Poverty

I want to talk briefly about how poverty presents itself in schools, and more specifically share some thoughts, based on my experience teaching in primarily high-need schools, about how it can affect an arts curriculum.

This is a big topic- the ways that poverty negatively affect the educational experience seem endless. Lack of health care can lead to increased absences and undiagnosed psychological/developmental/behavioral disorders. Transiency (again, more absences) destabilizes the cumulative nature of most curriculum designs. There are so many effects that poverty might have on the emotional and psychological development of a child, I don't know where to begin. More troubling, to me, is when the symptoms of poverty get mistaken by teachers and administrators as character flaws. One of my Kindergarten students couldn't sit still. He would not sit in his chair, or would use it incorrectly. He would sit on other students, roll around on the ground, etc. This was not due to undiagnosed ADHD or 'rowdiness.' A home visit revealed that the apartment where he lived had no furniture. Using a chair was a skill that had to be taught. Having furniture, and the correct use of that furniture, is a class-based skill set that not everyone has access to. As Gorski and Zenkov (2014) say, "perhaps the biggest and most pernicious lie about poor people is that their poverty is their own faults" (p.14).

In an arts classroom, poverty presents itself in a few specific ways that can have a profound effect on curriculum. First and foremost, the way that we conceive artistic 'talent' nearly always has more to do with time, access, and involvement than innate skill or aptitude (Visconti, 2012). Students with money, who have access to art supplies at home, access to extracurricular enrichment, and leisure time, are 'better' artists than those without. This is a definitional problem, since arts programs are "premised on the general assumption that the arts, in particular, are a domain that somehow transcends the dynamics of social inequality that usually shape racial and class segregation in schools" (Gaztambide-Fernandez, Saifer, and Desai, 2013, p. 126).

On a more practical level, art supplies are expensive, and the relationship between cost and quality has a very steep curve. Crayola colored pencils, which are the supplies most students have access to (if they have access at all) are less than $1.00 for a set of twelve. These pencils are qualitatively hot garbage, and present several instructional difficulties (the lead is fragile, the colors are inconsistent, they do not layer, etc.). Prismacolor pencils, which are closer to what a 'real artist' might use, are approximately 20x more expensive. I try to base my curriculum on authentic activities and discipline-based projects. That is, we learn about art by thinking and acting like artists. It is troubling to me that 'thinking and acting like an artist' usually involves having the time and money to do so.


References

Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A., Saifer, A., & Desai, C. (2013). “Talent” and the misrecognition of
social advantage in specialized arts education. Roeper Review, 35 (2), 124-135.

Gorski, P. C., & Zenkov, K. (Eds.). (2014). The big lies of school reform: Finding better solutions for the future of public education. Routledge.

Visconti, V. (2012). Linking the nature of secondary school students who are highly artistic with
curriculum needs and instructional practice. Exceptionality Education International,  22(2), 46-60.