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?

Teaching Thru the Prism 3: Neuroscience of Creativity

OK, if you don't already follow Dr. Rex Jung, you should. He studies the Neurobiology of Creativity at the University of New Mexico. A man after my own heart, he started with the top 3 myths of popular brain science, each with a wacky, yet memorable made-up name:

1. You have to be a genius to be creative (plebophobia) - the idea that there's a bell-shaped curve with Einstein at one end and Homer Simpson on the other is flat out not true; in his research with undergrads "in the middle of the curve," everyone has creative capacity.

2. You have to be crazy to be creative (mentallyillophillia) - again, just not true. While there have been many people who have struggled with mental illness and who also have demonstrated great creativity, there are also many who have not, and just as many who do not have a mental illness but are highly creative. Personally, I find that creative activity is what keeps me sane. My sister, a therapist, once told me that the creative process as I described it was much like the process of coming out of an episode of mental illness - you have an idea, you listen to others' critique of it, you take in what you think is right and reject the rest, and move on with your idea. I also think that this is one myth we really need to fight because parents who believe this are not likely to expose their children to arts education!

3. Horribly Overinterpreting Research Regarding Neurosurgical Interventions (HORRNI) - this is the myth that the the brain is neatly split into a creative (right) and an analytical (left) hemisphere. The Neurosurgical research had to do with severing the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres. In epileptic patients who had had this intervention, all sorts of interesting things were noted about which hemisphere took over control of what. However, for the rest of us whose brains are intact, there is a real collaboration between the two hemispheres. In creative work, we may imagine things more on one side, but we need the other side to plan and execute their design. And, all along, impulses are firing back and forth between them. Those of you who attended the MN Retreat for the Arts at Perpich in '06 heard a similar message from Eric "You name it-ing With The Brain In Mind" Jensen. Take home point is that developing all sides of the brain as much as we can will strengthen our creative capacity.

From the Ugly Myths he went on to the Good and the Bad(ass).

There were three important parts to the Good:
First (and aligned with #3 above) is that Creativity has both Emotional and Cognitive domains that cross Spontaneous and Deliberate processes. OK, this completely fits with the old Essential Learnings: something Emotional and Deliberate might be the work of a playwright, say, Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America has a highly emotional impact on the audience, but went through a deliberate process from idea to manuscript to produced play. Emotional and Spontaneous might be someone like Miles Davis, improvising to create an emotional connection between himself and his audience. Cognitive and Spontaneous might be someone like Robin Williams on Letterman's couch coming out with spontaneous commentary on the day's events or the previous guest's remarks. Cognitive and Deliberate creativity might be Einstein working through one of his "thought experiments."

Second - To have a brilliant idea, you need to have lots of ideas. Scott Weston, early VSAA Photo teacher used to say this about photos - to get a good one, you need to take lots of them. Apparently there's a Picasso web site that has now cataloged over 20,000 works by him. They were not all Guernica.

Third - and this goes along with Plato's ideas about teaching by Uncovering (previous post) - In the cycle of creative production, there need to be 4 elements:
Preparation (read: skill acquisition)
Incubation (mulling it around)
Illumination (AHA!)
Verification (hypothesis testing - is it novel? useful? matching the intent?)

According to Dr. Jung, schools are spending way too much time and energy on Preparation and Verification, when what kids need is more downtime for Incubation in order to uncover their AHA!

Well, laundry calls - getting Nat ready for his hike through northern Spain! Next time I'll go over the Badass technology that has uncovered the brain processes (or lack thereof) that coincide with creativity.

Teaching Thru the Prism 2: Cycle of Lifelong Yearning

Eric Booth talked about the three kinds of learning that Plato described:
Instruction - we know too well what that is, sit and get.
Experience - schools know that this works in arts, science labs, sports - but it's time consuming and hard to test, so we don't always assess what a kid got out of it. And, as Rick Stiggins says, "Just because it's hands-on doesn't mean it's minds-on."
Uncovering What We Know - including things we didn't know we knew. The arts (done well) add just enough reflection to get kids to the Uncovering piece. That's what underlies the actual Aha! moment.
In fact, he posited that if we bring students in to the experience level through the arts, then ask them to reflect, they will uncover what they know and then begin to yearn for more information or skill around this.

