Teachers Don’t Know From Creative

We all know that arts classes and opportunities have been disappearing from schools at varying rates for decades. It may or may not surprise you to learn that creativity is not encouraged in schools either. While you may have suspected it all along, Alex Tabarrok links to a number of studies from the Marginal Revolution blog.

He cites in one study,

“What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.”

As Tabarrok notes, the classroom process is not conducive to impulsive creative expression. Self control is valued in students in order to create an environment for a group to learn in. I would note though that this is not to equate self-control with smothering creativity. Even in self-directed learning environments where students are more in control of the pace and manner of their learning, a degree of self-control is still expected.

It occurs to me that part of the fight to restore arts education to schools needs to include advocating for a learning environment that encourages creativity. Arts people may hold certain assumptions about that arts in education involves cultivating creative expression, but it might not necessarily be so. Everyone probably has a story about a teacher who nearly killed their interest in an artistic discipline.

It may seem like incrementalism in the face of the size of the struggle to get arts education restored, but in the process, it will be important to try to preserve opportunities for creative expression still have left lest they slip away.

Think about it– outside the classroom the only place where a child is still permitted to indulge their screaming anarchist tendencies is on the playground and a lot of schools are doing away with recess. Without recess, there is another moment of a child’s life where they are expected to behave.

Now granted, for all I know kids today may stand around at recess playing on their Nintendo DSes and ignore their screaming anarchist tendencies without any help from their schools and such advocacy is for naught anyway.

My point is that while fighting for the restoration of arts, it is probably important to make teachers aware of what creative students are actually like and provide tools/guidance for dealing with them rather than requiring them to conform to expectations all the time.

Essentially the approach of “Arts offer X, Y, Z to your students. But since you may not provide opportunities in the coming academic year, we will happily help you to recognize the creativity of your students and engage it in your classroom to some degree since these kids are likely the ones you have pegged as disconnected.”

Will Perform For Snacks

On the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen has a short post about a psychology professor who requires his students take turns bringing a homemade snack in to each class. If they don’t bring in a snack, he doesn’t teach. I was initially pretty cynical about this approach as a valid teaching technique and was surprised to learn he had actually been doing it for over 30 years before it became an issue.

While I was still a little cynical after reading about his rationale for the requirement, I could understand how it fits into a psychology class that runs 3 hours at a stretch.

Parrott said that he’s teaching students to work together to set a schedule, to work in teams to get something done, and to check up on one another, since everyone depends on whoever has the duty of bringing snacks on a given week. Typically, no individual should be involved in preparing the snack more than twice a semester, he said.

Parrott said that considerable research shows that students learn more if they develop the skills to work in teams, to assume responsibility for projects, and get to know their fellow students. Team members need to count on one another, he said, and his students learned Thursday that if someone fails at a task for the team, there are consequences. “They need to learn to check on one another and clearly they didn’t get that done,” he said. “This was an important lesson.”

It struck me that this might be a good approach for building/engaging community around an arts organization (with the punitive elements de-emphasized, of course.) An arts organization might have a performance/gallery series where attendees were required to bring food as payment. Some times it might be the orange ticket holders, other times the blue ticket holders, so that an attendee isn’t bringing food for the whole audience every time they attend.

Allowing for a snack period like this will change the dynamics of the relationship with the audience. It isn’t going to pay the light bill, but it can get people involved and invested enough in the organization in other programs that do earn revenue and donations. I suspect the staff will do a much more effective job of convincing people their organization is worthy of support while chatting over chocolate chip cookies than pitching them during a curtain speech.

I can envision scenarios where groups bond over their shared responsibility to provide snacks to try to outdo the other groups. If that turns into its own type of headache and introduces stress to an event intended to be informal, that impulse could be channeled to support a more formal series of events to increase the investment in its success.

Who Will Punch Our Sacred Cows?

I was reading a post on the Marginal Revolution blog about professionalism vs. amateurism. I had moved past it before a section of it percolated through my consciousness.

Amateurism is splendid when amateurs actually can make contributions. A lot of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the inventions of so-called amateurs. One of the most revolutionary economic sectors today — social networking — has been led by amateurs….

Amateurs are associated with free entry and a lot of experimentation. Barbecue quality is very often driven by amateurs, and in general amateurs still make contributions to food and cooking. The difficulty of maintaining productive amateurs is one of the reasons why scientific progress periodically slows down. Specialization, however necessary it may be, can make big breakthroughs harder at some margin.

I am guessing it was the sensory part of my brain thinking about good barbecue (MMMMM barbecue!) that prompted me to scroll back up. The amount of time and money people spend competing in barbecue cook offs can be pretty amazing.

It didn’t take long before I started wondering about the ways in which amateurs have driven changes in the performing arts recently. I have to confess, other than some people who financed movies by maxing out credit cards before landing a distribution deal, I couldn’t think of too many ways. Other than suggesting new ways to finance a movie, I am not sure these films brought about a lot of change. Though it did seem like the faux documentary format became popular after The Blair Witch Project. As I scour my memory it seems like, hip-hop was the last big amateur generated development in performing arts.

