Charge Your Brain With ART! Lynette Fast, Art Specialist Lincoln Public Schools Lincoln, NE

1. Charge Your Brain With ART! Lynette Fast, Art Specialist Lincoln Public Schools Lincoln, NE

2. Arts With The Brain In Mind • Teacher’s lectures and textbooks are no longer the primary sources of content in our world. • High School graduation rates are rising in 25-29 yr. olds. So called hard-to-reach students used to drop out. Now we are committed to helping them stay in school. • Knowledge is no longer the key now that everyone has access to it. (Jensen 2001)

3. Into the 21st Century We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place a new value on the one human ability that can’t be automated: emotion. -Rolf Jensen, director Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies (Jensen 2001)

4. Into the 21st Century “…the Conceptual Age is dawning and those who hope to survive in it must master the high-concept, high touch abilities.… Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning - are fundamentally human attributes.” -Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind, 2006

5. Into the 21st Century • Workplace demands: • Emotional balance • Cognitive flexibility • Social skills • Self-discipline • Thinking skills • Art gives your emotions a form - and therefore creates an opportunity to manipulate that form. With the arts, we practice and interpret the demands that the workplace will place upon us, preparing our balance, flexibility, and skills.

6. The Enemies of Creativity • Cultural and Personal Forces • Prejudice and repression • Poor Models of Leadership • Fear, anger, lack of self-respect, negative speech and thought • Schools • Building fences, discouraging, no risk-taking • Habitual processes, repetitive lessons • Teach us safety in the known, do not teach us to choose • Red tape, parental pressures, meager budgets (McCabe 1990)

7. The Enemies of Creativity • Patterns of Parenting • Indecisiveness, demonstrate the burden of choice, showing great stress around making choices • Waste energy, become passive • Avoidance of Self-Expression • Lessons of fear, self-distrust, lowered self-esteem • Accept adults belief systems, loose interest • Made to feel incompetent, wrong in their approach, withdraw • Repression of Thoughts and Feelings • Learn to distrust, ignore, repress • Learn so well we do not always know how we feel or if we feel (McCabe 1990)

8. The Enemies of Creativity • Negative Emotions • Distorted by social codes, morals, ignorance, or fear • Lack of Self-Esteem • “I don’t count” • Idealized glamour, faking, hiding • Falseness causes problems in communication, contributes to disruptions, interrupts, confuses relationships with other people • Repressed feelings • Fear of making the wrong step, fear of: failure, success, what other people think or do, being wrong, different, risking being wrong (McCabe 1990)

9. Can students analyze, critique, and place information in context? • Less trivia = more in-depth learning • More in-depth learning = Organization, Flexibility, Cooperation = Integrity, Truth, Fairness, Justice, Dignity = Thinking skills, Contribution = A sense of wonder, Creativity

10. ART: Building a quiet confidence • A universal language, with a symbolic way of representing the world, allowing us to understand other cultures • Provide healthy emotional expression • Develops patience, self-criticism • Improve focused attention states (Sautter, 1994) • Enhance concentration, happy to work alone and focus on the task at hand, fostering commitment to task • Work ethic develops - social skill, teamwork, self discipline, self motivation, helplessness is decreased (Sautter, 1994) (Jensen 2001)

11. Art: A visual sketchpad for thinking Painting is just another way of keeping a visual diary. - Pablo Picasso

12. Art: A visual sketchpad for thinking Doing art is a way of thinking and demonstrating the product of thinking. - Howard Gardner

13. Art: A visual sketchpad for thinking Art exercises our creative, intuitive faculties in a way that other curricular areas might never do. - Eric Jensen

14. Art: A visual sketchpad for thinking An active mind can be self-stimulating and thus always create its own environment. A stimulating environment can induce activity in a brain that might otherwise remain sluggish.” -Ashley Montagu

15. Good Arguments to Make • Brain Function Development • The Act of Seeing • Thinking and Memory • Preparation for Tomorrow

16. The Action of LearningInside the Brain The brain has approx. 100 billion neurons. (Chudler, 2006)

17. The Action of LearningInside the Brain • Each neuron has about 1,000 - 10,000 synapse connections. We grow synapses. • Dendrite - receives information • Axon - sends information (Chudler, 2006)

18. (Chudler, 2006)

19. The Act of Seeing Brain Processing of Visual Thought

20. Brain Processing of Visual Thought - Seeing is a Whole Brain Experience • Your visual system has more than 35 areas for processing. • Retina transmits along millions of axons (electrical wires) to the thalamus • Midbrain organizes the information and packages it, determining where it will be sent next

21. Brain Processing of Visual ThoughtOccipital Lobe • Processes color, movement, contrast, form, and critical elements of vision

22. Brain Processing of Visual Thought Memory • Temporal Lobe names and memorizes • Parietal Lobe processes the spiral layout

23. Brain Processing of Visual ThoughtFrontal Lobe • Determines attention and how long to look at something

24. Brain Processing of Visual ThoughtRoutine • Active input • Construction • Feedback • Reconstruction

25. Brain Processing of Visual Thought • To create a visual image, our brain has to do a lot and not do certain things. It’s a complex and creative process. • Seeing also involves a backward flow, using our cognition and memory to double-check, mediate, and fill in what we see. • There is no passivity to seeing or creating. (Jensen, 2001)

26. Brain Processing of Visual ThoughtDeveloping Seeing • Experience space in the real world • Non-dominant hand plays a critical complementary (and covert) role. Non-dominant hand is getting directions ahead of the task. • Bilateral brain activity is present during art (Jensen, 2001)

27. Strong emotion-visual brain linkExpression • Thalamus • Amygdala • Top of brain stem to frontal lobes • Familiar activates hippocampus • Bizarre activates thalamus / parietal lobe (Jensen, 2001)

28. Brain Processing of Visual Thought Motivation and Self Discipline • Frontal Lobes / Emotional system: Choosing what students CAN do, OR what they actually CHOOSE to do.

