Arts education

United Kingdom: The only way to beat the robots is to back arts education in schools

Noticias

United Kingdom/March 20, 2018/By: ROHAN SILVA/Source: https://www.standard.co.uk 

If you’re doing a job involving creativity it’s less likely to be replaced by software: robots are hopeless on that front.

You can’t beat a good paradox. One of my favourites comes from Peter Moravec, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon university in the US — he points out that lots of things that humans find difficult, and have to study for years to master — such as chess, complex mathematics and financial analysis — are actually tasks that computers excel at.

Meanwhile, things that come naturally to a young child — recognising a face, interacting with people, moving around and so on — are some of the toughest skills to teach machines.  This insight has come to be known as Moravec’s Paradox, and it’s something technologists have been grappling with for decades.

As US academic Steven Pinker puts it: “When it comes to technology, the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted — recognising a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question — in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.”

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to creativity. Children are good at using their imagination, making things up, telling stories and concocting new games — but this innate human ability is fiendishly difficult to train software and computers to do. That means if you’re doing a job that involves creativity, no matter what the industry or field, it’s less likely to be replaced by software — because luckily for us, robots are hopeless on that front.

That’s great news because it shows how we can ensure we don’t lose out to technology — by doing more of what humans are good at, and nurturing people’s creative abilities.

Rohan Silva

At a time when the Bank of England is predicting that as many as 15 million British jobs could be lost to automation, politicians should be pulling out all the stops to ensure our education system is equipping people with the skills they need to find high-quality work. Sadly, we seem to be heading in the wrong direction.

The English Baccalaureate — known as the EBacc — now evaluates schools on their performance in English, maths and a handful of other subjects but excludes the creative arts. As a result, creative subjects are in steep decline in state schools across the country.

According to a report by the Education Policy Institute, the number of hours secondary schools spend teaching the arts has been reduced by 17 per cent in recent years, while the number of students taking at least one creative subject at GCSE level has fallen fast.

Changes to school funding are further adding to the squeeze. A recent BBC survey found that nine in 10 schools are cutting back on lesson time, staff or facilities in at least one arts subject.

Music education has been hit especially hard, with free musical instrument lessons being removed from many UK schools. This is tough on poorer families, and it’s bad for social mobility too.

As Andrew Lloyd Webber rightly says: “The removal of funding from music in schools is fast becoming a farce as well as a national scandal. Music is a proven asset to everything from children’s behaviour to academic achievement.”

To Lloyd Webber’s immense credit he’s put his money where his mouth is, and donated millions to provide music classes to children who wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to learn an instrument.

But if Britain is going to keep producing the employment, businesses and industries of the future, we’re going to need more than philanthropy — government needs to step up and make sure arts subjects are properly taught in schools. There would be plenty of other benefits too.

Right now, countries such as China and India are evolving fast, and moving away from low-cost manufacturing towards domestic consumption and higher-value goods. This means hundreds of millions of new middle-class purchasers of creative content like films, music and video games — as well as growing creative industries such as fashion, advertising and technology.

That’s a huge opportunity for the UK — but one we risk squandering if we don’t have the right education policies in place.

There’s another upside too — related to science, which you might think has nothing to do with the arts. On the contrary — an American study recently found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are almost three times more likely than the general population to play a musical instrument or regularly participate in the arts.

It’s a similar story with members of the Royal Society, Britain’s most illustrious scientific body — compared with other scientists, they’re twice as likely to have an artistic hobby.

As Nick Hillman, of the Higher Education Policy Institute, notes: “The UK’s future success depends on excellence in breadth and deeper links between the arts and the sciences.”

It would be so easy for the Government to start to put things right — for instance, by including at least one arts subject in the EBacc, and making clear that performance in the arts should count towards school league tables.

But the first step would be for politicians to recognise the economic importance of fostering creativity, at a time when technology is replacing so many human jobs.

Unfortunately, as another paradox shows, we’re not always smart at valuing the things that really matter.

More than 150 years ago, the economist Adam Smith described the paradox of value — the fact that essential goods such as water, which we couldn’t survive without, are often very cheap, while much less useful items such as diamonds are incredibly expensive.

If we’re going to win the race against the machine, and ensure we keep creating well-paid new jobs, we have to start valuing arts education properly — and put creative subjects back into schools. If we don’t, we’ll be much the poorer.

Source:

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/the-only-way-to-beat-the-robots-is-to-back-arts-education-in-schools-a3790916.html

 

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

How to Assess Arts Education—And Why You Should

Pluma Invitada

Only an arts education can prepare students for the future

By Emily Gasoi & Sonya Robbins Hoffmann

There is broad acknowledgment that schools are playing catch-up as we head into the 21st century. Technology and resulting innovation are rapidly changing our culture, making it imperative that schools change as well. We don’t know what many of the jobs of the future will look like, but we do know which skills and dispositions will be critical in order for people to navigate this new world. As our learning institutions adapt, the emphasis placed on teaching content will be supplanted by a focus on teaching process.

