's approval) or to the idea of finding an objective "right answer." ■ Participants must choose to participate as a pre-condition to learning. The most valuable learning happens when the learner chooses and desires to learn. These pedagogical principles have evolved over twenty years. In this process, particular qualities of the Company's approach to making theater have had major influence on their approach to professional actor training and the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. CHAMPIDNS DF CHANGE Some of the most important of those artistic perspec- tives and practices include: 1. Valuing "truthfulness." Guiding one's actions in rehearsal and performance by a rigorous awareness of what feels "true" or "honest" or "genuine" at that moment. 2. "Encouraging openness to new possibilities." Constant effort to resist the temptation to find and settle on one way of playing a scene, line, or moment. 3. "Presence." Constant effort to be fully present with each person on the stage and in the room. 4. "Playing" Shakespeare. Actors in Elizabethan England were called "players." The aim here is to approach acting Shakespeare's plays in a spirit of play. Fun is a crucial element, as are the rules that guide this play and the discipline required of serious players in any setting. 5. "Permission to Fail." Everyone shares responsibility to take risks and support others in taking risks. This means, first and foremost, that failure is not only quite acceptable, but necessary and expected. 6. Generosity. Everyone shares responsibility to approach the work and their colleagues with a spirit of generosity, of offering to help, give, and share whatever they have or perceive may be needed by others. 7. Visceral language. A commitment to work physi- cally with the text in order to explore its visceral qualities and the meanings that may only be discovered through "embodying" it. Further, a celebration of the integration of intellectual, physical, emotional, imaginative, and spiritual responses to each word of the text. 8. "Freeing the natural voice." A commitment to employing training techniques with the objective of a voice in direct contact with emotional impulse, shaped by intellect but not inhibited by it. The study also identified the following conditions as essential to acting as practiced by the Company and as a mode of learning: ■ a safe environment (physical and emotional), ■ an environment in which all ideas are considered and valued — where hard work is mixed with humor and playfulness, ■ a discipline and work ethic that fosters a sense of personal responsibility to the work and the group, ■ supportive and respectful relationships among everyone in the group, ■ opportunities for learners to find personal points of engagement and to make choices about signifi- cant aspects of their work and learning, ■ frequent and ample opportunities for learners to be actively engaged in the various aspects of the work of acting (including watching, listening, and responding to others' work), ■ support and respect for the subjective knowledge of the learner and the individual connection that the learner makes to the text, the play studied, and the work process, ■ appreciation for the contributions scholarship makes to understanding Shakespeare, and opportu- nities to integrate insights from scholarship with insights from acting the text, ■ opportunities to perform for witnesses (artist- teachers, fellow cast members, classmates, audiences), ■ opportunities to reflect on one's work, both individually and collectively. 'STAND AND UNFOLD YOURSELF' What are the Qualities of the Artist-Teachers of Shakespeare & Company? 1 . They are all artists. 2. They share a common aesthetic — a common body of knowledge about Shakespeare and the related disciplines necessary to perform his works. 3. They have a good working knowledge and abiding curiosity about the plays. 4. They have a proven progression within the rehearsal process that they follow or around which they improvise; in turn, this progression gives form and depth to their activities. 5. They have co-workers, co-directors, more experi- enced practitioners, and master teachers to learn from and consult with regularly. 6. They are not intimidated by strong emotion and high energy. 7. They are infinitely interested in the students, and in creating a meaningful educational experience, and are committed to the goals of the program. 8. They challenge themselves as they challenge their students; and specifically for the artist-teachers in schools, their students see them performing or directing during the summer season at Shakespeare & Company. They succeed and fail in public. 9. They develop strong relationships with the school administrators, teachers, and parents. 1 0. They have access to "experts" — fight directors, technical directors, sound, light, and costume designers, and dance instructors. I I . They remember what it was like to be in high school. 