There’s a growing consensus among students, families and teachers that something deep and intangible is broken in schools. Consequently, it is getting harder and harder to be a Teaching Artist working in the education sector. You can hear it in the exhausted sighs of off-duty teaching artists and fellow teachers — in staff rooms, on social media, and at ‘drinks to decompress’. Words like “exhaustion,” “micromanaged”, “inequity,” “cyberbullying,” “burnout”, “making the best of it”, and “exodus” now make up the glossary for professions fraying at the edges. Why does the sector value testing and compliance over creativity and care? And teachers are leaving in droves.
According to the UN, the world will be 44 million school teachers short by 2030, and current education policies are not helpful.
There are many reasons for this flight from classrooms, but among the most worrying is that many schooling systems no longer see education as a ‘social good’. Systems have left behind Thomas Jefferson’s broad and compelling priority “To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instil into them the precepts of virtue and order”. Citizens would be instructed in “their rights, interests and duties.”
Jefferson would not be alone in struggling to come to terms with what education has become. Indeed, many of the progressive writers and thinkers of the 20th Century would be similarly stunned. John Dewey, who began that work of the century in 1902 with The Child and the Curriculum argued for learning to be experiential, democratic, and rooted in the child’s interests. Developmental psychologists followed. Maria Montessori (self-directed learning), Jean Piaget (cognitive development through active exploration and discovery), Lev Vygotsky (zone of proximal development), Erik Erikson (identity formation, emotional growth) and Maxine Greene (aesthetic education, social imagination) laid the conceptual foundations for an approach to education which placed experimentation and the arts at the centre of pedagogies of creativity. As the last century ended teachers were valuing project-based and interdisciplinary learning often involving real-world problem-solving.
Now, all that is being set aside. The work of a century is being airily dismissed, rinsed away in a tide of mundane metrification. And teachers are leaving in droves.
This post does not seek to reiterate all the causes of education’s current trauma, but instead to remind readers that we must not be immobilised into thinking that rigid, utilitarian schooling frameworks are here to stay and will now, inevitably and inescapably, define our schooling systems for all time. Let us be reminded instead of two educational movements which do not ask teachers to be cogs in a machine obsessed with skill sets of cognitive verbs.
These movements are Nordic bildung (which is now promoted through the Global Bildung Network) and Teaching Artistry and both have an expansive concept of education. Each movement is a global network.
Global Bildung Network: https://www.globalbildung.net/ is open to everybody and is initiated and hosted by the Copenhagen based organization Nordic Bildung: https://www.nordicbildung.org/
Teaching Artistry: https://itac-collaborative.com/
Perhaps you are already familiar with one of these movements? Here are decent introductions to both.
How Scandinavia Got Great by David Brooks and The Nordic Secret by Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Björkman
The School of the (Im)Possible – Florianopolis, Brazil is a short video illustrating teaching artistry which creates an immersive educational experience for 8 to 10 year old students.
Two books, The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom (2023) by Lene Rachel Andersen and Making Change: Teaching Artists and Their Role in Shaping a Better World (2023)by Eric Booth invite you to dig deeper.
As a living philosophy of education and practice of education, Nordic bildung shares a number of fundamentals with Teaching Artistry including:
1. Personal and Societal Transformation
From 1850, bildung was adapted from a German tradition by Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland to emphasise each individual’s journey toward maturity, autonomy, and ethical responsibility – embodied in calls for Beauty and Freedom. Similarly, Teaching Artistry uses creative practice (alluding to Beauty) to foster personal insight and social change using the teaching artist as a catalyst for transformation (alluding to Freedom).
2. Emphasis on Aesthetic Engagement and Cultural Participation
While teaching artists use the arts to activate imagination, dialogue, and cultural vitality, often in marginalized or under-resourced communities, bildung, in the Nordic countries, incorporates cultural heritage, storytelling and a broadly defined aesthetic field (which includes the arts, but also “communal singing, folklore heritage, pop culture, avant-garde art, individual expression, multicultural input, and mixes thereof”) to engender the interplay of emotions and affect with the materials and forms for meaning-making, both rational and poetic.
3. Democratic and Inclusive Ethos
This shared emphasis on creativity and the nexus between emotion and analysis is seen by both movements as essential to democratic life and civic participation. The Nordic approach is explicitly grounded in egalitarian principles—education for all, inclusion, and equity. This is also seen in the purposes of teaching artists who invariably operate in community settings, advocating for access to the arts and education regardless of background or ability. Both challenge hierarchical models of education and entitlement and promote participatory, community-centered approaches.
All the while educational policymakers look on in bewilderment, helplessly wondering why the exodus continues – despite their never-ending reviews, (often led in far-a-way palaces of power) and accompanied by murmurs of hollow concern. Why, why are those who once embraced teaching as a calling, leaving in droves?
Teaching artists and their colleagues in the Nordic bildung tradition, are steeped in the lost secrets of child-centered classrooms and the aesthetic intensities of learners’ lives. Because of this, with impish self-assurance and moral imagination they steadfastly continue to re-imagine what living and learning in a democratic society truly means.
For those who remain, supporting them to shape their own answers to these abandoned secrets, and teach in their presence, is among the most vital work of our time.
Brad Haseman is a member of the Leadership Committee of the International Teaching Artists Collaborative (ITAC), a co-designer of The Basics of Teaching Artistry (Including Lincoln Centre Education, Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Sydney Opera House), and was an advisor to ITAC’s online course Teaching Artistry for Social Impact. Both courses are available on Kadenze.com
Photo by Dan Farrell on Unsplash