Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

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‣ Icelandic education is dedicated to building the skills and knowledge in the arts forms, especially visual arts, music, wood craft and textile and to a lesser extent dance, drama, photography and film making. ‣ Arts programmes in Iceland embed ideals of quality and this is evident in the fluency with which most Icelandic students are able to work within the languages of the arts. ‣ More focus needs to be given to developing creativity in schools through creative approaches to learning , including in the arts Learning the languages of the arts enables people to talk effectively about their arts experiences and express their feelings. The arts are a powerful form of communication. The development of language skills appeared to be central within the design and implementation of arts-rich education in Iceland. From an early age, the substantial commitment to arts lessons means that Icelandic children are fluent in the language of arts disciplines – such as the language of colour, movement, gesture and so on. Furthermore, the overall importance given to arts within Icelandic society means that, even if the pupils in later life do not wish to be active in expression through the arts, they possess ways to talk about arts and culture so they can participate actively in the cultural life of Iceland and beyond. Language has an important function to perform in giving students the words to enable children to talk about their artwork, performance and the work of artists. Children will develop this vocabulary with interesting questions from the teacher or artist and by talking to each other about their arts experiences. Concurrently, both the ability to express oneself through artistic means and to be able to talk and write about artistic and cultural experiences, gives the child a greater range of ways to express feelings. In this way, the arts are a powerful form of communication. The building of the critical languages of the arts was less developed in pupils than both their generally excellent expressive (arts) languages and their languages of arts appreciation. The arts provide a language that enables society to pass on cultural heritage to young people. Importantly, it also allows young people to create their own artistic language and to contribute to their global development (emotional and cognitive). In this way it equips young people with the capacity to develop the cultural heritage of the future. The arts are symbolic communications that act as a cultural driving force accentuated the role of the arts in social action, social reconstruction and the role of culture in society. For this purpose alone, there is ample justification to foreground the need for systematic development of artistic languages. Effective arts education combines development in the specific languages of the arts with creative approaches to learning. Despite the high level of discipline specific skills and knowledge within Icelandic pupils, the idea that the arts are a form of language and that ‘literacy’ in the arts is vital for contemporary and future society – especially in the light of the rapid changes in communication technologies – notions of visual literacy, aesthetic literacy, sound literacies and so on was not equally apparent in either policy or practice in Iceland. The area of integrated creative languages appears to be underdeveloped in debates and classroom practices in arts and cultural education and beyond in Iceland (see later section on integration). The need to develop broader ‘creative’ languages was seen by representatives of the creative industry sectors to be a vital and urgent role of education in Iceland, as these statements emphasise: The focus needs to be on creativity, not just painting and putting it on the wall, but something to do with how children actually think; opening up all the areas of the arts. A lot of this has got to do with the director of the school. In Iceland we need individuals with a sense of creativity. We need these people to be strong for business and to be able to be creative. To become creative is an urgent issue; we need this. The school system is how it 68
has always been and it is 20 or 30 years behind. We need a system for the future. We have never had a government that has had vision. The focus should be on creativity, to enable people to start up new things, new businesses... The school system is always old... creativity into all subjects, that will have to be a part of our revolution I'm afraid... The final quote above – along with those that follow – show that while there is widespread acknowledgement of the vital role of creativity in economic reform in Iceland, this is not being fully developed through the schools system. A lack of creative teachers and school tradition are in part given the blame. Additionally, members of the creative professions emphasise that the arts themselves are not always creative. Art and creativity is gaining importance – for the creative industries and the economy in general. Creative thinking is, and will be, high on the agenda. If we want good education we have to think of creativity. Local governments are responsible for the pre-primary schools, grammar schools, sports and music schools; this places hefty responsibility/difficulties on the communes. We need to focus on more diversity as to the different art forms offered. I am afraid of skill versus creativity. What is creativity when you are seven years old? I get afraid when arts and school is mentioned, it is damaging when you talk about teaching arts. More creativity doesn’t need to be all so formal... more fusion... different art forms... Creativity is awakening in education, one sees this in the official policy here... We are doing a lot of this already... the problem has been that the professionals have not been willing to go into the schools... The following vignette expresses the arguments for more integrated arts learning in Iceland: Vignette 3.4.1 People’s view is very much awakening People’s view is very much awakening. We are trying to emphasise creativity in all the planning of the school system. Then what has been the problem is the lack of professionals