Abstract
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Seoul Agenda for Arts Education (2010) calls for ensuring equitable access to arts education for all, strengthening the quality of arts education and harnessing its potential to contribute to resolving social and cultural challenges. In both South Africa and Denmark, a practice–policy gap exists between what the curricula prescribe in the area of arts education and what is experienced to be happening in the everyday life at schools. This gap contributes to creating inequality in terms of access to arts education. It is therefore important to find ways that might give access to arts education to a broader range of children, and to find out how their participation might contribute to advancing their future opportunities. This paper explores how arts education policies can be enacted within schools in both Denmark and South Africa. It takes as its point of departure a project that investigates the potential of an educational practice that integrates dance with visual arts and involves multicultural groups of children, teachers and artists in two school classes in South Africa and Denmark. It focuses on what importance arts education might have, especially to those children in the two classes who are ‘at risk’, by illuminating their experiences and opportunities for learning through integration of dance and visual arts. In this study, a phenomenologically inspired concept of learning, which includes enhanced awareness, theories of multi-modal experience in the arts and Todres’ concept of ‘soulful space’ contribute to illuminate educational potential of the artistic-educational approaches that were developed in the project. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, children’s experiences were elicited through reflective group dialogues involving ‘stimulated recall’ based on photographs of them engaged in different activities and drawings that they had created, which reflected their experiences.
Keywords
Introduction
This article aims to explore the potential of interdisciplinary arts education for children ‘at risk’. Both authors have since 2017 been involved in a project 1 that investigates the potential of an educational practice that integrates dance with visual arts and involves multicultural groups of 10–11-year-old children 2 from South Africa and Denmark. Some of the children in the classes are ‘at risk’ because they represent an ethnic minority, are exposed to racial prejudice, sexual abuse or various psycho-social, literacy or physical challenges, and are at potential risk of involvement in gang activity, drug taking and violence. We seek to understand how the work we do might assist children who are ‘at risk’. By illuminating the children’s experiences and teacher feedback, we will come to understand how dance and visual arts can add value to the lives of children who are ‘at risk’, and how such processes might be understood as processes of learning for all of the children.
The grade 4 class in Cape Town is from a school in Athlone, a former ‘coloured only’ area. This school focuses on providing access to education for children from townships 3 and has a specific interest in providing access to arts education whenever possible. For example, the school has a close relationship with the Peter Clarke Art Centre, a Western Cape Education Department art centre specializing in the teaching of the creative and visual arts 4 . The school also has a history of offering extra-curricular ballet classes since the 1970s and therefore has a dance studio. This weekly activity is understood as an extraordinary opportunity, because the children from this school are not otherwise as immersed in leisure time activities as children in more privileged areas of the city. For many who take these classes, it is the only extra-curricular activity they will ever engage in. The importance of this opportunity is reflected in the fact that a number of former learners from the school have gone into a professional dance programme offered at university level within the University of Cape Town’s School of Dance.
The grade 5 class in Copenhagen is from a school situated in an area known as ‘The Plan of Urban’, which is public housing in the area of Amager in Copenhagen. 5 In many areas of Denmark, children in a school class do leisure time activities together as they go to the same after school day-care (from 10 years of age the children go to ‘clubs’) and to the same sports associations. Most of the bilingual children from this class go to ‘native language classes’ in the afternoons, and many of those children come home after school and play in the neighbourhood rather than attend a ‘club’. For those families it is not so common to be involved in sports associations and other organized leisure time activities either. This means that the children from a school class in an area such as Amager characterized by a broad ethnic diversity generally are not involved in arts educational activities other than what the school provides. It also means that they do not spend more time with each other than the hours they are in school.
Most of the children from the school in Cape Town come from deprived areas where there are no resources for leisure activities or transport, other than transporting the children to and from school. As they live in areas far from each other they do not spend time together after school either. Therefore, in areas such as Athlone and Amager a project that focuses on dance and visual arts might be of special value as it provides access to arts education for children who would otherwise not have such experience and at the same time it gives the children an opportunity of experiencing each other in a different way.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Seoul Agenda for Arts Education from 2010 (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2010) calls for ensuring equitable access to arts education for all, strengthening the quality of arts education and harnessing its potential to resolving social and cultural challenges. Socio-economically disadvantaged groups generally have less access to arts education, but the problem of inequitable access to arts education is given limited attention in research (Beunen et al., 2015; IJdens and Siongers, 2018). The ways in which international policy goals are translated at national levels differ across countries in terms of implementation, both as part of compulsory and extra-curricular education, and the mechanisms through which the quality and relevance of arts education is achieved (EURYDICE, 2009). Studies also show that children from lower socio-economic and ethnic minority backgrounds are at greater risk of underachievement in school (Huffman and Speer, 2000), and the recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) from 2016 6 concluded that 78% of South African children in grade 4 cannot read the meaning of a sentence in their own mother tongue (Mullis et al., 2017). Children in Denmark do much better in this test, but in Denmark there are also children who do not learn as much as they could in school. The work we do might not easily be identified as being able to lower these percentages, but more indirect measures such as descriptions of changes of conditions for learning and other signs of change can be illuminated through an in-depth study of experiences.
