PME 811: Blog Entry 6 - Making Room for Creativity in the Curriculum

Making Room for Creativity in the Curriculum

When I first moved to Quebec as a student, I was amazed to discover that it was required by law for every student to have at least (at LEAST?!) two arts courses each school year.

Even in high school. TWO.

Furthermore, it was required that every school continue to offer at least two arts courses for the duration of high school as electives and upperclassmen had to take at least one per year. Specialist teachers were considered necessary for these programs, too, and the curriculum for them was challenging. There was money to fund these programs (although there is never enough to fund any program fully, I suppose). There was community and parent and administration support for these programs.

I came from a school board where specialist degrees weren't even recognized (much less paid for or used effectively) and where the one high school arts program - the concert band - had to raise 100% of our resources through fundraising and where the program existed solely because our principal ditched a math teacher every year to keep hiring the band teacher.

Now I will be the first to say that you can (and must) be creative in science, in math, in languages, in everything really. Creativity is the highest order thinking skill in EVERY subject and teachers will always activate it regardless of what their textbook is called.

... but you know what? In that anti-arts school board, 92 out of the school's 500 students were in that band and we won gold medals every single year at international competition. It wasn't about hiring this teacher or that one - it was something that mattered enormously to students and something to which they were willing to dedicate thousands of hours. The arts matter - not just to make you smarter or help you with math - they matter as an outlet for a specific kind of creative expression, a place to grow a different part of your mind, and a community of people to belong to. We felt safe in that band room in a way we never did in the physics lab.

So why the difference? Why does one province mandate arts programs while another (heck, the rest) just don't?

It isn't a matter of overall quantity of money - it's about how the available resources are allocated and prioritized. I can't believe that two provinces are so substantially different in culture that there is an ideological issue here.

Is it a job market thing? It's true that the arts-promoting province has WAY more jobs available in the arts, but I think that's the natural result of their education system - more people are trained in, and love it so more people create financially-rewarding opportunities (i.e.: start businesses) that use those skills.

Is it a curriculum thing? Both provinces have challenging, constantly-reforming curriculum that pushes math and science concepts ever farther down the grade levels so that grade 2 students are now calculating the hypotenuse when I can't even spell it. Yet somehow, the arts prevail in one province but disappear completely in the other.

I just don't know why. What do you think? Which would you want for your child?