I’ve been thinking about how to address the ways that arts integration furthers the practice of art. After all, the arts have struggled for centuries to break free of their manual labor roots and to achieve recognition as having intrinsic value apart from decoration or casual entertainment. In the university, their status as independent intellectual contributors was earned only after a hard-fought battle, struggling to receive recognition for their creative practice equivalent to their research-based colleagues. Why should they compromise their foundational belief in art for arts’ sake to become an instrumental actor in someone else’s project? Why should they collaborate with colleagues on co-taught courses, especially if their own discipline is merely enhancing someone else’s non-arts content?
I’ll give you five good reasons and then I’ll explain each of them in greater detail.
1. It can enhance your own work
2. It’s interesting
3. It enhances your professional standing and that of your department and your university
4. It exposes more students to your discipline
5. It enhances all students’ potential for career success
Improved Practice
The first and most important reason to engage in collaborations with other scholars is to enhance your own arts practice. As artists, we’re always looking for inspiration and new material. Collaborative projects expose you to new stimuli, new ideas, and new learning, providing opportunities to grow as an artistic professional. Artists draw inspiration from the sum of their personal experiences and influences, but remaining in self-imposed exile limits the possibility of exposure to the very things that lend richness and diversity to creative activity. Furthermore, no matter our level of expertise, we can always become even better by trying a new approach, or by adding to our personal tool kit of theory, techniques, and materials.
As a hypothetical example, let’s say that a professor of piano performance is invited to collaborate on a project involving the development of a software package providing computer-generated accompaniment for students of instrumental music. Of course, pre-recorded piano accompaniment for instrumentalists has been available for decades, but this particular program attempts to collaborate with the instrumentalist in real time, responding to the performer and adjusting the accompaniment just as a live pianist might do. Working on this project would require the pianist to take an objective, analytical approach to his own piano performance and to consider the mechanics of how it affects the person whom he’s accompanying. It would also include the pianist in discussions about the possibilities and limitations of current technologies.
By the project’s end, the piano professor will have benefitted in a number of significant ways. First, he will have developed a greater understanding of his own practice of piano accompaniment and insight into how his actions affect the person whom he’s accompanying. Second, he will have forged professional relationships with colleagues outside of his department, which may pave the way for further collaborations. Third, he will have a greater knowledge of computing technologies and the ways in which they can be of benefit to musicians such as himself and his students. All of these benefits would then be incorporated into his disciplinary work, improving his piano performance and his skills as an educator as he communicates his increased skill and knowledge to his students.
Personal Enjoyment
Participating in a project or course that integrates the arts with another learning area benefits arts practice simply because it’s intellectually engaging. For those of us who teach in a skill-based field, danger lurks in repetition: semester after semester, we teach the same things, risking boredom and burnout. Of course, each class is populated by new students, and the pleasure of imparting our skills and knowledge to receptive minds is among the joys of working in higher education. However, intelligence goes hand-in-hand with curiosity. Collaboration provides mental stimulation and a fresh perspective on our creative work, leading us to think of our practice in new ways. This is especially true if the connections between what we do and what the person with whom we’re collaborating does aren’t immediately obvious, presenting a nearly irresistible creative challenge.
For instance, I met a professor of dance who worked with an engineering professor to model mathematical algorithms, and a professor of theatre who worked with a physics professor to create a play presenting academic content in physics. Dance and engineering, theatre and physics seem to be strange bedfellows, indeed; yet these collaborations yielded fascinating results—not just for the students, but for the educators working outside their respective comfort zones to bring their professional expertise to bear on a shared project. Each of the partners expressed surprise and delight at how their collaboration enhanced their personal understanding of their academic field, and the new knowledge they gained in their partner’s discipline. Collaborative work provides moments of dynamic intensity—those times when we exclaim in sheer wonderment, “Wow! This is SO cool!” As artists, we crave novelty and relish opportunities to navigate through uncharted territory. Collaborative work opens the door to vast fields ripe for our creative exploration.
