One Vision of Arts Education: Project Zero’s the Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education

One Vision of Arts Education: Project Zero's The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education S. Seidel, S. Tishman, E. Winner, & P. Hetland. (2009). The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Project Zero.PDF available from Wallace Foundation website: http://www.wallacefoundation. org/KnowledgeCenter/ KnowledgeTopics/CurrentAreasofFocus/ArtsParticipation/Documents/Qualities-of-Quallty-Understanding-Excellence-Arts-Education.pdfThe Quality of QualitiesThe Wallace Foundation (2009) with support from the Arts Education Partnership (2009) commissioned Harvard's Project Zero (2009) to conduct a study of what constitutes quality arts education in the United States. The collaboration among these three groups has resulted in The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education (Seidel, Tishman, Winner, & Hetland, 2009). Foundations may fund whatever interests their boards and officers. Advocacy groups promote causes. Researchers, we like to think, use theory to guide dispassionate inquiry into phenomena and events. The collaboration of these three organizations makes it appropriate to ask whether the report is inquiry or advocacy? Quality arts education according to whom? Quality in what contexts? Quality to what end? These are the questions that underlie this review.When I taught in England at the Birmingham College of Art and Design in 1971, 1 carried the one book that I thought represented the cutting edge of arts inquiry in the United States: Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968). Goodman suggested that a knowledge of symbol systems may provide guidance in dealing with problems of education in novel ways.Once the arts and sciences are seen to involve working with - inventing, applying reading, transforming, manipulating - symbol systems that agree and differ in certain specific ways, we can perhaps undertake pointed psychological investigation of how the pertinent skills inhabit or enhance one another; and the outcomes might well call for changes in educational technology. (Goodman, p. 265)Goodman examined and compared phenomena such as pictures, musical scores, and dance notation, thus, calling attention to seldom investigated symbol systems used in the arts. He founded Harvard's Project Zero to conduct that investigation. The name came from the assumption that since no inquiry base existed upon which to build, the starting point was zero. Project Zero's first codirectors, Howard Gardner and David Perkins, produced an impressive body of inquiry pertaining to the arts and cognition. Just one example, Gardner's multiple intelligence inquiry, seems precisely to fulfill Goodman's dream (Gardner, 1983). Educators the world over, sometimes to Gardner's chagrin at the distortion of his ideas, have implemented educational programs based on attention to a variety of symbol systems. So where does Qualities of Quality fit within the Project Zero enterprise? In their Executive Summary, Project Zero's researchers state that, "Many children in the United States have little or no opportunity for formal arts instruction and access to arts learning experiences remain a critical national challenge. In addition, the quality of arts learning opportunities that are available to young people is a serious challenge" (Seidel et al., 2009, p.l ). The evidence for these claims is not presented - which may be a tip-off that what is to follow is at least as much advocacy as it Is empirical inquiry. Nevertheless, the research questions are empirical:* How do arts educators in the United States - including leading practitioners, theorists, and administrators - conceive of and define high quality arts learning and teaching? * What markers of excellence do educators and administrators look for in actual activities of arts learning and teaching as they unfold in the classroom? * How do a program's foundational decisions, as well as its ongoing day-to-day decisions, affect the pursuit and achievement of quality? …