The easy answer is that the rest of the world has passed live performing arts by aided by technology. True, technology has provided alternative means of expression and dissemination. Shows like American Idol and Glee have inspired people to make an effort at expressing themselves through performance. But has that driven improvements in quality?

If people were showing up at an event with higher expectations of a performance as a result of YouTube videos or “nobody to star” shows, that would be great. It doesn’t seem to be happening. Or if people were coming to auditions better prepared than usual or with little formal training and knocking the socks off people, having absorbed lessons from these shows about cultivating ones abilities, that would equally desired. But I can’t think of any recent development that is widely acknowledged as a factor in forcing artists to step up their game.

I know there are groups using technology to enhance their performances or allow audiences to influence performances in real time via feedback. A lot of that is isolated and individual. The sort of change I am talking about is the type we are witnessing regarding food where people are concerned about where what they eat is sourced. Regardless of how you feel about such efforts, it has clearly influenced the way we eat and the way in which food is presented to us on a large scale. Restaurant menus now feature notes on such details. I can’t think of a similar influence in the performing arts which has forced the sector to acknowledge it.

The argument that live performing arts use antiquated means of production doesn’t seem valid. Cooking barbecue uses the same basic means of production in terms of heat, spices, enzymes, etc. Improvements have come as a result of applying those means in myriad permutations. Does the same hold true for the performing arts?

Social media tools exist that can allow someone to spread the word about their accomplishments so it is tough to claim that people are doing great work in obscurity and have no means to spread the word to other performers. The amateur barbecuing world is something of a niche community with closely guarded secret recipes, but apparently enough word gets around to influence change in restaurants.

Most of the improvements in the technical side of the arts are made by people with big budgets in Las Vegas and Broadway. LED lighting has its problems, but it holds the promise of enormous power savings and versatility that allows one instrument to replace many. Achieving the spectacle of these things is pretty expensive right now so while it may be argued they can provide improvements in environmental terms, it hasn’t been accomplished by amateurs.

Despite the high costs of creating a technically appealing production, I don’t think it can be said that there are too many barriers to entry preventing amateurs from influencing the performing arts. There are community venues across the country available as performance spaces. Not that you would necessarily need one when any space in a park or empty storefront can serve. One can self produce musical work thanks to personal computers rather than depending on gatekeepers at media companies to approve of them. There are plenty of available tools to support innovation.

I might be claimed that the performing arts community is so insular and devoted to preserving a particular way of doing things that the professionals are utterly ignoring the efforts of the amateurs and the burgeoning successes they are having. I don’t think this is the case for a couple reasons. First, a heck of a lot of people have to be complicit in this. I read a lot of articles and blogs in the course of a week and I have to believe there are at least a couple who would be pointing to the results amateurs are having and urging the rest of us to get on board or get left behind. While these sentiments have been expressed about social media and relationships with one’s community, I can’t think of an instance where people have claimed that the amateurs were eating the profession’s lunch.

Second, if there was such a change I don’t think it would be possible to completely ignore. People would be giving cues. It would be like the slow food/localvore movement and people would be asking where our metaphoric produce was sourced from. In the literal context of the localvore movement, Scott Walters’ Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education may potentially be the next big movement, but it hasn’t manifested as such yet. Granted, it is entirely possible cues have been delivered time and time again and have been ignored.

Related to the idea of insularity, I also considered the possible claim that the performing arts was suppressing new innovation in this direction. I can’t believe there is enough of this stultifying energy present in the general culture of the performing arts to prevent the rise of a movement that thumbs its nose at everyone else and blazes its own trail.

Honestly, I think I am asking these questions because part of me is afraid an environment has been created where no one is invested in the performing arts enough to think it worth the effort to thumb their nose and punch a few sacred cows. Scoff all you want at the amateur, they are needed to drive change.

So I open it up to the readership. Show me where I am wrong. I am happy to learn otherwise. Perhaps there is a movement that is just developing legs that I haven’t recognized. I referenced hip-hop before. It started in the 70s but it really didn’t enter popular awareness until the 80s & 90s. It may be the same with whatever is coming. I should note that amateur lead change need not manifest itself in the destruction and supplanting of the old, it could be any sort of innovation that lead to change. In this context, perhaps the adoption of something has been so gradual and organic I have missed it.

The change also doesn’t need to have been something that achieved great popularity and acclaim. It could be an artistic development or new theory/approach whose impact is recognized internally to the performing arts but not necessarily widely acknowledged. Think Stanley McCandless, the father of modern theatrical lighting. Trained as an architect, his theories about how to approach lighting are the foundation for all lighting design today, nearly a century later. Few in audience members of the early 20th century likely recognized his efforts at improving lighting design were providing them with an better attendance experience much less knew he was responsible.