Career Enhancement
Third, collaborative work is undeniably a growing trend in higher education. Centers, Institutes, or programs spanning multiple departments bringing disparate disciplines together to work on shared projects have emerged at numerous institutions, such as the Studio Lab at Penn State, the Media Lab at MIT, or the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology at Virginia Tech. Choosing to participate in this kind of innovative, high-profile work allows administrators and community members to see the excellence of your creative practice in a new light. People who might not venture into your department to attend a performance or gallery show can be exposed to your work in a way that they might understand more readily—you’re playing on their turf instead of insisting that they come to you. Even though institutional policies haven’t caught up to collaborative work just yet, universities are nevertheless hiring for faculty members who can work collaboratively, not just strict disciplinarians. Working collaboratively outside your home department has the potential to enhance your reputation among your non-arts colleagues and can showcase your creative work on a much larger stage.
Discourse, research, and investigation refine, improve, and further practice. It’s so in the STEM disciplines and just as true in the arts. Every investigation in the arts touches on other areas of learning and understanding, but this isn’t always obvious. Behind the studio doors, our creative process is every bit as rigorous as that of the scientific laboratory, but few non-artists realize this. Art appears to have appeared, almost miraculously. We know, however, that this is simply not so. Those investigations that some people refer to as “advanced navel gazing” are much more similar to STEM research methods than many scholars might believe. Production of an artistic product or performance requires thought, ideation, a hypothesis, an investigation, processes of trial and error, success and refinement, until—finally—there is a product or artifact testifying to the success of the rigorous creative process. It’s a deep dive into a particular artistic medium. The ballerina appears to float, but only because she spent tens of thousands of hours refining her technique. The musician plays an intricate score without missing a single note, employing dynamics, nuance, and subtlety…but only because he has rehearsed to the point where the music can appear to flow effortlessly from his instrument. As Hemingway notoriously said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit at the typewriter and bleed” before we can produce a virtuoso performance or a product of genius.
The problem lies in the fact that an artifact or performance cannot testify to its own process of becoming. It is opaque, whereas investigations in other learning areas are transparent. We know exactly how scientific discoveries are made because the scientist publishes hundreds of pages of documentation, data, analysis, and theories based on his experiments. The scientist looks at the artist and says, “You do research? Really?” Arts integration presents a tremendous opportunity for artists to be more forthcoming about the work they actually do. If we want to be equal participants in the community of scholars, learning how to work within the norms of formal research as conducted in other academic disciplines has the potential to enhance our standing in the university, and arts integration is one way to become part of this research culture. Choosing to participate in collaborative projects or courses, even if only to lend our skills to data visualization or sonification, does not invalidate our artworks even though we might be employing our talents for an instrumental purpose. Rather, we should seize the opportunity to become an integral part of collaborative projects--to be the conduit that allows others to grasp complex data while also allowing them to perceive the value of our contribution through the excellence of our work—to share our intellectual wealth, technical skill, and scholarly achievement.
Engaging in formal research moves our arts practice beyond making and performing, giving us opportunities to educate our fellow scholars about the historical, cultural, social, and scientific value of our work and to gain a greater appreciation for how these factors play into why we do what we do. When I work in the ceramics lab, I’m acutely aware of the science behind the ancient processes involved in transforming wet clay into an enduring work of art. I don’t just use fire without thought or understanding: I know the scientific principles behind it and use these strategically in order to achieve a desired result. Indeed, every artistic process was once an important technological breakthrough. Printmaking, for instance, might not be cutting-edge technology any longer, but this does not mean it is devoid of contemporary relevance. Printmaking requires knowledge of chemistry, mechanics, drawing, materials, and an advanced aesthetic sensibility in order for the printmaker to communicate the intended message to an audience. Just because digital technologies provide artists with alternative processes for visual communication does not mean that historical methods are without merit. I understand digital photography more deeply because I also know the darkroom. I can use an electronically-controlled kiln successfully because I can also build and use a wood-fired kiln with my own two hands. Direct experience with these tools and materials makes me a better artist and a better arts educator. When artists make such connections explicit through formal research, they can communicate these foundational truths to their fellow educators, improving their status in the university community even as it deepens their knowledge of arts practice.
