Her face has haunted me again these past weeks. I was teaching in a school devastated by the earthquake that killed 370 people in Mexico City in September 2017. The crowded classroom with over fifty children and dozens of local artists, musicians and theatre makers seemed to be overflowing with singing and dancing. Six weeks after the earthquake less than half of the children had returned to this school in one of the most quake affected parts of the city, their parents too scared to let them out of their sight. As we worked, I noticed a growing group of families gathered outside the classroom. I opened the door to find out why they were there and they flooded in. They had come to school that day because they had heard the artists were coming and they wanted to participate with their children. One mother came forward and demanded that all the children of the school should have had the opportunity to participate in our arts making. She wanted to know why the school had excluded some children, including her own daughter from working with me and the other artists. It was about money and time and bureaucracy but I literally didn’t have the words to explain this then. So, instead, I welcomed her, the other mothers, grandparents and their children into the already crowded room. Parents had brought their children to school that day so they could begin learning and re-engaging with the world again. It was the arts that had drawn them back to the school. When I close my eyes I can still feel her fear of the present and for the future. As schools moved to Level 3 of the lockdown I saw, on television, the same fear written across the face of a mother in Auckland as she dropped her daughter to school. She seemed to ask of me, ‘How might the world be safe again for my little one? What does school have to offer?’ I knew what the answer would be if she asked about the arts.
I know well the damage earthquakes and natural disasters cause, the fear and despair they generate. I have worked in multiple disaster zones for over a decade. My first experience was in China after the Szechuan earthquake in 2008. In some villages, every child died in the poorly constructed schools when the earth opened up underneath them. I’ve worked since in earthquake zones in Christchurch and in Mexico City, and most recently in Australia as it seemed the very earth was burning and blackening the sky. Natural disasters take lives, destroy homes and smash economies. In the days and years that follow, the primary focus in disaster zones is on repairing and then rebuilding the physical damage caused. The fiscal case for this focus on economic recovery is imperative. Yet, my experience of working in multiple disaster zones is that the biggest damage caused is usually unseen, it lies in the spirit and soul of the people. COVID-19 is a different kind of disaster than those that rip buildings apart. Yet its cost in the dismantling of lives across the globe is immeasurable. Like all natural disasters, COVID’s damage will linger long beyond its initial impact, its damage lurking in the inner fabric of people’s lives. My years of research on post disaster response and the experience of the last ten years has taught me that schools become the healing grounds for children, the place where teachers help them connect again with each other, with learning and the future. I’ve learnt too how the extraordinary power of the arts can bring life back to damaged communities and the schools in them – in a way nothing else can. I had found myself in Mexico City working with artists in classrooms with children, because I had done the same in Christchurch after and during the years of earthquakes that had stolen futures there, literally upending peoples’ lives. I remember the confused looks on the faces of Christchurch teachers, unsure
as to what they should do when their children returned. I can still picture the cold indifference of the national Ministry of Education at the time, who offered them little support other than to tell them to ensure they established the old routines and to make sure missed literacy and numeracy lessons were followed up on. I remember the faces of the children I played with in classrooms on the first day they returned to school after the February 21 earthquake. I can still imagine the dislocated looks of young ones whose worlds had been literally tipped upside down. I remember too their total and complete absorption in the drama work I did with them that day. They became lost in learning, finding themselves in the arts, playing inside the story of a little girl whose dream cloth had been torn. I remember their joy in fixing the torn dream cloths by painting their dreams and then making thread strong enough to heal the tear before finally restoring its beauty with a teaspoon of light. Disaster makes us all victims, we feel as if we are unable to control and manage the darkness that envelops us. The moment in our drama on the morning where the little girl looked into our pretend cloud bowl and offered her teaspoon of light to meld together hope and love, reminded me that arts give us a moment where we make again, we are producers of the world, not consumers. Actors not spectators. John Dewey understood the importance of these acts of making. He understood that democracy was shaped and made by our hands. Participatory citizenship, acting