Effective programs take full advantage of the capacity of the arts and the humanities to stimulate ways of knowing and learning. These programs teach children new languages: the language of visual images, of movement, of sound. The new skills learned can be exciting; for children and youth whose verbal skills are limited, these new languages are empowering.
Arts skills can be wonderfully liberating. "When I teach kids drawing," recalls Carlos Uribe, director of programs at the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, Teen Project, "I say, 'The wonderful thing about drawing is you can be anywhere, and you can do it. You can draw anything you want. It's an ultimate freedom for you. It doesn't have to be the greatest piece of artwork. You can throw it away as soon as you do it. But for the moment, you are ultimately free, and there's almost no other place on this planet where you can experience that.'"
The Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia provides children with alternative techniques for perceiving their world. As Robert Capanna, executive director of the Settlement Music School, explains, "If you sit at a desk and try to understand your environment only through verbal concepts and verbal communication, it obviously has a different impact on you than if you get up and move around the space, or if you try to look at the space and reproduce it on paper, or if you engage in singing and making sounds through instruments. All of those things give you an opportunity to understand your environment differently."
The Experimental Gallery in the Washington State Historical Society, Capital Museum serves youngsters in juvenile detention centers who have failed in mainstream schools and society. This program encourages them to re-engage, re-define and re-enter their families and communities on new terms. "The youth come to us pretty beaten down and with a pretty low self-image. They start believing, perhaps, what people have said about them. But through their abilities to develop a skill in art or in expressing themselves quite differently, they' re able to bring up that self-image," says Carol Porter, superintendent of Maple Lane School, Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration.
Respecting young people's arts skills is crucial. "We treat everyone as an actor, or an artist or a writer from the minute they walk in," says Nan Elsasser, executive director of Working Classroom, Inc. Robert Capanna, of the Settlement Music School, agrees. "What is most important to kids is to know that they are in a place that is treating them with respect for their abilities."
Elsasser continues, "What happens a lot of times in education is that your imagination and vision is the last thing that you're exposed to. It's like you can't write a play because you can't write a sentence. When you have a perfect sentence, you're allowed to write a paragraph. When you can write a perfect paragraph, you're allowed to write [a short story]. We do the opposite. We start purely with the imagination and then help youth build the technical skills to finesse their expression of that. I think that's really, really important. These are kids whose ideas and imagination have not been encouraged, not even acknowledged."
This acknowledgment is often the key to altering positively youth's self-image. "I've seen kids walk in here who have been slumped to the ground because their self-esteem is so low," says Ana Gallegos y Reinhardt, director of the Teen Project, Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe. "They make bad grades. Their parents beat them, abuse them. They don't feel like they have any skills. They're coming in here, and we see what they have. You give them a little bit of stimulus, and it's like they blossom. It's giving kids permission to have ideas, because they don't even actually acknowledge that they can have an
original idea."
Effective programs take full advantage of the capacity of the arts and the humanities to stimulate ways of knowing and learning. These programs teach children new languages: the language of visual images, of movement, of sound. The new skills learned can be exciting; for children and youth whose verbal skills are limited, these new languages are empowering.