Last week began class preparation for the coming school year. More articles forthcoming.
Last week I didn’t have time to post to aesthesis. I spent the week attending a training seminar on integrating the arts with other subjects in elementary and middle schools. The training is part of the Greenville school system’s arts integration project which, this year, is planning to place an artist in class at two area schools. Each artist will team up with the teachers for four to six weeks. They will teach several units that combine special arts instruction and activities with other core subjects like math, social studies, science, and others.
I found the atmosphere charged with excitement. The teachers were very positive about having an artist in their classroom (not always the case) and the artists ready to use their talents to support the teachers’ educational goals.
Shameless plug to other artists: Greenville artists! Quit complaining about how the current state of education that minimizes the arts. Do something about it! Get involved in this project and use your abilities to help meet the needs of the children in your community. I’m not sure what the bets way to get involved is but I know that if you contact the folks at the Metropolitan Arts Council. They can point you in the right direction.
One concept from the seminar that caught my attention was Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. (There are lots of web site about this but THIS is one of them.)
Vygotsky believed that tasks could be divided into two basic categories (or zones).
The zone of actual development (ZAD) is full of tasks a person could to without help. Students come into the educational environment with the necessary skills to do certain tasks. They don’t need to be taught how to hear or see (thought they may need to be taught how to interpret their sense impressions). There are other tasks, however, that a person cannot accomplish on their own.
Vygotsky’s thinking about this second category is what he is known for. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) contains tasks that students cannot accomplish on their own. I might be able to read all the letters in a Latin epigram. I may even be able to pronounce the phonemes of the same epigram, but I would need the help of someone else to gain an understanding of the epigram. The help might take the form of another person—a master of Latin—who can translate the poem for me. Or I might get help from others through books they have written on Latin. In either case I have to have some outside help to accomplish the task of comprehension.
The concept of ZPD informs many situations other than those found in the classroom. Rugged individualism may be an attractive philosophy but it doesn’t play out well in life. I’ll refrain from using a trite expression about men and islands but it is none the less true that we cannot accomplish anything on our own. This concept is expressed in the New Testament in terms of the body. No single part of the body can accomplish its task alone. The eye cannot see without the cooperation of the muscles that raise the eyelid or the optical nerves that communicate with the brain.
How does art play into the ZPD model? (Why am I talking about it on a blog devoted to aesthetics?) Art is persuasive. Enticement is one of the principle uses of art. Enticement can be negative but it doesn’t have to be. In the case of education art can entice learners to step out of the ZAD into the ZPD. Art can be just the help a person needs to accomplish the task they couldn’t do on their own. Art can tempt us to change. Encourage us to think in a different way. Or it can guide us along a different path.
Vygotsky believed that teachers worked in the student’s ZPD connecting skills and concepts that the child had mastered with new skills and ideas that the student would not be able to master on their own. The artist’s role is similar. Art has to have some element that connects with what the viewer already knows. Only on this common ground can art pull the viewer into the ZPD and help them to an action or way of thinking they would not have come to on their own.
Art exists in the ZPD.