1 2. They are in the schools for a limited period of time for a special project. Developed by Kevin Coleman, Shakespeare & Company How Can More Adolescents Have This Experience? This study found that a pedagogical approach built on the artistic practices of theatrical rehearsal and performance was highly successful in engaging adoles- cents and adults in the study of Shakespeare's plays. Since these plays represent a core element of the high school literature curriculum and, in a sense, are among the ultimate challenges to both high school students and teachers, the success of Shakespeare & Company's programs raise important and difficult questions about how more adolescents can have similar experiences. The following questions, though somewhat specific to this situation, are the kinds of questions that come up in consideration of virtually any replication/adaptation effort. ■ What training, support, and experience are needed to create new programs that are faithful to the philosophy and design of these models? ■ Shakespeare & Company's education programs are embedded in a rich community of artists engaged in professional productions. Can people working in settings with far more limited profes- sional and artistic resources still create and sustain effective programs? ■ Starting new arts education programs is expensive. Can financial assistance be secured to induce the kind of training and support needed to create programs modeled on this work? ■ What is a reasonable expectation for the number of years it might take for a new program to fulfill its potential? ■ How can a group insure that the creation of programs modeled on the Company's educational pedagogies and approaches is a creative learning process and not simply an imitative one? The study further identified conditions that are important to (though no guarantee of) the success of efforts to support replication/adaptation. Those conditions are: C HAM PI D N S D F CHAN GE supportive local organizations (theaters, arts agencies, and schools, for example) to insure that the individuals who commit to this work are given institutional support, a community of artists and educators with an inclination toward this kind of work, a community with an interest in the arts and arts education, one which will value and support innovative arts programs, financial support, both for the new program and for a continued relationship with Shakespeare & Company staff. CONCLUSION The realms of learning described by the partici- pants in these programs offer another view of what the arts can create, contribute, and teach when carried out in favorable circumstances by well trained artist- teachers. The programs created by Shakespeare & Company provide examples of excellence in profes- sional development, teaching, and learning to be studied and adapted by other artist-teachers, classroom teachers, and teacher-trainers. Further, they provide powerful evidence that on the highest levels of literacy, in the realms of social and personal growth and development, and in the development of high-order thinking skills, the arts provide an ideal setting for multi-faceted and pro- found learning experiences. Why the Arts Matter in Education or Just What Do Children Learn When They Create an Opera DENNIE PALMER WOLF PACE, Harvard Graduate School of Education CHAMPIDNS m DF CHANGE INTRODUCTION At the turn of the last century, the educator Francis M. Parker wrote for a broad public that all deep learning was "expressive", and combined "the manifestation of thought and emo- tion." [ 1 ] The philosopher, John Dewey, carried the point a step further by arguing for the central role of the arts in all general education. In a culture more inclined to value the immediate over the eternal and the applicable over the aesthetic, we have frequently neglected their arguments. In many American schools that claim to teach the arts, children receive instruction no more than an hour a week for the thirty-two weeks they are in school. However, a century later, contemporary educators are reclaiming Parker's and Dewey's arguments by using avenues different from philosophical argument. In the last few years we have seen not only the creation of national arts standards and the collection and reporting of the National Assessment of Educational Progress data on American students' performance in the arts, but the appearance of a number of research studies suggesting that there are substantial benefits to be gained from arts education. [2] Having begun to demonstrate that arts education matters, we are in a position to muster the understand- ing and resources to ask the next questions: Why does involvement in music, theater performance, or the visual arts spark engagement with school, higher levels of academic performance and increased participation in community service? Under what conditions do the arts have these effects? These are difficult questions, but they are the keys to gaining the deeper understandings that will permit us to explain the importance of arts education to a public that is just beginning to listen. Moreover, answering them will give us the capacity to design quality programs likely to yield lasting effects. Lifting the Lid: Understanding Why Arts Education Has Effects The customary approach to demonstrating the effects of arts education is to select two groups of students, preferably similar in their backgrounds. One group receives no formal arts education, while the second group receives arts training in forums such as the addition of music to their curriculum, the integration of visual arts into their social studies curriculum, or a series of artist residencies. Following that intervention, we identify what distinguishes the students who have had arts education from their peers. S (Time 1) — > No arts education > S (Time 2) S (Time 1) — > ARTS EDUCATION — > S (Time 2) While helpful as far as it goes, this approach tells us nothing about the specific effects that arts education has and why those particular effects occur. For instance, imagine we find that, as a group, students involved in an intensive visual arts program perform better in school than their peers. What can we claim about the specific effects of visual arts learning on academic performance? If these students also perform better on academic tests, and succeed in the next level of education, we