SchoolArts - October 2007

Visual Imagery

Shawn K. Smith and Garrett Seaman

In 2002, less than half of the students at Huff Elementary School passed the annual battery of state tests. Two years later, the school found itself deep into federal and state No Child Left Behind sanctions. Two more years of failing test scores would have put the school on a path to closure. What did teachers and administrators decide to do? Not only did we rethink our academic curriculum, but we put the arts and technology at the center of major reform efforts.

the Harvard Business Review, Rich-
ard Florida, in a provocative article
on “America’s Looming Creativity
Crisis,” examined the state of Amer-
ica’s creative class from a global per-
spective. The United States ranked
eleventh in the
world in the
latest Global
Creative-Class
Index, with
roughly twenty-
three percent of

our workers being employed in creative fields.

Florida argued for greater funding in America for the arts and culture, and claimed that “education reform must, at its core, make schools into places that cultivate creativity.”

The blending of the high academic demand from NCLB, combined with a concentrated effort to increase the study of the arts and technology in public schools will be the driving force in strong public schools of the future. For this reason, we became even more determined to include the arts and technology in school-wide reform efforts at Huff Elementary School.

“Education reform must,
at its core, make schools
into places that cultivate
creativity.”

Finding a Balance

In today’s era of increased accountability, most schools are occupied with the need to raise their students’ achievement in reading and mathematics. Time and resources being limited, educational organizations find themselves making painful decisions concerning how best to allocate both in order to meet new grade-level standards.

Even so, leaders in the field are loath to neglect longer-term educational goals such as promoting lifelong learning, building a productive citizenry, and developing imagination and creativity. How can we best foster an environment where optimum teaching and learning can occur? Finding the right balance is the essential concern for schools in the twenty-first century.

A Need for Creativity During the last several years, we have heard a call from a number of different sources that America needs to rebuild her creative infrastructure. In the October 2004 issue of

The School as Art Gallery

At Huff, one of our first priorities was to change the appearance of the school facilities. What better way to do this than through the visual arts? We began by painting the interior halls of the school, changing a dark, dingy, stained brown brick hallway into a brightly painted yellow gallery in the center of the school. This hall became the symbolic focal point for change.