I was quietly enjoying writing this morning and I stopped for a moment to check Facebook – something I have been doing too much during lockdown and trying to be more self-disciplined about because it distracts me from the writing project I am engaged in. Well, this morning it was definitely a mistake, because I read an article put out by the NZ Herald that seemed innocuous enough, and yet when I read it, I have to say, it made me feel frustrated. So here I am, distracted from Integral Theory and feeling compelled to get on my soapbox (again).

The article is entitled, “Covid 19: Principals call for the arts to return to the classroom”. The thing is, I totally agree with everything Perry Rush said about the importance of the arts to a highly functioning society and, therefore, of the central place the arts should take in each and every child’s education. However, what I cannot agree with is the suggestion that schools are not culpable for losing their way with the arts. In the article, blame for this failure is placed at the feet of teacher training establishments which “placed too much emphasis on academia rather than practical teaching skills”; successive governments’ policies; and a “focus on literacy and numeracy which came with National Standards”. Again, I don’t disagree with any of that. These things all happened and they all contributed. But I have to say, they did not make a continued focus on the arts impossible, they simply made it challenging – yes, I agree, very challenging.

There has been so much talk about taking advantage of Covid 19 to do a reset in education, to move forward in a different direction, to being proactive about what our “new normal” will be. I am going to suggest that this must start with all of us in education taking responsibility ourselves for what we do in our schools and giving up the blame game. Even the title of the article is unfortunate: “Principals call for the return of the arts”. My initial question was, “Who are principals calling to?” Themselves? Because as far as I am aware, there has never been any edict or directive stopping schools from ensuring that the arts is central to their curriculum. In fact, if we truly, deep down, believed it was vitally important, we would not have let it go so easily. And if anyone had the power to do something about this, it was principals.

Let me reiterate, I am not for a moment suggesting that holding tightly to the arts during the time of National Standards and the neoliberal policies that were assailing education, would have been easy. Nor am I for a moment suggesting that we should beat ourselves up. It was tough times. But education’s coming of age, as it does for every person’s graduation to adulthood, will require us to take responsibility for what happened in the past and what happens in education going forward. We need to stop blaming others because when we do so, we are effectively saying that we have no power. We disempower ourselves.

I guess this all comes down to what we believe about what it means to be human. Do human beings simply respond mechanically to their environment and contexts, unable to make choices about what they do or how they respond? Are human beings not intentional thinkers with the capacity to influence and vary their own actions? Or, are human beings agentic? Are they able to make informed choices and vary the outcomes as a result? These are essential questions that the education sector needs to answer about itself. Is education completely at the whim of government policy and lack of effective initial education for teachers? Or do we have agency to be able to do something about it? To mitigate the impacts of policy? To innovate and overcome policy? To use our professional development and Provisionally Registered Teacher programmes very smartly to redress lacks, for example? Could we have fully integrated our curriculum so that we could focus on the whole curriculum? After all we have been talking about the value of doing this for a very long time.

Personally, I believe that individuals live out their lives within a social, cultural, historical and political world which we interact with and which we are influenced by and constrained by. However, I also believe we are agentic, we are not entirely constrained by our environments and histories, but we are able step outside of those constraints to act independently and do things in ways that we think are better. Personal and professional development can help us to develop increasing agency over time. Hence, I believe, that though the situation schools found themselves in was constraining, our hands were by no means tied, and we did possess some agency and empowerment to refuse to allow the policy situation to take us away from what we believed to be important. That we did allow it, is on us.

As I said in a recent post, we do need a clearly and elegantly articulated vision and purpose for education, but unless we move forward with a commitment to being an empowered workforce, which takes responsibility for what happens within our schools, then we might as well not move forward at all. There will always governments with policies that conflict with what we hold to be important and societal issues that negatively impact learning. If we continue to allow such constraints to take us away from what is most important for our students, then we will never achieve our purpose or even come close to it.

A couple of years ago, our school reframed literacy as Communication Arts. In this approach reading and writing are included as (albeit, significant) forms of communication along with the arts and we focus equally on the receptive modes (receiving communication) and the productive modes (producing or creating communications). Add to this the various technologies that we use to communicate and the fact that inquiry provides a lot of the context for communication, many of the learning areas in the New Zealand Curriculum are covered in the one integral approach. By focusing on "Communication" as the purpose, our approach opens up a way for dance, drama, visual arts, movement, even mathematics, etc., to stand strongly alongside reading and writing as modes of communication and expression.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly to say YES to Perry’s suggestion that the arts must be central to curriculum and to make a positive offering of one way to do this. And, secondly, to point out that we brought in the Communication Arts approach after National Standards were removed by the labour government. However, looking back, there was nothing at all to stop us from introducing this approach during the time of National Standards, other than fear. It was fear that we, as a sector, as individual schools, might not measure up in the public realm that contributed to the narrowing the curriculum. I ask you, is that an acceptable reason for not doing what we believe to be the best for our students? I don’t think so.

We must take responsibility and say NO to fear and disempowerment.