Constructivism and Performing Arts Education

The arts are especially compelling. Artistic expression in the performing and visual arts is often life transforming, and peak experiences (as described by Maslow) in the arts may be one reason you have decided to devote your life to the arts.

It is important to understand the basis for structuring your curriculum. Once we begin to examine what, why, and how we teach, we have entered a new realm of awareness with regard to our teaching and our concept of the curriculum.

This course has been structured to follow Jerome Bruner's idea of constructivism as articulated in his body of work over the past several decades. In his monumental book of 1960, The Process of Education, Bruner made a tremendous impact on the field of education, as did his book, Toward a Theory of Instruction. His work was extremely influential for visual and performing arts education, and his approach came to be known as constructivism because the learner creates meaning through constructing materials from basic ideas. With regard to this,

1. students are brought into a context of readiness to learn,
2. the curriculum will be spiral in nature, in that concepts appear and reappear in more developed forms throughout the learning process, and
3. students should have the opportunity to extrapolate or fill in the gaps by going beyond the information and applying similar concepts.

This class has utilized this concept and process as the generating principle for the sequence of technology utilized and the assignments for applying concepts to specific projects.

In more recent work, Acts of Meaning, Bruner in accessing the shortcomings of psychology as a field, notes an emergent need to learn by creating materials that establish meaning for us:

The wider intellectual community comes increasingly to ignore our [psychology] journals, which seem to outsiders principally to contain intellectually unsituated little studies, each a response to a handful of like little studies. Inside psychology, there is a worried restlessness about the state of our discipline, and the beginning of a new search for means of reformulating it. In spite of the prevailing ethos of "neat little studies," and of what Gordon Allport once called methodolatry, the great psychological questions are being raised once again -- questions about the nature of mind and its processes, questions about how we construct our meanings and our realities, questions about the shaping of mind by history and culture.

Bruner, Acts of Meaning

By creating your website with its specific goals creatively realized, and by examining your process through your Blog, you have participated in the construction of meaning concerning the materials of the class. Understanding that learning occurs only when our activities merge with all that is meaningful in our lives is part of the process you have been undergoing in these past three weeks. What is especially powerful, in my opinion, is that as students and as a community of artists and learners, you have shared the process of making knowledge meaningful by appropriating it for your needs while inspiring each other with your achievements.

Clearly, you have come a long way from that first tentative creation of your homepage, to skills in movie making and digital audio creation. More importantly, you have captured the techniques and technology and brought them into your personal realm.