MEDIA ADVISORY: August 21, 2020
CONTACT: Patricia Lamiell, lamiell@tc.columbia.edu, or Sara Clough, clough@tc.columbia.edu, 212-678-4147
Faculty opinion pieces posted on the Teachers College, Columbia University website, deal, respectively, with how the uncertainty and loss brought on by the twin pandemics of the coronavirus and racial animosity have highlighted the importance of both teachers and arts education.
In Amid COVID and Racial Injustice, Teachers Matter More than Ever, Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, a Bosnian Muslim who grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, writes that she experienced first-hand just how important direct teacher-student interactions are during dark times like these. And yet, writes Sabic-El-Rayess, Associate Professor of Practice in Teachers College’s Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis, “our society continues to under-value and even denigrate the single most precious gift our schools give us: teachers.” She asserts that “we need to invest more in our teachers to do this kind of work … in the resources we give them, and in how we esteem them for the courageous work they do.”
In “The Arts and Re-Envisioning COVID-Era Schools,” Judith Burton, Teachers College’s Macy Professor of Education, notes that we are in the midst of three pandemics -- viral, economic and racial -- and observes that “the current crisis highlights all the deepest flaws in our education system,” including “over-reliance on online learning far sooner than anyone anticipated.” But Burton argues that this perfect storm gives us the chance to re-think schools not as stand-alone buildings and communities, but instead situated “within clusters of cultural institutions in which the arts” become “central to how we provide all aspects of education.”
To some degree, Burton notes, arts institutions are already collaborating with schools and stepping into the breach to provide under-funded schools with arts and cultural education. But during a time of sheltering in place, they can meet children’s innate creativity and need for socialization by enabling even the youngest to make things, and, through technology, collaborate with peers around the world.
Still more broadly, through the arts’ materials and processes, “thought is endowed with personal significance and placed in the world,” fulfilling young people’s “implicit right as citizens to function as makers of culture,” Burton writes.
These are the latest pieces in an ongoing TC series of stories – spotlighting TC faculty experts and alumni who serve nationwide as superintendents, principals, teachers and school support staff – detailing how schools expect to function during the ongoing COVID crisis this fall. Next up, in early September: How districts are dealing with the heightened need to meet children’s psychological and emotional needs.
To reach Teachers College faculty experts on the educational, psychology and health aspects of COVID-19, contact Patricia Lamiell, lamiell@tc.columbia.edu, 973-449-7086