Miriam Hirsch is an assistant professor in the Department of Education, at Stern College, Yeshiva University. Dr. Hirsch’s current area of research examines the relationship between resistance and inquiry in pre-service teacher aesthetic education.
Miriam Hirsch’s research focuses on overcoming resistance to introducing arts into the curriculum.
As a pre-service teacher educator within an arts education collaborative, I often receive comments charged with resistance: “Why are we playing with musical instruments in a college course?” “How is listening to bluegrass music going to help me in my early childhood classroom?” “I never really feel comfortable moving my body in public.” However, it was only by listening and absorbing, truly embracing the resistance, rather than dismissing, ignoring, or countering the conversational gambits, that I made headway in supporting future teachers in practices of aesthetic inquiry and arts integration. This article presents a conceptualization of the dynamics of resistance based upon my work in supporting students, teachers, principals, and parents with classroom based aesthetic inquiry and arts integration. I conclude with specific strategies and practices that have helped teachers to create curricular spaces and more fluid relationships with aesthetic inquiry and arts integration.
Background Context
In my position as a professor of teacher education at Stern College, Yeshiva University, a small undergraduate college for Jewish women in New York City, I have been fortunate to be a member of the Lincoln Center Institute Teacher Education Collaborative (LCI-TEC). Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) is a premier aesthetic art education program whose approach to art education is
based upon the belief that works of art provide an “inexhaustible resource” for learning. Each individual – child as well as adult – possesses an innate ability to respond to works of art in ways that can heighten perception, ignite the imagination, and challenge preconceived notions. (Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., 2007, p. 3)
Maxine Greene is the philosopher-in-residence for LCI and her philosophy infuses the arts based pedagogic and instructional practices. This orientation does “not regard aesthetic education as in any sense a fringe undertaking, a species of ‘frill.’ We see it as integral to the development of persons- to their cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and imaginative development” (Greene, 2001, p. 7).
Every semester our faculty members select a work of art for study chosen from a rotating roster of music, theatre, dance, and the visual art works. Each participating professor is then matched with a teaching artist to plan pre- and post-performance workshops for his/her course. For example, in one of my Teaching Social Studies classes, we studied a puppetry work based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Snow Queen. Through experiential activities, manipulating different types of puppets to compose animated sequences, the students learned about aesthetic inquiry and artistic decision making embodied in a work of art.
Over the course of my work with LCI-TEC we have studied a wide range of theatre, photography, dance, visual art, and music. Still, after two and a half semesters of participation in experiential encounters with premium quality works of art and carefully designed hands-on workshops, our graduating seniors would write in their journals: “I’m sorry, but I found the activities to be somewhat demeaning and silly;” or, “We all weren’t really sure what the point was.” When we asked our students about their willingness to incorporate the arts in their own classroom upon graduation, a number of students reported comments such as, “I can’t say I really enjoyed it or would like to experience it again.” As a teacher educator of these pre-service teachers I held myself accountable for perpetuating an attitude inverse to our intentions. We weren’t opening up these future teachers to the possibilities emergent from a work of art. We were turning these prospective teachers off from art education in general.
The research journey that began with my own pre-service students led to three arts-based research initiatives within a Jewish private school, with a New York City public school, and with my colleagues at Stern College. Through meta-analytic methods I inductively derived five modes of resistance as I listened, learned, and wondered why the arts experiences were being met with such backlash, no matter the educational context.
Modes of Resistance
In this section, I explore five different types of resistance that I have encountered in my efforts to support aesthetic inquiry and arts integration in school settings. I also suggest that the source of the resistance offers vital clues to addressing the objection to the arts.
1) Personal resistance (“I’ve never been able to draw, sing, dance, etc.”). This type of resistance stems from the individual’s discomfort with arts subject matter. It is almost as if the person is saying: “I’ve never been able to do this, and I certainly don’t want to do it now in front of all these people.” Often there is a public aspect to arts based instruction that forces people to show their handiwork, which may cause discomfort because the activity places the individual in a position of psychological vulnerability. Who wants their least impressive work up for public critique?
A colleague of mine has repeatedly told me that she feels that many of the Jewish women in our education program are uncomfortable dancing or moving their bodies in front of others even though the class is entirely female. (Note – this may be a particular concern for Orthodox Jewish women, who repeatedly receive messages about the need for personal modesty. ZG) Sometimes there is temporal immediacy to our instructional directions in art education. “How can you use your body to suggest movement without actually moving?” “Show me three different ways you can make a sound using a cardboard tube.” While a little bit of anxiety in the classroom may be productive, overwhelming students of any age with tension, stress, and the fear of public exposure can create emotional resistance in the classroom. Clearly, teachers who don’t feel safe within arts-based instruction will resist putting their students in an atmosphere they find personally intimidating.