wanting to teach in the schools. There is a lack of the combination between the artists and the teachers working professionally side by side in the schools and I feel it more successful in smaller country schools where they have to cooperate. Society depends upon cooperation but schools do not operate in the same way. Students like coming in contact with creative subjects. The advantage of the Icelandic system is that it is not hard to make a project. You can easily contact people and different organisations. There are good things about working in a smaller place. Visual arts are very young but it is having a bit of an explosion. We are getting fewer visitors to exhibitions than other places in the world; there are too few hours and it is getting less. They are changing it in the curriculum they are giving it less importance and less time is spent on it. Arts should be seen to be on the top. It’s the most important thing but sometimes I think it is also viewed to be too expensive. There is also this view that you can teach art just by talking, but there should be no excuse; money should not be an excuse. You do not have to be educated in teacher training to do the arts. What would be good was if qualified artists and qualified teachers worked together. Last winter we have a collaborative exhibition with schools. It worked really well, it made a huge difference, especially if the school had arts education as part of it. We saw a big difference in the levels of the children’s appreciation and also the quality of the art they produced. Society in Iceland is not being taught to appreciate the arts. We need to look at arts education, teaching art as a professional requirement in schools. Schools do not tell enough about how importance the arts are. Most schools are based around the importance of Maths, Icelandic and English. Arts need to be very important and should be given more weight. We need more educated artists as teachers and more educated teachers as artists. You can teach a lot of subjects through the arts for example, I teach English through the arts. We are not saying just singing in a school but really deep cultural teaching. We need more creative and cultural teaching. There is very little dance and drama in schools and they will not go outside the box. The only dance that is taught is about movement. It might be in drama or children might learn some old time dances in the sports club. There is nothing in public schools. There is nobody to come to the schools and teach these subjects. Social ability courses could be an example. People need to feel they can push themselves to be more forthcoming more confident more encouraged; this is lacking in Icelandic people. When parents see this develop 69
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Arts and Cultural Education in Icel
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Acknowledgements This research woul
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Helga Rut Guðmundsdóttir Helgi Vi
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5.4.2 Talent developement..........
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practices, but in reality there are
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Chapter 1: Introduction and overvie
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school type to which the comment re
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A future study could examine specif
Page 17 and 18: The number of pupils with a foreign
Page 19 and 20: pre-primary school teachers were so
Page 21 and 22: Figure 1.5.3: How useful is the Nat
Page 23 and 24: The conclusions from this report in
Page 25 and 26: primary level exceptional students
Page 27 and 28: ‣ Schools and colleges should be
Page 29 and 30: Increasingly, schools are becoming
Page 31 and 32: here, it is a good cooperation. We
Page 33 and 34: In terms of suggested improvements
Page 35 and 36: There are 300 hundred pupils in thi
Page 37 and 38: Figure 1.12.2 Accessibility of the
Page 39 and 40: e active in a range of local profes
Page 41 and 42: schools have waiting lists of child
Page 43 and 44: Going to local schools… well we t
Page 45 and 46: in theatre. The students really lov
Page 47 and 48: We had a great show. The teachers d
Page 49 and 50: lot of satisfaction out of the proc
Page 51 and 52: Chapter 2 World Benchmarking 2.1 In
Page 53 and 54: Chapter 3: Responses to quality 3.1
Page 55 and 56: Figure 3.2.1 Compulsory school coll
Page 57 and 58: In the survey, dance schools report
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Page 61 and 62: visitors. The diverse and ‘quirky
Page 63 and 64: A smaller group of girls performs a
Page 65 and 66: Figure 3.3.6 Pupil performances in
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Page 75 and 76: Conversely, the accessibility of ou
Page 77 and 78: Vignette 3.7.4 Every day there are
Page 79 and 80: Despite the geographical challenges
Page 81 and 82: In visual arts we mainly assess acc
Page 83 and 84: We try to do professional developme
Page 85 and 86: This vignette from an academic in t
Page 87 and 88: in offering adult education. Other
Page 89 and 90: demanding more of our schools and t
Page 91 and 92: It was argued that the arts may not
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Page 95 and 96: There is a lot of respect amongst p
Page 97 and 98: “The popularity of pop music is g
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Page 101 and 102: interrelationship with nature and c
Page 103 and 104: From this summary, it can be seen t
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Page 107 and 108: Vignette 5.2.4 Our selection proces
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Page 111 and 112: During the research, various school
Page 113 and 114: The following sections are other as
Page 115 and 116: For older pupils, there are electiv
Page 117 and 118: Before I came here no-one was doing
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Creative and cultural industries Mo
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While the previously listed recomme
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Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

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