Raising the Creativity Consciousness Quotient in Education

By Kevan Nitzberg

In recent years in American schools, more and more emphasis has been placed on measurable accountability evidenced through student scores produced through the mass completion of standardized tests.  Various ‘core’ academic subject areas are mandated to have the delivery of the information that they bring to the curriculum assessed utilizing the idea that a test can actually measure all that is important in terms of the comprehension and growth of the students in question.(1)

In a similar vein (but in my view a more authentic one), students in the arts are also being assessed through a variety of competition / skill assessing venues that also seek to measure skill and knowledge attainment. What perhaps makes these experiences more valid is that the arts have always been performance based by the very nature of the craft and composition that is at the core of the activities that they are exploring. 

In my own experience as a visual arts educator, I have been very interested in the growth of this venue as evidenced by a particular series of events that are run in Minnesota in conjunction with the Minnesota State High School League and the Art Educators of Minnesota. Every year, the 16 different sections that the state of Minnesota has been broken into by the MSHSL, are given the opportunity to host their own Visual Arts Competition for the students who attend the high schools in their respective sections.(2) The student artwork that is selected for these events are representative of a variety of categories (both 2D and 3D), that are submitted by participating schools as the best examples of work being produced by the art students in their buildings. 

The works are then judged at the individual section level as part of the Visual Arts Competitions that are being held.  The judging of the work is done by art educators from the secondary and higher education levels who have been trained to look at student work as well as to utilize an assessment rubric that considers not only the conceptual, compositional and craftsmanship elements of each piece, but also considers the student’s own perception / communication of the intent of the work as related in an artist statement.(3)

Each Visual Arts Competition event is handled autonomously in the section that it is being held in.  As the Section Manager for my particular area, I have been able to facilitate not only the judging and award ceremony that follows, but also an opportunity for students (and their parents / guardians), to participate in art workshops taught by art instructors, as well as give students additional time to confer with the judges about their scores.  The students also get the opportunity to view each others work as well, adding to their own mental ‘libraries’ of idea generation and execution. The annual Visual Arts Competitions that I am responsible for has been held at the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, located on the western outskirts of Minneapolis. (4)

During the past 4 years a second tier event sponsored by Art Educators of MN. has been held at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, where the judges’ Spotlight On The Arts Awards winners are invited to have their art entries on display at the College’s gallery and also take place in a celebratory event on the last day of the exhibit.  Here students have the opportunity to have their work displayed in a professional gallery, and take part in additional workshops as well as discuss their work with those in attendance.  This last piece has been particularly important as the students who choose to talk about their work are able to articulate both their intent as well as the process that went into the creation of their art. (5)

This structure has allowed for a greater acknowledgement and systematic building of visual art programs that give students the opportunity to view and compare their works with those of their peers.  The individualized prospect for growth that this also helps to open up for students is enormous in aspect as they are being actively encouraged to develop a greater capacity for creative thought and apply it to their individualized visions in addition to building higher skill levels through this process.

  

An additional experience for art students in the conference my school is a part of, is the opportunity to expand their artistic / creative horizons in the annual Twin Cities Northwest Suburban Art Student Conference that takes place each year in the spring.  It has been held at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts for a number of years.(6)  This event combines selected students from the ten schools that make up the conference, and treats them to a day of art making outside of their typical school environment.  Students have the chance to select from a series of art making workshops including welding, raku-fired ceramics, stone carving, action painting, printmaking, photography, life drawing, and hand made sculpted books.  These workshops were either all day or ½ day sessions.  The students were able to not only get involved in making artworks using materials and processes not necessarily available to them in their home schools, but were also able to make art beyond the curriculum expectations that typically were part of the art class experiences.  This again provided the opening up of new prospects for considering new ideas and approaches in their own art making.

 
Further opportunities for substantive artistic student growth are made possible throughout the school year. Students may, for example, elect to pursue Advanced Placement Studio Art and Art History classes which provide more in depth exploration into both the making of visual art focused upon theme and diverse exploration of process, composition and material, as well as the study of the history of art through both time and culture to help provide more comprehensive understanding of the creative process in a variety of contexts.(7)

Dr. Elliot Eisner, noted art educator, speaks to the importance that all arts education experiences have for students and the values that they impart in his “Ten Lessons the Arts Teach”, a document that has been featured on the NAEA web site:
 
The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.(8)

All of these tenets collectively and individually speak to the importance of the development of creativity in the emerging thinking processes of youth and further underscore the importance of deliberately fostering and nurturing the ‘creativity quotient’ alluded to in the title of this article.

(1) http://www.fairtest.org/facts/howharm.htm
(2) page: http://www.mshsl.org/mshsl/activitypage.asp?actnum=466
(3) ‘resource section’: http://www.mshsl.org/mshsl/activitypage.asp?actnum=466
(4) http://www.pcae.k12.mn.us/
(5) http://www.cva.edu/
(6) http://www.minnetonkaarts.org/
(7) http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/courses/teachers_corner/index.html
(8) http://www.arteducators.org/olc/pub/NAEA/advocacy/advocacy_page_5.html