Cultivating the Arts in Education and Therapy

Malcolm Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136738784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The constituency for education and therapy in the arts is rapidly expanding beyond the conventional school and clinical settings to include the wider community. In Cultivating the Arts in Education and Therapy, Malcolm Ross integrates traditional Chinese Five Element Theory, also known as The Five Phases of Change, with contemporary Western psychological and cultural studies, to form a new Syncretic Model of creative artistic practice.

The Syncretic Model is explored and validated through an analysis of interviews with practising, successful artists, and in a comprehensive review of the latest neuro-scientific research into human consciousness and emotion. The book addresses the well-documented difficulties experienced by arts teachers and therapists intervening in, supporting and evaluating the creative development of individual students and clients.

This groundbreaking text repositions the arts as central to the effective initiation and management of change in contemporary society. Besides being of wide general interest, it will have particular relevance for practising and trainee arts teachers, arts therapists and community artists. With the demand for their services growing and pressure to demonstrate effectiveness mounting, the arts community is looking to build bridges between the different arts, and between arts education and therapy across national boundaries. This book offers a fresh, coherent, and challenging framework for a revitalized reflective practice from an experienced authority in the field.

Part 1

Theoretical

1 Towards a Participatory Practice

This chapter provides the research context for the introduction in Chapter 2 of the Syncretic Model of creativity in the arts. In particular, it sets out the difficulties teachers of the arts have traditionally had in finding a constructive, participatory role when promoting their students’ creativity. The chapter covers my own research and teaching since the late 1960s in the quest for a new pedagogy. Key figures in that search include Robert Witkin, D. W. Winnicott, Hans-Georg Gadamer, R. G. Collingwood and Rom Harré, whose cyclical model of the Identity Project is subsequently adapted to create the Syncretic Model itself.

To Constantine Levin the country was the background of life – that is to say, the place where one rejoiced, suffered and laboured; but to Koznyshev the country meant, on the one hand rest from work, on the other, a valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of the town.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

A strong tradition suggests that artistic talent is in the gift of the gods, and that, for the lucky few, progress towards success and the continuing command of talent is a matter to be settled between the artist and his or her muse (to use the old parlance). In other words, there’s not really much for the teacher of art to do apart from opening the students’ eyes to the canon of works constituting the best that has been done in the past, and instructing them in the most popular, practical techniques having contemporary currency. But where their distinctive talents are concerned, in the development of the young artists’ defining styles or voices, and in regard to their individual and unique creative energies and imaginations, the teacher must stand back and allow nature to take its course, offering critical and sympathetic encouragement in equal measures, judged appropriate to the circumstances. Teaching the arts, on this reckoning, would amount to little more than servicing a given talent; it would seem that there is little or nothing to be done ‘from within the student’s expressive act’, as Witkin expresses it in The Intelligence of Feeling, since, the act being finally private, there is no means of an outsider’s gaining access to it.

It is the purpose of this book, as it was of Witkin’s, to examine this tradition and to counter it by proposing a fully participatory practice, whereby the teacher becomes the intimate companion of the student as a developing artist as she/he works the expressive impulse into a satisfying feeling-form, or moves from merely passive reception of a work of art to a full, imaginative engagement with it. To this end, a model of the creative process in the arts will be presented that provides the teacher with a clear strategy of intervention, a model that is also, at the same time, a set of guidelines for creative self-help.

The different arts therapies have their own professional traditions of intervention, ranging all the way from ‘hands-off’, reflective dialogue to ‘hands-on’, free play with the client. Here again, the model proposed in the following chapters will offer clear guidance for a participatory strategy, but only where the healing potential of real artistic experience forms the basis of the therapist’s convictions concerning their work. Arts therapists who tend to see the arts simply as diagnostic tools or as activities preliminary to treatments of a different sort (e.g. verbally mediated psychoanalysis), may well find my suggestions problematic. Nevertheless, I ask them to read on – not least because I shall try to engage with these concerns. Since the model, to be called the Syncretic Model, for reasons that will shortly become apparent, provides a way of thinking about artistic creativity, it will also suggest a participatory practice to cultural animators and artists working in community settings, providing opportunities for arts experience outside the formal settings of arts therapy, education and training.

