Is Art Academic?

As I was finishing up teaching an art lesson to a class of school kids, their teacher admonished them to, "Hurry up -- fun and games are over. Time to get back to real learning."

Ouch!

We were just finishing a lively session where 100 percent of the kids were 100 percent engaged for the entire period. Since this was said right in front of the kids, I piped up, "Actually, they have been learning the whole time. This was a right-brain activity. "

The teacher corrected me, "Real education is reading and math and that's what we do in my classroom."

Me: "This is educational also. It was open-ended to promote critical thinking and doing. Art is hands-on. The kids made choices and fixed problems along the way to end up with a finished project that they created."

Teacher: "Like I said, real education is what goes on in my classroom."

What do you think?

Here's my condensed version of why art and teaching creativity is academic and educational.

For those of you who haven't had formal teacher's training, there's a 50-year-old academic model that we've all been taught and supposedly use when planning lessons. It's called Bloom's Taxonomy. Essentially, it identifies how learning takes place on any topic.

There are seven levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:
The first four levels are learned in the "left-brain" modality

Knowledge: Remember - learn the basic facts
Comprehension: Understand
Application: Practice
Analysis: Examine
...........................................
Creative thinking begins here once students have mastered the subject. The highest levels of learning occur in the "right-brain" modality

Synthesis: Create
Evaluation: Assess

Creativity is "connectivity." It's the ability to take what you've learned and do something new with it. It's the realization that there are many ways to solve problems. And it's the ability to make choices from all the possibilities. That takes practice. What do you hear when kids haven't had practice at this? "I don't know what to do!" Creativity = doing!

If teachers don't extend lessons to get to the top two levels of Bloom's taxonomy, students remain stuck in analytical, "left-brain" thinking -- learning the rules of how to find the one correct answer. That is how they spend a good deal of their school day.

But creative thinking is exactly the opposite! The rules of "right-brain" thinking are expansive. To activate these, kids have to DO. What is art? DOING.

Filling out mounds of boring white worksheets is not academic.