The Arts in the Primary School

Rod Taylor, Glennis Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136452567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Firmly based on the authors' personal experience, this book tackles a wide range of issues relating to the teaching of the arts in the primary school. The authors illustrate how primary children of all ages can be educated to both know about and to practice all the major art forms, and how a school staff can effectively accommodate and practice them all, even within the constraints of the National Curriculum. This book is unique in primary school education terms, as its primary focus is specific and it embraces every major art form – dance, drama, literature, music, visual arts and film.

Part I:

Theory

Chapter 1

The Arts in the Primary School: Addressing the Aesthetic

It will be found that the varieties of children’s play are capable of being coordinated and developed in four directions, corresponding to the four basic mental functions, and that when so developed, the play activity naturally incorporates all the subjects appropriate to the primary phase of education.

From the aspect of feeling play may be developed by personification and objectivation towards DRAMA.

From the aspect of sensation play may be developed by modes of self-expression towards visual or plastic DESIGN.

From the aspect of intuition play may be developed by rhythmic exercises towards DANCE and MUSIC.

From the aspect of thought play may be developed by constructive activities towards CRAFT.

These four aspects of development, DRAMA, DESIGN, DANCE (including MUSIC) and CRAFT, are the four divisions into which a primary system of education naturally falls, but together they form a unity which is the unity of the harmoniously developing personality.

Herbert Read¹

The Library on Aesthetic Education

The Arts in the Primary School is the final volume in a series of twelve which, in total, comprise a unique Library on Aesthetic Education — a manifesto for the arts. The series contains books of a general nature, dealing with the arts in education from the theoretical and philosophical standpoints, plus individual studies dealing with each of the major art forms in turn — Film and Television, Literature, Dance, Music, the Visual Arts and Drama. How might these art forms best be approached in the primary school in the age of the National Curriculum? How might they most effectively inform learning across the primary curriculum? The role of the arts is crucial in the primary curriculum, enabling teachers to harness constructively and to build upon children’s play through approaches to learning which involve the senses, imagination and personal experience. These sensory approaches allied to the life-issues and concerns which mature artists can make comprehensible to children are crucial to worthwhile arts experiences, but also have profound implications for learning in many other curriculum areas.

Individual primary teachers and, indeed, whole schools have successfully demonstrated during the last half-century that when the arts are afforded their rightful place in the curriculum, the creative dimensions they bring to learning in general are beneficial to children’s development in countless ways. However, the arts sometimes become the handmaidens of other subjects without their own essential needs being realized; they must never become just servicing agencies for the rest of the curriculum. There are also schools where the hold of the arts has always been tenuous, reinforced by attitudes within society which undervalue them, with them perceived as distractions to — or relief from — the ‘real’ business of teaching children ‘the basics’. There was, therefore, a clear need for the Library on Aesthetic Learning to contain a volume specifically devoted to the place, nature and function of the arts in the primary school.

The Gulbenkian Report The Arts in Schools (1982) highlighted the need to look specifically at the ways in which the arts manifest themselves in the primary sector, ‘because the kinds of provision they need and the problems involved are different. Where the curriculum of the primary school is teacher-based, that of the secondary school is teachers-based. This involves more complicated patterns of organisation’.² The arts, the report emphasizes, ‘are natural forms of expression and communication. Part of the job of education is to develop these natural capacities into practical capabilities.’ This process should begin in the primary school ‘and be extended through the secondary school, as a continuous process.’ A major benefit of a National Curriculum should be that, by identifying the essential principles underlying each discipline through the key stages, the resulting continuity should give added coherence and meaning to children’s learning. Having initially failed to take account of curriculum developments regarding the areas of experience — a fundamental one being the aesthetic and creative — a problem created by the National Curriculum is that its subject-specific structure has tempted some primary schools to move to more rigid secondary-type systems, with core and some foundation subjects inflexibly timetabled. It is even now being extended to subject-specific teachers being timetabled at the upper primary level. Ironically, in the period immediately prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum, there was a growing concern that secondary methods of organization and timetable structures had become ends in themselves — straitjackets, inhibiting rather than facilitating learning of benefit to the whole child.

In Education through Art, Read argued that each arts discipline grew naturally out of play to form the unity which is that of the ‘harmoniously developing personality’. The National Curriculum poses special challenges — and problems — to the primary teacher who believes in the arts as fundamental to human growth and development. Read consciously entitled his book Education throughArt, and many primary teachers readily identify with a philosophy which emphasizes how learning might become more holistic and cohesive as well as subject-based when and as appropriate. Unfortunately, Read’s emphasis on the child as natural creator contributed to a divorce between the study and practice of the arts, the consequences of which are still with us. However, strategies to bridge the resulting divide are now being addressed in positive ways, sanctioned particularly by specific attainment targets for art and music.

Some primary schools forcibly demonstrate the extent to which the arts can be valued and enjoyed in their own right, while also informing learning in subject areas like the sciences, mathematics and environmental studies, likewise contributing to language development in a variety of invaluable ways. It would be a tragedy if these developments, so essential to real learning, were curtailed by the National Curriculum leading to rigid timetable structures compartmentalizing subjects at the expense of the education of the whole child.

