Educational goals and results of arts education
cultuur + educatie 23 (2008)

What is arts education's most valuable contribution? After conducting an analysis of their research into the goals and impact of arts education, British researcher John Harland and American educator Lois Hetland described how they wish to see the discipline develop.

Unbalanced curricula
Harland identifies three different outcomes of arts education as core values of the field:

  • knowledge of and skill in the various art disciplines
  • development of creative abilities and intellectual capacity
  • capacity to explore and express meaning in or through art

He concludes that arts education curricula in the UK are unbalanced. According to Harland, the greater focus on acquiring skills over creativity, logical thought and expression of meaning is unjustifiable.

Harland argues that arts lessons should incorporate a more varied approach, promoting skills on the one hand and teaching children how to listen, read or observe critically on the other. According to Harland, research into the relationship between ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ in various arts disciplines can play a key role in designing arts lessons that are both effective and rooted in empirical science.

Improvements
Hetland’s article covers four research projects conducted by researchers from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She analyses the interrelationships between these projects and demonstrates that research can affect the practical reality of arts education.

Although Hetland, too, arrives at three different preferable outcomes of arts education, she formulates and classifies them differently. However, the outcomes she outlines are relatively easy to express in comparable terms. Her classification also centres on specific artistic skills, creative thinking, aesthetic assessment, expression, comprehension of meaning (in terms of both the arts and societal/social issues) and personal development.

Finally, the researchers agree that careful quantitative analysis of educational results is required, both to legitimise arts education and to improve the effectiveness of arts lessons.

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