I know this was certainly what we were trying to do at VSAA in the Integrated Academic Core class. Meet kids at the art and they will come along with you to a point of instruction that they didn't know they needed and wouldn't have wanted if you'd just sprung it on them!

And now for my favorite Booth quote of the day:
"We live in a belligerently anti-reflective culture. We have to remediate this.  This leads to being curious about instruction. The curious kid lets instruction soar. We want to create a cycle of lifelong yearning."
Don't you just love that?
He went on to talk about how yearning can cause a kid to risk caring about a thing and thereby experience the rewards of yearning.

And then, the etymology lesson:
Reflect = to bend back toward
We need to teach kids to bend their experiences back toward themselves so they can learn from them.

Connoisseur = one who is adept at coming to know; a great learner.
So, Knowing isn't so much the goal; becoming adept at coming to know is.

Bravo = an exclamation originally used to recognize acts of great courage on stage, whether or not they were fully realized. 
This gets back to Booth's distinction between Art and Entertainment - that Entertainment confirms your sense of what the world is or ought to be, regardless of the emotions it may elicit; but Art happens outside of what you already know, so it stretches you. I like this - I've struggled for years to define these without doing a blanket put down of entertainment! Also, I wasn't sure what to do with works of art that are in fact, fun or entertaining on some level. But, like the arts education itself, I think that we sometimes attract our audience in to an experience that is or seems entertaining on the face of it, and then gradually or suddenly allow them to uncover something new. Does this ring true?

Well, my flight's just about to board, better button up this post. Tomorrow I'll get to Dr. Rex Jung, Neurobiologist, and the reason we need to let our brains disengage from time to time.

Teaching Thru the Prism Part 1

This is a series I started on my Facebook page as notes last month. I've transferred the first three and will continue on this site:

Just finished day 1 of a great Arts Integration summit held by the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. For those who can't quite place that name, Phillips was the gallery that lent In the American Grain to the Portland Art Museum back in 1995-96, the year Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (VSAA) opened. (VSAA based that entire year of integrated curriculum around that collection of work by the Stieglitz group). Coincidentally, the keynote speaker was Eric Booth, who also key-noted VSAA's Origins national conference on Creativity in Education back in 2002.

Booth was the highlight of the day. He had several great points:
1. Verbs vs. Nouns - the more we talk about the nouns of arts integration, the more divisive we'll be and the shallower the projects can get. The more we stick with the verbs, the processes, the deeper it will be and the more authentically we'll be able to connect with other disciplines. Not that we didn't know this, but the verbs/nouns language makes it easy to explain to newbies.

2. The Law of 80% - OK, Booth admitted he made up the statistic, but my gut feeling is he's got it about right. The gist is, teaching is 80% about you, the teacher - what you bring in terms of interest, knowledge, passion, etc. Now, there's some actual research about the zone of flow for learners - halfway between anxiety and boredom. Booth's contention is that at any given time, a few members of your class will fall out of motivation because they are bored and a few more because they are too frustrated - it's too hard. But, if they sense that you love them, that 20% will self-correct back to what you are doing. The frustrated kids will give themselves permission to drop out a few details that are hanging them up, and the bored kids will add a few bizarre twists of their own to keep it interesting.

I love this part because of the way it intersects with critical race theory as practiced at the FAIR Schools and elsewhere - it's all about relationships. And, that doesn't mean you have to keep it easy or safe to stay in relationship with a kid - what you have to do is put energy into the relationship before the work gets hard, so they will have a reason to come with you when it does.

More tomorrow about Plato's theories of learning and the roots of the word, "Bravo!"