Student Learning
Another compelling reason that arts integration is of significant benefit to university arts practitioners is emerging research into the benefits of direct participation in the arts on student learning. Admittedly, most of the studies on this topic focus on K-12 rather than higher education, but we only have to look at those individuals whose professional practice is enhanced by their participation in creative activity to see the correlations. Theatre and dance allow students to gain skills such as reading body language and being poised in speaking before an audience or giving a presentation. Playing a musical instrument has well-known benefits in raising a student’s IQ, and performing with a group teaches lessons in working together, taking direction, and the value of an individual’s contribution to the greater whole. Creating works of visual art allows students to develop their skills in visualization and to understand the physics of making and construction. Creative writing and poetry lead students to think of words as an artistic medium, improving their linguistic abilities and increasing their sensitivity to verbal communication. No matter which artistic medium or modality we can think of, benefits exist for any participant. We’re not trying to make every student a professional artist, musician, dancer, actor, or writer, but I do believe that each and every person has a deep well of creativity that can be unlocked through a broad exposure to direct engagement in the arts, even if only for lifelong personal enjoyment.
Arts integration broadens the reach of arts practice, increasing our influence beyond the confines of our particular departments. Students who might not venture into an art class can still receive the benefits of an arts integrated course without having to make painful choices about credits spent outside of their own departmental requirements. Whether we invite students from STEM, business, humanities, and social sciences to our studios and practice rooms, or we meet them in their own classrooms, our goal is not to make them accomplished arts practitioners. Rather, we’re serving hors d’oeuvres—a little taste that we hope will leave them hungry for more, awakening an appetite they might not have even known that they possessed. In fact, I’ve experienced this myself. When I was an art student, I thought I’d only ever be interested in photography—that’s what I went to art school to learn how to do. I was actually kind of annoyed to find that I had to take a class in 3D media in order to graduate. Why, I though, would I ever need that? But I dutifully signed up for ceramics…and found that I loved it. The elemental power of blending clay, water, air and fire to create works of art was—and still is—of tremendous fascination to me. I’m still a photographer, but my artistic horizons were powerfully expanded. The same was true of theatre. I’ll confess that I wasn’t a big fan of live theatre in my younger (less enlightened) days. But then a friend asked me to act in a film he was making. He asked me to dress in my best business attire, and I ate a steak dinner while the others at the table ate small bowls of rice. As we shot the film that day…and as I ate, and ate, and ate…I gained a much greater appreciation for what goes into a theatrical performance, and it made me understand aspects of how to appear before an audience that I use in my public speaking today, even though it wasn’t actually a speaking part.
I believe that every student should have a chance to get dirty, sweaty, and hoarse experiencing the arts, to be stretched beyond their comfort zones, pushed outside of their chosen academic fields. They should have fingers stained with printer’s ink, paint, and clay. They should feel the butterflies in their stomachs as they await their cues to go onstage. They should be in the center of the choir or symphony orchestra, knowing they’ve hit their note and it’s part of the glory of sound that surrounds them. That’s the real magic of the arts. Increasing opportunities for arts-integrated classes and projects, or through non-major arts participation requirements, allows a much wider body of students to enjoy these same kinds of transformative experiences.
From a purely utilitarian standpoint, increasing our involvement in arts-integrated courses and advocating for all students to engage directly with the arts would bolster the status of our departments within the university by increasing enrollment in our classes. More students, of course, means more tuition dollars, which leads to larger budgets and additional faculty positions. If participatory arts courses (not—heaven forbid—dull, disconnected “appreciation”-style classes) become a graduation requirement for all students rather than just liberal arts electives, we would find ourselves performing on a much larger stage, in a position of increasing influence. We only stand to gain by opening the doors of our department to a wider population of students, and the same can be said of co-taught or arts-integrated courses: any way that we can find ways to share our knowledge and foster artistic skill is only to our professional benefit.
Student Career Success
Participating in arts integration is of value to artists and non-artists alike. Truth be told, few students who major in the arts achieve greatness, even when they work for the 10,000 hours presumably needed to become a master. Experts disagree about the origin of genius, with some saying it’s merely a matter of sufficient amounts of practice (that proverbial 10,000 hours), while others cite factors such as physical or emotional aptitude, parental support early in life, or an as-yet undefined combination of traits, characteristics, and direct engagement.[1] Whatever the reason, genuine virtuosity in any field is comparatively rare. That’s precisely why it’s celebrated. Therefore, in addition to the next rock stars in our respective artistic media, we need to produce graduates who can make a living in the arts even if they’re never invited to present a solo exhibition at MoMA or perform at the Kennedy Center. Encouraging students of the arts to participate in collaborative work with other academic disciplines expands their career horizons and provides them with opportunities that a traditional mono-disciplinary approach might not usually supply.