might claim that their visual arts experi- ence has conveyed general learning strategies and understandings. But suppose we find that these students are better at reading diagrams and graphs, and doing geometry and that doing well in geometry places them in higher level math classes with peers who are more invested in school ? What if all that distinguishes these students, beyond their higher grades, is regular atten- dance rates? Do we want to argue that visual arts training lent them persistence? Do we consider whether schools give higher grades to good citizens? Depending how we answer these questions, our understanding of the effects of visual arts learning would be dramatically different. The rest of this paper discusses the particular role that qualitative research can play in providing a deeper, if not yet conclusive, understanding of what effects arts HY THE ARTS MATTER IN EDUCATION education programs have and why these effects may occur. The focus of this work is a multi-year study of "Creating Original Opera (COO)," a program in which elementary students form a company to write and produce an original opera. Beginning with "Gregarious" Moments In a preliminary evaluation of the Creating Original Opera program, teachers made the claim that "the opera makes students work harder and smarter." To under- stand what they meant, we worked closely with teachers, in observing classes and examining tapes and transcripts of student work. We asked teachers to identify instances of learning that they believed were specific to the opera. They pointed out situations such as the following in which a teacher and two students (Wendell and Anna), along with two other students (SI and S2) developed a set of feasible solutions for a changing set: T(eacher): So let me re-state the problem for you. All right, the fact is that we are going to have two drops. SI: The library. T: The library, and the other one is. . .? The what? S2: The playground. T: The playground. T: Now, they are going to be happening in the same space on stage. Now we don't have a high place to hang these things from. . . I need some of your thoughts.... A: Well, you know how you have those maps up on the wall there? (she points) If we could just find something to sort of hang it from, and then pull it down each time and then when you're finished you can just pull it down and... T: You mean like a shade? A: Yeah. T: OK, let's think about that. That wall is a folding wall they open and close frequently... A: So it might have to be a little forward. . . T: . . .The whole idea of something that pulls down and goes back up is a neat idea, but the idea of putting something... across the wall might not work. Does anyone else have another idea of what we could do? Wendell? W: We could take like a long strip of wire or something like that and get a piece of paper, and get a big roll and like a garbage can kind of thing, but bigger, and we could staple the design on it, and keep rolling it when we want a different design on it. Like if you want a different set design. . .and then if you don't want the people to see what you're doing you just close the curtain and. . . T: Do we have curtains? W: No, but I mean, you could just turn the lights out or something. T: Oh, blackout. . .go to black. W: Yeah. [3] When we asked what the teacher saw in this episode, she said unhesitatingly, "They just keep working toward a solution. The opera's so... gregari- ous." In short, she had a theory about what students were learning from the opera: something about persistent joint work. She also had a sense of why that persistence mattered: somehow it created an ecology in which quality was a central issue. Our challenge as researchers was, in part, to follow up on that intuition by examining what exactiy happened in those "gregarious" moments and asking why gregariousness should improve, not merely animate, what students were able to do. What is learned in an opera company To pursue these questions, we selected four class- rooms in which the COO program was fully imple- mented (e.g., classroom and specialist teachers were involved, teachers were trained in the program, there was adequate classroom time, and so forth). Since we were developing an understanding of "gregariousness" and why it mattered, we wanted maximum insight into the D F CHAN GE fine workings of opera classrooms. In a sense, we wanted to take the back off the watch and see how the fine cogs and wheels produced movement and change. To help us gain such insight, we developed a set of qualitative approaches to collecting data. These included classroom observations, transcripts of teacher and student interviews, and student ethnographies, logs of important activities and collections of student work. From these sources we selected moments of shared problem-solving that we compared to similar episodes from non-opera settings, such as working in small groups to answer an open-ended math problem or to develop an oral presentation on Native American leaders in social studies. By studying and coding a sub-sample of this data, we developed a set of features that distin- guished many of the opera episodes of whole class discussion from problem-solving in other contexts. Using the larger pool of episodes, we could see whether or not these contrasts in collaborative work held up. These initial findings are summarized in Table 1. These data suggested that students in the opera setting participate in more substantive ways in group interactions then students in the alternative settings. In addition, these data demonstrate that during opera Table 1: Collaborative Interactions across Opera and Non-opera