The British economist Amartya Sen has proposed a neat formula for what he calls personal ‘capability’ – the development of which, in its citizens, would seem to be the just aspiration of any civilized society:

TALENT + OPPORTUNITY = CAPABILITY

Sen assumes that everyone has talents if given the opportunity to discover and express them. We can judge no-one’s ‘capability’ without understanding the nature and extent of the opportunity they have had to develop and hone their gifts. In so far as everyone has the inclination to and wherewithal for personal expression, they have a talent for the arts. In some of us that talent will be remarkable both in its specificity and its force. Nonetheless, everyone carries the impulse of self-expression and a propensity for reading the ‘signs’ of art, and whether their talent is exceptional or run-of-the-mill, ‘opportunity’ will determine the extent of their artistic capability, both in terms of personal fulfilment and their contribution to the wider community. Opportunity in the arts takes many forms. It might mean having a sympathetic parent or relative (e.g. Van Gogh’s brother, Theo); finding a spiritual home (e.g. Joseph Conrad, England); finding a creative partner (e.g. for Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears); finding a sensitive and inspiring mentor (Antony Caro and Henry Moore); making artistic friends (Paula Rego and Vic Willing at the Slade). Opportunity clearly embraces the spheres of education – both formal and informal – and of therapy. My hope in writing this book is that it might offer its readers a way of rethinking the character and quality of the opportunities they represent for their students and clients. If their practice were, as a result of reading this book, to become more fully participatory, I would claim a higher rating for the opportunities they were offering to a ‘talent’ in the process of its conversion to ‘capability’.

The notion of teaching – or healing for that matter – ‘from within the expressive act’ became the principal pedagogical message to emerge from the research project on the arts in secondary schools in the UK that Robert Witkin and I undertook for the Schools Council in the early 1970s (the ‘Arts and the Adolescent’ project – Director Peter Cox, Principal of Dartington College of Arts). Doing our research, we found arts teachers largely devoid of a pedagogy where their students’ creative work was concerned – pupil creativity then beginning to become a popular idea in schools, particularly where arts and English teachers were concerned. Inspired by Herbert Read’s and the Modernist movement’s enthusiasm for child (and so-called ‘primitive’ or naïve) art, famously expressed in Read’s dictum ‘every child an artist’, teachers of the arts were beginning to reach out beyond conventional methods of instruction, but were hesitant about intervening in the mysterious and apparently private processes of creativity, which, to be fair, were little understood at the time. In his book The Intelligence of Feeling (1974), Witkin set out the project’s conceptual framework for teaching creativity in the arts. Teachers were invited to understand the creative process as a reflexive exchange between feeling and medium, with the making experience culminating in a feeling-form or art work that satisfied the child’s expressive desire.

We called this formative process subject-reflexive action, in that it was action in a medium determined reflexively by a subjective feeling for the formal outcome that was desired. It was the child’s ‘intelligence of feeling’ in action. Expressive work proper was judged to be directed by feeling impulse rather than procedural rules, by having a good ear, a good eye, a touch, a sense of timing, of rhythm, a feel for how formal decisions are made, the ability to think in terms of contrasts and harmonies, balance and tension, suspension and climax, grace and surprise. All of which meant that a pedagogy centred on teacher rule-direction had to be replaced by one centred on the child’s expressive impulse and feeling for forms that were significant, that signified, for them.

If it was now the teacher’s task to work with the child’s feeling impulse, i.e. with their subjectivity, how was she/he to evoke and recognize it? The project distinguished between reflexive and reactive feelings. ‘Reactive’ feelings – usually strongly experienced – demanded instant release in action, their, often violent, outcomes being an emotional reaction to a situation, a cathartic discharge triggered by a threat to or disturbance of the subject’s homeostatic state. ‘There’s a snake on the path there; watch out!’ – followed by a squeal as the threat is seen and appropriate evasive action taken. The ‘expressive’ squeal has no part in ‘subject-knowing’. It is intelligent in the sense of its being a practically effective response to danger (a signal to others among other things), but it does not belong to the realm of reflexivity, whereby new understandings of the subjective life are accomplished. No consideration of ‘significant forming’ occurs in the generation of the squeal. It is about rapid responses and is, generally speaking, soon over and done with. Some ‘reactive’ responses, like crying in grief, for instance, resolve themselves more slowly and have a longer-term impact upon the restoration of psychological balance and the recovery of feelings of wellbeing.