Participation in arts integration enhances students’ potential for career success, regardless of their major field of study. In a well-known 2012 study conducted by IBM, proficiency in communication, collaboration, flexibility, and creativity were traits most prized by CEOs, and interestingly were also those ranked most highly by students. We, in the arts, are hard-wired for these characteristics. We know the essential role they play in our arts practice. Doesn’t it then stand to reason that, as educators, we possess a unique opportunity to engender success in the graduates of our universities? Whether we open our doors to all comers, inviting them in to experience artistic practice for themselves, or venture out to engage in collaborative work with our non-artist colleagues, we can provide students with invaluable experiences with potential to contribute to their career success by engaging them in activities that foster the very skills necessary in the 21st century workplace.
From the Inside Out, and the Outside In
We, in the arts, possess skills and knowledge that are so much a part of our DNA as to be nearly unnoticed. We embody creativity, innovation, and collaboration as our very way of life. It might not be immediately obvious to the painter wielding the paintbrush, the poet holding the pencil, the composer working at the piano, or the dramaturge reading a script, how the discourse about arts integration furthers arts practice. However, we need to recognize that the more people who can be introduced to our work, the more students who can experience the power of the arts for themselves, then the more we, ourselves, will benefit from the conversation.
We, in the arts, sit atop a dragon’s hoard of intellectual wealth. We can keep it to ourselves and the select students who major in our disciplines, or we can share it with the world. Like Rumplestiltskin, we artists and arts educators know how to spin the straw into gold. Our work might appear as if by magic, but rather than guarding our secrets, sharing them only with select initiates, I believe it is incumbent upon us as arts educators to open our artistic work to our non-arts colleagues and their students as well. Allowing the audience to peek behind the curtain through our collaborations and our research will not forevermore rob our work of its mystique—it offers a priceless opportunity for others to appreciate the rigor of what we do and to experience the joys and frustrations of creative practice for themselves.
The work of arts integration is to bring our inside knowledge to those outside of our professions, but the benefits we receive flow from the outside in. We’ll enhance our own creative practice and find professional enrichment through collaborative engagement. We’ll receive the respect and acknowledgement of our colleagues in other learning areas and raise the profile of our departments. We’ll also promote student learning through the arts and bolster all students’ chances of career success.
Arts integration is the bridge across the chasm separating arts practice from other academic domains. To realize its benefits, we have but to step outside.
[1] Szalavitz, M. “10,000 Hours May Not Make a Master After All.” TIME, Health & Family. May 20, 2013. http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/20/10000-hours-may-not-make-a-master-after-all/
I’ll give you five good reasons and then I’ll explain each of them in greater detail.
1. It can enhance your own work
2. It’s interesting
3. It enhances your professional standing and that of your department and your university
4. It exposes more students to your discipline
5. It enhances all students’ potential for career success
Improved Practice
The first and most important reason to engage in collaborations with other scholars is to enhance your own arts practice. As artists, we’re always looking for inspiration and new material. Collaborative projects expose you to new stimuli, new ideas, and new learning, providing opportunities to grow as an artistic professional. Artists draw inspiration from the sum of their personal experiences and influences, but remaining in self-imposed exile limits the possibility of exposure to the very things that lend richness and diversity to creative activity. Furthermore, no matter our level of expertise, we can always become even better by trying a new approach, or by adding to our personal tool kit of theory, techniques, and materials.
As a hypothetical example, let’s say that a professor of piano performance is invited to collaborate on a project involving the development of a software package providing computer-generated accompaniment for students of instrumental music. Of course, pre-recorded piano accompaniment for instrumentalists has been available for decades, but this particular program attempts to collaborate with the instrumentalist in real time, responding to the performer and adjusting the accompaniment just as a live pianist might do. Working on this project would require the pianist to take an objective, analytical approach to his own piano performance and to consider the mechanics of how it affects the person whom he’s accompanying. It would also include the pianist in discussions about the possibilities and limitations of current technologies.
By the project’s end, the piano professor will have benefitted in a number of significant ways. First, he will have developed a greater understanding of his own practice of piano accompaniment and insight into how his actions affect the person whom he’s accompanying. Second, he will have forged professional relationships with colleagues outside of his department, which may pave the way for further collaborations. Third, he will have a greater knowledge of computing technologies and the ways in which they can be of benefit to musicians such as himself and his students. All of these benefits would then be incorporated into his disciplinary work, improving his piano performance and his skills as an educator as he communicates his increased skill and knowledge to his students.