Contexts Dimension: Non-opera Context Opera Context % students participating 33 50 % students taking substantive turns 20 26 % of student turns with questions 11 12 % student turns with links back to previous comments 18 38 % student turns with constructive critique of others 9 32 % student turns with revisions of a student's own earlier ideas or proposals 9 26 % student turns with links back to a long term theme or issue for the group 7 20 sessions, students operate in a more cohesive way, connecting what they say to others' turns, their own earlier comments, and to issues that have a long- running history for the group. Interestingly, this overall pattern holds in three of the four classrooms studied. It breaks down in the fourth, where students were more often a work force doing teachers' bidding than a company of individuals in charge of making choices and decisions. In that classroom, the data from opera contexts is no different from that of non-opera settings. Finally when we look across three time periods (Tl = outset of the opera process, T2 - midpoint, T3 = the week of the final production) another equally interesting pattern becomes apparent. The cross-time comparisons show that within opera contexts these substantive and cohesive collaborative behaviors actually increase in the large majority of the categories. This pattern suggests that the opera work is not simply one which is more con- ducive to joint work, but one in which collaborative interaction grows over time. Thus, we go beyond the observation that the opera experience produces students who collaborate effectively to solve artistic problems. We can begin to specify what it is that students learn about collaboration in the search for quality. In the context of continuing and well- implemented opera work, groups of students become increasingly expert at active participation in the form of taking turns and asking questions. Moreover, students become increasingly expert at coherent work towards quality. That is, they build off what others propose. Student remarks link back to earlier turns, they can make constructive comments, and they can edit their own earlier suggestions in the light of an evolving discussion. Finally, they can see their current conversation as linking back to, or shedding light on, an idea or issue that they have taken up earlier and are continuing to address. This phenomenon of sustained and coherent collaboration is apparent not only to observing researchers, but to students themselves. Students are keenly aware of the way in which joint creation defines their opera work. When asked to describe important choices, decisions, and insights ("ah-ha's"), they quite HY THE ARTS MATTER IN EDUCATION Table 2: Longitudinal Changes in Collaborative Interactions across Three Classrooms % students participating 10 15 53 50 44 60 10 13 50 % students taking substantive turns 20 23 33 25 44 67 17 33 53 % of student turns with questions 13 17 17 17 27 27 8 8 6 % student turns with links back to previous comments 11 27 40 38 27 60 21 25 29 % student turns with constructive critique of others 13 15 40 32 40 40 6 21 29 % student turns with revisions of a student's own earlier ideas or proposals 9 17 40 17 15 27 6 8 29 % student turns with links back to a long term theme or issue for the group 7 7 10 20 15 27 8 8 21 typically, focus their responses on gradually evolving solutions to an artistic challenge. Here, for example, is an elementary school student explaining how composers and writers developed the concept and structure of a song that had long eluded them. It is a song to be sung to children trapped in a natural history museum by dinosaurs who come to life and warn them to save the earth or meet extinction. See, see, we knew that we wanted to have a song, you know, where the dinosaurs come to life and warn the kids that they better not fight or they will become extinct just like they did. And so we made up this tune, and we were fooling around with it on the keyboard. And Marcus keeps switching like the background beat — you know, like disco or Latin, or Caribbean — and we were getting angry with him. Then he won't quit and he makes it into this, like this rap, and going "Hs- shahs - shh shh." And it was good. So we like started to snap and slide around. And then we took it to the writers who said, "No, no rap, no way." And then we got back at them and said that it made the dinosaurs seem cool, like they knew what was up, so the kids should listen to them. [4] Why Does Coherent Collaboration Matter? Having identified what it is that students may be learning as part of opera sessions, we must still deal with the question of why it matters. What do these findings teach us about how or what arts education contributes to learning? Students' narratives, like the dinosaur story above, were telling. They hinted at a possible link between coherent collaboration and the achievement of more than "ho-hum" solutions to artistic challenges. To pursue this possibility we returned to all the instances of sustained, joint discussions that were about solving an artistic problem in the opera, such as composing a song or not firing a set designer. Early on in the opera process, as the script and songs are first written, increasing numbers of self-contained (i.e., occurring all in one session) collaborative discussions occur, for example: The classroom teacher (JB) and the writers are going over a moment in the script where one of the kids in the opera is about to stomp out of the clubhouse. JB asks a student to read aloud from the script as it stands in draft: S:( reading from the script as "Casey") "Well I'm not chicken