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THE PRODUCT IS NOT THE POINT WHEN ART AND SPECIAL ED MIX

October 21, 2000

WARRENTON, Va. -- They may never become great artists or musicians or actors. Then again, maybe they will. The beauty of using the arts in educating students with disabilities is that, either way, the students end up with one critical, often elusive feeling -- success. Getting parents, the community and other teachers to see this, however, can be an art teacher's biggest challenge.

"We have found that sometimes the product is not the thing, it's how we get our students to that point, to produce the product," Salt Lake City teacher Barbara Heglund said at the P. Buckley Moss Foundation's annual conference.. Working in a self-contained school for students with mental retardation and additional disabilities, Heglund and her co-teacher Mary Brow have developed dozens of lesson plans and activities incorporating visual art, dance and music to help students learn a variety of basic skills.

Art activities can provide an alternative teaching approach when other methods fail, but schools often do not recognize they have other options, says Sally Smith, a longtime educator, lecturer and founder of The Lab School in Washington, D.C. Too often, she argues, students who are having trouble mastering certain academic skills are simply handed more academic work as a means of trying to get them up to speed. For many students, no matter how much increased time and instruction they get, those teaching methods are not going to get through, she says.

"We need to expand the brain and the student's ability to learn, so they can try to conquer those learning problems," because students with learning disabilities need visual, concrete learning, Smith says. The arts, by stimulating different portions of the brain, can speed that development.

Reaching Out to Parents

Getting parents involved in a special needs child's arts education can be as challenging as getting a fourth grader with severe emotional disabilities to stick his hand in a puddle of finger paint, the Utah teachers said. The answer to the child's objections may simply be to make sure he or she has access to a brush or sponge instead. "Sometimes we just learn from a project that what we thought would work doesn't," Brow explained.

Overcoming the parental hurdle is a little more involved. The key is first educating the parents about the important role the arts play in development of specific skills their children need to work on, Heglund says. After that, teachers often have to convince the parents that their participation in that process, at school and reinforcing the skill development at home, is equally critical to achieving a positive outcome.

One way Heglund and Brow have tackled the parent education task is to overhaul the traditional "back to school night," in which parents usually attend school without their children to meet the teachers and learn about the curriculum and teaching methods. At Hartvigsen School, the renamed "Parents' Night" is a full-fledged social event for parents, students and teachers, including dinner together, swimming and opportunities for parents and kids to work together on guided art projects. In those activities, the parents get a chance not only to see how their children are learning but feel for themselves the benefits of dance for a child having trouble with spatial concepts or drama for an emotionally disturbed student.

The school also sponsors a "father-daughter" activity periodically to help parents feel a sense of success in relating to their children. "Not only do we try to help the student accomplish something, but more importantly, we help the parents see that their children can do things," Heglund said.

Community Orientation

Showing that students with special needs are not helpless or useless is also a necessary component of efforts to integrate them into their communities, educators say. Andrew Raeside, arts program coordinator at Spaulding Youth Center in Tilton, N.H., helps his students create their own paper, then produce cards, stationery and art works to sell in their communities. At South Side High School in Muncie, Ind., special ed teacher Nancy Barnett's students create a variety of products they sell to community members from a store within their school, donating the proceeds to local charities the students choose. Raeside and Barnett, named teachers of the year by the Moss Foundation and the Council for Exceptional Children, respectively, argue being part of a community-based business can provide a powerful sense of success and belonging for the students.

In addition to enabling each student to focus on specific abilities they need to develop, the community-based stores help students develop social skills, teamwork and an understanding of how businesses work and how business people conduct themselves. To accomplish this, Raeside and Barnett argue, the educator must strike a careful balance between instructing and intruding in the students' business and artistic creativity. For Barnett, the key is "each one teach one." She encourages her students to find out from each other how to perform a particular task, with the teacher or teaching assistant guiding one student through the task of explaining a process or skill to the other student.

Raeside, on the other hand, says he does not deliberately try to keep the educator out of the process. Instead, he emphasizes that the business is run by a team, on which both educators and students play equal, valuable roles. Allowing the students to express themselves artistically through the project is important, he said, but it can also be tricky. The end result does not have to conform to the teacher's concept of what it should be, but it must be something people in the community will value and take notice of, he explained.