I have found that working collaboratively, often beginning with pairs or trios, provides a safety zone to mitigate personal discomfort. Pacing the presentation or public display is also vital in nurturing the individual’s confidence and participation. Something as simple as directing the class to share in pairs (“show your neighbor the three different sounds you created with your cardboard tube”), rather than forcing everyone to individually show one at a time can make all the difference in scaffolding a positive emotional relationship with arts experiences. After all, in this type of pedagogy, individual talent or ability is secondary to aesthetic engagement. The work of art, not the individual’s drawing, dancing, singing, or sculpting skill, remains central. Sometimes finding an initial work of art within the individual’s comfort zone, such as photography, may be instrumental to addressing personal resistance.
2) Professional resistance (“I don’t have time for this. How does it fit in with my regular curriculum?”). The time pressure on teachers today limits instructional opportunity. Who has time for everything? Professional resistance emerges from reflective individuals who value the fleeting nature of educational opportunities. My pre-service teachers ask about our LCI involvement year after year: “How is this relevant to my intentions of being a classroom teacher?” Higher education faculty also inquire about the impact of this work on teacher education: “How does it make a difference in teacher education preparation?” “Please tell me again, why I should give up my class time for this study of art?”
Throughout my research I have found three sets of factors responsible for generating professional resistance: structural factors, collegial factors, and experiential factors. First, structural factors surrounding the context of the arts integration, such as scheduling constraints, curricular coordination, or assessment design, may be in part responsible for the professional resistance. Instructional time is always an issue in school life, so that when a teacher insists that they cannot take class time for such programming, creativity may be necessary to find a curricular place for the arts experience. In our own program, when we created a special LCI day outside of class hours, the experience landed more smoothly. And when we began formally assessing the arts education work with grades rather than qualitative comments, the students took the assignments more seriously.
Second, teachers may really need excellent professional support to try something new. Most dedicated teachers enjoy working in a positive collaboration with another professional, and many enjoy taking a professional risk, but it is important to find the right kind of guidance. Some teachers may need ample hand-holding, while others may want additional reading material, or to watch a colleague in action. On occasion, a mismatch of personalities, styles, and even communication patterns between collaborators may compromise success. My colleague, who had a bad experience with LCI in the past (“I tried it; it didn’t work for me, I had no idea what the teaching artist was talking about.”), found that the right support person, in her case someone who intimately understood early childhood higher education, transformed her relationship with aesthetic inquiry and arts integration. “He made it work for me. He understood what college teaching is really all about.”
The third set of factors that may be important in the process of addressing professional resistance concerns the nature of the experience, and the need to experience the work as an educational professional, not as a passive participant. In the case of my pre-service students, it was only when they had to design and implement an arts-based lesson in front of live students that they understood the value of the work. The active experience as a professional educator not as a passive student was a vital key to unlocking the professional relationship between the individual and the arts. As one of pre-service students wrote after teaching her art-based lesson:
The planning of the lesson went well but it was only once we taught the lesson that I realized how much I had gained. I didn’t realize the lingo I had picked up or the strategies I had acquired from countless teaching artists I had encountered . . . to see that the lesson was intriguing and successful for the students was a highlight of the entire process.
The three sets of factors that may underpin the germination of professional resistance, the structural, collegial, and experiential factors, can also be considered cyclically. First, the structural features of the environment should be a good fit for the professional educator. Next, the professional educator should have ample and appropriate collegial support, but the professional educator has to ultimately ride the bicycle on his/her own. For the teacher to convey the wonder and magic of arts engagement to children, s/he will have to model it independently, or perhaps as in the case of my students, the individual will always be concerned that they cannot do it on their own. “What do we do if we are not in a school with LCI involvement?”
3) Institutional resistance (“We already have a separate music teacher in the school.”).
Dewey (1902) reminds us in The child and the curriculum that compartmentalizing the school day into separate artificial divisions denies the child the cohesiveness that is true of both his/her world and his/her interests. Realistically, with economics of Jewish education as it is, it is sometimes hard to justify arts integration in the classroom when there is already an arts specialist in the school. However, because we who promote arts experiences believe that aesthetic inquiry and arts experiences are situated across arbitrary subject matter divisions, we must be creative and resilient in our work. One strategy that I have found most effective in creating curricular spaces for the arts is to pay attention to the magnetism of the arts. In one school I worked with, teachers not directly involved in the music collaboration were text messaging from one part of the building to another, “I cannot believe what I am hearing in school today! How can I get involved in this?” In another school when we encouraged parent chaperones to accompany the school classes to the performance of the work of art, we were blessed with a cadre of supporters who went back to the school administration with glowing reports of the experience, talking up the arts work on the playground, in cafes, and with non-participating teachers so that a positive buzz was generated. This allowed the arts collaboration to expand across different grades within the school institution the following year.
