"Artscientist," David Edwards

Paulette Beete wrote an article called David Edwards and the Intersection between Art and Science for the National Endowment for the Arts magazine.  According to Edwards, creativity is a mash-up of aesthetic and analytic thinking, what he calls "artscience."


http://www.nea.gov/about/NEARTS/storyNew.php?id=07-fertile&issue=2010_v3

http://www.lelaboratoire.org/en/

Michael Czarnecki works with Frank Pierce Early Childhood students

It is hard to believe that another year has flown by,  but Arts in Education at its best is taking place once again at Frank Pierce Early Childhood Center. Students are four sessions into their poet-in-residence program with poet, Mr. Michael Czarnecki, who has been working with all classes at FP. Each of the classes collectively produce a poem which will be put into a published poetry book. They will celebrate the poetry on March 25th with a Poetry Share.

Once the poetry sessions end they will have Mr. Joe Crookston, songwriter, in residence here to turn the poetry into song.  The pictures below were taken this year,  but  click on the links at the bottom of the post to get an idea how the whole program works.

Pajama Day!

http://www.gstboces.org/iss/artsineducation/FrankPierceCorning/2010-02-24-1353-46/Frank%20Pierce%20Early%20Childhood%20Center.htm

http://www.gstboces.org/iss/artsineducation/FrankPierceCorning/2010-02-24-1353-46/michael_czarnecki.htm
http://www.gstboces.org/iss/artsineducation/FrankPierceCorning/Joe%20Crookston/JoeCrookston.htm

John Maeda - Arts Education to make "STEM" "STEAM"

The following link to "The Guardian" will take you to yet another compelling argument for integrating the arts into the academic curriculum.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/14/my-bright-idea-john-maeda

It is Maeda's conviction that scientists need art and artists in their professional lives in order to invent and innovate successfully, and with a particular focus on education he has toured the world to promote the idea that government-approved "Stem" subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) should be widened to include art; "turning Stem into Steam," as he puts it. This week Maeda, who is president of the Rhode Island School of Design, will expound on these ideas at an experimental installation at London's Riflemaker gallery, where he will "dispense wisdom from a sandpit".

Sara Holbrook presents poetry at Parley Coburn Elementary School!

I can entertain kids. No problem. Give me your bored, your skeptical and your reluctant and I can entertain them. But an author visit is not just a live animation puppet show; it should be a learning experience. I've been at this for 16 years and have (through some hard knocks) developed a do's and (please please) don'ts list of guidelines to make a visit as beneficial and pain free as possible.

                                                                                                                             Sara Holbrook

Pictured below is the performance poet,  Sara Holbrook,  at work in the classroom at Parley Coburn Elementary School. Sara provides standards based writing across the curriculum and improves oral presentation skills and reading fluency with poetry performance. She has been writing for most of her life and shared her passion and her skills with the fortunate students here in the GST BOCES region.

To learn more about Sara,  check out her web-page  http://www.saraholbrook.com/ and blog, http://saraholbrook.blogspot.com/

Mae Jemison, astronaut, medical doctor, engineer, dancer and art collector on the reconcilliation of science and the arts

Dr. Mae Jemison (medical doctor and engineer) is a great achiever in multiple disciplines, but she is most renowned for her explorations in outerspace!  What many do not know about her,  however,  is that she also dances and is an avid collector of art.  In fact,  Dr. Jemison believes that the best,  most comprehensive education is one that combines science and the arts. 

I think our mission is to reconcile and reintegrate science and the arts because right now there is a schism that exists in popular culture...but it's really becoming critical now...to see that scientists can be creative and artists can be analytical.  The creativity we were required to have to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle springs from the same sources of imagination and analysis it took to carve a bundu statue or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph and stage "Cry."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynf2IHiFqV0&feature=related   Each one of them are different manifestations, incarnations of creativity.

Dr. Jemison was a featured speaker on the renowned series,  TED talks.  To hear her compelling argument for arts integration in education,  click on the following link.

http://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html

"We're educating people out of their creative capacities"

Sir Ken Robinson believes that our educational system should be radically changed.  He is an advocate for arts in education and subscribes to the theory of multiple intelligences. He has written many books and articles and  was a professor at the University of Warwick and Director of the Arts in Schools Project.  He was knighted in 2003.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

My contention is that creativity is now as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go....They're not frightened of being wrong. Now I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original....And by the time they are adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.  And we run our companies...we stigmatize mistakes and we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the result is that we're educating people out of their creative capacities.

Many highly talented, BRILLIANT, creative people think they're not, because everything they're good at in school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized.

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence 1) It's diverse - we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic 3) It's distinct.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology - one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way we have strip-mined the earth - for a particular commodity.

Education and the "Conceptual Age:" the thinking of Daniel Pink

If you are an educator and you are not yet familiar with the thinking and writing of Daniel Pink, here are some links to serve as an introduction. Pink is the author of four books including A Whole New Mind; Free Agent Nation; The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, and Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He has written articles for The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Wired.
Pink's insights have major relevance for all areas of the academic and arts curricula. According to Pink, "the Information Age" is now giving way to "the Conceptual Age" and this has implications not only for the corporate world, but for pedagogy.

It used to be the abilities that matter most in work were characteristic of the 'left hemisphere.' They were the logical, linear, sequential, analytical SAT spreadsheet - dare I say 'no child left behind' - kind of abilities. Those kinds of abilities are absolutely necessary - 100% necessary - but they are no longer sufficient. Right brain abilitites - abilities having to do with artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big picture thinking - these are now the abilities that matter most...in nearly every profession and a whole range of industries.... These metaphorically right brain abilitites are becoming the first among equals; they are becoming basically the engines of the economy....

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain.html   (Revenge of the Right Brain, Wired)



Related to this argument is Pink's investigation of motivation. Linked below is a Ted talk entitled "Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation" filmed July, 20009.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html


If we really want to get out of this economic mess - if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century - the solution is not to do more of the wrong things - to entice people with a sweeter carrot or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. The good news is that the scientists who have been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation - around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting, because they're part of something important. Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction works better.

He cites the examples of Microsoft's encyclopedia "Encarta" vs. "Wikipedia."

Microsoft started a new encyclopedia called Encarta. They deployed the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure everything came in on budget and on time.

A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model: do it for fun, no one gets paid a cent or a euro or yen, do it because you like to do it.

Now if you had gone to an economist and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia! If they went head to head, who would win? Ten years ago, you could not have found a single, sober economist anywhere on planet earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.

According to Pink


This is the Ali-Frasier of motivation. Instrinsic motivators vs. extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose vs. carrots and sticks. And who wins? Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose in a knockout!

The implications of Pink's thinking on the arts curriculum are obvious and myriad. In fact, Pink cites the fact that many corporations are catching onto the skills artists can bring to the workplace.

Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools...in search of talent....With applications climbing and ever more arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the master of fine arts is becoming the new business degree.

Administrators and teachers who are privy to current trends in the economic sector can no longer afford to relegate arts instruction to the periphery of the curriculum.

http://www.drawingonthepromises.com/blogs/blank/2005/03/mfa-is-new-mba.html

http://www.danpink.com/