In Utah, Heglund and Brow work on community inclusion for their students with more severe disabilities through a peer tutoring program they established with neighboring schools and through field trips. Woven into every lesson, art activity or field trip is instruction on and reinforcement of "appropriate behavior," according to Brow, so the children will be more easily accepted by mainstream society. Regular trips to matinees at the local ballet are a combination of art appreciation and experience using public skills the students will need when they leave school. Even for those who are highly unlikely to ever master such skills, Heglund says, "You have to give them a chance."

Such efforts to integrate students with disabilities into the community have a significant impact on society's attitude toward them, the educators say, but that attitude apparently still needs some adjusting. Though Heglund and Brow, for example, have incorporated visits from a variety of guest artists into their lessons at Hartvigsen, they still get some artists refusing to work with children with special needs. "I think it's just fear," Heglund says.

As is the case with reluctant parents, teachers can usually help non-disabled people overcome that fear through education, she argues. Breaking outsiders in slowly helps, as Heglund and Brow do both with guest artists and with peer tutors from their neighboring schools. The volunteers first get a brief overview of what the school looks like, how it operates and what types of students it serves, then the volunteers and school staff sit down in a "neutral room," one that is not threatening or involved in educating the students, Heglund says, to discuss the similarities Hartvigsen's students have with typically developing students their age. Through this discussion, she added, the peer tutors usually "find out they are more alike than different."

The next step is to introduce the visitors to some of the students with less severe disabilities, then gradually introduce them to others with more difficult challenges, Heglund said. The school also shows a video on seizures before the volunteers start working with the students, to help them understand what happens and how they should respond, and they get a quick lesson on wheelchair safety, including practice wheeling students around and up and down curbs. Many volunteers do not realize, Brow noted, "the person in the wheelchair is relying on you to be safe with them."

An Enemy Within?

Ironically, arts educators say one of the biggest barriers they face in establishing regular, ongoing contact with students with special needs is within the school itself. Teachers with other specialties, such as math or social studies, as well as some administrators, often resist including art, music and drama teachers in IEP planning and other activities related to teaching students with disabilities. Though they are educators, they often fail to realize the value of the arts as an alternative way to develop specific skills. Or they discount the value of an arts teacher in core academic skills instruction.

"Art teachers tend to be the hidden treasures of our schools," The Lab School's Smith says. "We need to bring them into the central hallway of our educational system."

To break down this barrier, says Brian Carroll, director of special programs for North Country Union High School in Newport, Vt., arts teachers may need to convert the parents to the cause first. In IEP meetings, Carroll says, "an enlightened parent has the power." If the arts teacher reaches out to the parent, the parent may then help ensure the arts teacher is invited to IEP meetings and is heard by the other team members. Alternatively, he said, arts teachers can talk to school principals or IEP case managers to make sure they are on the invitation list for these meetings.

Once through the door, arts teachers at an IEP meeting should push for more collaboration among themselves, the special ed teachers and general ed teachers -- perhaps with the help of the student's case manager -- to ensure the methods and lessons the arts teachers use to reinforce certain skills are replicated in math, history and other classes. It makes more sense, some educators believe, to try to integrate these practices into all classes than to try to set aside a specific amount of time each day or week for the student to engage specifically in art to address those goals and objectives.

Showing general ed teachers the diagnostic value of art activities may help win them to the cause, Smith says. In addition to introducing information and reinforcing skills, teachers can watch what students do during an activity -- such as how they position their bodies in relation to a task or how well different types of tasks hold their attention -- to recognize basic skills students have or have not mastered. From this observation, teachers can draw connections between the challenges a student has in physical activities and in literacy, spatial concepts or other lessons. A student who thrives in dance and music but shies away from drama, for example, may have a language problem.

Because art projects demand focus and attention on one specific goal or central theme, they can help students develop valuable tools for reading and other abstract tasks, Smith says. Space and time challenges, "the hidden dimensions of learning disabilities," according to Smith, "are elements that I believe cause [students] more trouble in life than even learning to read and write."8