and I'm not going! Yay." Other students correct in unison: "Yeah." Student continues to read from the script: "She has been acting like a brat!" Other student: "Isn't that in the wrong place?" CHAMPIONS DF CHANGE Teacher: "No. After uh. . . after uoohh! Well, I wanna. . .Then. . .Okay. Casey leaves here. Good. I'm glad you caught that... I missed that. Okay." Teacher reads the corrected version of the script, checking it with the students: "Let's go. C'mon. C'mon, chickens. Well, I'm not a chicken and I'm not going. Yeah." Teacher asks "And then (referring to the need for better stage directions) Casey kind of storms out. . . instead of leaves. . .?" Student: "In a temper tantrum. Other student: "Casey storms..." Teacher: You like storms out. . .or. . . Other student: Or blazes out. . . Teacher: Blazes out. Okay. What's "blazing" telling the director? Student: That he's furious... Like she's thinking "Why do I have to be in a club with a bunch of chickens?" Teacher: Okay. So when the writers do their subtext, I think that's probably what the characters will say. . . Okay. . .Casey. . . We can put a little stage direction here. So do you think it should read "storms..." Student: Storms out. Teacher: Storms or blazes? Other student: Blazes. Teacher: Blazes isn't a word that we usually use for moving, but it works here. Okay. Students call out simultaneously "zooms," "storms," blazers, zooms . Teacher: Zooms just means to be fast but we don't want that... (Student voices get louder, yelling "storms out", "blazes", "We want blazes", "Storms out! Storms out!") Teacher: Storms out. Student: She shuts slams the door and... Student: Thunders out. Teacher: Thunders out! [5] An Evolving Meaning A second type of collaborative discussion, one that evolves over time, occurs with increasing fre- quency as the opera work enters its final stages. It was evident in one classroom where students were creating an opera about how a test divides a group of friends into gifted and ordinary students. The students attend a school that uses such a test to select participants in a gifted and talented program, and the test is very much on every third graders mind. For dramatic effect the students create a character, Charlie, who comes from "away" and who is caught unawares by the test. Initially, they simply pick Kansas for his home, but over repeated conversations Kansas acquires an increasingly complex meaning within their opera. Time 1 : Informational view of Kansas Students decide that the new kid, Charlie, who will be trying to get into a special school (like their own), should come from "Kansas," where they have opera pen pals. Time 2: Kansas as signaling "outsider" Writing the dialogue for the scene in which Charlie first appears, students build in all kinds of jokes about Kansas, such as the taunt: " We can kids from Kansas." Time 3: "Home" As work on the libretto continues, the conversation in class comes around to the parallels between Charlie's Kansas and the Kansas of Dorothy in The Wizard ofOz. Students return a number of times to discuss how both children have been carried away from a familiar life in Kansas to a place where they are strangers and face dangers. In Charlie's case, it is the danger of not passing the test to get into the gifted and talented program. HY THE ARTS MATTER IN EDUCATION Time 3: Kansas Vs Oz Much further on in the development of the opera, students are writing the lyrics to a song in which the kids from New Jersey at last welcome Charlie into their club. As they work on the lines to this song, they continue to think about what Kansas stands for in his life and in their opera. This section of the song is about what he will be able to do now that he is a member. (JB is the teacher, S stands for the several different students in the discussion.) S: And now you can play baseball, even though you're not in Kansas. S: You are in Emerald City S: Yeah, like Dorothy in OZ. JB: So what might Charlie find if he were in the Emerald City? S: The scarecrow got a brain, the Tin Man got a heart. JB: We can be pretty sneaky here. We still have the name of the town to choose. I think calling it Emerald City would be hitting them over the head. S: Jewel City S: Green City S: Club City S: No, we want to get them to think Kansas — green city, emerald, lessons. (6) Time 4: Lost Kansas After much discussion, students decide they want to end their opera with Charlie failing the test, but staying on in the community. The other students who once teased him mercilessly suddenly understand what it is to be an outsider. They also understand their community as exclusive. The students have been working on the reprise of a song from earlier in the opera. In a previous discus- sion, they had planned that Charlie would join the other kids in making fun of his old home. But at this moment the class develops a more nuanced meaning for Kansas as a place that Charlie (and they) have lost forever. JB: Sings the first verse of the lyrics as they occur earlier in the opera. S: Why not just keep the rest of the song? JB: We could. Ss: No, it's different now./ Uh-huh./ No. S: Things have happened. S: (suggesting a new version of a line) "You've found a place to replace Kansas." (Conversation about what Charlie is escaping). S: (emphatic) No, I don't think so. JB: Why not? S: Charlie wants to return to Kansas — like Dorothy. JB: Oh, so, they are consoling him? It won't be so bad here? S: He is not about to start saying bad things about his old home. JB:Works on re-ordering lines. Ss: Sing out different possibilities: S:Now you know what Kansas is. S:Now you know what Kansas really is S: Kansas will always be in