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The Window: Saving Creativity in Teens
We have all seen that first moment of shame and self consciousness pass over a child's face like a cloud over the sun. We have also witnessed how that light in a child turns inward just before puberty – how the child who once drew, danced, sang, wrote poems and little plays suddenly says, "I don't do that now." And we witness the sad closing of the windows of creativity.
There are those for whom the windows do not close. Look at Mozart writing his symphony 26 at sixteen: a symphony that has sympathy and sentiment, a great longing expressed in a manner that for Mozart is his coming of age work. You can hear young Mozart grapple with the torment of being a teen in the rough edges of the work. Here is the joy of seeing a teen fully engaged in their art as they pass through that universally difficult passage.
There are many other examples of the genius teen: Rimbaud and others. But here we want to turn to the teens of our times and that rough transition to maturity. To do so let's go back to the terrible twos and threes.
I remember my son Auguste at the age of three standing by the sea and screaming at the rising tide to "go back!" Here the self confronts the enormity of the world and the loss of control. When the self was part of mother and the world, all was well, but as the self separates and forms its own world, the trouble starts. Now you see that toddler falling to pieces because the table has the wrong bowl or spoon. We witness here the egg of self that is created like a membrane about the child. Once that egg is complete the child has a sense of self and can move into the next stage of growing.
Now follow the magic years: four to ten. Obviously this can vary enormously but I am looking at the years that follow from the "terribles" and move up to the dawn of puberty. This first egg of self is a thin and porous membrane: the child is still fully engaged with the parents and is in full discovery mode. During these years children sing, dance, create plays and play imagination games with the least of things: sticks and stones.
Think of eight to twelve year olds writing Haiku:
Where I buried
The little bird, only there
The ground bumps up
Norikako Miyashita, Grade 6
As teachers we know and are in awe of this moment of creativity. Richard Lewis' Miracles: Poems by Children, is a great example of the creativity of these years. His film, the Journey Within, illustrates beautifully the uses of art in the classroom and the importance of play and freedom in the learning process.
Now comes the change – the much written about fall. This is banishment from the garden, the fall of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. Here is the fulfillment of the initial moment of self consciousness and shame when the paints are pushed away, the singer is silent and the praised poet who now says, "I don't do that."
Part of this is the desperate urge to be grown up, to put away childish things. And there is peer pressure – to be like the kids in the grade above for whom it is definitely not cool to draw – unless they are drawing the code of the kids above them: graffiti.
Students now recognize that creativity can be judged by peers and adults. If you win a race, or place well, you know you are a good runner. But how do you really know what is good in this endless world of creativity that has changing rules and borders? And if you do like this world of creativity, is there something wrong with you? Or different? So the windows close.
In this dawn of puberty the membrane of the egg of self is growing thicker and less porous as the windows close. The pre-teen here begins to build a defensive self – why do I need to know about artists long dead and from totally other worlds? I can have my own world built within a world that adults know nothing about. Let's look at that "within."
In the 60's Rock and Roll offered a new world. The parents of that generation knew nothing of this world – perhaps a few who had had the luck to hear Blues; but most of that generation knew nothing of electric guitars and back beat. As the Stones, Beatles and Doors came on they were creating a new world with its own code. The teen relished the parent's absolute ignorance of this world and their "turn that noise off!" confirmed to them that they were within a new world as they were finding their new feet.
How innocent that world seems looking back – true of all nostalgia. There would follow Heavy Metal, Punk – disco – and hip hop. The teen who is listening to Black Sabbath is hearing a world whose reference is within a very narrow band and a message that reinforces that shell, that says: we are all you need and here is the speech code and dress code. And the culture at large is doing much the same as the teen watches MTV, listens to radio and reads magazines.
There is much here that is part of a natural process. The child must be able to remove themselves from the autonomy of the parents, find themselves as transitioned individuals, and then return to the affection of the parent on a new footing. A harrowing experience for all and often it is the parent who fails or delays this process. Thank goodness for driving lessons and the coming of age ritual of the license!
In tribal cultures there are a complicated series of rites that allow this process to occur within the "we" of the tribe. The aboriginal pre-pubescent who leaves the group to "go walkabout" finds his spiritual self and undergoes the ritual of circumcision. Now he is a man and has the scar to prove it. I remember my brother in law in Kenya telling of being at a urinal and the Masai man next to him laughing and saying, "Oh, you are still a boy!" The scar and the pain suffered are the undeniable proof of passage.
When I was teaching undergraduate students I would ask, "when did you know you had become adult?" Most could not answer the question, laughed awkwardly, even though they were well beyond puberty and in college.
So the teen in this culture moves into an amorphous world – longing for adulthood and responsibility while often being infantalized by parents and teachers. For the teen, the best way to declare a change of role is by separating from the approved mode by adopting a new code: a new way to dress, walk and talk.
When Rock and Roll aged and became the norm, punk arrived as anti-fashion. And then punk became fashion in the great capitalist machine that knows so well how to make revolution into capitalist evolution: let's package and sell that look. The teen has to re-invent revolt every generation and kill that which went before – to continually escape the mainstreaming of the alternative. This oedipal art patricide was already established by art nouveau, dadaists, abstract art, pop and shock art. They all understand the battle cry: "make it new!"
Rap and hip hop occupy a special place in this oedipal chain of teen culture forms. I do not wish here to go into an analysis of the art form, merely to say that as a world of code, I see it as deeper and stronger than any that has proceeded it. From the videos to the CDs and to fashion there is here a complete and self referential world that is more obscure to the parent than any preceeding movement save perhaps the very dawn of Rock and Roll. Here I want to look at this issue of how that teenage egg hardens and closes all windows to that "other" world of culture and history and what can be done to keep those windows open and re-open the windows that are closed. How can I say to the urban teen that Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Picasso matter – that their life will be richer and safer if they read Shakespeare, Voltaire and Emily Dickinson – that Mozart and Debussy have something critical to say to them?
I know I just quoted exclusively from the Western canon, but I believe that if these teens want to answer the question, "who am I and how did I get here?", then yes, that canon is a dominant part of that answer, along with the knowledge of world culture. They are, after all, "living in a material world." Here are some thoughts on the solution – how to keep the windows open and maintain reference with the full history of culture. William Carlos Williams famously said, "no thoughts but in things." I believe this to be the answer.
Jacques Barzun, in his survey of culture from 1500 to the present called From Dawn to Decadence, paraphrases the writings of John Comenius in 1550:
anyone who has had much to do with education can guess what Comenius said: things, not words . . . change school from prison to a scholae ludus (play site), where curiosity is aroused and satisfied. Stop beatings. Reduce rote learning and engage the child's interest through music and games and through handling objects, through posing problems (the project method) stirring imagination by dramatic accounts of the big world. The orbis pictus teaches objects and places simultaneously with words, by means of pictures to be studied and talked about.
I believe that the K to 6th grade years are critical to creating a way of thinking and investigating that is based in the concrete. That children who work with images and objects, and extrapolate ideas from these things, will be able to maintain a relationship to the larger culture as they move into middle and high school. Here again is Barzun quoting Montaigne on education:
… the tutor must listen to his student, not continually, "bawl words into his ears as if pouring water into a funnel." Good teaching will come from, "A mind well-made rather than well-filled."
A mind well made rather than well filled. Or as Kant would have it: a mind that acts as a waffle iron on batter. How far we are removed from this thought as the test becomes the paradigm of learning! So here as early as 1550 we have two great thinkers, well before the enlightenment, saying what we would say now with even more conviction. Let us use the arts as objects as images that students can experience and learn from. Let's take K-8 students to the museum and look at images, let us bring objects into the classroom and say, "what do these things tell us?" If we can induce a love of object and image, then I believe we have something that will last into the teen years and be there to hold windows open.
In Fitchburg, MA, there is an experiment underway where a middle school and the Fitchburgh Art Museum have teamed up to teach. Here, seventh and eighth grade students have their regular classes in the school in the morning, and then cross the road to the art museum for their afternoon classes. During the afternoon, the students sit in the galleries and listen to their classes and do their activities. While they are learning they are constantly surrounded by great art: whenever they daydream, their eyes drift across the paintings and sculptures. One of the teachers in this program told me how the behavior of the students changes, how they relax and listen in a different way. They also, just by being there, learn the art as they learn about the history and social context of that period. And she added that it gave her a deep love and appreciation for those paintings by being in their presence every day and watching the students look at the paintings.
Recently I was walking though the Fogg Museum in Cambridge with a group of teachers and came across a student tour with middle school students. The teacher leading the tour was asking the students what they saw in the painting and when one of the girls gave a particularly good reply the teacher said, "yes, what good looking you are doing." We want our young students to do good looking.
Having looked, having been taken to museums and having listened to Mozart, middle school students can feel a physical connection to the culture that proceeds them and they are a result of. They have heard it and felt it. When I take students to a museum, the first thing I want to do is have them describe the smell of the museum as they step inside – you know that museum smell. We seek anything that will establish a connection by the senses to this world that is so other.
If we can establish a physical relationship to culture, if we can teach the code of symbols and create a strong bond with the great images of the culture, then there is a hope of keeping windows open as that powerful world of teen-culture laminates that teen age egg.
