The Arts, Four P's and the Plastic Brain

OK, I was a kid who was saved by the arts. No surprise, as an adult I'm an educator who believes in Arts Education. So I am always both saddened and surprised when I hear of others who have had a negative experience in the arts - that audition that publicly pointed out students' flaws; that program that was all about stars and status; those endless, mind-numbing drills; that teacher that believed in talent, not teaching. Why is it that some auditions can be positive experiences and others devastating? How can some teachers balance the "perspiration" with the "inspiration" of arts learning? Why is community so important in the arts?

I recently picked up a book that seamlessly connects with Dr. Rex Jung's work described in my Teaching Through The Prism posts,and begins to explain the above questions.

I picked it up while staying with my elderly parents, who are interested in keeping their brains as sharp as possible as they enter their 90's. They heard about it, as might some of you, on a PBS fund drive - it's Dr. Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself. I've included his site in my links at the right.

What Drs. Doidge and Jung have in common is an understanding that what we do, think and learn actually changes the structure of the brain. The new adage is, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." This phenomenon is referred to as brain plasticity - so, as entertaining as it is to think of the "plastic brain" as something you buy for Halloween decor, it's actually something you have in your cranium right now. What's revolutionary about this idea is that the brain is now known to be plastic through your whole life span. There are times when exponential change occurs - as in the building of language during early childhood and the development of judgment in the frontal lobe in adolescence. But, incremental change is always possible. And the key to continued learning is not only in practicing the skills and knowledge we currently have, but in continuing to learn and experience radically new things.

So what does it take to learn something - really master it - at the brain level? Dr. Jung gave us "Four P's" at Teaching Through The Prism:

1. Practice - Yes, Martha Graham was right, it does take 10 years to make a dancer. Or, more specifically 10,000 hours of practice to develop a skill. Ten-thousand! Actually, neurons begin to wire together to facilitate the coordination right away - it can be noticed in as little as 3 months. But, with this shallow pool of learning, the neurons can also unwire in a short time. The 10,000 hours gives you a wealth of connections, such that a short break won't significantly detract from your skill. Also, over the course of those years, skill and knowledge interconnect as you put new skills and ideas to work in useful ways. I'm thinking this is the subtlety, the nuance, perhaps the part we call wisdom. Interdisciplinary Artist and Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts founder Kristy Edmunds (an early advisor of the Vancouver School of Arts & Academics program) maintained that, although creative breakthroughs come when boundaries between disciplines are breached, both skill and integrity come when a discipline is taught first as an intact system. This is why our arts specialists are necessary in an arts-integration system. They need to demonstrate the intact system of the discipline.

"Teaching students to self-censor is much worse than any judgment passed on completed work because it leads to the loss of ideas before they are even born."

2. Play - Unstructured activity helps us achieve that state of transient hypofrontality 
(see my Teaching Thru the Prism 4 post for more on this). In addition to this being required for creativity, it's also required to put any kind of information together. 
There really is such a state as information overload and it occurs when the brain has not had time to down-regulate. Much has been made of this in early childhood learning of late, but it is important for us to understand that we all need this free play time in order to consolidate our learning and make solid, meaningful connections. By contrast, activities that bombard our brains with a constant stream of information take away from our processing time.For this reason, Dr. Jung referred to iPhones and the like as "autism generators." Yikes! The moral for all of us arts integrators is to keep encouraging play alongside its partner, skill.

3. Productivity - Jung defines this as "putting a lot of ideas out into the world." Again, the more ideas you have the more likely it is that one will be great. An important piece of this is getting things out before you think they are perfect. I have to say that I have known many students who seem unproductive at first glance - but when you ask them why they aren't turning things in, completing projects, or even brainstorming, they will say they don't want anyone to see their ideas before they are "done." One of the big contributions of the arts here is the work in progress showing, the critique session, the workshop. By carefully managing the development of critique skills, we can help students learn to share their bare bones, their blueprints, thumbnails, studies, études and sloppy copy - in and out of the arts. Of course, this is where building community comes in - a studio with a true sense of community can engender sharing the imperfect work; without it, students learn that it is too risky to share - in or out of the arts. This teaching students to self-censor is much worse than any judgment passed on completed work because it leads to the loss of ideas before they are even born. If ideas are not born they cannot be shared, critiqued or improved. 

"The arts are the enticement to grapple with difficult skills or understandings - but in the grappling we actually open a much larger door for our students."

4. Perseverance - that ability to keep trying, take a rejection, refine the work and put it back out there. The understanding that it's possible to fail forward. I always think of 
Wile E Coyote, who can fall off a cliff, get hit in the head with an anvil or experience an exploding stick of dynamite yet respond with a nonverbal, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."  Dr. Jung goes on to discuss the personal characteristic necessary to bounce back from failure - not self-esteem, which may be a hollow, praise-based confidence, but self-respect which he defined as a skill-based sense of dignity and integrity. We come by self-respect when we struggle with something truly challenging and master it. Dr. Doidge points out that the largest changes in brain structure come with learning something truly new and different. As we engage in difficult learning, our brain-level attention is activated in a way that allows us to learn more and faster. When this focus is activated, we increase our abilities to learn other things as well. Wow. Is this one of the secrets of arts learning - that it may turn on students' brains and facilitate other learning? I had always just thought it was about motivating students to persevere; the truth is it is both. The arts are the enticement to grapple with difficult skills or understandings - but in the grappling we actually open a much larger door for our students.

At the top of this post I posed some nagging questions about the difference between arts experiences that are life-affirming vs. those that are crushing. Is it simply the balanced application of the 4 P's across the learning experience? What do you think? What have you seen?