The Wow Factor Global research compendium on the ... - E-cademic

oom boundaries to include art and cultural institutions and be flexible with timetables
and other structures to allow students to become immersed in their investigations.
<strong>The</strong> arts have an enormous part to play in the total experience of education that
students receive. Students develop greatly in terms of risk-taking, confidence, and
ownership of learning through involvement in the arts. <strong>The</strong> arts really are involving;
they promote a sense of community through a shared sprit and encourage student
motivation to learn. Through establishing connections with students, the arts offer
something unique and intrinsic to the quality of education.
<strong>The</strong> arts directly contribute to positive self-perceptions and identity, vital to effective
educational achievement and the pursuit of lifelong learning. <strong>The</strong> arts may
assist in developing cultural awareness and the acceptance of self and others.
Recent technological changes have also sparked considerable interest in the impact
of the arts on students’ learning in relation to emerging multimodal literacies.
Despite all these claimed benefits of the arts, education monitoring and issues of
quality have still largely concentrated on achievement defined by quite limited
notions of scientific, mathematical or technological thinking and the cultural
dimension of education has been largely overlooked. This problem is compounded
by a lack of sustained evidence of the benefits of arts-rich programmes on educational
outcomes and definitional problems associated with the scope and nature
of arts education as it is operates within schools.
Arts education involves
<strong>The</strong> term ‘arts’ is used to denote both instruction in the arts and artistic pedagogy
used to instigate education. Richardson (1999: 25) defines the arts broadly and
simply as being anything made by humans. Embedded within this definition are a
number of assumptions. Richardson contends that the arts involve skills in creating
something that is beautiful and/or moving in its form. He considers that the arts are
constructed and sited within a cultural context. Definitions of the arts continue to
be the subject of entire theories, and it is not the intention of this book to add to that
extensive body of work. <strong>The</strong>re is considerable questioning over whether a term
such as the arts – with the ‘s’ – is even an appropriate way to group disciplines
whose paramount forms can be as diverse as portraiture, orchestra, ballet and Greek
tragedy. Yet the dominant political and educational discourses widely use the term
‘the arts’ and embed within this term an assumption of unity underpinned by
notions of culture, heritage, citizenship and creativity.
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