Multimodal Statement
Art can help reduce anxiety and be able to help us understand one another. Art is an expression and a tool of communication to show our feelings. Currently our schools are going through a decrease of the liberal arts, pulling the tool of expression away from our students. With the amount of work that are put onto students these days are causing high rates of anxiety and low creativity IQ’s. Through my multimodal project, I will be using at least three modes to get my point across. I will have a short paper, to make sure my words and arguments are understood. The paper will explain what is going on in the school district without liberal arts, how anxiety is affecting students and that it’s harder for them to explain their feelings without that understanding of arts to help them express themselves. I will also include a piece of art that is relates back to my topic. The piece is taken from an art therapy website, showing how people may draw what their mind looks like. With this picture it will help understand how the people who drew it were feeling. We could see their expression and relate it to ourselves. This would be used as a visual mode. So the last mode I would use would be including some music, it would be auditory and visual. A lot of songwriters will write how they are feeling through song. I will include a song that states one’s feelings. This will show us the feelings/anxieties and let us interpret what we think of them. These modes will be beneficial to help us show that the arts are important to keep through everyday life.
Consider STEAM
The arts were a big part of growing up as a child, as in every child has at least taken one art class to get their creative mind flowing. As we got older, reaching middle school and further, the arts seemed to disappear and become a small option and not a required class to participate in. STEM education, Science Technology Engineering Mathematics, is taking over school curriculum and is the new way of learning.While STEM education helps us to get a career directly, it lacks the creativeness of the liberal arts that can be found in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics). STEAM helps decrease the high rates of anxiety and lack of creativity that can be found in STEM students.
Art is important to the expression and understanding of the human mind. With the lacking of the arts in the STEM program, it hinders the understanding of one another. Yo-Yo Ma, a cellist and songwriter, believes that the arts are necessary in the education system. He states in his article “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education” that, “Because the world economy is so competitive, much of the focus in education … is on STEM. As important as that is, it is short sighted. We need to add the empathetic reasoning of the arts in the mix – STEAM.” (Ma). Ma believes that the importance of empathy in education is through the arts. The arts is what teaches us to be human and to be able to understand one another. How we can understand one another is important for interpreting feelings and addressing problems. Without the arts we can’t feel for one another and when we can’t feel for one another it leads to problems. Problems like the highest rate of anxiety in teens and the lowest creativity IQ that is present in this generation.
Students don’t have the outlet of the arts like they used to, they are loaded down with classes and homework throughout the day and at home. As a student sometimes there is a feeling where you just can’t breathe, that your mind is running a mile a minute. There are incredibly high stress levels in school. With that can come a mental break. Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an interviewer who talks to a boy suffering from the pressure of school in his New York Times article, “Why Are More American Teenagers Suffering Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”. Benoit uses this article to show how school with the pressures and busy lifestyles can affect mental health. Benoit talks with a now college student, Jake about a break he had in highschool. Benoit states “Jake was right — his parents didn’t understand. Jake didn’t really understand, either. But he also wasn’t good at verbalizing what he thought he knew: that going to school suddenly felt impossible, that people were undoubtedly judging him, that nothing he did felt good enough.” (Denizet-Lewis). Jake had suffered the heavy pressure of school without a creative outlet. He strived to be the best but being the best piled up until he eventually snapped. In the quote Jake states that he was not able to verbalize what he was feeling and that could be due to the lack of creativeness he could have received from not having the teaching of the arts at his school. The rates of anxiety in teenagers are extremely high and it could be because of the generation’s lack of talking and increase in social awkwardness. School is getting harder and so is life, there’s pressure to do everything perfectly when the mind really just needs an outlet to express itself.
Creativity in children is just not as present as it used to be. There has been studies shown that the creativeness IQ of this generation and the few before is starting to dip down into low numbers. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman talk about this in their article “The Creativity Crisis” published in Newsweek. Scores were analyzed and, “creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”” (Bronson, Merryman). It has been shown that with the lack of liberal arts that children are suffering with their creativity levels. Without creativity it seems as though children can’t be explorative and imaginative, teenagers can’t manage and break into anxiety. There is such an important part in turning STEM into STEAM. Our children must learn, but they must be able to take a break and be able to express themselves and what they are feeling.
The lack of liberal arts is clearly causing suffering in today’s students. I feel it and so do other students, the arts seem to relax. They give us a new perspective and can possibly introduce us into a new world. I personally have been able to express my feelings of anxiety through the arts. Through painting, ceramics, and attempts at drawing, I find that the arts are something I can use to leave my feelings into something productive. STEM will get a student to their job faster but with a lower creativeness IQ, STEAM will get a student to their job with the creativeness for ideas and the ability to relate to their future clients. The arts can change a person into who they are, how they communicate, and how the express themselves.
