Teaching Through the Arts and Creativity

How do we begin to prepare ourselves and future generations for jobs we don’t even have names for yet? 

Learning facts rote and verbatim is all well and good, that is until you have to solve problems. Information doesn’t stick, tool-up though and you’re sorted.

To succeed in the future it won’t matter what your exam results were. What will be important though is how you arrived at your answers to the exam questions. What processes did you invoke? 

What’s in your toolkit?

Tomorrow’s world is beyond our understanding. With vast changes in machine automation, medicine, our countryside, the weather systems, space travel and of course our longer life span, who knows how all that will collide. How will we live? Where will we live? What will we live in? Will there still be doctors? Will we eat flavoured chewing gum instead of food (hopefully not)?

We must equip future generations with the right toolkit to understand our world, as unrecognisable as it may become. Perhaps then, the arts could be the torch that shines the way into the future of our school corridors.

Empowerment through the arts

We are all creative. True story. Creativity is unique. It’s what happens when we generate something new with all that noise in our head. Think of humans as receptors; each one a different height and shape with varying sensitivities. As the world goes on around us each receptor picks up different messages. Some are more sensitive to colour, some are lit up by sound whereas others home in on the written word. Each receptor picks up a different signal from the same environment. Creativity then is the external manifestation of how we have received, processed and combined all those inputs. It’s a very personal interpretation of how each of us sees the world. 

Artistic techniques give us the means to connect the various inputs and to turn them into something. Education in music, art, movement, speech and drama allow us to experiment and express ourselves. Engaging in the arts allows for elaboration and repetition and it’s visual, which the brain loves. It helps us to build resilience and determination as we try and try again to get it right. Not right as inaccurate but right to us. It has to feel right and sound right according to our interpretation.  

When we’re performing on stage or spinning a pottery wheel, we’re in ‘the zone’. We are engaged as fully as possible. Indeed isn’t that the aim of any education? Therefore, to incorporate art into mathematics is actually genius, so let’s get students to sing the times-tables, draw french vocabulary words and colour in the elements of the periodic table.

Because we are all so different, harnessing those artistic techniques to bring what’s inside, outside, could be the most transformative tool we have. It’s about giving students confidence in their toolkit. 

Creative humans

To succeed in a future that will be so radically different we need to be creative. We must teach traditional conventions such as mathematics and English in school by creative means through art, music, and movement. To give the workforce of the future any chance we need to equip them properly. We must help them to furnish their individual toolboxes and we do this by providing an education that lights up all areas of the brain simultaneously. That’s it - job done because from that point on the work is all internal. Those wee brains are then making connections, creating pathways and essentially becoming bendy. 

Art encourages us to be vulnerable and to share our work. To problem-solve effectively students should be willing to take risks and be bold. Each unique approach must be celebrated for the rich and varied outcomes. Children should be allowed and prepared to take the road less travelled.

Machines, technology, and artificial intelligence are faultless by their very definition. Where does that leave us? Indeed we may well see robotic bricklayers in the future therefore what can we do that machines can’t? Simple, we must embrace our humanity because we are the most creative of creatures. The future of human work requires imagination and creativity, and where better to cultivate these behaviours than at school.

Join us in building a more ambitious Australia at s p a c e 2020