Arts education, which includes drama, dance, music, and visual arts, provides students with opportunities to strengthen fine and gross motor skills, problem-solve, and engage in critical thinking. More importantly, the arts also serve as a form of communication that can provide students with opportunities to express ideas and feelings in a non-verbal way. This can be particularly beneficial for English language learners and students with disabilities.
If participation in art can offer all these advantages, why do we need to involve technology?
The benefits of art education are not experienced by all students. Part of this is because of the way that the arts have been taught in schools.
Growing up, I loved visual art. Painting, drawing, cutting, pasting - you name it. Oftentimes, I would begin creating without a fixed end goal in mind, allowing my ideas to develop with each mark I made on the page. However, my creative process began to change when I started school. Instead of following my own imagination, I learned to follow my teacher’s example.
While my creative freedom had narrowed, my confidence as an artist continued to grow with each successful re-creation I completed. In fact, my confidence grew so much that in Grade 8, I decided to exercise my own artistic creativity by adding some additional details to the drawing we created in class. I couldn’t help but think how proud my teacher would be that I went the extra mile.
When my teacher returned our pieces several weeks later, I was heartbroken to receive my lowest-ever grade in art along with these three words:
‘Too much detail.’
Although this assignment did not determine my overall grade, my confidence as an artist took a pretty hard blow. Not because I couldn’t take constructive feedback, but because I was discouraged from engaging with art in the way I loved most.
If you have experience in a classroom, you have likely encountered a student who is disinterested in participating in art because product-based activities have caused them to falsely believe that they ‘just aren’t good at it.’ While we have normalized the idea that art is not for everyone, this view imposes harmful consequences for participation, depriving children and youth of opportunities to experience its rich, developmental benefits.
That’s where technology comes in.
Online learning platforms can help to make art education more inclusive and its advantages more equitable by encouraging creative experimentation through process-based learning. Coding sites, like Code.org, can help to relieve anxiety in dance by providing alternative ways for students to engage with movement. Digital tools, like Toytheater.com, can invite students to experiment with shape, colour, size, and symmetry to create a design that is unique to them. MusiQuest and other virtual music studios allow students to experiment with pitch, sound, and tempo.
While meaningful on their own, the value of learning on these sites can extend into other subject areas. For example, challenging students to represent their understanding of the water cycle in a digital poster can help them to connect with their learning more personally and engage in greater critical thinking than recall alone. Integrated learning also benefits teachers by strengthening student interest and engagement, which can ultimately help to reduce classroom behaviours that can make learning more difficult.
Perhaps most importantly, these digital tools can create opportunities for students to develop transferable skills that we discussed in class this week, like creativity, entrepreneurship, problem-solving, and digital literacy, that not only set them up for success at school, but also in the future.
So, is technology restricting critical thinking and creativity in art education?
Maybe a better question to ask is whether its limited implementation is.
KarissaS@OTU
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