Such concerns highlighted the need for a book focusing on the arts in the primary sector to conclude a series born of a concern that many of the major developments currently taking place in education are marginalizing the arts, and the time devoted to them, to the detriment of all children and, ultimately, of society as a whole. Peter Abbs in Living Powers sets the scene for the whole series.³ The arts comprise an essential and substantial area of the curriculum to do with the aesthetic; the aesthetic is the common bond which gives them their common purposes. Living Powers defines the philosophical framework upon which the Library is founded — a kind of microcosm for the series as a whole in terms of both content and structure, with the second section of the book examining how each art form entered the curriculum and now manifests itself in relation to these aesthetic considerations.

It is fitting that the series concludes with The Arts in the Primary School. All the art forms, having been examined separately in subject-specific volumes, are once again considered together in relation to the primary curriculum as a whole, but with attention paid to the essential distinguishing characteristics of each. The chosen approach illustrates theory through practice, in-depth case-study material illustrating the centrality of the arts to learning in one Wigan primary school. The school is a typical one in many respects; the staff are generalist primary practitioners with no arts specialists. It is perhaps untypical, though, in that it demonstrates the richness and diversity which the arts can bring to all children’s learning on an ongoing basis. This book complements other volumes in the series but should be of especial use to all primary teachers with a concern as to how they can make maximum use of essential artistic experiences within the framework, context and demands of an inevitably National Curriculum-focused curriculum.

The Library on Aesthetic Education is certainly timely. Living Powers was published during 1987 in close proximity to the National Curriculum Consultation Document which led to such a huge response from all sectors of education, albeit one that was largely ignored. The Arts in the Primary School is published with a National Curriculum firmly in place, the first modifications to the core subjects in the light of practice already made, programmes of study and attainment targets in the ten designated core and foundation subjects known, testing by law of 7-year olds a reality, the initial tests already modified to fit more narrow paper and pencil criteria, thus testing schools rather than diagnosing individual pupil needs. The series has therefore been written and published against the constantly shifting backdrop of sweeping educational changes through imposed legislation. Living Powers highlighted the inadequacy of arts practice and provision in the majority of schools at the outset of this process. The most ardent advocate of the National Curriculum will readily concede that, whatever its virtues, the accompanying debate has paid little attention to any coherent view of the arts, or of how aesthetic education might or should comprise an essential part of all children’s entitlement.

Living Powers argues for a shift of emphasis in how the arts are taught and for more allocation of arts time, the arts representing, as they do, a fundamental area of profound human achievement, expression and understanding. Secondary school time available for their study has, if anything, diminished since 1987. In the primary sector, there is a very real danger of the arts being marginalized and only taught in isolated pockets. There is a long tradition of some schools successfully harnessing the arts to facilitate learning across the curriculum, permeating everything while they also flourished in their own right. The pressures to teach only that which is to be tested risk fragmenting the primary curriculum with ‘subjects’ taught in isolation and the in-depth experiences necessary for engagements of an aesthetic nature in danger of disappearing. The need for the Library on Aesthetic Education is therefore more pronounced now than when Living Powers was published such a relatively short time ago.

The Nature of Aesthetic Experience

A central argument in Living Powers is that it is the aesthetic which the six major art forms share. Each discipline has a different and distinct history in education, though, having come into the curriculum at different times and for different reasons. As creative subjects, their history is a relatively short one in primary education, as Sir Alec Clegg emphasizes:⁴

By the 1930s, the infant schools — schools for children 5 to 7 years of age — had already embarked on the course that has followed ever since. Teachers in training for these schools learned the value of clay, sand, water, and all manner of sense-training apparatus. The physical education of infants already included dramatic games, even though they erred on the side of sentiment. Music teaching had elicited the support of percussion instruments. And whatever the training of infant teachers in those days did not do, it most certainly insisted on the importance of learning how to manage the many and varied teaching materials already available at that time….

But these improvements in the infant school were not immediately accomplished by improvements in the primary schools. The schemes of work in use in the primary or junior schools of the late 1930s still showed little evidence of the transformation that was to begin some ten years later.

As illustration, Clegg sets out a scheme of work in use in one school in the early 1940s. It comprised English, speech training, arithmetic, history, nature study and art and craft. Art has played a particularly notable part in primary education, but there it comprised:

—The relationship between primary and secondary colours (provide each classroom with a simple colour wheel);

—Complementary colours;

—Simple exercises in the laying on of colour;

—Design in circle and lozenge;

—Paper and card wash, leading to bookbinding;

—Jotters, notebooks, mounting Christmas cards, blotters, bookmarkers, purses, table mats, comb cases, friezes, and repeat patterns.

English comprised comprehension exercises and dictations, punctuating sentences, rearranging words, blanks to be filled in and spelling lists to be learnt. English composition was on an assigned topic with suitable words listed on the blackboard to be woven in. Handwriting was practised daily. Art and craft and English were the two art forms that specifically appeared on the timetable, but the main thing they shared in common was that neither addressed the aesthetic other than, at best, marginally.

Particularly in the primary sector, where the arts have subsequently fulfilled two functions — being taught for their own sake and as an aid to wider learning — it is hardly surprising that teachers have not always recognized what they share in common, invariably to the detriment of aesthetic education. For Abbs, ‘Aesthetic denotes a mode of sensuous knowing essential for the life and development of consciousness; aesthetic response is inevitably, through its sensory and physical operations, cognitive in nature.’ In order to focus more fully upon the significance of the aesthetic, he draws attention to its opposite, anaesthesia. Interestingly, thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contents of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• PART I. Theory
• PART II. Practice
• Index