on and for others, is what this drama was all about as school reopened that day. After disasters the arts give us a sense that at least in those moments we might have the chance to change our lives. We might make something beautiful, stitch new dream cloths together as an act of defiance against the world that has acted against us. I can still see the frightened faces of the refugee and migrant children I worked with in Christchurch in March last year, after a tragedy that still deeply scars our nation. Only two weeks after the terror attack, I was working with children in Hagley again. With 5 and 6 years olds, we imagined super powers that we might need. One boy suggested an invisible cloak and we used our imaginations to make ourselves invisible, unnoticed and safe in a dangerous world. I remember our laughter as we developed other superhuman characteristics and wore cloaks of kindness. One young boy using the full strength of this power told his father he was ‘quite good looking’. As we sat and thought about the drama we might make together, one child suggested we do a version of Alice in Wonderland. She told us, this story would be about a place where you are promised everything will be fine, but you don’t know the rules and you are made to feel like you’ll never fit in. I asked, ‘that would be a great place to have our drama set but what might happen there.’ With a knowing smile, the young girl added, ‘Don’t forget, there is a Queen who wants to cut your head off.’ The arts always allow us to use fiction, the making of other worlds so we might better understand our own world. The arts are perhaps so powerful in education because they are not about preparing for the future. They resist the nonsense of a futures focused curriculum. Instead they are about the urgent and demanding task of helping children make sense of the world now. The metaphor of Alice in Wonderland and our work over
the coming weeks as we tried to make the Queen see that her visitors to Wonderland deserved to be treated well was exactly the metaphor we needed to address the deep questions they had about the world after the mosque attack where death might fall on you suddenly and without warning. As we worked towards a fairer and more just Wonderland we practiced a form of active citizenship, of being able to influence and change the world in which we live. Perhaps the greatest strength in the arts in education is that rather than preparing children for the future we are working with them so that they can re-imagine it differently and see themselves as agents in the change we desperately need. In Christchurch, after the terror attack, I understood too how the arts create a bridge to the past. Albert Wendt knows that the dead are woven into our flesh ‘like the music of bone flutes’. And it is the arts that weave their stories, their faces, their lives into who we are as people, and as a nation. It is the arts that allow us to bring them in some form back to life again, for us to speak to them, to be with them again. They come to us in the moments when tears spring uncontrollably to our eyes as the high-pitched call of the kaikaranga sends a shiver down our spine. They come to us when we hear again the songs we once sung together. They walk across our stages, sit inside our novels, dance in our poetry, hang in frames on our walls. They come to us when we need them to help us survive the present. As we speak through the arts to the dead, we also disinter ghosts. The arts have a way of finding those ghosts we bury deep within our collective consciousness, or they reveal the stories of those deliberately forgotten and obscured from our formal histories. The arts carry the potential to challenge and subvert stories that have colonised ways of national knowing. In the New Zealand context, the ghosts of colonisation are regularly wakened by artists who – rather than affirm a singular identity as New Zealanders – challenge and question who we are and who we might become. Teaching the arts gives children access to this bridge, so that they might use it throughout their lives when they need to reconnect with what has been lost. Children need to also learn how others have used different cultural forms to more deeply understand our past and how we arrived at the present. That knowledge gives them a creative and critical capacity to read the arts, to name their world. The arts after disaster bind us together, they become the bridge where we might find the pattern, shape, the image of our deepest hurts, both individually and communally. The night after the terror attack I attended a concert in the Auckland Town Hall with 1,000 others. It was a celebration of Māori Waiata. After the whakatau and karakia we sang Whakaaria Mai. We started tentatively, listening carefully to each other. We found ways to weave our own voice, our own story into the wider song. I felt the tears burning my cheeks, recognising how this act of communal music released our pent up hurt and anger in a way that only music can. As I remember that night, I find a different anger rising. An anger for the generations of primary children in New Zealand who now no longer have music in their classrooms, for the empty rehearsal rooms in my own faculty at the University of Auckland, where cobwebs decorate the musical instruments. I feel a silent rage at teacher education courses where the hours