Teaching and assessing skills gained through the arts, as well as in creative processes across other disciplines, will become the norm. Here are some examples of the kinds of demands we are already responding to in the 21st-century that compel us to advocate more and better arts education:

1. To sift through the constant flow of information, students need to develop skills to evaluate the quality and accuracy of content and recognize false information.

2. A wide variety of technology and media platforms necessitates the ability to think critically and work with a variety of tools.

3. Employers are demanding creative problem-solving skills, as well as the ability to self-direct and collaborate.

4. In a gig economy characterized by temporary projects and frequent shifts in occupation, students will be faced with both increased control of career path and no clear road map. Being able to imagine one’s path and to pivot as external realities change is critical.

5. In our global society, curiosity, flexibility, and particularly the ability to see multiple perspectives are necessary building blocks for interacting with other cultures.

As decades of arts education scholarship have shown, engaging in high-quality arts learning develops these important skills and dispositions. And there is now broad agreement that schools need to explicitly teach them, as evidenced by widespread practices to deepen social-emotional learning, global citizenship, and 21st-century skills in general education.

However, assessment of these skills is difficult. Content learning, focused as it is on studying a set body of information, is easier to assess than process learning, which engages students in an ongoing cycle of inquiry, experimentation, and refinement. In order to devise strong assessments for arts learning, educators must grapple with how exactly to gauge these skills.

In our work as consultants, we help schools and arts education organizations strengthen creative teaching and learning practices. We have learned that when we are helping to craft assessment tools, we are often also helping to revise curriculum. Devising effective assessments in this arena requires schools and arts education organizations to clarify what it is they want students to learn in the first place.

«We don’t know what many of the jobs of the future will look like, but we do know which skills and dispositions will be critical in order for people to navigate this new world.»
Take this case study from our own work, for example: An arts-focused public school, which received Title I funding for disadvantaged students, was struggling with how to assess K-8 student learning across arts disciplines. When we began working with this school two years ago, the primary evaluations they used were performances and exhibits for families that showcased students’ skills. In addition, within individual arts classrooms, teachers had come up with their own idiosyncratic methods for measuring student growth. Students moved from one arts classroom to another encountering wildly different expectations and values.

The school administration was eager to help teachers align their classroom practices and develop more substantive assessments that would bring cohesion to expectations for student learning, as well as to convey to families and other stakeholders—such as board members, community members, and students—the value of deep arts learning.

In this package, Education Week has convened a range of researchers, professors, and practitioners to argue their case for arts education’s path forward. Despite their many contrasting opinions, these experts all agree on one thing: Arts instruction is key to American schooling and is worth supporting, researching, and protecting.

This special section is supported by a grant from The Wallace Foundation. Education Week retained sole editorial control over the content of this package; the opinions expressed are the authors’ own, however

Though we’ve worked in a variety of settings, we share our work with this particular school because we have found that many other educational settings wrestle with similar issues when measuring learning in the arts. The steps we use to guide and improve practices may be helpful for schools or arts education providers looking to strengthen their assessment process:

• Clarify site-specific goals. We worked with the administration to understand its unique needs. In this case, that meant creating assessments that could be used to align arts instruction through developing process-based and cohesive arts curriculum.

• Surface existing values and practices. We met with all teachers and staff to learn about individual values and documented their language for describing practices and intended outcomes.

• Identify areas of cohesion and aspiration. We scanned transcripts from these meetings to identify shared language and desired outcomes.

• Create shared expectations. We shared our findings with the faculty to decide which outcomes they deemed most critical for students at a variety of developmental levels.

• Devise a site-specific assessment tool. We produced an assessment framework anchored to the National Arts Standards and tailored it to the school’s values, language, and practices.

• Foster ownership through ongoing refinement. Teachers were able to use this new tool to inform their curriculum development and assess student learning. That, in turn, created greater cohesion across arts classrooms.

While this work is not rocket science, it is also not easy. Developing strong, place-based assessments entails an investment of time and resources. But our future demands a dramatic shift in how we think about assessment, both in the arts and in education more generally.

Of course, this shift must happen in a way that does not diminish the beauty and mystery of creative processes. Fortunately, educators have a wealth of information to draw on as they move toward assessment in process learning. Where schools have thus far failed students, however, is in not making these values clear and coherent at the organizational level and explicit in all that teachers teach.

It is not only our schools that are dependent on this level of learning. It is our democracy writ large. If we do not teach students how to do this work in schools, how can we expect them to grow into thoughtful and engaged citizens?

Source:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/10/04/how-to-assess-arts-education–and-why-you.html

Emily Gasoi is a co-founder of Artful Education, a Washington-based consulting practice. She is a former classroom teacher and the co-author of the newly released These Schools Belong to You and Me (Beacon Press).

Sonya Robbins Hoffmann is a co-founder of Artful Education and a longtime arts educator for schools and arts organizations.

 

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »