The Verbs in the Arts

By Director of Visual and Performing Arts Barbara Weinstein
Thanks to a friend and colleague, I was pointed to a brilliant article about the importance of the arts in education with a focus I never considered as key until now. What is it that we do in the arts profession that empowers students outside of the classroom? The article from actor, author and teacher Eric Booth was an edited version of his presentation from the Educational Theatre Conference in 2007. Essentially, he focused on how we are comfortable using nouns to describe the arts, but it’s the verbs that get lost in translation.

Booth states, “For centuries we have defined art by its nouns—the performances we pay to go see, the objects that grace our homes and museums...Today, the verbs of art are as important as those nouns. Good teaching artists know how to work with the verbs together with the nouns.”

Within the arts field, we talk passionately about how the arts embody creative and critical thinking and problem solving. In our society, we proudly put a lot of emphasis on productions, shows and concerts as outcomes of successful programs and indeed they are. However, we focus much less on the process and the journey of getting to those outcomes and its effect on personal and professional growth. We also don’t give enough credit to the teaching artists who are inspiring students through creative and critical thinking.

Booth emphasized, “Eighty percent of what we teach is who we are. Eighty percent. The other 20 percent, all the formal aspects of our work and our technique—our pedagogy and curriculum—they’re very important too, but the real impact on young people is who we are as human beings when we are teaching them...It was not the quality of the handouts or the cleverness of the curriculum.”

Quality arts education impacts all facets of one’s life in and outside the arts. Booth shared, “There’s a school I know that wanted to start as an art school, but they knew they wouldn’t get any funding, so they announced themselves as a creative problem solving school, and they were launched in months.” Along with creative problem-solving, Booth adds that other acquired skills include: “originality and inventiveness in work; ability to take risks; ability to communicate new ideas to others; tolerance of ambiguity; integrating knowledge across different disciplines; fundamental curiosity; ability to identify new patterns of behavior or new combinations of action; and, finally, the notion of no right answer.”

The skills described are the attributes corporate leaders look for in employees. There’s a new article that comes out every day regarding grit and determination and all of the characteristics above that the arts supply under the facilitation of incredible teaching.

How the arts are the incubators and essential fertile ground for developing life skills is through discussing the verbs. Booth shares, “We are all complicit in letting the nouns colonize way too much of the arts experience when all the learning happens in the verbs. The verbs are in what people do to create those nouns, and those are what businesses want—the verbs that allow for creativity across the curriculum. The verbs are what artists love about art and the experiences of making art.”

It’s no longer enough to talk about the humanizing factor associated with arts and quality arts education, although it’s incredibly important. The relevance of the programs building leaders of the future lay with learning to exploit the hows and to challenge the whys with the why nots and the what ifs that arts naturally do.

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