Review by Arnold Aprill from
Community Arts Network (www.communityarts.net)

"Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century" is an important new book -- a breakthrough document that cogently explores the role of the arts in innovative educational practice and school-improvement policy in the contemporary world. What makes it a break-through book?

For one thing, it is well written. It's actually readable. The sheer volume of books written recently about school improvement and educational policy could fill an almost endless vista of groaning bookshelves, but even setting aside the important question of how many of these tomes speak in meaningful ways to a broad base of concerned stakeholders, one first has to ask how many of these books are even readable to a small cadre of specialists. (The designated audience of most educational publishing, a world in which value to practitioners is often considered a negative.) The unfortunate answer is, precious few. And "Putting the Arts in the Picture" is one of them. Despite the variety of writers that address a broad range of topics in this one slim volume, the tone is consistently intelligent, lively and engaging. It is a joy to read as pure storytelling about kids and schools and teachers and artists and educational injustice and sustained hope. It is also a pleasure to read for its strengths in policy analysis, and for its willingness to grapple with intriguing and challenging intellectual puzzles concerning the role of aesthetic development in the cognitive growth of young people.

It is also, as is appropriate for a book about the arts, beautifully designed. The haunting school photo on the cover by Scott Fortino (who also photographs prisons) of an all-too-familiar-looking hallway, devoid of any student creative expression, makes the reader urgently long for "putting the arts in the picture." And the pleasing ivory tones of the pages are the color of those in a treasured old book handed down from parent to child.

Furthermore, the book takes a stand. It articulates a clear commitment to democratic culture in the classroom, and to the critical role that the arts can play in developing thought across all areas of content knowledge. The book is outspoken in its findings that not all arts education is the same -- that as necessary as it is to teach art appreciation and formal technique, "Putting the Arts in the Picture" takes the radical position that arts education that also explicitly connects the arts to all other school subject areas (and vice versa) is much more valuable for young people's development. And, according to the authors, this "arts-integrated" approach produces richer, more varied and more contemporary art products, and by implication, more thoughtful, flexible, and innovative young artists.

But most important, the book is usable as an organizing tool. It was written with the express intention of communicating to various gatekeepers, in a compelling and lucid voice, that something right is going on here, and that there is an urgent need to reinvest resources and to develop policies that recognize the arts as a powerful engine for effective whole-school improvement. This is about valuing the arts, not as an add-on, not as a "finishing school" touch, but as central to our core mission and responsibility in educating the next generation.

The Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, which produced this book, conceives of the publication as just one piece of an intentional and unfolding strategy for organizing for better education-through-the-arts, for advocating for more public and private investment in it, and for developing new policies that will sustain it. The Center is actively submitting articles about the book's findings to visible media venues, and has engaged a new staff person specifically to follow up on the national wave of interest that these articles have generated. Nick Rabkin is regularly asked to present the book at conferences and symposia. This should serve as a little object lesson to arts-education advocates everywhere: It is not just a matter of "publish or perish." The harsher reality is "publish, disseminate and organize or perish."

To provide an example of how clearly Rabkin and Redmond are making their case, here is an excerpt from the article they placed with the Washington Post:

It is fall. Fourth-graders in a Chicago school in a low-income neighborhood are focused and coiled with excitement. They are drawing portraits of each other in a lesson that is part of a unit on descriptive writing. They are deeply engaged, and the rich writing and art on the walls are evidence of real learning and accomplishment. Most other classrooms in the building also integrate the arts with other subjects and buzz with the intensity of discovery.

The same day, in another low-income Chicago school, fourth-graders slump in their chairs, waiting to read a bit of advice to their classmates. They mumble, "Don't hit your sister," and "Do your homework." There is no children's work on the walls, no evidence of learning. Instead, posters remind students of rules they must follow. One asks, "What is freedom?" The answers suggest freedom is a reward for self-control.

The new economy may require higher-order skills such as creativity, adaptability and teamwork, but most schools in low-income areas focus narrowly on "basic" academic skills, testing and discipline. The student boredom and academic failure that follow prompt calls for yet more testing and discipline.

The first school and others like it are proving that integrating the arts into the core of the academic program is a far more productive strategy.

Within a month of the article's publication, this reviewer heard that particular passage quoted to him, unsolicited, from colleagues all across the United States. In a spirit of collaboration and shared goals, they all thought I should visit the arts-infused school described in the piece, unaware that that school is part of the program I direct in Chicago. Anything that causes a wide range of respected colleagues to lecture me passionately about my own organization's work has to be powerful stuff.

Another strength of the book is its kaleidoscopic approach to its multifaceted subject matter. Each chapter is structured to address a different aspect of learning in and through the arts. It is significant that Columbia College chose to enact its mission as a college that connects the arts to the rest of learning by becoming the publisher of the volume. And it's a good thing. Like any good arts-integrated endeavor, "Putting the Arts in the Picture" crosses the boundaries of so many silos that editors at many a publishing house wouldn't be positioned to even consider turning it down.

In a chapter titled "You Can't Get Much Better Than That," veteran education writer Dan Weissmann profiles various arts-integrated teaching and learning initiatives in Chicago, Minneapolis and Boston. To make a full disclosure, the program that I direct, the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), is one of the initiatives profiled. CAPE has been written about in many different venues. I am relieved to report that for the first time, the portrait here captures the practice in ways that are actually true to the character of the work, and that places the initiative in the appropriate larger context of school reform through the arts. Dan is also the first writer about CAPE to quote me accurately, for which I am grateful.

Distinguished curriculum scholar Madeleine Grumet examines the strengths of arts-integrated approaches to teaching and learning as a way of revealing broad-based criteria for effective general curriculum development. She reminds us of the need to lift compelling stories of arts integration "out of anecdote, without losing their incandescence, to show that they are now embedded in educational programs that sustain and augment them."

Cultural historian Michael Wakeford's chapter, "A Short Look at a Long Past," outlines the fluctuations in American educational policy and in perceptions of the arts that have made it hard for arts educators to plant their flag in the shifting sands of public education. "Nonetheless, the current conversation about just how the arts relate to learning does pursue something new and ambitious...[making the] radical assertion that the arts, deployed most effectively, are of a piece with the higher-order types of learning from which they have traditionally been deemed separate."

Renowned researcher Shirley Brice Heath and esteemed scholar Sir Ken Robinson place the American discussion about youth, arts and learning in an international perspective, presenting powerful case studies from such disparate locations as South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Liberia, India, and the Middle East. They describe how brave, resilient young people from all over the world, facing down such horrors as ethnic cleansing, apartheid, conscription, refugee camps, and AIDS, place the arts at the center of their urgent need to reconnect the fragments of caring communities.

The editors conclude with a sober but hopeful discussion of the challenges to and opportunities for "scaling up" field-tested but under-resourced successes in improving education through the arts in the 21st century. Everyone who gives a damn should own a copy of this book. Read it and don't weep. Organize.
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Arnold Aprill is the executive director of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), a network of public schools and artists and arts organizations committed to school improvement through arts-education partnerships. He is one of the co-editors, with Gail Burnaford and Cynthia Weiss, of "Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning," published by Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, and described by Harvard Educational Review as "required reading". He presents nationally and internationally on school improvement through the arts. He is a Chicago Community Trust Community Service Fellow, and received a Leadership for a Changing World Award from the Ford Foundation.