29. Information Processing Model How the Brain Learns David A. Sousa 2001

30. ( Sousa, 2001)

31. Information Processing Model ( Sousa, 2001) How the Brain Learns, David A. Sousa, 2001

32. ( Sousa, 2001)

33. ( Sousa, 2001)

34. ( Sousa, 2001)

35. Teaching Visual Arts Preparing for Today and Tomorrow - Elliot W. Eisner

36. Ten Lessons the Arts Teach (Eisner, 2004) Good judgments about qualitative relationships • Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail. Problems can have more than one solution • Questions have more than one answer. Celebrate multiple perspectives • Many ways to see and interpret the world. Complex forms of problem solving • Learning that ideas can change with circumstance and opportunity. • Willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities. Elliott Eisner, in Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Getty Center for Education in the Arts. 1985 p. 69.

37. Ten Lessons the Arts Teach (Eisner, 2004) Reveals cognition • The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition. Subtleties • Small differences can have large effects. Conceptual knowledge becomes real • Learn to think through and within a material. Meaningful literacy • Ability to encode or decode meaning in and of the symbolic forms used in culture. • Learn to say what can not be said. Elliott Eisner, in Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Getty Center for Education in the Arts. 1985 p. 69.

38. Ten Lessons the Arts Teach (Eisner, 2004) Discover emotion • Experiences not possible from any other source. • Discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important. Elliott Eisner, in Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Getty Center for Education in the Arts. 1985 p. 69.

39. Teaching Visual ArtsAesthetic Value • How visual arts is taught is just as important as what is taught. • Joy, pleasure, surprise, novelty • Exploration, discovering, motivation (Jensen 2001) (McCabe, 1990)

40. Teaching Visual ArtsFunctional Value • Exercises in shifting perspectives, attitude change, too much ego, testing out possibilities, keeping an open mind • Brainstorming, “what if”, consider what might be possible, the more the better • Finding ways to express and develop ideas (Jensen 2001) (McCabe, 1990)

41. Teaching Visual ArtsAn Inclusive Subject • History, styles, time periods • Society, collaboration • Communication, criticism • Production • Literacy • Investigate big questions in shaping our interactions with the world around us. (Olivia Gude, 2007) (Jensen 2001) (Eisner 2004)

42. Teaching Visual ArtsInfluences on Thinking and Memory • All forms of color are superior to black and white for recall • Realistic color is better than unrealistic color in memory tasks • Unrealistic color is processed the the right hemisphere, realistic ones (color or black and white) are processed in the left hemisphere • Context does play a role in color processing (Berry, 1991) (Jensen, 2001)

43. Teaching Visual Arts The Questions We Ask How does the brain respond to art? How can we cause the brain to do the work (processing) of learning? In what ways can learning opportunities be aligned with the natural learning systems of the brain? How do the arts ignite whole minded learners?

44. Lincoln Public Schools 5901 “O” Street, Lincoln, NE 68510 http://artweb.lps.org/art/ Let’s join neuroscientists in the advocacy for children and learning! Lynette Fast Lincoln North Star High School Lincoln, NE lfast@lps.org

45. Eisner, E. W. (2004). Preparing for today and tomorrow. Educational Leadership, 61(4), 6-10. Kelley, T., & Littman, J. (2001). The art of innovation. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday. Jensen, E. (2001). Arts with the brain in mind. 1st ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Marzano, R., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J. (2001). Classroom instruction that works. 1st ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Jensen, E. (2000). Different brains, different learners. 1st ed. San Diego, CA: The Brain Store. Sousa, D. (2001). How the brain learns. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc. McNiff, S. (2004). Art heals. 1st ed. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc. Zigler, E., Singer, D., & Bishop-Josef, S. (2004). Children's play, the roots of reading. 1st ed. Washington, DC: Zero To Three. Jehlen, A. (2006). How can we help kids stay in school?. NEA Today, , 32-33. McCabe, M. (1990). Opening the corners to creativity and self-esteem. 1st ed. Lincoln, NE: Marla McCabe. McCabe, M. (1991). The creative spiral. 1st ed. Lincoln, NE: Marla McCabe. Chudler, E. H. (2006). Explore the nervous system. Retrieved Mar. 18, 2006, from Explore the Brain and Spinal Cord Web site: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html . Greenleaf, R. (n.d.). Retrieved Mar. 18, 2006, from http://www.greenleaflearning.com/. Levine, S., & Coe, C. (1995). ”Endrocrin Regulation" in psychosomatic medicine. Smart Moves, , 140-144. Torrance, P. (1962). Guiding creative talent. 1st ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc.. Pink, D. (2006). A Whole New Mind. 1st ed. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing Group. Bibliography