Show Notes
In this episode, Kyle Gnagey is joined by Heather Vaughan-Southard (Professional Learning Director - MAEIA), Brenda Bressler (Music Educator - Huron School District), and Susan Briggs (Art Educator - Dearborn Public Schools) to discuss the role of Arts Education in social emotional learning (SEL). Our three guests discuss the importance of student development through the arts, as well as the role art plays in supporting learning across the curriculum.
Length - 20 minutes
Music by Wataboi from Pixabay
Resources
MAEIA Website - Here, you’ll gain free access to the MAEIA Assessments in Dance, Music, Theatre, and the Visual Arts, as well as the MAEIA Blueprint, Program Review Tool, Blogs, Professional Learning opportunities and the MAEIA calendar.
To learn more about our recent activity, look at the MAEIA Annual Report.
Contact Us
Heather Vaughan-Southard
MAEIA Professional Learning Director
hvsouthard@gmail.com
MAEIA Links and Information
Embodiment: The Depth of SEL in and through the Arts
Shifting from Implicit to Explicit: SEL in and through the Arts
Talking Process: Getting Clear on SEL in and through the Arts
Choreographing Connection: Interactive Dynamics of SEL in the Arts
Rigor and Resilience: SEL within the Assessment Process
Join MAEIA’s Better Together in the Arts (BTA)
BTA is a year-long community of support for arts educators that meets one Sunday of each month from 2-3pm from October to June. In this program, arts educators deepen their understanding of social-emotional learning in and through the arts, Culturally Responsive teaching, and the formative assessment process. The MAEIA suite of resources support highly effective teaching practices and offer tools for continuous improvement planning in the arts.
Transcript
Kyle Gnagey: Welcome to another healthy serving of Wayne RESA’s podcast: Getting to the Core. Today's topic features a conversation around social emotional learning, or SEL, and how it is embedded in the arts. Before we take our first bite, I'd like to start off by defining just a few specific talking points that will guide our conversation today.
The arts, particularly in education, provide ways for students to connect with themselves, with each other, and the world around them. Social emotional learning, or SEL, focuses learning around five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, responsible decision making, and social awareness. When we teach the artistic, creative, and feedback processes, we position students to directly interact with these concepts, while engaging in rigorous arts experiences.
Now, arts and education is a very broad topic as is social emotional learning, so before you think we've bitten off more than we can chew, let me introduce you to our three guests who will guide us through these dense subjects. Here to chomp and chat with us today are three arts educators who specialize in three distinct arts disciplines.
First, we are joined by Heather Vaughn-Southard. Heather has directed K through 12 and university-level dance programs and currently serves as the Professional Learning Director of the Michigan Art Education Instruction and Assessment project known as MAEIA. She also is a part of the education team for the Polyvagal Institute, teaching about the nervous system regulation and the art and science of human. Welcome, Heather.
Heather Vaughan-Southard: Thanks for having me.
Kyle Gnagey: Next, we have Brenda Bressler, who is a music educator in the Huron School District located in New Boston, Michigan. In her 24 years with the district, she has instructed students in grades K through 12 with a concentration in middle school education. Thank you for joining us, Brenda.
Brenda Bressler: My pleasure, thank you for having me.
Kyle Gnagey: Finally, we are joined by Susan Briggs, who is the art resource teacher for the Dearborn Public Schools, leading an apartment of 35 wonderful K through 12 arts educators. She's in her 24th year of teaching elementary art. We're glad to have you here, Susan.
Susan Briggs: And I'm glad to be here, thank you.
Kyle Gnagey: I’d like to start with Heather if I may. Heather, could you start our conversation by providing like a big picture perspective on what engaging with the arts has to offer students, as they connect to social emotional learning?
Heather Vaughan-Southard: Sure. So, I think of the arts really being a great delivery system for what I consider to be the most authentic form of social emotional learning. And that's because we are teaching students to engage in embodied ways, so they sense where they are in space and time, they start paying attention to their bodily signals. You know, if you think about the answers that are considering when they walk into the movement studio: How am I feeling on this day? ...and not just happy/sad but where am I feeling sluggish? Am I able to move as quickly as I need to in order to complete the choreography that's being asked of me? ...and more.
When we think of theater actors walking into their studio spaces ready to embody character, they're doing so with consideration to things like their facial expression and their tone of voice, how they're holding their body and their posture and alignment and their proximity to each other and objects in space. And so, again, we're using this embodied collection of systems to really engage in how we're creating meaning for our audiences, and we're also starting to pay attention to how we do this in our relationships in greater life.