of training in music has been reduced to almost zero. The great joy of the arts helping to connect beyond our own bubbles is even more important when we have lived in bubbles for weeks before returning to school. The bubble of a desperate mother in Mexico City, or a bubble in Lockdown 3 here in New Zealand. The arts help us to notice each other again, how to move through space, reconnect bodily with each other. The arts remind us that digital learning can never replace the full embodied joy of using all our senses and our whole bodies to learn, rather than just with our fingers. And perhaps most importantly the waiata connected us together in the room and then it felt, we were somehow connected to the people of Christchurch. In the soaring chorus,
education background would be part of any decision-making or consultative process. Neil Gaiman says there is no word to describe the micromoment between drawing in breath and breathing out. This is the space we have been in now for weeks while living in Lockdown. In that moment between collective breaths many teachers have taken stock of what they do in schools. We can bounce back to what we had, or we can take a risk, we can leap, skip, and dance forward. I led a team at the University of Auckland to develop Te Rito Toi, an arts-based resource to help teachers use the arts when classrooms reopened. Within a week, over 70,000 page views confirmed for me that there is a genuine and real hunger for change, for restoring the
as we grew louder and more confident, our singing became a bridge to possibility. Our song was a cry of faith and hope. In its communally created beauty, an act of defiance against the ugliness of terror. This is the possibility inherent in arts making. It gives us, as individuals and communities, the strength to imagine afresh, to see the world again as a place where hope might dwell. It gives us the possibility of connecting to others across time and space and beyond life itself. Through the arts as a nation we will remember, mourn, come together, rebuild who we are after COVID-19. The arts will be the way we claim back the spirit of who and what we might be as a nation. In the same way that we sang that night, through many different art forms, we will find ways to deeply listen to each other and to find new ways to breathe in harmony. Knowing about the power and potential of the arts, our proud history of educators such as Gordon Tovey and Elwyn Richardson, you would imagine the arts to be sacrosanct in New Zealand schools. The truth and the heart of the matter is that they have all but disappeared. The near death of the arts in New Zealand schools is not just some unintended collateral damage in the never ending pursuit of better PISA rankings in literacy and numeracy. The callous disregard for their potential is the result of years of deliberate neglect, of successive governments’ policy that has marginalised and trivialised their role within schools. Elliot Eisner reminds us that there are multiple curriculums. He suggests the arts are part of the nul curriculum. One of the things that are deliberately not taught, like New Zealand History. The risk we ran before COVID-19 was that an impoverished curriculum would continue to fail to realise the dreams of young people. Ministerial reference groups continued to rehash the same tired ideas, tinkering with examination systems, focusing on assessment and ensuring no one with an arts
arts back into schools and using them to imagine a different kind of schooling. Te Rito Toi is the first resource in the arts developed for New Zealand schools (recommended but not endorsed) by the Ministry of Education in over a decade. In 2002, I was working as the National Facilitator for Drama overseeing the implementation of the Arts curriculum, I remember the discussion on the last resource developed for drama. We had to decide whether to put it on VHS or this new thing called DVD. We chose VHS because we were not sure how long DVDs would last. No wonder teachers are ready for support and grabbed at the resources we developed. As part of Te Rito Toi a group of writers produced a suite of lessons using nga toi called Ha Ora. Co-writer Rawiri Hindle, who was 15 years ago the National Facilitator for the Nga Toi curriculum, thinks it is the only resource ever developed to support that curriculum. That we have abandoned the Arts Curriculum is one thing, but Nga Toi is the only National indigenous arts curriculum document in the world. That we have neglected and let that languish is a national disgrace. I remain haunted by that mother in Mexico, who so desperately wanted her child to experience the wonder and joy of making art in a classroom. She knew that was her right. Just like that day I stood in front of her, I still can’t find the words to say why we have let the arts die in New Zealand schools. We have lost much as a result of COVID-19. Perhaps we might imagine schools rich with the joy of the arts, the colour and vibrancy of making and rebuilding our democracy. There will be no guidance about this from the Ministry nor the various Ministers of Education for whom this is totally alien to their narrow view of schooling. A more whole, arts-rich curriculum will come from teachers and principals who understand and value the possibilities this rare moment between breaths has given us.