Arts Struggle in San Diego : Admiration, Animosity Greet Integrated Teaching of Arts

There’s a story going around among educators in Torrance about a young girl from that school district who visited Paris recently with her parents. While at the Louvre, she began talking to her mother about the art. Before long, 30 people were following her on an informal tour of the museum.

The girl’s ease and expertise in discussing art not only impressed her fellow tourists but vindicated the teachers and administrators back home who have championed the district’s controversial new approach to arts education.

Discipline-based arts education (DBAE), introduced in Torrance in 1985, weaves together lessons in art history, art criticism, aesthetics and art-making with regular classroom study of math, history, science, English and other subjects.

It’s the wave of the future, DBAE advocates say. But many who support the schools’ more traditional, activity-based approach to arts education that has dominated the field for generations describe DBAE, which would be school-run and school-funded, in less-glowing terms.

“I find the DBAE programs a little superficial,” said Kay Wagner, the San Diego Unified School District’s program manager for the visual and performing arts. “There’s a body of knowledge about art that children should know, and if we only integrate it into history and science and literature, that body of knowledge just gets watered down.”

Ann Heidt, the fine-arts coordinator at the San Diego County Office of Education, disagrees.

“We’re not trying to develop artists,” she said of the DBAE approach, “but preparing students to be articulate consumers of the arts when they’re adults, and to enrich their lives as a result of knowing more about the world. It really frees them to make their own choices about the visual world.”

Though students, parents and educators all agree that they want more arts education in the schools, they remain divided over what exactly should be taught and how best to teach it.

Conditions in San Diego schools may be ripening for more visible confrontation between differing ideological camps because no comprehensive arts program now exists. Most courses were budget-cut victims.

The highly acclaimed and unusual Young at Art program, which focuses on visual arts, has run its three-year course. Administered by the school district and to date financed privately with a donation of $1.5 million from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation, future funding for the program remains in doubt as city schools try to match a potential gift of an additional $50,000 from the foundation that has been promised only on the condition that it be matched.

During the past three years about 150 artists were brought into San Diego’s elementary schools to work directly with students on hands-on projects from murals to mask-making. More than 80,000 of the 115,000 district’s pupils benefited from the program.

As Young at Art dissolves, discipline-based arts education is making a quiet start. In San Diego County, second-grade teacher Leslie Vollmer (with her principal’s blessing) is using the system at Hope Elementary in Carlsbad.

Nationwide, however, the numbers are more encouraging. With start-up funding and administrative support from the Los Angeles-based Getty Center for Education in the Arts, DBAE now reaches 40% of Minnesota’s elementary school students, one third of Nebraska’s and growing numbers of students in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere in California. California’s state board of education supports DBAE but has not mandated it.

“By training the teacher, we have a long-range program,” the county’s Heidt said, contrasting one of DBAE’s strengths with a weakness of supplementary, temporary programs, such as Young at Art, that bring artists to schools. By teaching principles and properties of art, its history and criticism, DBAE reaps a long-term reward among students, too, its supporters claim.

“Very few teachers ask the big questions like ‘What is art?’,” Heidt said, a criticism of traditional methods. “Many of those questions don’t have answers, but they’re important for students to deliberate over. They help us focus better on artworks. If we arrive at pleasure as a result of paying attention to these artworks, we’re having an aesthetic experience. Many teachers feel students have to have a product when they come home.”

Opponents of DBAE object that art-making occupies only one-fourth of its curricular agenda. They say the program stifles creativity in young minds by putting too much emphasis on studying art and not enough on making it. DBAE supporters, such as Carlsbad’s Vollmer, defend their program’s breadth.

In Vollmer’s classroom, for example, a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is used to launch discussions about the artist’s life and work, as well as astronomy lessons and writing assignments.

“Every child can succeed with DBAE,” Vollmer said. “If you’re in another context, and the teacher says, draw a bunny, and you don’t know how, you don’t know what to do. My kids know about the expressive potential of art, the sensory properties of art. They do learn to draw, but it’s not just Christmas trees and bunnies.”

As the Young at Art program has demonstrated, however, hands-on programs can offer a great deal more than the “crafty, holiday art” scorned by DBAE supporters. Artists Salvador and Gloria Torres took their Young at Art charges on tours of the murals at Chicano Park, then brought them to their own studio to create puppet skits, clay pinch pots and portable paper murals. Paul Hobson let students help him design a musical playground, and Eddie Edwards had the children assist in developing themes for murals before painting them.

Even these short-term activities yield long-term benefits, the artists say.

“I know how art affected me as a youngster,” Edwards said. “It was my salvation. Art was a way of reaching out and using my imagination. Art raises self-esteem. Once students start doing well in the area of art, they start doing well in math and science and reading. They feel good about what they can do.”

One of Young at Art’s primary successes, according to Wagner, who oversees the program, was in bridging the schools and the community.

“The schools need that kind of thing, people coming in from the outside. And the artists worked as a catalyst to raise the consciousness in the community to the importance of the arts.”

The program also brought students and their families to the San Diego Museum of Art, which received half of the nearly $3-million grant from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation used to launch the two-pronged Young at Art. The museum built a traveling “Art Rig,” a museum on wheels that visited schools citywide, and it initiated a series of “Family Days,” with free museum tours, music and storytelling. The Gluck money has also provided many local schoolchildren with scholarships to attend SDMA art classes.

Though the Young at Art programs in the schools ended in June and at best will be continued only on a radically reduced scale, the museum’s programs will continue to be funded for at least two more years as part of the original deal.

But such was the enthusiasm of many of the artists who participated in the school program that several have continued working, as volunteers, to finish their projects and maintain contact with their students.

That connection between artists and children is a valuable one, Wagner feels, and one that does not evolve from discipline-based programs.

“Artists are lifeblood,” she said. “The idealism that they have about art translates to the kids. Art is an empowering process. Just looking at Van Gogh prints isn’t going to do that for kids. I’d like to see that in history classes. In art classes, I want to see kids finding out who they are, what they can do.

“I think the emphasis on talking about art doesn’t do that. It goes along with what teachers want because it doesn’t get the room messy, but I don’t think it should be imposed on young kids, because I see art as a tool. It empowers people and this approach (DBAE) doesn’t.”

Gail Wickstrom, Torrance’s assistant superintendent for educational services, couldn’t disagree more, and she uses that little girl from from her district who commanded the adult audience at the Louvre as a prime example of DBAE’s potential.

“When I first saw discipline-based arts education in practice, I realized this was a very powerful curriculum innovation, and the innovation goes beyond arts education,” she said. “Art teaches something that we all need. There’s a way of seeing the world, visually, that is reading the world much like we read a book. I believe youngsters need to be educated in ‘seeing’ the world.”