This is what the Creative Arts curriculum is all about. Getting students in K – 8 to understand the process of creativity while they still have the natural joy of that creativity and openness to great art. To gently and by osmosis (having great art in the classroom without even having to talk about it) let students understand their connections to the archetypal images. By this style of teaching we legitimize play as a mode of learning and creating. We keep the relationship between doing and learning clear and let art teach its lessons.
The timeline of art, from the earliest cave drawings, (the human hand on the wall,) to today's art can allow students to witness time as image: eg. to see what was being drawn, written and played in 1776 and how that relates to American history. They can see the circular emergence from tribal culture as compared with the linear "progress" of western culture. The hope is that by giving students a love of culture as something real and tangible – something meant for them to play with and enjoy – that then there will be a connection that will withstand the onslaught of puberty. That in this world there is comfort, explanation and connection as the child journeys into early adulthood.
In teaching the use of poetry in the in the classroom over the last ten years I have witnessed one constant surprise amongst teachers. They return from using poetry in their classroom amazed that poetry has touched the most unexpected of their students: those with the weakest language skills and worst behavior problems. That this world of imagery – a freedom to communicate in a new mode – releases these students from the confines of a standard English and allows them to say the un-sayable as imagery in poetry. Having expressed it, they experience the great relief we all feel when we take that which is within and get it out.
We have the same effect when we teach students the relationship between journaling and poetry. When students write in a private journal they can talk to themselves in their own voice and code. Once that dialogue with the self starts we have, in Socratic terms, a reflective child. We also have a child who can now say "my life is unique, and worth recording." That piece of self-esteem alone keeps the new window of poetry ajar.
Can we test this new ability? Yes, by seeing the increased ability to problem-solve and research through curiosity: the well made rather than well filled mind.
We know that with drama, dance, painting and composing, the teen has the ability to externalize those harrowing feelings of transition. Once they have participated in this cathartic creativity, then they can look at the work of the masters and feel a visceral relationship with that work. Now they know why the hair stands up on the back of their neck when they hear, see or read a powerful piece: it speaks to their own predicament. A connection is formed across the ages through art.
I wish I knew who it was who said that one moment's pain is another moment's privilege. That phrase explains so much of art. When the breast cancer survivor writes a poem, performs a dance, paints or composes – we see her work become the privilege of her pain. That work in turn helps others survive their trauma. When teens can understand the universal message of art – personal pain as universal expression – then they can experience art not because they have to but because they need to. Now when they see the fight in the hallway they see Romeo and Juliet enacted again; they hear the vicious whisper of Iago, they feel Mozart at sixteen writing his coming of age symphony. They experience the deeper context of their lives and know they are not alone but are experiencing in a completely new way the age old drama.
By gently teaching the iconography of object and sound in the early years we create the vocabulary of symbol. I was always dismayed by how few first year college students had any concept of symbol. If I asked what sea, sun and sand symbolized they answered: wet, hot and fun. Without a basic symbolic vocabulary art remains impenetrable. We need to teach how to look at the "thing." How an oak in a painting suggests strength and longevity, or olive as peace. We start early to give a way of doing "good looking."
I travel around to schools and perform Homer's Odyssey for children from K to high school, as well as for colleges and adults: a womb to tomb Odysseus. I particularly enjoy telling for young teens – I know I can connect them with this great tale of coming of age, of overcoming impossible difficulty in order to achieve home and love, hospitality and civility. For these teens, the text is often too dense and full of resistance, and what they need is to see and feel the passion, pain and power; then they can relate and return to the text with new curiosity and a knowledge that this is about them. Performance makes the text tangible.
If we can establish this joy and need for art, the habit of being around great art, then there is hope as they delve into the teen years, they will filter their new emerging culture through their knowledge and feeling for the greater culture. Let them do good looking, listening and reading. The window will stay open. With the habit of creativity, the teen years can be a time of joy, discovery, and resonance.
References
Barzun, Jacques. (2001) From Dawn to Decadence : 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. New York: Perennial.
Lewis, Richard, ed. (1966) Miracles: Poems by Children of the English-speaking World. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hamerow, Eleanor and Naomi Trubowitz, producers. (1990) The Journey Within, (VHS) Renascence Films.
The book Miracles and the film The Journey Within are both available from http://www.touchstonecenter.net/publications.html#imagination
Sebastian Lockwood travels the country as a bard performing Homer's Odyssey. With his partner, Nanette Perotte he also performs their original rock opera called Emily Dickinson Rock. Sebastian teaches creative arts and learning for Lesley University and Endicott College and teaches Visual Anthropology for The Boston Conservatory. More on his work and writings can be see at: odysseylive.org where the CD, Emily Dickinson Rock, is also available.
© December 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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