The educator team has sat for hours drawing up the school’s timetable for next year — never an easy task, but they feel they have nearly cracked it.
Relieved teacher 1: ‘What’s left? Oh, only arts and culture!”
Happy teacher 2: ‘Well LLC have taken their portion of A&C time already. So there aren’t many periods left to allocate. Let’s see, which teachers are free then?”
Or: the hockey team needs to leave early to reach the competition venue in time. The coach approaches the principal for permission to take learners from their classes. The timetable is consulted. ‘Oh, it’s only arts and culture, yes of course they can go,” responds the principal.
Such is the status of arts and culture in many South African schools. Despite the time allocation being stipulated in policy documents, the Learning Area is often viewed as being of so little value that ‘important” Learning Areas such as LLC and MLMMS poach periods, leaving a token one or two lessons each weekly, or even fortnightly, cycle for arts and culture.
Even then these are rarely double periods. How many timetables reflect double periods for Technology (‘Well you can’t cook or get very far in making something in woodwork in one period can you?”) yet fail to take into consideration the time it takes to create a work of art or develop a role-play situation or teach a song or choreograph a dance?
Even arts and culture teachers themselves feel like poor relations. ‘Oh no, our school has no money for materials or instruments or a tape/CD player,” is the cry from those holding the school purse-strings. What arts and culture teachers are not told is that it is up to the school authorities to requisition funds or allocate part of the school’s budget for this legitimate part of the curriculum.
The other source of discouragement is the lack of space in which to work and to store work in progress. But then how many arts and culture teachers even know what could be done with basic equipment? Many are given the classes to fill up their timetables, so they have no background in the work.
Those that do try to give this Learning Area its due are sometimes treated with derision by their colleagues: ‘You are just playing in your lessons!”; or censure from their superiors: ‘There seems to be so much noise and no control in your class!” All in all, morale is often low among arts and culture teachers.
A further concern is that arts teachers are frequent victims where staff ‘rightsizing” demands retrenchment or redeployment. Or if an arts teacher leaves, there might be no effort made to find a replacement. ‘It’ll make our ratios look better,” they say.
In actual fact, arts educators have every reason to be confident that their Learning Area epitomises all that is good about
Curriculum 2005. Their work genuinely promotes the holistic development of the individual learner. All the intelligences championed by outcomes-based education supporters are stimulated in arts education: linguistic, musical, spatial and kinaesthetic abilities are the essence of arts education.
But just as important are the benefits in interpersonal development. Much of the work is in groups and students have to learn to listen to their fellow participants; they have to solve problems and make decisions. The intra-personal value of the arts leads to self-discovery, identification and acknowledgement of one’s feelings, ideas, skills, weaknesses and strengths. Arts and culture teachers are able to integrate arts lessons with EMS, HSS and MLMMS concepts, bringing them to life in a way that enables learners to understand and remember. And they even have fun along the way!
The arts educators should begin to stand up for what they believe to be the value of their Learning Area, banding together to help raise awareness.
Sadly, what happens in schools is a reflection of the broader society in which they operate. The status of the arts in South Africa is far from satisfactory. Arts NGOs struggle for funding; artists, musicians, dancers and performers of all kinds are either ignored or regarded with suspicion.
Arts education faces many challenges in South Africa, but none greater than this: ‘The main challenge in modern education is to make the greatest number of people inventive, capable of personal creativity and able to adapt mentally to a changing world, while preserving their own identity and cultural values” (from the regional conference on arts education, Port Elizabeth, 2001).
This, clearly is the essence of arts and culture teaching in our schools and it is time that the Learning Area be allowed to take its rightful place.
Vanessa Bower is an arts education programme coordinator