And when we think about musicians and visual artists, although this happens for the dancers and actors, we also think about how we're using our technical skill to elicit emotion for other people. When we sustain that breath or hold that note that may offer indications of hope and sustainability, we're doing that by constantly assessing what are we doing with our bodies, how are we engaging in this process, and how is this impacting the people that we are seeking to move. And so, all of these things actually have relationship to our nervous system state.
So, in the polyvagal world, which is Polyvagal Theory developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, this walks us through how the autonomic nervous system functions and how our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems help us move through self-protection into safety and connection.
And within that work, we're constantly… our bodies are constantly assessing the environment that we are in, the relationships that we are in, the tasks during that are being asked of us;
and it allows us to move through various nervous system states. And all of that is work that is directly addressed in art classrooms, mostly taught in the implicit ways, but has the potential to be taught in explicit ways that teaches students not only how to improve their artistic work, but how to improve their relationships of themselves, to communicate more effectively through body language and through voice with other people.
And then, when we do this, we've set this against the backdrop of social awareness. Because the arts really serve as not only a record of our experiences, but also our commentary.
And so, we're thinking about what is the lived experience that we have, how is that compliment or contrast to those of other people, and then, how do we continue to evolve these conversations effectively, efficiently, and emphatically?
Kyle Gnagey: Thanks so much, Heather. That was very insightful. So Brenda, you're a music educator; I’m wondering if you have some insight into how music and the arts have been used to support academic achievement in schools, and how you see that relationship now and 2021.
Brenda Bressler: Oh, of course. So, for years, music and what I’ll call the core subjects have been intertwined. Anyone who thinks back to their early education, probably learn their ABCs through the song. And music has always been used to help those other subject areas. We think about the connection with mathematics, being able to teach different concepts…Schoolhouse Rock in the 1980s was all about music and putting it with those core subjects on a Saturday morning. And so, those little kids were learning something else through there and it's worked. And it's true: music can elevate on so many different levels, the different core subjects. The thing you have to be cautious of, however, is that we have to realize that music can exist on its own. Music education for music education’s sake, is valid and necessary. It does not have to be linked to a core subject to have value. While it can complement and it can help other areas, as Heather expressed, the arts just on their own help the human being and help the soul, for lack of a better word. When my musicians can take a song and think about what did the composer… What was their intention here? Why did they make that note go up high? Why were they holding it out, why is it very bouncy? They start to have those human feelings and the interaction part that's so important in this social emotional environment. Music can reach them on a level that words can’t. So, they can pick up a piece of music, whether it's on the piano, on trombone, and they can put into music their feelings that they just can't express another way.
Now don't get me wrong, it will definitely help all of the other subjects, also. Because music is mathematics, because we're talking about note values and how long and the duration. It is science because we're talking about the acoustics of the room and how to use air to produce that sound. But we have to be careful that we don't only say that music can only exist if it supports something else. Music education is important to our children it's important to our society.
Think back to this past year and a half. What got people through these tough times? It was their films, their TV, their music that they were able to link into. And so, realizing that the arts have a very valuable and substantial place in our education system is pretty key.
Kyle Gnagey: Thank you Brenda. I would agree very much with that. So, my next question is for Susan. Susan, as a visual arts educator I’m sure you see students work as like a window into their lives: so, would you share your perspective on how the arts support the students?
Susan Briggs: Of course. So, while the performing arts can coach the social skills needed to build relationships and more, visual art gives students an outlet to explore and express themselves nonverbally. Making art can be really confidence building and rewarding, and sometimes students say they aren't good at art. I’m sure we've all heard I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. But I explained it takes practice, just like learning a new language or how to sing a song, or how to play an instrument. It's something that just needs practice and it's using experimenting and problem-solving skills to express what they are thinking or feeling.
Sometimes art classes and music is why students want to come to school. It's a place where they can explore create things on their own. They learned there isn't one correct answer in art, like in math there is a correct answer, and they all love the different kinds of materials, a lot of things that they would never be able to use at home…like most homes don't have kilns, you know, when they do clay. National art education research has shown that high school art programs engage students and sometimes keep at-risk students from dropping out of school. Many of my students are ESL learners, English as a second language, and it's really neat when they come to art, you can almost see them relax… like really immediately, just because they can watch demonstrations or look at what their neighbor is doing, and even if they don't understand what is being said or what's written on the board. They can still participate in the lesson completely. So, it helps these and all students communicate what they're feeling or just give them some time to enjoy creating things.
I also like to introduce a lot of art history to my students, and sort of take them around the world through art, where they can be influenced about what they see and maybe make some art in the style of other artists. This year for our goals for professional development, Dearborn elementary art teachers are developing and teaching some social emotional learning lessons. Many are structured around a book for elementary students to start it and they're learning things about emotions or empathy, self-awareness, all the things SEL embodies. So, we're trying to make them open-ended lessons so there's a lot of choices built in so students can make their own decisions about they want to explore, but also what they want to share or maybe keep a little bit private.
