This is the Reading Instruction Show. I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
The topic of today's podcast is language art. Now, the language arts is the study
of grammar, punctuation, composition, spelling, and speech, usually taught as a
single subject in elementary and middle school. This podcast is not about this.
I'm taking a little bit different approach. This podcast is about language art
with the emphasis on language versus the language arts. Language art is art that
uses language to create an aesthetic response. It's the act of putting words
together in certain ways to create a certain effect. Examples would be poems,
comedy, modelogs, creative fictions, personal essay, song lyrics, autobiographies,
memoirs, comic strips, podcasts, movies, TV scripts, plays, speeches. You get the
idea. Words put together to create a certain effect. Now, the reality principle.
In earlier podcasts, I've indicated that writing instructions should look somewhat
like the writing that students will someday be doing out in the real world.
In other words, writing instruction should reflect reality to the greatest
extent possible. Now, in the reality in which I exist, I've never been asked to
write a poem or to go back and add more details to a memo, to use adjectives and
a report to make it more descriptive, or to use dialogue in my articles to make
the characters come alive. I just haven't. Well, maybe if you had yourself more books.
What? Maybe if you'd included a little dialogue on the way, people would want to
actually read your damn books. Do you ever consider that? Well, no, because that's
right. Never thinking. Just throw out all of those big college words on the page
with your little citations to show how smart you are. My purpose isn't to sell
a bunch of books. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. My purpose is to create a product
that teachers can use to help them teach writing. Well, maybe that's the damn
problem. Let me ask you this. Any of your textbooks ever get made into a movie? In
the reality in which I exist, most people use writing to transmit ideas
efficiently and effectively. However, it is entirely possible that I exist in a
parallel dimension that operates in accordance with a different set of
physical laws. This indeed is a possibility. But whatever dimension in
which one exists, writing instruction should have some resemblance to the
reality that students will encounter in life outside a school setting. So, why are
you writing this damn podcast? Why? I asked you first. Why am I writing this
chapter or this podcast? Again, I asked you first. You got listening problems? Why
are you wasting all this space talking about language art when most people don't
do any language art in the real world about lives? While it's true that most
students will not be doing language art in the real world existence outside of
school, this doesn't mean that it should be excluded from writing
curriculums. As a matter of fact, I strongly recommend that all students have
an abundance of opportunities to do all kinds of language art. Every kind of
language art should find its way into a K-12 language arts curriculum. Why? Three
reasons. First, will liven things up a bit. Imagine that education that's not
boring. Now, notice the different reactions that you have to the following
sentence. Boys and girls, today we're going to learn how to write a five-paragraph
essay. Can you picture anybody in your class getting excited about this? Now,
consider this sentence. Boys and girls, today we're going to learn how to create
comedy monologues. Totally different feel. Rule of thumb and teaching is this. If
you want students to enjoy learning, create something enjoyable for them to
learn. The second reason, language art is more likely to create the conditions
whereby students want to write. Motivation is an essential part of learning of
any kind and it's essential part of teaching writing. Now, there are students
who hate expository writing, who seem to put forth very minimal effort for
reports and other types of required essays and writing. But some of these
same students will often spend hours with creative writing projects because
they find them enjoyable and it fulfills this innate need to create. As well,
students are often very motivated to write if they know they're going to be
able to share or perform their language art with peers. And the third reason, as
described in earlier podcasts, the same process used with language art transfers
to academic and professional writing. Regardless of the genre or form, the same
five steps are used. Pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and then sharing and
publishing. It's all about the process. However, it's not an academic standard.
Let me explain. Language art is an important thing. Language art is an
important thing. However, the minute people realize something's important in
education, there seems to be a sudden rush to create an academic standard
related to that important thing. Students are then required to demonstrate
their ability to perform that important thing and teachers are required to
document students' demonstration of their performance of the important thing.
But this is not at all important for something that's as important as
language art. Language art is not an end, but a means to a greater end. The
greater end being the ability to create, express, and transmit ideas efficiently
and effectively. Language art is but one vehicle to help you get there. It's an
important vehicle, but it's not the destination. Also, language art leads to
other greater ends, none of which could or should be captured or contained or
constrained by academic standards. These greater ends include understanding
of self and others to a greater degree, exploring one's consciousness and
unconscious, expressing or communicating ideas and issues that might otherwise
lay dormant, seeing the commonality of the human experience, perceiving more
fully and being more connected to the world, perceiving important, preserving
important moments and ideas, and learning how to use critical thinking, creative
thinking, and problem-solving in the creation of a product or performance. For
these reasons and more, language art should be an essential part of all K-12
curriculums, but it should not be included in any academic standards related to
writing or English language arts. Language art is an important thing, but many
important things exist apart from academic standards in educational settings.
You can't standard your way to good education. So, let's look at the
importance of art in our K-12 curriculums. Let's start with an understanding of what
art is. Art is not something beautiful. Art is something beautifully described or
portrayed. There are many instances of beautiful art portraying horrific events
or ideas. Consider the many outstanding award-winning books, movies, TV shows, and
even music portraying unpleasant events, but done so in a way to be considered
art. Now, over the weekend, I saw the play A Soldier's Story by Charles Fuller.
