10 lessons The Arts teach - Elliot Eisner

1 The arts teach children to make good judgements about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgement rather than rules that prevail.

2 The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3 The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4 The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5 The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6 The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7 The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8 The arts help children to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9 The arts enable us to have the experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10 The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolises to the young what adults believe is important.

from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/january/elliot-eisner-obit-011714.html

On re-reading

Booker Prize excitement live in M10 last year

Last year, after Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize, I read an article written by one of the Booker judges who talked about how they chose the winner.  One of their main criteria was: does the book deliver upon a reread?  And again, on a third read?  The Luminaries has so many layers to it that it could be enjoyed, and new elements discovered, each time they reread it.

This reminded me of Kate De Goldi's love of rereading (she always seems to be talking about this with Kim Hill), and mine, when I was young.  My all-time favourite book/series when I was a kid was Anne of Green Gables and all the ensuing novels.  I can't even tell you how many times I've reread each of those books.  It was as though Anne and Diana and Gilbert became friends who I could return to, almost converse with, whenever I picked up my worn, well-loved copies.

I can think of many authors I reread as a kid: Cynthia Voigt (especially the Tillerman series), Judy Blume, Tessa Duder...   Recently I was talking to a ten-year-old friend of mine who's another avid reader and rereader, and she said that her take on a good book is one that you can reread at least three times.

This made me think: perhaps a good way to encourage kids to read is to read them a novel, and then let them reread it themselves afterwards?  I'm reading Joy Cowley's latest book, Dunger, to the class at the moment.  Perhaps you could try getting it out of the library and giving it a reread?

What do you think?  Are you a rereader?

~ Amy

Do returns diminish on rereading and re-rereading? The Guardian
Rereading The Guardian