On the other hand, ‘reflexive’ feeling, the project argued, works towards new forms of apprehending experience: the spur to action is lacking and instead we are aware of the need to stay with the experience and allow for the gradual shift in apprehension that characterizes deeper, often unconscious, processes of assimilation and accommodation to take their course. We are in the realm of ‘knowing’. We might feel the need to take time out, to be alone for a while, to ‘sleep on it’. We deploy reflexive feeling when we deliberate on matters of taste, when we make aesthetic judgements, when we brood quietly and expressively upon emotional experience and its deeper meaning, when we wait for feelings to become intelligible to us. The impulse of reflexivity is towards holding on to experience and being enriched and enlarged by it; reactivity, on the other hand, seeks to void, or distance the self from, what is simply too painful – because too disruptive – to bear. In the creative experience of art-making, reflexive feelings guide the formative process by allowing the artist to make the series of adjustments that will bring the work closer to the heart’s desire. Reflexivity, the continuous to and fro in attention to a feeling of ‘rightness’, will, if all goes well, finally issue in a form that is good enough to capture, hold and deliver the artist’s knowing.

Teachers involved in the Arts and the Adolescent project needed a new pedagogy that would help attune them to their students’ subjectivity, and support authentic self-expression as intelligent feeling at work: in other words, to work from ‘within the child’s experience’. I was later to discover a similar emphasis in the writings of English philosopher R. G. Collingwood, notably in his book, The Principles of Art, in which he argues that the arts ‘properly so called’ militate against ‘the corruption of consciousness’. Collingwood makes a sharp distinction between art that has its roots in human ‘expressive’ activity and what he calls ‘pseudo’ art, which makes use of artistic technique (and mystique) to pursue the imperatives of political propaganda, commercial advertising and the marketplace.

With the child at the centre of the arts curriculum, we offered the project’s teachers a set of steps by which to proceed, a procedure intended to make the student’s expressive act the centrepiece of the creative arts curriculum, and was intended to help the teacher remain in touch with the student’s subjective project as it progressed. Underpinning the whole project was Witkin’s theory of ‘subject-knowing’, essentially making the connection between expressive action and self-actualization, a theme that was concurrently also being developed elsewhere by Abrahm Maslow (1968) and, somewhat later, to be proposed by Rom Harré (1983). Our project of the 1970s saw the role of the arts teacher to be the fostering of the student’s confidence in their feelings and of their resourcefulness in expressing them ‘reflexively’. The creative arts were to counterbalance a curriculum that we felt put too much emphasis on purely vocational or academic goals. As Witkin puts it in his book:

If the price of finding oneself in the world is that of losing the world in oneself, then the price is more than anyone can afford.

(1974: 1)

Our message for arts teachers was that it would not do simply to induct the child into the world of the arts and neglect the world of art in the child.

In the event, although the project created serious interest amongst arts teachers at the time, and doubtless helped to promote the child’s own creativity to centre stage in the developing debate about the arts in the curriculum, I’m not sure that the pedagogic model itself was to prove all that useful in helping the teacher to a more interactive engagement with the pupil. The initial step of ‘setting the sensate problem’ proved for many teachers less successful than allowing the children to find the problem for themselves and tune in to it, problem-finding being at least as important an aspect of creativity as problem-solving. It began to look like a rather contradictory move, made to ensure the teacher’s status as the one setting the agenda in the classroom. The second step, ‘making a holding form’ (capturing the basic impulse for the work in a rough outline or sketch), remains a powerful practical idea for helping to set boundaries, for maintaining focus for the individual creative project, and for allowing both teachers and developing artists systematically to track work in progress. The final step, ‘the movement through successive approximations to a resolution’, made assumptions about art-making as a kind of systematic, whittling-down exercise that were not always borne out by experience. In effect, certain aspects of the recommended routine still seemed to imply a rather too controlling role for the teacher.

In terms of the interaction between teacher and student, I later found a more telling approach in Winnicott’s model of the client–therapist relationship. Winnicott insists that no therapeutic progress can be made unless the therapist and the client are capable of playing together. Winnicott was basing his practice as a healer on his observations of mothers playing with their children. Quite apart from the diagnostic and monitoring information provided for the therapist by playful interaction with the client (he worked mostly, though not exclusively, with children), Winnicott was actively supporting the child in their playing, making the playing serve the healing. We shall be returning to Winnicott’s notion of play in the therapeutic context later. What reading Winnicott did for me as an arts teacher was to suggest a model for a more directly interactive relationship with the student’s work, a relationship in which I might well actually play with/for the student as well as share in a playful and intimate conversation about the ongoing work.

The idea of a playful conversation came to the fore in the research on assessment in the arts for which I was responsible in the 1990s. My partners then were Hilary Radnor, Sally Mitchell and Kathy Bierton (Assessing Achievement in the Arts, 1993). Exploring the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part 1: Theoretical
• Part 2: Practical
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: Good habits
• Appendix 2: Dangerous play
• Bibliography and further reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index