Personal Enjoyment
Participating in a project or course that integrates the arts with another learning area benefits arts practice simply because it’s intellectually engaging. For those of us who teach in a skill-based field, danger lurks in repetition: semester after semester, we teach the same things, risking boredom and burnout. Of course, each class is populated by new students, and the pleasure of imparting our skills and knowledge to receptive minds is among the joys of working in higher education. However, intelligence goes hand-in-hand with curiosity. Collaboration provides mental stimulation and a fresh perspective on our creative work, leading us to think of our practice in new ways. This is especially true if the connections between what we do and what the person with whom we’re collaborating does aren’t immediately obvious, presenting a nearly irresistible creative challenge.
For instance, I met a professor of dance who worked with an engineering professor to model mathematical algorithms, and a professor of theatre who worked with a physics professor to create a play presenting academic content in physics. Dance and engineering, theatre and physics seem to be strange bedfellows, indeed; yet these collaborations yielded fascinating results—not just for the students, but for the educators working outside their respective comfort zones to bring their professional expertise to bear on a shared project. Each of the partners expressed surprise and delight at how their collaboration enhanced their personal understanding of their academic field, and the new knowledge they gained in their partner’s discipline. Collaborative work provides moments of dynamic intensity—those times when we exclaim in sheer wonderment, “Wow! This is SO cool!” As artists, we crave novelty and relish opportunities to navigate through uncharted territory. Collaborative work opens the door to vast fields ripe for our creative exploration.
Career Enhancement
Third, collaborative work is undeniably a growing trend in higher education. Centers, Institutes, or programs spanning multiple departments bringing disparate disciplines together to work on shared projects have emerged at numerous institutions, such as the Studio Lab at Penn State, the Media Lab at MIT, or the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology at Virginia Tech. Choosing to participate in this kind of innovative, high-profile work allows administrators and community members to see the excellence of your creative practice in a new light. People who might not venture into your department to attend a performance or gallery show can be exposed to your work in a way that they might understand more readily—you’re playing on their turf instead of insisting that they come to you. Even though institutional policies haven’t caught up to collaborative work just yet, universities are nevertheless hiring for faculty members who can work collaboratively, not just strict disciplinarians. Working collaboratively outside your home department has the potential to enhance your reputation among your non-arts colleagues and can showcase your creative work on a much larger stage.
Discourse, research, and investigation refine, improve, and further practice. It’s so in the STEM disciplines and just as true in the arts. Every investigation in the arts touches on other areas of learning and understanding, but this isn’t always obvious. Behind the studio doors, our creative process is every bit as rigorous as that of the scientific laboratory, but few non-artists realize this. Art appears to have appeared, almost miraculously. We know, however, that this is simply not so. Those investigations that some people refer to as “advanced navel gazing” are much more similar to STEM research methods than many scholars might believe. Production of an artistic product or performance requires thought, ideation, a hypothesis, an investigation, processes of trial and error, success and refinement, until—finally—there is a product or artifact testifying to the success of the rigorous creative process. It’s a deep dive into a particular artistic medium. The ballerina appears to float, but only because she spent tens of thousands of hours refining her technique. The musician plays an intricate score without missing a single note, employing dynamics, nuance, and subtlety…but only because he has rehearsed to the point where the music can appear to flow effortlessly from his instrument. As Hemingway notoriously said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit at the typewriter and bleed” before we can produce a virtuoso performance or a product of genius.
The problem lies in the fact that an artifact or performance cannot testify to its own process of becoming. It is opaque, whereas investigations in other learning areas are transparent. We know exactly how scientific discoveries are made because the scientist publishes hundreds of pages of documentation, data, analysis, and theories based on his experiments. The scientist looks at the artist and says, “You do research? Really?” Arts integration presents a tremendous opportunity for artists to be more forthcoming about the work they actually do. If we want to be equal participants in the community of scholars, learning how to work within the norms of formal research as conducted in other academic disciplines has the potential to enhance our standing in the university, and arts integration is one way to become part of this research culture. Choosing to participate in collaborative projects or courses, even if only to lend our skills to data visualization or sonification, does not invalidate our artworks even though we might be employing our talents for an instrumental purpose. Rather, we should seize the opportunity to become an integral part of collaborative projects--to be the conduit that allows others to grasp complex data while also allowing them to perceive the value of our contribution through the excellence of our work—to share our intellectual wealth, technical skill, and scholarly achievement.
