Art and the 3 Rs

A ground-breaking arts program is helping students with reading, writing and arithmetic.

 

Paul Devlin Wood

 

The kids at Kula School have been acting up lately. And that’s a good thing.
   
These days, if you peek into a classroom at that Upcountry Maui elementary school, you’re likely to see fourth-graders dressed in costumes, roaring and squeaking and dancing around like monkeys. They’re playing—that is, making plays—right when they should be learning their ABCs. So what’s going on? Has academic discipline collapsed? Is this an example of what’s going wrong with our schools?
   
Far from it. This is an example of something very right with Maui schools—a careful evolution of enlightened  new teaching methods. Maui Arts & Cultural Center and ten teachers from Kula School are engaged in a year-long research project to see if arts-based classroom activities help our kids learn their essentials faster, better and more indelibly. In other words, they’re testing an idea: that dancing, painting and making music actually boost student performance in reading, writing and arithmetic. Those fourth-grade Shakespeares, for example, are studying one of the most vital of core academic subjects: reading comprehension. But they’re learning on their feet instead of in their seat.
   
The research project is still underway, the data not yet analyzed, but the teachers are confident about the power of arts-based teaching. “In any subject matter,” says Kula fifth-grade teacher Diane Peters, “if the children are allowed the opportunity to draw it, to act it, to dance it, that becomes a much richer concept for them.” In her experience, the arts not only enrich student learning, but also enrich the teacher-student relationship. Says Peters: “We come to understand what is actually in their hearts and in their minds—these things become clear in the arts.”
   
The idea of the arts-based classroom—which is clearly intended as a device for reforming education in America—is gaining ground in cities and school districts across the country. Unlike other approaches to reform (such as demanding accountability, imposing standardized tests, or even the rarely seen device of boosting school budgets), this one is not coming from the top down. This is a grassroots movement growing out of the collaboration of artists and teachers. It’s powered by the classroom experience that—“Hey, this works.”
   
Don’t think that Maui is just catching on to the tail end of this movement. In fact, our teachers are right in the vanguard. The research project at Kula School is funded by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. (among others, including the Zellerbach Foundation). The work will be reported to, and probably emulated by, educators throughout the movement. The country has its eye on Kula School.
   
Much of the credit for this groundswell of innovation goes to Maui Arts & Cultural Center. Ten years old now, the MACC was pursuing new ideas in education well before its board members stuck those symbolic first shovels into the ground of its Kahului site. Today when you visit the center, you are impressed by the prominent and usual functions of such a facility—the theaters that present world-class performances, the gallery, the dance studios and the meeting rooms.
   
What’s not so visible is the daily work with and for students and teachers. Most of that emanates out of a single office tucked in the back of the McCoy Studio Theater, the domain of the MACC education director, Susana Browne.
   
“The center made arts education one of its primary missions right from the start,” says Browne, “and the board has continued to renew its commitment to this work. That’s rare. You just don’t find very much educational work happening at arts centers in other parts of the country.”
   
For this emphasis on education, Browne credits the MACC’s godfather and guru, Masaru “Pundy” Yokouchi. He’s the community leader who steered the campaign to construct the center, and who has served as its board chairman since the get-go. “Pundy has always said that the arts can transform lives, and that the center can improve the lives of our children by opening their minds and encouraging their creativity,” says Browne.
   
Browne first saw the efficacy of this approach when she was teaching at Horizons Academy in Ha‘iku, a private school for children with learning disabilities. She started bringing her students to the MACC to sing, dance, paint and learn at artist-led “Can Do!” days. And she herself attended 32 hours of workshops during the first two years of professional development offered at the center—workshops with titles such as “Drawing For Terrified Beginners” and “Creating Stories In Your Classroom.”
   
The techniques she discovered there supercharged her teaching. For example, American history turned theatrical when students wrote and acted out the roles of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other bewigged strangers of yore. “The historical characters came alive for them. The kids loved it,” says Browne. In fact, students who bog down in the conventional classroom typically wake up and shine with the arts approach. “Many students just can’t connect unless you engage their motor skills and their senses,” she says. “You have to plug into different parts of the brain. When you do, the lights come on.”
   
These workshops in art, dance, drama, music and poetry have influenced the teaching styles of hundreds of Maui educators. One of them, Lesley Nelson of Kïhei School, says, “I use everything I’ve taken from these workshops. The traditional mode of education reaches a certain group of students, but this new approach reaches more.”
   
In 1997, Browne came on board as assistant to the MACC’s founding director of education, Chris Cowan. A year later, Browne took over the department when the center’s board selected Cowan to serve as CEO.
   
Browne’s primary working method is to use the MACC as a link between all parties who have something to gain from arts education. For example, the workshop leaders (local artists) are trained by representatives from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (the national advocate). The attending teachers come from Browne’s “Partners In Education” (a cadre of Maui schools) and earn professional-development credit with the Hawai‘i Department of Education (the state authority).
   
In this way, Browne and her crew are creating partnerships—connecting individuals, island schools, state organizations and the national network.
   
This last connection, the partnership with the Kennedy Center, is especially potent. Programs, funding, speakers, trainers and news from across the country all stream in to Maui on the Kennedy pipeline, and word about Maui’s successes goes the other way. Before the MACC became “the center” of this network, the idea of arts education was the chirp of a thousand separate voices. Now, more and more, these voices are joined in a roar.
   
The force of partnership has gained tremendous momentum in recent years. The tremors started in 1999, when the Hawai‘i State Legislature passed Act 80, which called for a statewide plan to inject these new learn-through-the-arts ideas into the public school system.
   
The bill triggered a new coalition, called the “Arts First Partners,” which consists of the Department of Education, two colleges of the University of Hawai‘i, the Hawai‘i Association of Independent Schools, the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and several other members including of course, the MACC.
   
In 2001 the Arts First Partners delivered that plan. Its centerpiece is a how-to manual—the “K–5 Essential Toolkit”—that has been distributed to all schools in the state. It provides detailed instructions that show teachers how to use painting, dance, drama and music to meet the state’s established standards of education.
   
At present, use of the toolkit is just an option, not a requirement. Maui artist Neida Bangerter, who worked for two years with the team that created the toolkit, admits that its use is still limited to a “select few” teachers.     “But there’s all this infection going on,” she says. “Teachers see beauty coming out of the next-door classroom and they want that too. That’s how to lead them in, with the beauty.”
   
At the same time, the Arts First Partners are working to implement the plan, which means helping our public school administrators and teachers undergo a sea-change in the way they approach daily life in the classroom.
   
Here again the MACC is taking the lead. Browne and company have surged past the limitations of those teacher-training workshops, which are just three hours long and held on site, away from the classroom. Browne is finding ways to send the artists, like missionaries, into the field. She is experimenting with an “artist mentor” program, in which artists are paired with individual teachers and work closely with them in their own classrooms for extended periods.
   
For example, third-grade teacher Sharon Castile of Kïhei School teamed up with drama specialist Donna Breeden to tackle the challenge of vocabulary-building.            

Working together in a trial-and-error process, teacher and dramatist devised a way to teach new vocabulary words by using theatrical improvisation. “All of a sudden my vocabulary tests started getting better,” says Castile. “The lower groups were making the greatest leaps. It was the drama. The drama took vocabulary out of their seats and gave it life.”
   
Browne has also begun a more rigorous training program for the artists themselves. Her goal is to establish a state–recognized certification for “artist educators”—working artists who also understand the classroom and who come into the schools as paid specialists, moving from room to room providing ideas and materials.
   
In educational parlance, such a specialist is called a “resource person.” The big dreamers of the Arts First camp yearn for the day when every Maui school will have its own resource person in each form of the arts. The reality of today is that Maui has not one resource person in the arts. Zero.
   
Crossing from the reality to the dream will cost money; new personnel will need salaries. That means the education purse-string-holders will have to really really really want the arts in the schools. For that to happen, the budget-minders will need proof-positive of something arts educators have been saying for years—that an arts-based classroom is a place where no child is left behind, a place where students learn their core subjects better than they do now, a place where kids develop “high-level thinking skills” and self-confidence to boot.
   
That’s why the MACC is pursuing the research project at Kula School. By the end of this year, we might have some good hard evidence that an arts-based classroom produces kids who are creative, happy and … better readers.