Arts and Learning

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As I read about learning and its intricacies, I keep wondering how interconnected, and interdependent, everything that is related to learning is, by nature and design. From the prism of arts, we can take, for starters, the idea that no new learning happens if not based upon prior knowledge (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2010; 2014). The fact that Aristotle has developed the same idea through the notion of schemas seems only to confirm that nature lends itself to a kind of observation to the keen eyes of true educators who are willingly to dissect its secrets.

It is only when each student's vast array of previously learned content is accessed that what is known (content to be learned) will find a way to bind into what is already familiar. As each one of us has a different repertoire of previous experiences, it makes sense to use arts to hook what is known to what is to be learned by using varied ways, i.e., differentiation, to let each learner use and anchor the new learning in ways that will be better for his/her own memory creation, storage, and retrieval.

The fact that arts come with a syllabus-free and rubrics-flex mode of engagement and assessment is every bit as strong as the learner's own motivational drive to acquire new memories that will eventually form their 'treasure trove' of learned knowledge.

Additionally, arts tap into a language that speaks to each of us without words; it is felt rather than understood and that takes us back to our inner core as human beings. When we are born and before we truly acquire language, the world is perceived and understood via our senses (Ayres &Robbins, 2005). Babies are masters in understandings very subtle nuances of tones and expressions as well as colors and actions in their environments. (Blakemore& Decety, 2001). That is their means of survival and thriving in a world that they relate to through their perceptual channels.

With time, and with language, we learn to encode information and to decode it in patterns that allow for a much faster processing but also desensitizes us from the stimulus we are currently receiving. Arts, and its siamese twin, music run counter to this tendency. They make us engage and reconnect with our sensorial channels like no other form of communication. Deprived of words, we have colors, shapes, movements, forms, materials that evoke distinct emotions via a visceral connection to what we all hold dear: creation.

Arts let each create and recreate in a way that will always be unique; and that uniqueness, in turn, engages memory and attention resources in a meaningful interpretation of what is to be learned. That engagement will propel true learning or what we are likely to remember, use and apply whenever we want for whatever purposes we find in our path through life.

What about you? How do you use arts to make learning stick?

References

Ayres, A. J., & Robbins, J. (2005). Sensory integration and the child: Understanding hidden sensory challenges. Western Psychological Services.

Blakemore, S. J., & Decety, J. (2001). From the perception of action to the understanding of intention. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2(8), 561-567.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2010). Mind, brain, and education science: A comprehensive guide to the new brain-based teaching. WW Norton & Company.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2014). Making Classrooms Better: 50 Practical applications of Mind, Brain and Education Science. New York: NY. Norton & Company