It dealt with the ugly subjects of racism and murder during World War II,
yet the acting, the writing, the stagecraft was brilliant. It was one of the
most beautiful works of art I have seen. Other plays like Les Miserables and
Miss Saigon resulted in my leaving the theater in tears. Horrible things
portrayed beautifully. So, what the importance of the arts in education?
Let's take a look at that. In times of budget shortages, the arts are more often
one of the first things to be cut. And I'm going to describe six reasons why
this is to our detriment. First, it enhances learning. Every experience we
have connects a new set of neurons, strengthens neural pathways, and expands
our neural networks. Our experiences literally impact the physical shape of
our brain. The arts use different parts of our brain than other types of
cognition. New types of neural networks are established. Our learning organ is
expanded and enhanced. More expansive neural networks enable us to learn more
and to learn more efficiently. The second idea cultivates important
dispositions. The arts cultivate cognitive dispositions that are essential to
writing as well as problem solving in general and the creation of products or
performances in all areas. These dispositions are a willingness to think
outside the box and to imagine possibilities, an inclination to embrace
ambiguity and an ability to generate ideas, to recognize multiple perspectives,
and to accept a variety of resolutions. The third reason develops more complex
thinking. The arts contribute to the development of more complex forms of
thinking. Now in today's schools there's an over emphasis on convergent, logical,
and deductive thinking to the exclusion of divergent, intuitive, and deductive
thinking. Yet it is the latter, divergent thinking, intuitive thinking, and
deductive thinking that have led to some of humanity's greatest innovations. The
arts contribute to this. The fourth idea is understanding ourselves and others.
The arts promote greater understanding of ourselves and others. They enable us to
examine those parts of ourselves that may have been ignored. They give shape to
the feelings and ideas rummaging around in our head and transforms them into that
which can be made public. As well, the arts enable us to look more deeply and to
see the greater commonality in the human experience, one that transcends time,
geography, race, ethnicity, society, status, and religions. This deeper look
helps us to connect with others in more meaningful ways. The fifth idea is
self-actualization. The arts can become a vehicle toward self-actualization. Part
of self-actualization then involves integrating the conscious and unconscious
parts of one's personality. It's only by bringing unconscious images, wants and
feelings to consciousness is one then free to act upon them. The arts allows
these images and ideas to interact with other human beings and in so doing
creates a more dynamic and more richly defined interaction between the ego and
the self. This can all be done through poetry, writing, music, dance, the visual
arts, drama, and last the sixth reason, our humanity. Art is an expression of our
humanity. It's what makes us human. In 500 years, people looking back at this
time aren't going to be looking at our spreadsheets or software programs or
memos or our reports on grain exports from Bolivia. They'll be looking at our
art. That's who we are. We are our art. By excluding art from our curriculums, we
are excluding an important part of ourselves. Art textbooks as art. Finally,
let us consider the textbook as art. In talking with artists and musicians,
YouTubers, visual artists, dancers over the years, I've come to realize that many
of the same processes they use to create their art are used to write my textbook.
That led me to think about these boring old textbooks as a form of art.
Textbook is art? What the hell? You got to be kidding me. Aren't you getting a
little full of yourself? Just hang with me for a minute here. I'm going to
make a point. Oh, I know all about your little points. There's nothing even
remotely Mona Lisa like in this pile of word garbage. Oh, what about you? What
about me? You only exist because I've strayed a bit from the technical into
the artistic. If it weren't for this, you'd be just an ignored part of my
unconscious buried deep among all the insecurities and neuroses. But I've
breathed life into you and given you voice. You are alive because of me. Well,
you do got a point there, Dr. Frankenstein. Now, we've all been forced to read
textbooks that were definitely not art. They were cumbersome, unwieldy, boring,
irrelevant, and confusing. There's no way we'd read them unless we were
threatened with an exam. The authors of these textbooks didn't understand the
art of textbook writing. They seemed to think of themselves as mere
distributors of information. The thinking was that if they distributed enough of
the right kind of information with enough of the right kinds of citations,
then they would have written a good textbook. To them, writing a writing was
simply a technical endeavor and their product showed it. They usually end up
writing technically bad textbooks. There are other textbooks that strayed too far.
They're too wordy and irrelevant. I find myself shouting at the pages, get to the
point. Probably like you're doing right now. But all ideas no matter how good are
irrelevant if nobody reads them. It's not just the ideas that are important,
rather it's how the ideas are expressed. That determines if people are going to
want to read them and understand them. Anybody can take complicated ideas and
write complicated gobbledygook. It takes no special talent. However, a really good
writer of textbooks takes complicated ideas and makes them seem simple. That's
the art in textbook writing. Now, in the book that I'm writing about writing, I'm
trying to make the ideas accessible to all. My publisher, Rutledge, gave me
permission to write a different kind of textbook. One that includes a different
way of seeing and understanding and thinking is designed to provoke both an
effort and an aesthetic response. So in this way these ideas may be seen more
fully and understood more deeply. Again, art is not a beautiful idea. It's an
idea beautifully expressed. My textbooks may not be good art, but I'm trying to
express these ideas, this knowledge and skill, in a way in which people will
understand them and actually want to read them. They may not be beautiful, but
hopefully they'll be beautifully understood. All of which to say that the
arts, language art, is an important part of every K-12 curriculum and language
art specifically should be part of every K-12 language arts curriculum. This has
been the Reading Instruction Show. As always, I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.