Engaging in formal research moves our arts practice beyond making and performing, giving us opportunities to educate our fellow scholars about the historical, cultural, social, and scientific value of our work and to gain a greater appreciation for how these factors play into why we do what we do. When I work in the ceramics lab, I’m acutely aware of the science behind the ancient processes involved in transforming wet clay into an enduring work of art. I don’t just use fire without thought or understanding: I know the scientific principles behind it and use these strategically in order to achieve a desired result. Indeed, every artistic process was once an important technological breakthrough. Printmaking, for instance, might not be cutting-edge technology any longer, but this does not mean it is devoid of contemporary relevance. Printmaking requires knowledge of chemistry, mechanics, drawing, materials, and an advanced aesthetic sensibility in order for the printmaker to communicate the intended message to an audience. Just because digital technologies provide artists with alternative processes for visual communication does not mean that historical methods are without merit. I understand digital photography more deeply because I also know the darkroom. I can use an electronically-controlled kiln successfully because I can also build and use a wood-fired kiln with my own two hands. Direct experience with these tools and materials makes me a better artist and a better arts educator. When artists make such connections explicit through formal research, they can communicate these foundational truths to their fellow educators, improving their status in the university community even as it deepens their knowledge of arts practice.
Student Learning
Another compelling reason that arts integration is of significant benefit to university arts practitioners is emerging research into the benefits of direct participation in the arts on student learning. Admittedly, most of the studies on this topic focus on K-12 rather than higher education, but we only have to look at those individuals whose professional practice is enhanced by their participation in creative activity to see the correlations. Theatre and dance allow students to gain skills such as reading body language and being poised in speaking before an audience or giving a presentation. Playing a musical instrument has well-known benefits in raising a student’s IQ, and performing with a group teaches lessons in working together, taking direction, and the value of an individual’s contribution to the greater whole. Creating works of visual art allows students to develop their skills in visualization and to understand the physics of making and construction. Creative writing and poetry lead students to think of words as an artistic medium, improving their linguistic abilities and increasing their sensitivity to verbal communication. No matter which artistic medium or modality we can think of, benefits exist for any participant. We’re not trying to make every student a professional artist, musician, dancer, actor, or writer, but I do believe that each and every person has a deep well of creativity that can be unlocked through a broad exposure to direct engagement in the arts, even if only for lifelong personal enjoyment.
Arts integration broadens the reach of arts practice, increasing our influence beyond the confines of our particular departments. Students who might not venture into an art class can still receive the benefits of an arts integrated course without having to make painful choices about credits spent outside of their own departmental requirements. Whether we invite students from STEM, business, humanities, and social sciences to our studios and practice rooms, or we meet them in their own classrooms, our goal is not to make them accomplished arts practitioners. Rather, we’re serving hors d’oeuvres—a little taste that we hope will leave them hungry for more, awakening an appetite they might not have even known that they possessed. In fact, I’ve experienced this myself. When I was an art student, I thought I’d only ever be interested in photography—that’s what I went to art school to learn how to do. I was actually kind of annoyed to find that I had to take a class in 3D media in order to graduate. Why, I though, would I ever need that? But I dutifully signed up for ceramics…and found that I loved it. The elemental power of blending clay, water, air and fire to create works of art was—and still is—of tremendous fascination to me. I’m still a photographer, but my artistic horizons were powerfully expanded. The same was true of theatre. I’ll confess that I wasn’t a big fan of live theatre in my younger (less enlightened) days. But then a friend asked me to act in a film he was making. He asked me to dress in my best business attire, and I ate a steak dinner while the others at the table ate small bowls of rice. As we shot the film that day…and as I ate, and ate, and ate…I gained a much greater appreciation for what goes into a theatrical performance, and it made me understand aspects of how to appear before an audience that I use in my public speaking today, even though it wasn’t actually a speaking part.
I believe that every student should have a chance to get dirty, sweaty, and hoarse experiencing the arts, to be stretched beyond their comfort zones, pushed outside of their chosen academic fields. They should have fingers stained with printer’s ink, paint, and clay. They should feel the butterflies in their stomachs as they await their cues to go onstage. They should be in the center of the choir or symphony orchestra, knowing they’ve hit their note and it’s part of the glory of sound that surrounds them. That’s the real magic of the arts. Increasing opportunities for arts-integrated classes and projects, or through non-major arts participation requirements, allows a much wider body of students to enjoy these same kinds of transformative experiences.
