Classroom Renaissance

In Gwendolyn Poche’s classroom, you won’t find any “fuzzy bunnies”--code for the typical activity that passes for art training in elementary school.

In fact, if you subscribe to traditional ideas of what constitutes art education--something involving crayons, construction paper, glue or gloppy paint--you might be hard pressed to pinpoint exactly when Poche’s 20 students at Loyola Village School in Westchester “do art.”

On a recent afternoon, for example, fifth-grader Garet Takiguchi was reading aloud the ancient story of Daedalus and Icarus. Then Poche held up some artists’ impressions of the mythological pair, including one by the French painter Henri Matisse.

That prompted a lively discussion about color, shape, technique and emotion, ending with a writing assignment in which the class pretended to be art critics commenting on a show of Matisse’s work.

This is “discipline-based” arts education, an approach to blending the visual arts into the school curriculum that is slowly taking hold in schools around Los Angeles.

More than arts and crafts, it draws on arts disciplines--art production, history, aesthetics and criticism--to develop skills needed for success in school and in the workplace.

Regular arts instruction began to disappear from California public schools in the early 1980s, after Proposition 13 rolled back property taxes and gutted school district budgets, and the back-to-basics drive took hold. Both movements prompted local school districts to regard the arts as a frill, causing teachers of the visual and performing arts to lose their jobs in droves.

This is why in the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, only one elementary school--Wonderland Avenue in Hollywood--has a full-time art teacher. The status of music instruction is slightly better, with 420 elementary schools sharing 75 music teachers.

To encourage schools to take the arts more seriously, proponents have begun touting arts education as a tool of school reform, arguing that it builds skills critical for academic success and cultivates talents that business needs to fill the jobs of tomorrow.

“The practice and study of the arts is far from peripheral and can be a major building block in giving American business the broad competencies needed as we enter the 21st century,” James Houghton, former CEO of Corning Inc. and chairman of the National Skills Standards Board, told several hundred educators in Los Angeles last month at a conference hosted by the Getty Education Institute for the Arts.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin will launch a task force this month to recommend ways to incorporate regular arts instruction into the kindergarten-through-12th-grade curriculum. She also plans to sponsor legislation this year to require that every high school student complete a year of study in the visual or performing arts as a condition of graduation.

Bringing the arts back into schools is not as much a problem of money as it is priorities and expertise, says Leilani Lattin Duke, director of the Getty institute. “So many school superintendents and teachers themselves have not had any background in the arts,” she lamented. “You can become a teacher in California and not have to take any art or music courses.”

Thus, many teachers feel uncomfortable doing much more than arts and crafts in class--certainly not art history or art criticism.

But at Loyola Village, all 26 teachers have undergone specialized instruction through the Getty institute, a longtime advocate of the idea that exposure to the arts is as crucial to a child as learning to read and write.

Students learn to describe a work of art in terms of color, shape, texture and technique, and then discuss and interpret its content. Posted on a bulletin board in Poche’s bright yellow classroom are the three questions that guide their explorations: “What do you see?” “What is it about?” and “How do you know that?”

“Those are art criticism criteria, simplified for children,” said Lila Crespin, a Getty consultant who helps train teachers. “This is learning with a purpose.”

So when Poche gave the order to be art critics, the students eagerly pulled out paper and pencil and began to discuss in small groups what they wanted to say about Matisse. “Come see the new artist Henri Matisse--he does wonders with texture,” one cluster of fifth-graders wrote. At another table, the students proclaimed Matisse a “master of collage.”

Viewing the hubbub, Principal Gary Domnitz looked pleased. “This is basically an oral language program. It develops their language skills,” he said.

Elliott Eisner, a Stanford University professor of education and art, said there is evidence that visual arts instruction develops communications and problem-solving skills in children.

Studying an artwork forces students to observe relationships among the parts of the piece and pay attention to nuance, he said. Learning to talk about art requires youngsters to employ metaphor, innuendo and other sophisticated modes of thinking.

“They learn that problems can have multiple solutions,” Eisner said.

Some arts educators point to the performance of arts students on the Scholastic Assessment Test as proof that such training has academic benefits. The College Board reports that last year students who took four years of art or music scored 32 points higher than the national average on the verbal portion of the SAT, and 23 points higher in math.

The scores went up the more arts instruction a student took. UC Irvine researchers have found that music education produced dramatic increases in the IQ scores of preschool children.

Loyola Village fifth-grader Porsche Norman, 9, agrees that learning about art has made a difference in her schoolwork.

“When we have art, it’s fun,” she said. “You get to piece all different things together. You can draw and paint. And it helps me if I have to write with my spelling and my vocabulary.”

Poche believes that her students learn self-confidence through the program. She teaches them techniques--they will learn the steps Matisse followed in his cut-paper collages, for example--allowing the children to express themselves without worrying whether their end result will come out looking like the teacher’s.

First-grade teacher June Walden said that exposing her students to a wide range of artworks has broadened cultural understanding.

“At the end of the year, if I hold up a photo of an African costume,” she said, “they don’t laugh. It’s an attitude they have that’s different.”