So the cool thing about art is it something anyone can do, really. And I really believe that it's an integral part of education. Like Brenda was saying, it can stand alone. It also does naturally tie into other subjects and they reinforce each other, being an art teacher watching students grow and express themselves is amazingly rewarding and it's really fun, too. I have the best job.
Kyle Gnagey: Thank you, Susan. So, you just mentioned other subjects, and so I know that thus far we've talked about the value of engaging the arts through the content of the arts, but there are other practices that are heavily used in the arts that can be used in other disciplines. So, Heather could you speak about assessment?
Heather Vaughan-Southard: Sure, in my role with the Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment Project we spend a fair amount of time helping teachers and other disciplines understand how we use assessment within the art in a way that can really create more safety for students, when they are being evaluated in other subject areas as well. As we think about the national core art standards and the Michigan standards we've created performance standards at MAEIA that collapse some of those, to really focus on the pillars of create, perform, and respond. And this goes back to those processes that you had mentioned in the introduction wherein when we're developing artistic practice we're really looking at refining the technical skills of the performer or of the artist. And then, when we're moving through creativity, we're really engaging in divergent thinking processes. So, students have the opportunity to explore composition, to take what is happening on the inside and take that outside of their bodies and outside of their minds.
And then we use the feedback process to teach them how to look at that more objectively, and to process their lived experience through a shared language that can help us refine their work artistically as well as creatively and build more relationship to their social awareness and to one another within the classroom. So, two ways that that can happen in terms of assessment are performance assessment and also the formative assessment process. So MAEIA has created 360 performance assessments in dance, theater, music, and visual art, and many of these connect to the competencies of social emotional learning in the content in and of itself. But that role of assessment can really be used in a rhythmic capacity within our instruction. So, we want the assessment to be embedded within the curriculum so that, from a teacher's point of view, it's not the separate entity that comes outside of anything or after a unit; it's consistently done within it.
But we also want to think about how students move through the assessment process and experiential ways. That it is experientially embedded so for students, that means that it's not a separate experience from the learning cycle; it is a completion of that learning cycle that then repeats, and allows them to cycle and move through by adding more content and then they're progressing and skill or progressing and creativity and they're progressing in confidence and resilience building, simply because of the methods in which we do that, right?
So, I think about even my own kids going through their movement or their music classes. Where they're starting playing tasks that begin with whole ensemble. And so, there's safety in numbers and then, when they make a mistake, they sit down they circle what was mistake they've made, and they've identified exactly what needs to get worked on. And then, they develop the skills of rehearsal so that they know how to go back and master that skill. And then, this cycle repeats, and as it does that whole group of safety in numbers gets smaller as it scales down. So, the risk of the experience gets a little bit more intense, but so does the skill that they've been developing throughout the entire process.
And so, when we use performance assessment in that capacity it's just part of the natural experience. But they don't see it as test day, they see it as an extension of this continues to move through, and this is just part of what this learning is like in this classroom. And so, when we also engage in the formative assessment process, it's more of that as well. The students have the opportunity to borrow the teachers regulated nervous system. I know you are with me, I know you are supporting me in this process, you are using really clear learning targets to help me understand the content. But you're also using deep, thoughtful questioning to pull out what I know in the way that I know it. Again, it's not about what I can Google, or what I can look up; it's not about this experience that is separate from how instruction has occurred. This is all part of what we do and we do it together and we do it in bite sized, tolerable pieces that is OK, for my nervous system to stay open and connected rather than moving into self-protection, right? So that we are trying to balance, where we experienced that rigor and where we experienced that resilience making. So, those are just a couple examples and you could find some of those very direct resources on the Michigan Assessment Consortium website and on MAEIA website and we can include those in the show notes for you as well.
Kyle Gnagey: Thank you, those are very good examples. And yeah, I just want to echo that we're going to include a lot of information in the show notes for this particular episode, particularly because it's hard to remember certain web addresses and email addresses when you're listening to them. But there is just a wealth of information covering these topics, I feel like we just barely had time to scratch the surface. I’m just really grateful for all of your time today. Each of you had just very fascinating things to talk about and I appreciate your work and putting this together, and I wish we could just continue the conversation.
For those of our listeners who'd like to you know look more into the ideas and the resources that we've shared today, like we said, we are going to put the web address in the show notes. We're also going to put Heather's email directly in there she's been really kind to provide her contact information. As you heard she has quite a bit of information on these topics, so please contact her to learn more about this.
Thanks once again for listening and thanks for your time today. And I hope that we can have you guys back, because this is just big topics and we can go on for quite a while. So thanks again.
