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Few issues in education have been as consistently debated as the value and function of arts learning. Often this debate stems from the divide placed between artistic achievement and academic or scholarly pursuits, and the question of how arts education relates to other, more academic, education. Does the value of art education outweigh the value of academic education? Why is arts education important? Should it be incorporated into daily learning, and to what extent? Does arts education enhance learning in other subjects? How do the school and local community accept and implement arts education? What distinguishes schools that believe in arts learning and then build their educational structures around it?
In Passion & Industry: Schools That Focus on the Arts, Patricia Bauman and John Landrum Bryant Senior Lecturer in Arts in Education Jessica Hoffmann Davis, director of the Arts in Education Program, seeks to better answer these questions through "portraits" of three schools in the Boston area that are developing educational communities with a special focus on the arts. To capture some of the different circumstances under which an arts program can take shape, the study looks at three different types of schools: a charter school, a pilot school, and an independent school, respectively the Conservatory Lab Charter School, the Boston Arts Academy, and the Walnut Hill School. The project is supported by the National Arts & Learning Foundation. Passion & Industry: Schools That Focus on the Arts presents at its heart the three schools by means of what Davis calls "portraiture." Combining ethnographic writing with the composition and tone of literary narrative, portraiture as a writing form aims to be an effective means of commentary and analysis by placing ideas and concepts in a context that connects with real places, real teachers, and real students in a newly engaging way. Through these research portraits, Davis and a team of Arts in Education doctoral and master's students look across these schools for shared qualities that distinguish the work that they do. launch photo essay (JavaScript required)
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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