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Different Styles And Aproaches Of Learning

  1 min 22 sec to read

I trained as an art teacher in the UK and taught there briefly before moving to New York.

I quickly discovered that the arts are considered luxury extras in many US schools. The goal of most urban charter schools is to provide a long day of instruction in math, English, science and social studies, so they can get their students through exams essential to college acceptance: the American educational gold standard.
It’s taken me five years to find a school which truly values the arts and which infuses them into the rest of the curriculum to encourage the kind of deep noticing and practical problem solving children need to become flexible and creative thinkers. My school’s partner, The Lincoln Center Institute, sent us a wonderful dance teacher who introduced our math students to Flamenco, teaching them to use their own bodies to map the formal patterns of the dance and connect the patterns to the idea of constants and variables in algebra.

So this is my lesson from teaching abroad – the importance of the arts in schools, but I would want to apply it to the rest of America, which badly needs it. Also, British art teachers please note: never asks a class of American adolescents to take out their rubbers - that won’t go so well.

- (Based on talk with Amanda Barragry, art teacher, New York, USA, by Emma Dury: The Guardian)

 

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