In both South Africa and Denmark, a practice–policy gap exists between what the curricula prescribe in the area of arts education and what is experienced to be happening in the everyday life of schools (Friedman, 2015; Svendler Nielsen, 2009). This gap contributes to creating inequality in terms of access to arts education. It is therefore important to find ways that might provide access to arts education to a broader range of children, and to find out how their participation in artistic activities might contribute to advancing their future opportunities. As seen in numerous projects from around the globe many school teachers do not feel qualified to teach the arts and welcome initiatives that involve artist-educators in their classrooms (e.g. Burridge and Svendler Nielsen, 2018 ; Svendler Nielsen and Burridge, 2015). Such initiatives have in Denmark since 2014 become more common in schools as part of a new reform where schools are obliged to collaborate with community actors in Open School initiatives. This emphasis on collaboration with actors in society creates new opportunities for involving artists and art institutions in everyday life of schools to bridge the gap between practice and policy. When a collaboration happens, it is very often as a ‘one off’ experience. There is a need for developing strategies and approaches that teachers can use also when the artist is no longer there (Danish Arts Foundation, 2017).
Methodological framework
In the Red Apples–Green Apples project, it is the children’s futures that we are seeking to ‘advance’ through providing different experiences than they normally have in their schools, but this might seem very ambitious taking the relatively short time we have had with them into account. Methodologically, it is a challenge to examine the value of this project and to grasp the phenomenon of learning in arts education as the kinds of learning processes that occur in this context are complex and cannot easily be observed or accounted for through words. This challenge has to do with the translation between experience and expression as highlighted by Todres: Even though language and experience are implicated in one another they cannot be reduced to one another nor replace one another in the ongoing aliveness that is understanding. (Todres, 2007: 23)
A leading thought of phenomenological philosophy is that our intentional and embodied being-in-the-world is a foundation of our existence and that we constantly seek to make sense of the relationships and situations we are part of (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [2002]). For the purpose of this project, an analytical strategy that combines a focus on both the phenomenon of lived experiences in interdisciplinary arts education of children ‘at risk’ through hermeneutic phenomenology (Van Manen, 1990) and their expressions and artistic productions through arts-based educational research (Barone and Eisner, 1997) has been developed to grasp meaning that is conveyed in the empirical material through multi-modal formats. According to Wright (2010: 81) “the somatic meaning-making is performed as children play and draw”. This is perhaps even clearer when they also dance as part of the learning processes. Through playing with different means (paper, colour and movements) the children in our project explore ideas which allow them to understand the world in new ways and to share their reflections with us.
Central to the methodology developed for this project is the use of concrete descriptions of the children’s experiences in the form of extracts from dialogues with the children and as descriptions of ‘significant moments’ (Van Manen, 1990) described by the artist-educators and researchers. In the analyses of extracts from reflective group dialogues on the one hand we seek to understand how the children are present in the situations we speak to them about. We look at what they are directed towards, what they do and what they are able to tell us about the experiences, that is, how they make sense through words and visual and embodied expressions. But on the other hand, it is the art educators who create the framework for what it becomes possible to do and experience, so the analyses also focus on understanding the processes that are initiated by them. For this, audio-visual documentation of the workshops was used as a complimentary way of illuminating situations that at first perhaps did not seem to be significant, but when considering what was highlighted in the dialogues, they start seeming important in order to understand what happened.
Ethical considerations
Informed consent for the children to be allowed to participate in the educational project and in interviews and to be filmed for research purposes was obtained from parents/guardians through a letter informing them about the purpose of the project, how it would be carried out, their right to get insight to material involving their own child and to withdraw their consent at any moment until publication of articles about the project. The children were also informed about the purpose of the project by us and by their teachers, but it was the schools’ and teachers’ decisions to embark on the project, so the children did not have the choice to not participate in the educational activities. However, they could tell us if they did not want to be part of interviews or be filmed, regardless of what their parents had given permission to. A few children in both groups did not want to be part of interviews and one child in the Danish group did not want to be filmed. As the children were often divided in groups, it was possible to not film the one who did not want us to do that, and those who did not want to be part of an interview were then not invited to become part of a reflective group dialogue.
Even though we had permission to interview, film and also to use this material for publication, we have had to discuss ethical issues along the way; do we, for example, mention the names of the schools since they have said that this is not a problem? We have chosen not to, as it is not important in relation to the overall purpose of the research exactly which schools they are. Another question is related to the use of the children’s names. Is it more ethical to use the children’s real first names (but not surnames) instead of giving them invented names for publication, when we do not know if there might be another child of the same name and age at the school that we might have chosen to use? Is it actually a risk that they might be recognized, if we are mindful about not sharing material which might be of a vulnerable character in ways that can reveal who is involved? Based on these considerations, we have chosen to use the children’s real first names, but to not mention names if we are sharing material which is about difficult issues or might put somebody in a vulnerable position. For such material, we only mention the gender of the child.
