"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
E.O. Wilson
REFERENCES
Roosevelt, R. 1960. You learn by living. New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers.
​
Neperud, R. 1995. Texture of Community: An Environmental Design Education. Neperud, R. Context, Content, and Community in Art Education Beyond Post-Modernism. pp2222-247. New York & London. Teachers College, Columbia University.
​
McFee, J.K. 1995. Change and the Cultural Dimensions of Art Education. Neperud, R. Context, Content, and Community in Art Education Beyond Post-Modernism. pp171-192. New York & London. Teachers College, Columbia University.
​
Wilson, E.O. 1998. Consilence: The Unity of Knowledge. p294.
EXPLORATION
​
What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, imagination, and a sense of adventure of life. You will find no courses in which these are taught; and yet they are qualities that make all learning rewarding, that make life zestful, that make us seek constantly for new experiences and deeper understanding. They are also the qualities that enable us to continue to grow as human beings to the last day of our life, and to continue to learn (Roosevelt, p.4.)
​
Creativity will come from those life ingredients set out by Eleanor Roosevelt years ago - curiosity, imagination, and a sense of adventure. How do we set out to have those experiences in a classroom? First, you open all of the doors. Literally and figuratively. Putting walls between modes of learning and thinking shuts out opportunity. No one kind of knowledge should be preferenced above the others. They need to be integrated, cross-pollinated. That is where new ideas and solutions will come.
​
Students will need to have the freedom to find connections, follow threads, build multi-dimensional ideas.
​
Let's start over and send out children to Exploration instead. If we conceived of school as exploration instead of education, we would shift the idea that students need to meet certain benchmarks by certain times. Instead, we would allow them to find their own way through a series of open doors. Ones, we as teachers would help them through. Students could come in and out of these metaphorical doors with ideas, following their own curiosity.
​
Yes, creativity doesn't just come from exploration, it also comes from challenges. When presented with a new wall, you have to find a new way around. Creativity is grown through knowledge being applied, or questioning being put into practice. Learning how to take those disperate explorations and weave them through together in new ways, that is the kind of exploration that needs to be fostered.
​
What counts in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your mind, it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which makes you an interesting person (Roosevelt, p. 7).
ENVIRONMENT
​
...knowing the environment begins with the familiar, the close at hand, providing a base from which to move toward more distant spaces, measured from one's body, in a knowing understanding manner. Textures mean that there is a differentiation among things resulting not in a rejection, but a dynamic tension and a dialectic between and among things. The old is not discarded, but repaired and preserved, which in environmental terms results not in never-ending material consumption, but in use, repair, and preservation (Neperud, p233)
​
We are past a point where simply expressing ourselves is useful. We do not need more artists staring at their proverbial navels and declaring everyone should be interested. First and foremost, we need to be thinking of the impact of our actions. But, doing so through creative inquiry.
Our environment, from the classroom to the world, is need of heavy consideration and creative solutions. I am advocating for an art education system that can provide a flexible learning space to investigate the problems at hand, and devise innovative solutions that not only help us come to terms with our place in our community, but also truly help our communities.
Art education does not need to be the producer of more junk to hang on the fridge. It does not need to be regulated to the "fun" class. It isn't "special", it can be critical. Within true art-making practices, one learns to research, engage, investigate, experiment, and produce. One also learns to re-iterate, critique, and evolve. Those are critical skills.
But, the solutions found in the art room do not need to stay there. Art education can become a site of action. Asking students to think about and engage with the community makes it possible for them to see themselves outside themselves. June King McFee writes,
Education is at the heart of culture change. It is a central point where the children of many cultures share the same learning space, where conflicts of values between dominate and minority cultures arise, where conflicts of identity and social recognition emerge, and where the institution of education with its lines of authority and structure of acceptable practices and procedures tries to superimpose a kind of order. Each cultural group has sets of values about what art is and its significance in human experience, and each child has his or her own cultural and adaptive sense of it (McFee, p177).
​
If all of this is true, and I sense it is, then the classroom is the experimental lab of the community. As a practice, I want to work towards engaging kids in their communities, so they can understand that their actions have an impact, both good and bad, depending. So, they can see and understand that through deep inquiry and experimentation, they can come up with the solutions that are not only gratifying for themselves, but a true benefit to their environment.
​
The meaning of environment has changed dramatically in recent decades. The integrity of ecology, place, community, and biodiversity have been added to "good design" as measures of environmental design. Social responsibility, justice, equity, ethnicity, class, empowerment, and gender are now legitimate environmental issues. These changes in environmentalism, now joined with multiculturalism, become increasingly potent forces in the American society (Neperrud, p244).