From a purely utilitarian standpoint, increasing our involvement in arts-integrated courses and advocating for all students to engage directly with the arts would bolster the status of our departments within the university by increasing enrollment in our classes. More students, of course, means more tuition dollars, which leads to larger budgets and additional faculty positions. If participatory arts courses (not—heaven forbid—dull, disconnected “appreciation”-style classes) become a graduation requirement for all students rather than just liberal arts electives, we would find ourselves performing on a much larger stage, in a position of increasing influence. We only stand to gain by opening the doors of our department to a wider population of students, and the same can be said of co-taught or arts-integrated courses: any way that we can find ways to share our knowledge and foster artistic skill is only to our professional benefit.
Student Career Success
Participating in arts integration is of value to artists and non-artists alike. Truth be told, few students who major in the arts achieve greatness, even when they work for the 10,000 hours presumably needed to become a master. Experts disagree about the origin of genius, with some saying it’s merely a matter of sufficient amounts of practice (that proverbial 10,000 hours), while others cite factors such as physical or emotional aptitude, parental support early in life, or an as-yet undefined combination of traits, characteristics, and direct engagement.[1] Whatever the reason, genuine virtuosity in any field is comparatively rare. That’s precisely why it’s celebrated. Therefore, in addition to the next rock stars in our respective artistic media, we need to produce graduates who can make a living in the arts even if they’re never invited to present a solo exhibition at MoMA or perform at the Kennedy Center. Encouraging students of the arts to participate in collaborative work with other academic disciplines expands their career horizons and provides them with opportunities that a traditional mono-disciplinary approach might not usually supply.
Participation in arts integration enhances students’ potential for career success, regardless of their major field of study. In a well-known 2012 study conducted by IBM, proficiency in communication, collaboration, flexibility, and creativity were traits most prized by CEOs, and interestingly were also those ranked most highly by students. We, in the arts, are hard-wired for these characteristics. We know the essential role they play in our arts practice. Doesn’t it then stand to reason that, as educators, we possess a unique opportunity to engender success in the graduates of our universities? Whether we open our doors to all comers, inviting them in to experience artistic practice for themselves, or venture out to engage in collaborative work with our non-artist colleagues, we can provide students with invaluable experiences with potential to contribute to their career success by engaging them in activities that foster the very skills necessary in the 21st century workplace.
From the Inside Out, and the Outside In
We, in the arts, possess skills and knowledge that are so much a part of our DNA as to be nearly unnoticed. We embody creativity, innovation, and collaboration as our very way of life. It might not be immediately obvious to the painter wielding the paintbrush, the poet holding the pencil, the composer working at the piano, or the dramaturge reading a script, how the discourse about arts integration furthers arts practice. However, we need to recognize that the more people who can be introduced to our work, the more students who can experience the power of the arts for themselves, then the more we, ourselves, will benefit from the conversation.
We, in the arts, sit atop a dragon’s hoard of intellectual wealth. We can keep it to ourselves and the select students who major in our disciplines, or we can share it with the world. Like Rumplestiltskin, we artists and arts educators know how to spin the straw into gold. Our work might appear as if by magic, but rather than guarding our secrets, sharing them only with select initiates, I believe it is incumbent upon us as arts educators to open our artistic work to our non-arts colleagues and their students as well. Allowing the audience to peek behind the curtain through our collaborations and our research will not forevermore rob our work of its mystique—it offers a priceless opportunity for others to appreciate the rigor of what we do and to experience the joys and frustrations of creative practice for themselves.
The work of arts integration is to bring our inside knowledge to those outside of our professions, but the benefits we receive flow from the outside in. We’ll enhance our own creative practice and find professional enrichment through collaborative engagement. We’ll receive the respect and acknowledgement of our colleagues in other learning areas and raise the profile of our departments. We’ll also promote student learning through the arts and bolster all students’ chances of career success.
Arts integration is the bridge across the chasm separating arts practice from other academic domains. To realize its benefits, we have but to step outside.
[1] Szalavitz, M. “10,000 Hours May Not Make a Master After All.” TIME, Health & Family. May 20, 2013. http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/20/10000-hours-may-not-make-a-master-after-all/