Please note that I am not suggesting teachers should avoid communicating with administrators, but I am advocating non-linear communication practices. If classic top-down institutional support is not readily available, institutional resistance may be effectively addressed from within. Creating eye-catching photographic displays, describing arts events in school newsletters, and just talking up the good that comes from arts experiences stirs up interest. These informal networking practices can seed small pockets of positive and magnetic energy pulsating with ramped-up potential.
4) Philosophical resistance (“What is the point of this study, anyway?”). There is principled resistance that comes from critical thinking about the philosophical origins of aesthetic educational practices. The LCI approach is non-vocational; it is not designed to train artists, dancers, musicians, sculptors, or photographers. The experientially oriented pedagogy is expressed as
An effort to move individuals (working together, searching together) to seek a grounding for themselves, so that they may break through the “cotton wool” of dailyness and passivity and boredom and come awake to the colored, sounding, problematic world. (Greene, 2001, p. 7)
Huh? Re-read, think, try again. And still, it may not sink in until one has experienced the work successfully and embodied the practice first-hand. A fluid, and often contradictory, relationship characterizes arts pedagogy and philosophy which links students, teachers, context, and the work of art. We have to accept that we may not totally understand the artwork before us, the music in our heads, the dance on the theatre stage, or the actor’s choice of gesture. Art inquiry and pedagogy may not be like a Google query that pops back seconds later with a set of answers. In fact one of the answers may be the dreaded non-answer, “I still don’t get it.” All of us involved in this work may have a responsibility to get used to the uncertainty, complexity, and risk inherent in this voyage, and the challenges that come from adopting this philosophical perspective. Part of the story is that you may not get it today, tomorrow, or next year. That is a tough pill to swallow, and for some a disagreeable item on the menu.
Engaging in the act of questioning is in fact a truly vibrant part of aesthetic inquiry. LCI (2005) includes questioning as one of the capacities that is part of their arts education practice. However, it is also important to remember that philosophical resistance is potent. It indicates that the person is really trying to align this school of thought with their own prior assumptions about art education and the role of education in general.
5) Disengagement: I also acknowledge a type of resistance I am calling disengagement. Disengagement presents when the individual refuses to engage in the arts encounter and effectively tunes out or fades away from the discourse. I have seen this behavior at the classroom or institutional level. Examples at the classroom level include those students who ask to go to the bathroom and never return to class, or those who don’t show up to the session and proffer minimal words of explanation: “I just couldn’t stay,” or “I couldn’t make it.” An illustrative example at the institutional level occurred at one school in which I conducted research when the school insisted on doing things their way, flagrantly defying the directions of the teaching artist.
Of course, there may be another chance in the future to reintroduce arts education, but when someone doesn’t show up to class or is unable to relinquish control, it is often a sign of disengagement. The relationship has been broken by the act of disengagement, and it is best to validate that action and accept the consequences. Relationships require energy and input from both ends, and if you reach out repeatedly and only find air, then the energy may be better spent.
In this article, I have explored five different types of resistance that I have encountered in my efforts to support aesthetic inquiry and arts integration. Moreover, the nature of the resistance yields tactical and strategic practices, (i.e., “Start warm-up activities in pairs rather than through individual sharing in large circle formations;” “Assess student art-based assignments with clear expectations and grades;” “Create spaces for people to give voice to their resistance.”), that may be effective in supporting teachers and their students with aesthetic art experiences. This research argues that the nature of the resistance offers valuable and specific information that may be important in facilitating the bond between teachers and arts education, and that this teacher-art relationship is a critical fulcrum for supporting teachers in aesthetic inquiry and arts integration in their classrooms and school communities.
As Dewey reminds us, it is only in opposition to some impulse that real artistry can emerge:
An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy . . . . resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care. (Dewey, 1934, p. 60)
This research finds that resistance to aesthetic education should be attended to with acute attention and pensive reflection. Modes of resistance can interfere with one’s relationship with art education. It is always important to listen deeply and consider patiently. More than labeling the types of moral resistance as a recipe book or a how-to-guide, I intend this analysis of resistance to aesthetic art education to further our understanding of the potential and opportunities for the arts and aesthetic inquiry in teacher education and across all school communities.
Note: An earlier draft of this meta-analysis was presented at “Educating the Creative Mind: Developing Capacities for the Future:” An International Conference for Educators at Kean University, Union, NJ, March, 2010. The first two individual research studies were published by the author: Hirsch, M. (2008, Spring/Fall). Frostbite. Schools: Studies in education 1(2),205-220 & Hirsch, M. (2010, October). Embracing resistance & asymmetry in pre-service teacher aesthetic education. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 9(3), 323-328.
References
Dewey, J. (1902). The child & the curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Perigee Books.
Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Lincoln Center Institute. (2005). “Capacities for aesthetic learning.” Teaching and Learning at Lincoln Center Institute. www.lcinstitute.org
Lincoln Center Institute. (2007). Entering the world of the work of art. New York: Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts.