Learning in and through the Arts: The Question of Transfer

The Issue of Transfer The issue of transfer from the arts to other subject disciplines has almost become a leitmotif of arts education - unhappily it has almost come to define what we do! Perhaps because the arts have lost ground in recent years, it has become almost axiomatic to claim their importance in learning to read, write and compute, or in learning other subjects. Advocates have been anxious to demonstrate that experiences in the arts can advance the general education of K-12 pupils, in particular through the development of higher order thinking skills. As our research team read through the accumulated literature we began to see that the value laden and somewhat strident claims often skewed research endeavors by coloring them with the needs of advocacy. Put directly, most studies of transfer in the 1980s and 1990s have been framed by a unidirectional and linear model of learning in which certain capacities engendered in the arts are thought to travel to other subject disciplines and to be "causal" in supporting enhanced learning. Despite its attractiveness, there are two major problems with this as a theoretical model of learning. First, together with Gardner's (1983) more situated theory of multiple intelligences, neuroscience has given us a broader picture of the human mind actively creating connections and associations across a broad front of stimuli - or across intelligences. Thus, there is no reason to believe that learning from other subject disciplines does not in some fashion also "travel back to enhance arts learning." Second, capacities usually identified as "engendered in arts learning," such as creativity, imagination, critical and divergent thinking, are also dimensions that are widely held to characterize thinking in other subject domains (Burton, 1995; Gardner 1983; Greene, 1995; Perkins, 1987). In other words, perceptions of transfer may well be, in part, a function of the degree to which different disciplines share certain cognitive elements, dispositions, or ways of thinking. Given this, one can hardly argue that the acquisition of such capacities in the arts are "causal" to their emergence or enhancement in other disciplines. A Taxonomy of Effects However, while unidirectional causality may be a disputable claim, this hardly rules out the existence of some sort of effect implicating arts learning in learning in other subject domains! Thus, transfer, if and where it exists, may be part of a larger constellation of impacts of arts learning on other subjects. Indeed, while there have been some dramatic failures to find what has been defined as transfer, there also have been some dramatic successes (Catterall, 1998; Dorn, 1994). Here, a long list of arts learning items have been introduced into the literature, which have been seen to boost, illuminate, or enhance learning in other domains (Catterall, 1998). For example, a list of cognitive capacities, dispositions, and attitudes that have been found to be implicated in arts learning-across visual arts, music, dance, and drama-include creativity, imagination, and the ability to think critically. Indeed imaginative, critical, and creative thinking have also been found to implicate other capacities such as the ability to centralize energy, focus perception, engage in reflection, show Flexibility by changing directions, explore new possibilities, and elaborate on ideas (Catterall, 1998, Eisner, 1998; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1976). Beyond creativity and imagination, other kinds of meta-cognitive thinking have been implicated in the arts, involving the ability to: integrate divergent points of view, layer relationships, and construct unified wholes -in other words, construct coherence among relationships within complex forms-as in paintings, musical compositions, choreography, or poems (Eisner, 1998; Perkins, 1994). Looked at from the other direction, a steady stream of studies carried out over the past decade have found gains in writing, reading and reading comprehension, and verbal expression among elementary age children following creative and appreciative experiences in visual arts and music (Catterall, 1998; Luftig, 1994; Moore and Caldwell, 1993; Redfield, 1990). …