Seeing and knowing our culture
By: Andrew Tredinnick
Posted 01 July 2009
Each school day starts for staff members with a devotion by a fellow staff member. This short talk given earlier this year by music teacher Mr Andrew Tredinnick is a sharing of some of his thinking on being a Christian teacher of the arts in the 21st century:
A verse in Proverbs catches my attention: ‘A life devoted to things is a dead life, a stump; A God-shaped life is a flourishing tree.’ What does it mean to live such a ‘God-shaped’ life in our 21st century culture?
We have been encouraged to grapple with understanding God on the one hand, and understanding our culture on the other, as Moses had to – and connecting the two. So how do I as a Christian teacher of the arts get connected to my culture and my students, in our pursuit together of a God-shaped life in Christ? Is it even possible for an artist to have a God-shaped life? Aren’t artists secularists by nature and practitioners of frivolity and foolishness, almost by definition? Clowns, entertainers, mavericks, ne’er-do-wells, idolaters?
Yet I think that the artists themselves can show us a better way. I want to focus now on the culture side of the equation: how do we better understand our culture, in all its depth and wisdom, and darkness and frivolity? How can we wise up, so that we can communicate better? The artists can help us here.
One theory of aesthetics says that we all – all of us: see sunflowers differently because of Van Gogh’s painting; know Australia differently because of Sidney Nolan’s painting; know city life in Australia differently through the painting of John Brack; or through the poetry of Henry Lawson; know the Holocaust in a new way through the poetry and song of Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass, or through the Diary of Anne Frank, or through Hilary Swank’s portrayal of English teacher Erin Gruwell’s work with LA high schoolers in Freedom Writers; experience fog differently because of the novels of Charles Dickens.
And that these things are true even if we have not directly experienced these works of art ourselves. That is, our experience of fog (or the Holocaust, or the landscape, or history) has been changed by our participation in a culture that has itself been shaped by the vision of an artist. Artists do not just give us new or nice things to see. They give us new ways of seeing. Even if we are not looking, or paying attention. Our culture is shaped by the perceptions and perspectives of artists.
I could multiply this many times: just through the things that come up in content and references in my classroom – in all our classrooms. Our perceptions are shaped by artists and we in turn transmit these perceptions as we engage with the work of artists – and scientists, and writers, and researchers, and all purveyors and practitioners of knowledge, if you will. And we are artists as we participate in God’s world as sub-creators, in image of the Creator, as Tolkein reminds us.
Moving from the famous artists to our students as artists, who are shaping the perceptions, knowledge and understandings of our culture, now, and leading the culture in the future: I could give hundreds of examples of student work that has moved me, and expanded my knowledge of the world, in dance, photography, art, music, drama, textiles, writing, poetry and song. These are the young artists altering their perception of the world through their participation in art, and altering the perspectives of their peers, their communities, their teachers.
So let’s connect with our culture through the perceptions and experiences of our students. Let’s keep building our awareness of how our art and our culture have shaped us. This will all help us in our choices when we are deliberately shaping a student experience – teaching.