your heart. [7] These instances suggest one of the reasons why students produce such strong work in the context of the opera and why opera learning might contribute to achievement in other tasks and domains. The company structure creates a setting in which students are expected to collaborate on matters of quality, and in which they learn to select the best from a wide field of possibilities. The sustained nature of the project means that these conversations need not be one-shot discussions of local matters. Since discussions recur over time, both questions of quality and of complex meanings, such as "Kansas" develop a long life. In their exit interviews, children as young as third grade, when asked to write reviews of a video performance of the comic opera "Gianni Schicchi," spontaneously interpreted the many messages that that a performance can convey. For example: ■pHpHH^H UMU IONS D F CHAN GE The way {the greedy relatives) acted, they really expressed the characters they played. The scenes really fit their show. When all the relatives searched for the will, they tore the apartment to pieces, even the pillows. Feathers were flying everywhere. The way they moved, acted, and especially how they dressed. For example, the greedy fancy aunt, Zita, was dressed like she was so rich she only thought about money. And she acted like she was too good to even breathe the smoke from her cigarette (she had to have a long holder.) So get your tickets before they sell out. Remember, don't befooled by no other. Go to see the real Gianni Schicchi near you. [8] This data suggests that the work students do on their own operas can be applied more broadly. Students can extend their understanding of the many-layers of meaning and the many modalities for conveying it to the work of others. It is robust enough to transfer. A next step in the inquiry would be to ask whether their opera work has given students a broad understanding of how artistic communication works, or enhanced their ability to understand that many messages have multiple meanings [9]. Are opera students better non-literal readers? If so, the kind of qualitative inquiry outlined here will have helped us to uncover a productive partnership between arts education and a fundamental human capacity. CONCLUSION Clearly we can demonstrate that arts education matters. We can show how, in the context of opera work, students collaborate often and effectively. But it is not enough to say "Opera work improves perfor- mance." We need to ask "What exactly is being learned?" Similarly, we need to ask why such effects occur. What is it about sustained and coherent collabo- ration that supports the development of a taste for more than convenient solutions or a capacity for understanding complex meanings. Such questions are significant, for their precision carries us from knowing that the arts matter in education to understanding why and how they matter. REFERENCES [ 1.] Parker, Francis W. (1894). Talks on Pedagogics. New York and Chicago: E. L. Kellogg & Co. [2.] Catterall, James S. (1998). Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School. In Americans for the Arts Monographs, 1(9); Cossentino, J. and Shaffer, D. (1999). The math studio: Harnessing the power of the arts to teach across disciplines. In Journal of Aesthetic Education, 33 (2), pp. 99-109; Heath, S.B., Soep, E., and Roach, A. (1998). Living the Arts through Language Learning: A Report on Community-Based Youth Organizations. In Americans for the Arts Monographs, 2 (7). [3.] Wolf, D. & Balick, D. (1994). Evaluation of Creating Original Opera Program. Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1994. [4.] Wolf, D. 8c Balick, D. (1994). Evaluation of Creating Original Opera Program. Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1994. [5.] Wolf, D. & Balick, D. (1994). Evaluation of Creating Original Opera Program. Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1994 [6.] Wolf, D. 8c Balick, D. (1994). Evaluation of Creating Original Opera Program. Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1994 [7.] Wolf, D. 8c Balick, D. (1997). Evaluation of Creating Original Opera Program: Phase II. Harvard Graduate School of Education [8.] Wolf, D. 8c Balick, D. ( 1994). Evaluation of Creating Original Opera Program. Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1994 [9.] Goodman, N. (1983). Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. SPONSORS GE Fund's award-winning arts-in-education program supports model partnerships between schools and cultural organizations. Through advancing the role of the arts in education, the GE Fund promotes both skill development and community involve- ment in schools and arts settings nationwide. Known as an innovator in corporate philanthropy, the GE Fund is a catalyst for improving the education and well-being of men, women and children around the world. As the principal vehicle for the GE Company's philanthropy, the GE Fund supports a wide range of education, social service, arts, environmental, and other charitable organizations in the United States and abroad. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grant-making institution dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the human condition. The Foundation seeks the development of healthy individuals and effective communities; peace within and among nations; responsible choices about human reproduction; and a global ecosystem capable of supporting healthy human societies. The Foundation pursues this mission by supporting research, policy development, dissemination, education and training, and practice. 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