Exercising the Mind

Arc arts and athletics really necessary in schools?

BODY OVER," Kermit Cook 'OO shouted at his classmates as their long black oars flailed the footdeep water in the rowing team's practice pool. Cook and Dave Hoverman '98 were teaching the rowers how to hunch forward from the hips to prepare for a stroke. Another dozen students watched from the sideline. After a few beginners' mistakes (had this been a real boat, some of the students would have been rowing it backwards), the rowers moved in unison, same with lips pursed in concentration, others grinning broadly. Assistant Professor Randy Testa nodded in approval. That's right—professor. This was not a team practice. Teaching students to row was Cook and Hoverman's final project for Education 38.

This isn't just boating for credit. Testa designed Ed 38—"Education8—"Education Through the Arts and Athletics"—to make students literally participate in answering a question that affects every school in the nation: Are the arts and athletics merely attractive addons to basic academic curricula, or are they essential ingredients?

So students splashed in the rowing tank, pounded African drums as music professor Hafiz Shabazz demonstrated complex musical patterns from Mali, ran hurdles on the track, practiced dance steps in the dance studio, and staged vignettes from Richard III. No staid lecture hall for this class. Instead, home base was the second floor of Alumni Gymnasium, where the only boards carry basketball hoops.

Harvard-educated Testa co-taught the class with Lesley Wellman, curator of education at the Hood Museum of Art. But Ed 38 is his baby, conceived through the marriage of his appreciation for athletics (he used to run marathons) and his experience as a former third-grade teacher. "If you teach elementary school, you do the arts," Testa says. "I saw the power of, and what children derive from, that educational venture."

The intellectual backbone of the very physical course has two major vertebrae. One is Art as Experience, by the great educator John Dewey. The book has long been a mainstay of the so-called progressive education movement. With American education increasingly under a critical microscope, interest in Dewey has resurgedthough his principles have yet to be realized in classrooms, Testa says. Dewey saw education as a process of "continuous reconstruction, moving from the child's present experience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies," Testa explains. Since art centers on what Dewey called "having an experience" he believed art to be the consummate educational pursuit.

The second key book Testa uses is Thomas Armstrong's Multiple Intelligencesin the Classroom, a guide to applying the contention that different people learn in far more ways than the two dominant at Dartmouth—linguistic (processing information in words) and mathematical (processing by reasoning, as when doing calculations). There are five additional intelligences: spatial (ability to perceive the visual world, like an artist), bodily kinesthetic (ability to move one's body skillfully, like an athlete or dancer), musical (ability to understand rhythm, pitch, etc.), interpersonal (ability to respond to the moods of other people), and intrapersonal (ability to know oneself). People's perceptions are shaped by the medium in which they think, says Testa, just as a picture of a tree would be shaped differently by two artists, one working with watercolor and the other with charcoal.

And each kind of intelligence speaks its own language. As Testa explains, "It's like Isadora Duncan once said, 'lf I could tell you what I meant, I wouldn't need to dance.'" When his students drummed with Shabazz, "they learned something that they could not have been told about," Testa continues. "When you're standing next to somebody who's doing a 6/8 rhythm and you're doing a 3/4 rhythm and somebody across the room is doing another elaboration, participating in all that involves listening in a certain way; it involves being able to physically, with your hands and your arms, keep up; it involves a more complete set of understandings."

In short, it's learning about the different intelligences by doing them. One Ed 38 student, writing in her class journal about the various projects her classmates submitted after reading Shakespeare, was struck by the different ways that different minds interpreted the same play. "Seeing the story of Richard III demonstrated via a poem, video, poster, and playbill allowed me...to not only witness several different intelligences in action, but also to gain a much better understanding of Richard III than if I had solely read the play."

You won't learn that kind of lesson from an art, music, or gym class, Testa says. Those classes might make you a better cellist, painter or hurdler, but the instructor won't be concerned with one of Ed 38's central questions: What is the intelligence required for these activities? "We were not out to teach people how to become really wonderful hurdles runners," Testa explains, "We wanted to really get at the processes whereby people learn how to run hurdles."

So what intelligence does it take to clear those horizontal bars? More than just kinesthetic intelligence, Testa says. It also takes intra personal and interpersonal intelligence. Intra personal because hurdlers have to reflect on and modulate their performance, interpersonal for the rapport a hurdler needs to have with coaches and teammates.

Students found that learning by doing paid off in unexpected ways. One student, who was surprised to find that their dance session emphasized not how to dance but the processes involved (including dancers' techniques for carrying themselves and moving around others on-stage), found herself using the same techniques at lacrosse practice later that day. "This was clearly the first time that I have ever made such a connection between my academic and athletic life," she wrote in her journal, "and I never would have thought it would have been through the arts."

Schools that don't offer the experiences from arts and athletics won't necessarily turn out illiterates, of course. Yet in passing along knowledge but not insight, they stunt the possibilities of the imagination, Testa believes. "I would defer to Albert Einstein, who said imagination was more important than knowledge," he says. "The arts—and I'm considering athletics an art—are the place where people synthesize knowledge in new and interesting ways. The arts explore the ways in which we are not just educated, but ways in which we are human."

And that, he says, is something society cannot afford to do without.

RICH BARLOW writes for the Valley News.

The act of throwing a javelin requires a more complete set of understandings than does book learning.