The Red Apples–Green Apples project
In 2017, the Red Apples–Green Apples project included two week-long workshops, one with a grade 4 class in Cape Town in February (with a follow-up in July 2017) and one with a grade 5 class in Copenhagen in September 2017 (with a follow-up a couple of months later).The theme of the project was to explore the seasons and the elements of nature (WATER, AIR, EARTH and FIRE) and how we as human beings both make and receive imprints in the world. The overall educational aim in relation to the children’s learning in the project was to make them understand and be aware of elements of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals related to dichotomies between culture and nature; global and local; personal and environmental; to give and to take; and choices and consequences. As the stimulus to explore these issues, we worked with the seasons, exploring how the elements of nature are important in different ways in the different seasons and how they have divergent importance in the Northern and the Southern hemispheres. In the project, we also focused on the challenges of climate changes, especially the issue of drought in Cape Town, which at the time was classified as a disaster area because of lack of water. Also in Denmark and other places of the world there is a water problem, but it is of a different kind, as sometimes people there get too much water at once. Every day of the week had its own sub-theme (WATER, AIR, EARTH and FIRE), and those sub-themes were explored through exercises that either used the visual arts or dance, or ways of combining the art forms. Sometimes, a product was created which could be ‘rainsticks’ made from paintings of the qualities of water, paper shapes formed from wet paper that were put on a body part and dried in the sun, or it could be a short choreographic piece. Other times, the exercises were more about processes of exploring different movement qualities, or reflecting on experiences through drawing. At both schools, the project weeks ended with a showing of what had been created to other people (teachers, children and parents).
Data production and analysis
For both groups, a follow-up period was carried out some months after the initial project week in order to elicit the children’s experiences through reflective group dialogues involving ‘stimulated recall’ (Vestereinen et al., 2010) based on photographs taken by researchers and artist-educators and drawings made by the children. In various exercises in the workshops we included elements of drawing. During the reflective dialogues we talked about what the children decided to draw and how they decided what to draw. The reflective group dialogues involved two–three children and two adults (artist-educator and researcher). Based on some initial attempts to try to interview the children individually, we felt it was necessary to re-think the interview method we used in order to diminish inherent issues of power in the interview situation. The power issue seemed especially at stake in Cape Town, probably because the South African children are not so used to being asked their opinions, and they seemed quite overwhelmed by our questions, which then limited their abilities to share and discuss their experiences. Therefore, we explored ways to develop ‘the qualitative research interview’ with a multi-modal and more collaborative perspective in which two–three children, the artist-educator and researcher together were involved in a process of analysis of a number of situations that they recalled as being of significance.
In the workshops, we tried different verbal and non-verbal/arts-based exercises integrating movement and visual expressions to create a relationship between the children’s embodied experiences and ways of expressing themselves about those experiences, as is the case in the exercise described below: At the end of day three’s sessions the children are given a piece of paper and asked to fold it. They are then asked to take a moment to think about what we have done during the morning and to choose one exercise that they particularly liked. On one part of the paper they are asked to draw themselves doing the exercise, on the other page they are asked to draw their sensation of doing the exercise. On most of the drawings we see the sandpit and imprints of feet, hands and other body parts. And many visualize the sensations of this exercise as drawings of over-sized body parts with sand on them. (Charlotte, co-researcher)
The ‘translation’ between modalities is a challenge when analyzing arts-based material. In a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective (Hermansen and Dahl Rendtorff, 2002) all kinds of expression can be considered a ‘text’ as expressions hold meanings that can be interpreted. The procedure which we have used to analyze interview transcripts and situations captured from video recordings is a three-step ‘reading’ suggested by Van Manen (1990): we first identify parts of the material that is relevant to our focus on exploring the potential of interdisciplinary arts education, we then read or watch through the selected material in order to identify themes and the next step is to dig deeper into what qualities characterize the different themes. After the readings, interpretive texts are developed about the themes and qualities that we found, and finally these are discussed in relation to theoretical ideas that form the base for exploring learning opportunities. Before presenting the results of this analysis, it is now necessary to put forward the theoretical ideas.
Signs of learning in a phenomenological and social constructivist perspective
The concept of learning is in a phenomenological perspective defined differently from more traditional understandings that emphasize skills and knowledge as products of learning processes (e.g. Illeris, 2003) because it includes change of awareness. According to Danuser and Sabetti: […] we can say that we have learned when we have understood a new idea, developed a new skill or become more aware of something than we were before. (Danuser and Sabetti, 2001: 79)
Characteristics of the artistic-educational space
We are always physically engaged in the world. When we meet other people we first and foremost meet them as physical beings, but the physical dimension is in a phenomenological perspective (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [2002]) interconnected with the psychological dimension of living. To have an experience in a space with others always happens as inter-personal processes. When it works as truly open and fostering creative processes, the artistic-educational space can be a space of vulnerability, but also of deeply involved participation and thus learning in and through personal and social dimensions. There needs to be a kind of human openness in order to feel touched, this openness is what Todres (2007) calls the ‘soulful space’. ‘Soulful’ is used as an adjective meaning ‘“full of sentiment or emotion”, “evoking deep feeling”, and “not mechanical or heartless”’ (Todres 2007: 152). ‘Soulful space’ refers to a ‘spaciousness' that can tolerate or embody the vulnerability of ‘soulfulness’ (Todres 2007: 152). According to Todres (2007: 150) the ‘soulful space’ provides a foundation for empathic connection with others. It is “the kind of human openness in which we feel touched” (Todres, 2007: 162). To be in a vulnerable position or situation can, according to Todres (2007), metaphorically be described as if a ‘passage’ (an openness) is made to other existential possibilities, for example in relation to opportunities for learning. This openness is what makes us vulnerable. We cannot control what will happen, are in a state of change and might be unsuccessful. Opening ourselves in an active sense means disconnecting from continuity, “a tear in the sense of simple going-on-being […] a stretching towards what may come” (Todres, 2007: 154). Therefore, it is also a space where there is the possibility of being wounded psychologically, of feeling ashamed or weak. But with a skillful teacher a ‘soulful space’ holds a spaciousness in which vulnerability is not avoided, but rather, embraced (Todres, 2007: 162).
A combination of phenomenological (Danuser and Sabetti, 2001; Todres, 2007) and social constructivist (Hermansen, 2003; Illeris, 2003) perspectives on knowledge and learning were key to planning the workshops with our learners, and to how we will explore what opportunities for learning became possible. This is summarized as follows:
Every child constructs knowledge based on their own former experiences and in connection to other participants. Embodied experiences and thought processes are interrelated and happen socially and are ’situated’ in certain contexts. Artistic processes have the potential of creating openness towards others and to one’s existential being. Teachers need to be aware of both the risk and potential of creating ‘soulful spaces’ and that they cannot make someone learn, they can only teach, guide and inspire children to actively participate and thereby encourage the development of new skills, knowledge, awareness and ways of being and acting.
We cannot prove when learning happens and exactly what has been learned in artistic-educational processes, but we can grasp signs of change either by what is expressed by the children and teachers of what they now know or are aware of, or by what they are able to show and which thus can be observed as new ways of engaging, or abilities to do something new.
Views into experiences of the Red Apples–Green Apples project
“Moving on ice”
When arriving to the Peter Clarke Art Centre on day three of the week I see that the South African visual arts educator who is going to lead the beginning of the session has spread a big piece of white paper over the whole floor. The piece of paper makes me think of a short text I read one day in the newspaper by a Danish author considering the different experiences feet have with surface depending on where they live as to me this piece of paper looks like a big piece of ice. At our morning coffee moment, before the children arrive, I tell the visual arts educator about this text. Quickly she takes up that idea and develops it into a concrete exercise related to the EARTH theme of the day. We decide together to split the children in two groups, so that they will have enough space when walking on the ‘ice’ and drawing their imagined sensations with different coloured crayons. One group is thus moving and drawing while the other is sitting around the piece of paper observing what the others do. But those who are sitting are almost as active as those who are on the paper. They are so eager for their turn to come and so interested in seeing what is drawn on the paper that they can’t help leaning over the paper to get as close as possible to their moving peers and thereby participate in creating this moving picture as a sitting ‘choir’. (Charlotte, co-researcher)
A couple of months later when sitting talking to Libolethu, Imaan and Zoë about this exercise, Charlotte first asks: ‘I have another photo here, do you remember this?’
Libolethu: ‘Oh yes!’
Imaan: ‘That’s when we scribbled!’
Charlotte: ‘Yes. Do you remember the big white piece? What was that?’
All the girls respond as a choir: ‘Yes!’
Imaan: ‘Yes, we took like different colours of crayons and then we scribbled on it …’
Charlotte: ‘Yes? And why, what were …’
Imaan: ‘An ice block’.
Charlotte: ‘It was a big, huge piece of ice, like a lake that’s frozen. Yes, and then we were trying to move as if, you know, ice breaks really easily. So you were trying to move as if you were on ice and then drawing it. Do you remember that?’
Imaan: ‘Yes’.
Charlotte: ‘How did that make you feel? Have you ever tried to walk on ice? No?’
Imaan: ‘Walk on ice? No’.
Libolethu: ‘I did when I go ice-skating’.
Charlotte: ‘Yes, when the ice is not very thick it’s just a sound like …and your feet could go through’.
Imaan: ‘I tried to skate on ice, yes’.
Charlotte: ‘You tried to skate on it?’
Libolethu: ‘I skate on ice’.
Charlotte: ‘Yes? So, this might be skating movements as well’.
Libolethu: ‘Imaan, where’s that skating thingy again?’
Imaan: ‘There somewhere!’ [she points towards the window].
Libolethu: ‘No man, it had like different shops and there was like a movie theatre there’.
Imaan: ‘I don’t know what’s it called’.
The children that Charlotte talks to about this exercise do not recognize the sounds that she speaks about, but they quickly find their own way of making sense of the question by referring to ice skating which they have tried in an ice-skating rink in a shopping centre in Cape Town. The exercise and the reflective group dialogue together become a way to learn about sensations of the winter season in the north and the element of water in its frozen form, at the same time as they also give us insight to the children’s experiences and imaginations of moving on ice in an embodied research perspective.
Creating and receiving imprints in the sandpit
In the sandpit of the front garden of the Peter Clarke Art Centre the Danish artist-educator guides the children to explore the idea of an imprint using different body parts to make an imprint in the sand. First a foot. They all stand on the concrete border surrounding the big oval sandpit and slowly put a foot heavily in the sand as they are asked to. Then they observe the marks they have made in the sand. They then try with a hand. They make clear hand imprints in the sand and then the artist-educator asks them to turn their hands and look at them. ‘What do you see now?’ He asks. They see the humid sand in the lines of their palms. They then talk about how they make an imprint in the sand, but the sand also makes an imprint on them. The next session is in the upstairs room of the building. They are together in pairs. Back to back. They take turns in leaning on top of each other. Then they grab each other by the hands and try to make a balance on one leg each still holding on to one another. Again they talk about imprints and how we can also make an ‘imprint’ on people we meet.
(Charlotte, co-researcher)
When sitting with Ngcali, Onako and Jadine looking at their drawings of ‘significant moments’ from day three Charlotte asks them what is on their drawings.
Ngcali says: ‘This is my friend, I drewed 7 , I drew my friends from my area, we here at school. And this is the sand that we were in’.
Charlotte: ‘So what did we do in the sandpit?’
Ngcali: ‘We made footsteps’.
Charlotte: ‘You made footsteps. Yes. And only the foot?’
Ngcali: ‘And the elbow, and the knee and the hands’.
Charlotte: ‘Yes. Do you remember what happened when you put your hand in the sand? What happened?’
Ngcali: ‘We left a handprint and fingerprints’.
Charlotte ‘And what happened to your hand afterwards?’
Ngcali: ‘It was all sandy’.
Charlotte: ‘It was all sandy. Yes, so Peter was talking to you, I remember, about, well we make an imprint, but something also happens to us (…) was there anything else that was kind of new to you, or something that you didn’t know before?’
Jadine: ‘Yes’.
Charlotte: ‘Anything you can remember?’
Jadine: ‘The imprints. I didn’t know when you litter you make an imprint’.
Charlotte: ‘So you didn’t know that before….and Onako, what’s on your drawing?’
Onako: ‘Here I wrote this, I wrote, I put my toe in there, it was cold and no one liked it in there, and there was …’
Charlotte: ‘And what is this what they put? The toe? Is that also the sandpit?’
Onako: ‘Yes, it’s in the sandpit’.
Charlotte: ‘Yes? So the drawing of you is that when you were in the sandpit? And it felt cold you said?’
Onako: ‘Yes, and I put in my leg there’.
Charlotte: ‘And you remember that cold feeling?’
Onak: ‘It’s like in the beach, but those days were so hot that people don’t…’
Charlotte: ‘So hot that maybe it was a little nice to be a little bit cold?’
Then Charlotte goes on asking: ‘What do you think you were learning with Peter and Fabian and Liesl and…’
Ngcali: ‘Art’.
Charlotte: ‘Art?’
Onako: ‘Friendship’.
Jadine: ‘Lessons. We learned lessons about obstacles, water, imprints…’
Charlotte: ‘So you have learned these words, what they mean? Yes? You didn’t know that last week, maybe?’
Ngcali: ‘Yes, I did’.
Onako: ‘We learned that you be your original self. Like when we came in the door you mustn’t do the same thing as somebody else. You just…’
Charlotte: ‘So you learn to find your own way. And you learned to invent new things maybe? Is that also learning?’
Onako: ‘Yes. That’s part of learning’.
The exercise of making imprints in the sandpit is a way of working with an embodied experience of the concept of making and receiving imprints. We can do this concretely as the children do when putting a body part in the sandpit, but the concrete actions lead to an embodied understanding of the concept in its more abstract sense. The children noticed the temperature of the sand which was cold and in contrast to the hot air of the morning. The involvement of the senses seems to help in remembering the situation and thus also the contents that the children were learning about. The children also notice ‘friendship’ as something they learned in the exercise. This is their way of emphasizing that relationships and the social dimension are also important for what they engage in and remember. The physical contact which was in focus in the exercise of making imprints on each other inside the room of the building was in focus on many of the children’s drawings of the ‘sandpit exercise’. But they have also paid attention to the artist-educators saying they had to find their own solutions.
In Denmark, we also discussed the concept of learning with the children. While sitting talking to Sami and Mehndi, Charlotte asks, ‘What do you think it is to learn? When do you learn? What does it mean?’
Sami: ‘You can learn from this’.
Charlotte: ‘From the week we had with you?’
Sami: ‘Yes, we learned to balance…we learned to relax, slow motion and that we can calm ourselves down if we become angry. That was a big help. And then it was also fun’.
Charlotte: ‘Did you learn anything else?’
Sami: ‘We learned to make things. We learned to use our brains better. We learned to make fireballs and flowers (…) because we don’t like… well, it is not like we don’t like school…’
Mehndi: ‘But it is good that we learn even though we are not so crazy about school’.
Sami: ‘But even though we think we learn in a boring way we still learn’.
Charlotte: ‘So is there something about the way you learn, perhaps?’
Sami: ‘What?’
Charlotte: ‘Is it boring to learn when you sit on a chair and have to listen…?’
The boys interrupt as a choir: ‘Yes!’
Sami: ‘That is not fun’.
Mehndi: ‘Because when we had to learn with you it was more fun. We had to dance and all that, but normally in school we sit and write with our hands. It is a little hard and you get tired’.
Charlotte: ‘But if you did this all the time, would it then still be fun? I mean if all weeks were like that?’
Sami: ‘No’.
Mehndi: ‘No, I think you have to try something new all the time’.
Sami: ‘Every week’.
Mehndi:‘But this was fun. I liked it’.
Sami: ‘It can also be fun sometimes on normal school days to do schoolwork, because sometimes you can do math and Danish in a fun way, for example by going outside and move, do movement games in maths or something like that’.
Charlotte: ‘Do you sometimes do that?’
Mehndi: ‘Yes’.
Charlotte: ‘Do you then remember the maths better afterwards?’
Sami and Mehndi both answer: ‘Yes!’
Mehndi: ‘We just started equations again and we had forgotten a lot of it. But, for example, when we did it as a game outside, we could remember the game, because it is more fun. So, we do remember the fun things’.
In this reflective group dialogue the boys emphasize that the project gave them opportunities to learn to relax, to balance, to move in slow motion and to calm themselves down. This, we can add, has happened through exercises of breathing and grounding which are central in dance. The boys underline that they remember better when something is engaging and fun which is the case when teaching happens differently to what they might expect. It is underlined by Danuser and Sabetti (2001: 76) that the experience of ‘fun’ is central to learning and they (Danuser and Sabetti, 2001: 75) also make the argument that, “the way we learn influences the way we live”. This supports that teaching children to learn in many (and ‘fun’) ways including being able to breathe deeply, be in balance and calm themselves down might also give them a broader spectrum for ways of living their lives which also counts avoiding too many of the conflicts the boys from this class often experience with each other. It is also key to these boys that in this project they learn in other ways than what they normally do in school, because they are moving and actively involved most of the time. The more senses that are involved in a learning process at the same time, the more engaging the experience will be and as a consequence the comprehension and experience of meaning will also be deeper and longer lasting (Danuser and Sabetti, 2001: 77), which is what the children in the quote above also highlight. This is because we are touched at a more fundamental (embodied) level and the learning is thus integrated more completely with who we are as persons. This also comes forth in the exercise described below and in the reflective group dialogue with two other boys quoted below in which we see that they remember many details of the exercises we talk about. With support from Danuser and Sabetti (2001) we can say that this is probably because they remember the way that they were sensuously engaged in the exercises.
Melting ice cubes and wet paper imprints
On day two in Copenhagen the theme is WATER. After greeting each other good morning in the classroom the children are divided in two groups and one group goes with Peter, Jamie and Lisa to the schoolyard. They find a little corner space with some low walls and a couple of trees. It is a very cold September morning. The sun is shining, but it is so cold that when the children exhale the humid air becomes damp. The first thing that happens is that the children are asked to close their eyes and put a hand forward. Jamie then walks quietly around them and puts an ice cube in each of the children’s hands. Sounds of surprise when feeling the cold cubes fill the air. The children can now open their eyes and they talk about the form water has when it is cold and what happens to the shape of the ice cubes while they are standing talking. The melting action of the ice is taken into movement as the artist-educators ask the children to try to melt in different ways and then to move around the space in ‘melting ways’. Spontaneously Lisa starts inventing a song to accompany the rhythm of the children’s movements, ‘walk, walk, walk everybody, melt, melt, melt, everybody…’ Peter now takes over and hands a small piece of paper to every child. They are asked to come to a bucket that he has filled with water and to make their papers wet. Once their papers are wet they have to place them on a part of their body and wait till they are so dry that they will keep their shape when they take them off. As it takes a while for the papers to dry, Peter asks the children to start moving in the space still wearing their papers and taking care not to lose them. This creates new and funny ways of moving and lots of laughing is heard among the group.
(Charlotte, co-researcher)
When sitting talking to Youssef and Basem about their experiences in the workshops, Charlotte first asks if they remember what they told about these experiences at home.
Basem responds: ‘I told about many things that were funny and that I had not done before’.
Charlotte: ‘What were those things?’
Basem: ‘Fireballs, rainsticks and that what we did with the ice cubes. That was really funny’.
Charlotte: ‘What was this about the ice cubes? What did you have to do?’
Basem: ‘You had to hold it…you had to close your eyes and then something was put in your hand and I immediately knew it was an ice cube…it was like brrrrrrr’.
Charlotte: ‘How was it?’
Basem: ‘It was funny. But my hand got all red’.
Charlotte: ‘Why do you think it got all red?’
Basem: ‘It was really cold’.
Charlotte: ‘And what happened to the ice cube?’
Basem: ‘It melted’.
Charlotte: ‘Mmm, do you remember what you did after the ice cube had melted?’
Youssef: ‘Theeen…’
Basem interrupts him: ‘Oh, yes!’
Youssef: ‘A figure or something like that’.
Charlotte: ‘You had to make some figures with your bodies?’
Basem: ‘Yes, and then we had to take a piece of paper and make it wet and then you had to make a paper shape somewhere on your body’.
Charlotte: ‘Do you remember who of the teachers were there?’
Youssef: ‘Peter’.
Charlotte: ‘And do you remember what Peter said, I mean why you had to do this with the papers?’
Basem: ‘Nooo, I don’t’.
Peter: ‘When you make an imprint…did I say that?’
Youssef: ‘Yes, imprints’.
Charlotte: ‘Did you make imprints with these papers?’
Youssef: ‘Mmmm’.
Charlotte: ‘Do you remember what you then had to do?’
Youssef: ‘We had to hold it there for as long is it then had the shape of your nose’.
Charlotte: ‘So, perhaps we could say that you changed the shape of the paper?’
Basem: ‘Yes!’
Charlotte: ‘Did anything also happen to you? I mean are you used to walking around with papers on your bodies?’
Youssef: ‘No!’
Charlotte: ‘So what did it do? How was it?’
Basem says while laughing: ‘Not very normal’.
Charlotte: ‘So it was not very normal. Could you move the same way you usually do?’
Basem: ‘I had to hold my hand here [he illustrates how his hand was on his nose]’.
Youssef: ‘You just had to hold on to it like this [he holds his right hand on his left wrist]’.
Charlotte: ‘I remember Peter said something about you making imprints and that at the same time imprints were made on you?’
Basem: ‘Yes!’
Discussion of the potential of interdisciplinary arts education
The approach to arts education that we practise in this project is one in which the children’s imagination and creative processes are at the fore. When we work on imagining new or different possibilities, this might indirectly also help to imagine different possibilities in the bigger picture of their lives as in very concrete ways “art making also allows children to explore abstract and complex concepts, such as what the future may be like” as highlighted by Wright (2010: 10). In this respect, Wright (2010: 10) noting that art-making “is a means of inventing, a method of thinking, a way of giving life to hopes and dreams”, refers to Kellman (1995: 19).
Working with children in the Cape Flats we get insights to lives that certainly could be better in many ways compared to other children’s lives that we know of, but it seems difficult to change much in a society that deals with so many huge challenges. The urgent need of rainfall in the Western Cape province at this time was important to the very survival of the population. In the context of all the challenges that the South African society deals with, however, this is just one more challenge on the list of many that are also life threatening. The children in Copenhagen do not live in similarly life threatening circumstances. Some are poor, some have learning deficits or dysfunctional family backgrounds, or deal with other issues that might determine them as being ‘at risk’, but they do after all live in a part of the world which is much safer. To be poor in Denmark does not mean that the only food you will get during a day is the bowl of porridge and the tray of rice and chicken which is served to you at school. But for both groups of children we could ask what help arts education is within the broader picture of their lives? How might the experiences we made possible give the children better opportunities for learning and living? With the place, the time, the artist-educators and the materials we had at our disposition it was possible to create a space that fostered elements of learning about the subject specific contents (climate changes and the elements of nature) and about more existential themes. The day-to-day possibilities and challenges in the schools of especially the Western Cape, however, are a different reality as to what we as ‘a project’ were able to do. Here the little arts education that there can be made room for is the one hour of music every week in which a concert needs to be prepared, or the one-off dance show being prepared by a hip-hop dancer who has been hired by the school to prepare a show with all the students in which they learn to imitate a set of movements. This product-oriented approach has qualities in its own right which we saw in glimpses when the children showed us dances and songs that they had learned through other activities than what we offered. In that way it was evident to see that the children like to learn new steps and new songs. The approach we have in the Red Apples–Green Apples project is more of a process-based one which makes it different to how they are used to being taught. The potential of this approach is in focus in the discussion below.
Other ways of learning
Among ourselves in the project group we constantly questioned whether it was relevant to the children that we did this week of teaching which was so different to what they normally experience. What would happen when they came back to their normal school day and the teachers who did not have the resources to teach in this way? These were questions that could only be answered by the teachers. In written correspondence with the class teacher of the grade-four class from Cape Town, she replied as follows: The learner’s normal school day doesn’t necessarily consist of that many practical/physical activities. The curriculum proves to make the implementation of such teaching challenging, along with class sizes. Taking all learners outside alone, proves challenging along the route. They too are overwhelmed. Each experience outside of the classroom is seen as a fun one and so it is. The challenge comes when the curriculum content outweighs the contact time we do have with the learners and the class size outweighs the manpower for activities of such a nature. The learners do love it and get to engage with the content in no better way. We try to engage with the content in a creative manner. I try to incorporate this as much as I can. I believe that not all learners learn in the same way and so I try to include the various learning styles. Drawing and designing (pamphlets, posters, etc.) is something we do across all our subjects. The absence of this project was especially seen in the learners who had severe barriers to learning. They became less involved in learning and more immersed in their ‘own world’. (Teacher of grade 4, Cape Town) The creative activities open for these possibilities (…) they work together and then also have the possibility of talking about issues that they don’t normally talk about (…) and then they open up towards each other. There was an exercise in which they had to create drawings in groups. In order to do one drawing in common that had to be good then they had to discuss and make decisions together. This is very different to many other activities in school that are about the individual’s performance. (Teacher of grade 5, Copenhagen)
Wright (2010: 78) says that “drawing involves representing the world and capturing reality through experience, imagination and reasoning” and we could add – as it is seen by the child. Both Wright (2010) and the teacher in the quote above refer to drawing which is, however, different from dance as dance is not so much about representing reality, but more about playing with form and sensation of movement, sometimes expressing certain feelings or situations. “The act of drawing integrates sensorimotor and other forms of thinking, reasoning, feeling and learning, which emerges through the ‘thinking body’, […] a somatic meaning-making” (Wright, 2010: 80). With dancer and phenomenologist Sheets-Johnstone (1966 [2015]) we can highlight that in the process of creating it is not some hidden material that comes to the surface, it is creating something new in dialogue with the now. Drawing is according to Wright (2010: 81) a form of thinking and being aware that is deeply rooted in the body. When working with the arts in a creative manner it is unavoidable that “a variety of modalities, such as speech, image, sound, movement and gesture” contribute to creating “multimodal forms of meaning” (Wright, 2010: 2). From the perspective of dance, we can argue that this is perhaps even more so when the body is the means for artistic-educational processes. This is so because choreographing movement unavoidably also involve visual and pictorial forms, even when it is not the focus to integrate the bodily and the visual forms as in this project.
