Arts for Imani

This fall Imani will once again take a Preschool Ballet & Tap class at a local studio as well as take a to-be-determined visual arts class. Last year it was Crafty Creators at the Hamilton YMCA and the Art Start class offered by the ladies of Smudges & Strokes - whom I convinced to let Imani take the class despite being only 3 years old. Imani loves the visual arts in particular. My job owned an art gallery so she has been surrounded by fine art since she was 2 months old and she began to look forward to the art openings as a toddler, though it always seemed like she ran around the gallery more than she actually looked at the art.

We've encouraged her creativity at home. For years now Imani has been creating drawings and "mixed media" pieces on our living room coffee table that she would then tape to our living room wall as her "exhibit" (see exhibit A from earlier this year posted above!). Despite hiding the tape from her to prevent future random installations, I am encouraging Imani's love for the arts because my mother did the same for me.

I was raised in White Plains, a New York City suburb in well-to-do Westchester County, by a single mother who never made a salary above poverty level but who always encouraged my interest in the visual and performing arts. I started playing the recorder in primary school and by 4th grade I moved on to the flute. After renting a flute for a couple of years my mother somehow scraped up funds for me to buy a flute. During those years she also sent me to an after school program where Afrocentric instructors taught us about African art and to speak Swahili. One summer I went to a visual arts day camp - I'm assuming I was a scholarship kid - on the the campus of Purchase College, the arts school in the State University of New York system.

I took tap in an afterschool program at Battle Hill Elementary School and I took the modern dance classes offered at the children's center where my mother was a teacher's aid. When I was about 10 or 11 Mom and I tagged along with a friend of hers whose child was going to be evaluated for training at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Suited up in my leotard, I remember a stern Russian woman had me do a plie and a low arabesque and then while I stood in first position pronounced me suitable for the school to a man I now think was probably THE Arthur Mitchell. The girl we went with, who was a lean and lithe form to my muscular one and who had been in ballet since since she was like 5, wasn't accepted for training but she and I were both disappointed that day. My mother didn't expect me to be admitted and couldn't see bringing me to Harlem from White Plains weekly for ballet classes (of course, this all didn't prevent her from boasting about my admission for years!). Ultimately I continued to study modern and African with a local instructor with whom I would tag along to Manhattan to take classes at various studios which was an amazing experience. By sophomore year in high school I was admitted into a competitive dance program at Purchase College where I took classes multiple times a week. (I dropped the classes by senior year in favor of the school drill team, a job, and the mall!)

By high school I knew it was the performing arts that I loved: orchestra, band, jazz vocal ensemble, Cultural Horizons gospel choir, musicals (during the school year and the summer), these all among my cherished childhood experiences.

According to the National Arts Education Association, there are 10 lessons that the arts teach children.

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment 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 re 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 learn 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 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 symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Source: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.

I was blessed in that I lived in a community with schools that were rich with arts opportunities and that my late mother, despite her modest means, understood how important the arts could be in my development. The reason I am determined to provide the arts for Imani is so she can have a childhood as full as mine was.