|
Home > Programs > Berkeley > Advocate Profile
An interview with Paul Ammon
Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, specializing in Human Development and Learning, director of programs for preparing elementary school teachers
From a research perspective how do students benefit from the arts?
Teaching for understanding is very central. That means helping students make sense of what we are asking them to learn. So we are trying to prepare teachers to get past that superficial approach to teaching and learning. I see the arts as a way of enhancing teaching for understanding by means of the powerful tools it provides for making meaning, for making sense of things and representing things in different ways that allow you to understand them better.
Listen 
Are there strategies that you’ve identified that can bring out the ability to have meaning to the things that they are teaching?
Absolutely. I think what we have pretty well established is that a key part of it is for our own students, the educators that we are preparing, to experience the arts themselves as learners, to engage in arts based activities as learners in the programs that are preparing them…and its not just the experience in the arts as a learner, but also being able to reflect on that experience and discuss it with others and to see how that engagement with the arts has contributed to their own learning because I think that’s the way they begin to see how it’s going to contribute to the students they’ve been working with. Listen
How have your students responded to this?
Some of our students are very reticent about doing arts-based activities because they say, “Well, I don’t have any particular talent.” I had a student who said “Please don’t ask me to draw because I don’t draw”. I said, “Well what if you have students who like to draw? Are you going to deprive them of the opportunity?.” I think she began to realize that she would have to find a way to give students opportunities even though it may involve an opportunity that she may not feel very comfortable with. The biggest thing for students to come to grips with is that they can use arts-based activities without feeling that they are accomplished artists of one kind or another themselves.
Listen
|