Seeing one’s self and others in a new light
We asked the teacher from Cape Town if she thought a week was long enough to make any positive changes in the children’s lives. Her response was that: The effect that the week’s activities had on the learners proved to be more of an intrinsic one. The practical nature of each lesson encouraged every type of child to be an integral part of it. From the learners who can’t concentrate to the one that struggles with schoolwork, everyone felt a part of something. The exhibition of their artwork filled them with pride. Especially for the learners who don’t necessarily ‘fit the mould’. It changed their outlook on themselves regardless of what their circumstances may be. I believe that every experience they have, leaves its mark. It shows them something they aren’t necessarily used to and provides them with that opportunity. (Teacher of grade 4, Cape Town) One of my pupils, a small guy, was very engaged in the dance. Usually it is not a boy’s thing this dance, but I could just see that he concentrated so much […] I filmed him with my phone because it made me so happy to see how engaged he was, he concentrated and made an effort and he thought it was fun and here he participated at an equal basis […] he is not so strong in the school subjects and has many challenges, but I saw that sometimes it is perhaps not necessary to use so many words when focusing on including children as our ’inclusion specialist’ does […] he grew in this and he got an experience of ’I am able to do this, I am actually good at using my body in this way’ […] and I can see that he is now getting better in the school subjects. I am sure that this experience contributed to that change for him. Another example is one of the girls who was very good at drawing, right? I had never seen that. So some of those who are not so strong in the school subjects they can grow and get some good energy and self-confidence which then influences their other schoolwork […] The intensive week we had, I am sure, has had a deep influence on the social relationships in the class. For example among the boys there was a hierarchy, but the fight about being the leader suddenly disappeared. (Teacher of grade 5, Copenhagen)
The analysis of situations from the workshops and the children’s and teachers’ experiences leads to ideas of how a ‘soulful space’ of education can be created through artistic approaches that include the children as co-creators. Wright (2010: 2) claims that working with the arts provides young people with “authentic meaning-making experiences that engage their minds, hearts and bodies”. She also refers to Gadsden (2008: 35) who emphasizes the importance for development of empathy that arts education can have as the arts: “[…] allow individuals to place themselves in the skin of another; to experience others’ reality and culture; to sit in another space; to transport themselves across time, space, era in history, and context; and to see the world from a different vantage point”. However, it is important to stress that arts education does not automatically do this. When children are seen as co-creators in the processes and not just as learners who have to follow what the teacher does, they engage in different ways, both with the material and with each other as highlighted by the teacher in the interview quote above.
Conclusion
The analyses and discussions provided here show some of the potential that teaching the arts in an interdisciplinary manner has had especially to some of the children who might be said to be ‘at risk’ in the two classes taking part in the Red Apples–Green Apples project. The qualitative impact which has become illuminated through analyses of some of the ‘significant moments’ from the workshops and which might contribute to ‘advance’ their futures has to do with creating good conditions for learning such as having fun and building social relationships. The analyses of situations from the workshops and the children’s experiences lead to ideas of how a ‘soulful space’ of education can be created through artistic-educational methods and what kinds of learning processes may be promoted in such a space. The different approaches that we can observe leading to the educational space being ‘soulful’ are some that involve physical contact, that the teachers ‘see’ the children, and include tasks that make them ‘see’ each other, that they create curiosity through surprising uses of the space and evocative questioning which stimulates emotional engagement.
We cannot answer, however, if the new and positive self-experiences, or the positive social relationships that were made during these project weeks will last. Also we do not know if the consequences of opening for some more sensuous engagement are only positive. Opening for sensuous engagement also means opening for feelings and sensations of all sorts, not only happy and positive ones. Is this necessarily good in their contexts where many of (at least the South African children) experience violence and shootings on a daily basis? Or should school be a place in which they are free from emotional issues for a while, and do not have to run around feeling ‘overwhelmed’ as some might do when the teaching becomes of a more open approach as noted by their teacher? Hopefully the consequences of our project are generally more positive than negative.
Unfortunately, in this project we could only offer the opportunity to be taught by our group to one class at each of the schools. Considering what can be gained from such activities, it would be of utmost importance that it is not just the selected few that will have access to being taught the arts. In both Denmark and South Africa arts are part of the national curricula, but it depends of the resources of each school how often arts are taught and also how often arts education is in focus in other ways than the few lessons provided in music (South Africa) and music, visual arts and design (Denmark). The practice–policy gap that exists in both countries creates inequality in terms of access to arts education. But what are the main problems for this practice–policy gap? It seems that there is a need to find more hours and more ways of including arts education, but also to build more permanent structures through which artists can collaborate with teachers in order to include a broader offer of artistic disciplines. Open School strategies can extend the ways arts education policies can be enacted in schools, but how can initiatives continue ’living’ when the artists leave the school again? What do the teachers need? With this combined research and educational project, we are trying to answer some of these questions by developing underpinning philosophies based on existential phenomenological concepts such as the ‘soulful space’ and ‘seeing’, and concrete approaches 8 to arts education that teachers could use inspired by these concepts.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank all the children and school teachers who embarked on this project with us. Without the acceptance of the schools, the teachers, the parents and the children it would not have been possible to start this project. We also wish to acknowledge the contributions of our colleagues in the project (in alphabetical order): Anu Rajala-Erkut, Erica Maré, Fabian Hartzenberg, Gerard M Samuel, Jamie-Lee Jansen, Karen A Vedel, Lisa Wilson and Peter Vadim Juhl Nielsen.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This combined educational and research project was made possible due to funding from the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education (an international network programme led by Associate Professor Karen A Vedel, the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen), the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces and the Municipality of Copenhagen’s Open School funds. Moreover, the project was made possible by contributions of in-kind working hours and materials from the Peter Clarke Art Centre in Cape Town and the Universities of Cape Town and Copenhagen.