Arts as a Second Language

By Stephen Hunt

Alberta schools have never shied away from teaching second languages, but if University of Calgary professor Dr. Brittany Harker Martin has her way, they’ll be adding a new one no one saw coming: the arts.

“Often when people talk about art integration in schools, they talk about adding an art lesson here and there,” she says, “but what they don’t think about is how deeply trained most artists are in their work, and the time it takes to become [truly] proficient in things.”

Trickster residency at Elizabeth Barrett School | Photo: Courtesy of Trickster

Harker Martin, who combines a Ph.D. in Global Leadership with an undergraduate degree in arts education, believes training students in the language of the arts could—at best—help produce a new generation of Alberta innovators, in the arts and elsewhere.

At the least, it could improve student engagement in learning—and what’s not to like about that?

“If we really want to have a creative society where citizens are able to think in these other, important ways,” she adds, “then we need to make sure we’re teaching the skills and elements and principles and all the bits and pieces out of the arts in the same way that we teach languages to people.”

How do you teach kids to speak the language of the arts? Harker Martin has proposed nine core principles as a template for what comprehensive, mandatory arts education (in music, dance, and theatre) in our school system—becoming part of the core curriculum—would look.

“Those principles I’ve proposed are in line with the way second languages are taught,” she says. “I’m suggesting a schoolwide, integrated approach in that you teach the arts in the same way that we teach language.

“Those principles,” she adds, “help guide a school administrator or teaching staff that really want to do this, but want to do this in a rigorous way, where the arts becomes another way of knowing the world, where at the end of it, the student will be able to think in those art forms, rather than just using them on the side. They become the mode of expression and fact.”

One of Harker Martin’s comparables for adding arts education to the Alberta education core curriculum is that other provinces, such as British Columbia and Saskatchewan, already do it, and as a result, students in those provinces receive far more mandated minutes of arts education each year than Calgary students do.

Harker Martin and the U of C’s Werklund School of Education were commissioned in 2015 by the Rozsa Foundation to conduct a study to to quantify the positive impacts of arts education on students, in order to create the sort of peer reviewed data that wins funding in caucus debates.

That commission led to Harker Martin working with Trickster, a Calgary theatre group that has been working in the Calgary school system for over 30 years, using innovative theatrical workshops to teach students about everything from flood recovery response (in the aftermath of the 2013 floods) to helping build global awareness following the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

Harker Martin’s group studied 359 students, between Grades 5 and 7 from four different schools, measuring whether arts education could improve students’ engagement with the material, empathy and entrepreneurial spirit.

Basically, what Trickster’s artistic director David Chantler has always known—and what the research confirmed—was that students become engaged, and learn as much through interaction, improvisation and physical movement as they do absorbing information via textbooks and computers.

“Our bodies remember what we physically do much more [than our heads],” Chantler told Eric Volmers of the Calgary Herald in a December, 2016 article about the project.

Studying the impact of Trickster on inspiring more engaged learning habits among kids was only the first step, but it did provide valuable quantitative research into the value of teaching through arts education, Harker Martin says.

“The research we did with Trickster theatre was quantifying the impact of arts-integrated experiences on students’ intellectual engagement,” she says—which, she acknowledges, is a challenge.

“Where arts studies get themselves into trouble,” she adds, “is when we would try to quantify things that are really difficult to measure—like saying they can measure a student’s creativity. It really starts to try to distill something within a holistic context and makes it really difficult—so we were talking about arts as a second language and the [potential] impact of that [sort of policy on students].”

And when you stop and think about it, arts actually is a uniquely kinetic kind of language, Harker Martin says.

“If you look at the way arts have been used across time, they are a mode of communication and expression, right?” she says. “They aren’t actually a language, but it’s really a nice analogy, because of all of those expressive, communicative elements that language has.

“They [students] need to have the embedded time,” she adds. “They need to have the opportunity to explore what they’re learning through these other ways of knowing and representing—to experiment with those things in the same way they do with language.”

Learn more at ucalgary.ca and trickstertheatre.com.