“We need people who think with the creative side of their brains—people who have played in a band, who have painted…it enhances symbiotic thinking capabilities, not always thinking in the same paradigm, learning how to kick-start a new idea, or how to get a job done better, less expensively.” ~Annette Byrd, GlaxoSmithKline (a multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, London)
I recently read an article that reinforced this belief that the thinking gained from arts experiences can transform your life and work experience. The article, a June 2019 publication written by EdSurge reporter Emily Tate, focuses on conversations with tech students as they talk about how soft skills and the arts set them up for success. Connections made from deeper learning experiences in the arts enhance a person’s awareness and knowledge of the soft skills needed to succeed in today’s world.
What Are Soft Skills and How Does Arts-Based Learning Help?
Soft skills are a collection of competences and attitudes related to the willingness to participate in your life and work with a growth mindset, with openness and authenticity, and with collaboration and connection. While it’s not likely that soft skills have been a part of your education or technical training, they’re nevertheless important for everyone. Deeply understanding these more personal aptitudes can reinforce your knowledge and training in ways that lead you to a high level of success. Without them, you risk significant limitations on your vision and imaginative power.
The following list, adapted from The Arts and the Creation of Mind by Elliot Eisner (1933-2014), identifies some of the lessons that are learned through experiences in the arts. While this list is not all-inclusive, it does give you a sense of the value of arts-based learning in today’s complex and challenging world.
- The arts teach one how to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the learning in a field of knowledge or training in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
- The arts teach that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
- The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
- The arts teach one that in complex forms of problem-solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
- The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
- The arts teach that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
- The arts teach one to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
- The arts help one learn to say what cannot be said. When one is invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
- The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
Examples
Some time ago I observed that several departments in a college had been operating for many years with a “silo mentality.” They were unable to see the value of opening up their processes and policies as part of a cohesive institutional initiative, fearful they would lose control and weaken their department, diminishing what they considered to be a position of importance. However, with coaching, they learned to use a process that could connect their deep knowledge of how the individual components of a work of art add meaning to the whole and extend that understanding to the dynamic relationship between the bigger picture and the viewpoints and expression of every part of the organization. They grew to understand that the greater the number of parts, materials and/or people involved in collaborative work, the greater the complexity—but the artistic principles are the same. They thrived as they discovered how the big picture added meaning to their individual departments and how their destiny was beneficially affected by this larger perspective. It allowed them to experience support they hadn’t previously experienced and a coherent problem-solving mechanism that expanded their options.
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
In another experience, I had the opportunity to view an outstanding performance of Handel’s Almira. Even though I sat near the top of the mezzanine of a large theater, when the opera began, I was immediately drawn in and held captive by the spectacle. Opera performers are singers, actors, dancers, and linguists. Besides the high quality of the singing, these artists hold your undivided attention through their acting, using every means of communication available, expressing their characters with honest and powerful body language. Actors communicate emotions—that is what moves you; they stir your passions and grab hold of your attention by moving authentically—not pretending but being honest in their non-verbal communication. If you were to watch without sound, you would see the way they use their bodies in the expression of sadness or anger or lighthearted mischievousness. They create something real out of various movements and gestures and—along with the relevant singing or vocal nuance—connect you to an authentic human being. They use every means of communication in a congruent manner, commanding your emotional response. You are taken into the drama. Everyone can learn to make as much of an impact as an opera performer in various roles in life by practicing interpersonal skills. When you’re authentic in your communication, you can gain the respect and trust of others.
Years of building belief systems that don’t align with the soft skills needed to thrive in today’s world can’t be erased in an instant. But when you begin to see the productive benefits of thinking and behaving with the skills covered in my online course —https://artsawarenessexpressions.teachable.com/p/h… —and you willingly open to risk a new way, you will find the remarkable ability to succeed in ways you might have never before thought possible.
If you teach music and would like ideas about how to incorporate deeper learning in your band and orchestra rehearsals, consider enrolling my online course—Transform Your Band and Orchestra Rehearsals from Ordinary to Extraordinary— https://artsawarenessexpressions.teachable.com/p/r….
Dr. Patricia Hoy