When I was a youngster, there were certain album recordings I would replay over and over again on my father's living room stereo turntable, typically the songs that made me cry. Yet I would listen to the rare songs able to penetrate my castle-walled emotional defenses only when I was alone in the house—usually with the curtains drawn, the lights dimmed, and the sound cranked up high enough to overwhelm my bulwarked senses. I freely admit… I welcomed such invasions.
One such song was titled “Everything Must Change,” originally written and debuted by Benard Ighner as a guest vocalist on the 1974 Quincy Jones studio jazz album, Body Heat. In this fashion I tended to the wounds of my adolescence as a deliberate means of altering the inertia that kept me isolated and ineffectual as a human being. I knew I wanted to live a meaningful life, but I was just as aware that I could not do so unless I learned to communicate as directly as these songs did—cutting through the same-old, ripping away the monotony, and pulsing across my psyche like a warm balm applied to an injury. Ighner's song has been covered by numerous artists, from Nina Simone to George Benson to Oleta Adams, but the lyrics always begin this way:
Everything must change
Nothing stays the same
Everyone must change
No one stays the same
The young become the old
And mysteries do unfold
Cause that's the way of time
Nothing and no one goes unchanged
There are not many things in life
You can be sure of
Except rain comes from the clouds
Sun lights up the sky
And hummingbirds do fly
The meaning I take from these simple words and their musical phrasing is complex and layered, simultaneously issuing lament and heralding something new and necessary about to happen. Everything changes—even those things we do not want to change, will change. Everything changes—given time, even those things that are currently unknown will unfold and become apparent. Everything changes—and because we do not know what will happen next, life is certain to remain uncertain. Everything changes—except for the few things that never do… including, paradoxically, the inevitability of change.
This year's National Convention celebrates the 70th anniversary of the National Art Education Association with the theme, “The Challenge of Change.” Near the end of the circulated rationale for this year's theme, art + design educators and scholars are reminded that, “Change is never complete and that is the real challenge: It is a continuous cycle that requires both vision and action.” As a prelude to our gathering in New York City, the January 2017 issue of Art Education is aimed at prompting the question: “What is the change we need, and how is the change we need sustained?”
Just as there is no single definition of art that all educators and scholars agree on, the change we each need in our own classrooms, communities, and research agendas will invariably differ. Sometimes the change we need is spiritual or psychological. In contemplating the well-known Wallace Stevens verse, “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar” (1982, p. 165), I note with the same intrigue as the authors of On Writing Qualitative Research that the Self as instrument of study is also the Self as artist (CitationEly, Vinz, Downing, & Anzul, 1997, p. 335). In other words, changing the mediums, materials, or methods by which we represent our experience in the world or as a community of educators is often the catalyst for the inner change we need to recalibrate our souls. Sometimes the change we need is systemic or structural. Because a system is a “set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure” (CitationMeadows, 2008, p. 188), changing the story structures by which we organize or interpret our worldviews and practices is often the catalyst for the systemic change we need. Sometimes the change we need is seasonal or cyclical. But we do not need to necessarily wait through the yearlong seasonal cycle to experience that change. Simply altering our location or global positioning is often the catalyst for the seasonal change we need in our current situation.
In this issue of Art Education, Nicole Elizabeth Roth embraces the challenge of change by writing a new chapter in her story of elementary art instruction, allowing her pupils to thrive in a learning environment centralized around student choice rather than a formalist, discipline-based art education. In order to maximize artmaking time, student engagement, and the efficiency of transitions for her elementary school art students, Katy Mathes created a technology-driven classroom management system as a catalyst for change. Leslie Gates engages other practicing art + design educators in the difficult task of changing how we assess some of the less tidy aspects of student artmaking that are nevertheless central to learning in our discipline, including strategies for generating quantitative data desired by administrators from rubrics that include qualitative, subjective language.
Based on a year-long investigation in her 8th-grade art classroom, Jacqueline S. McElhany explores what happened when she undertook the challenge of changing her classroom from teacher-centered to student-centered. Ryan M. Patton and Aaron D. Knochel examine the change-making agency of the maker movement, via the availability of stuff and the ease of social networking, toward establishing innovative, project-based inquiry vital to rigorous science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) curriculum-making. Cala Coats and Denise Clyne envision the challenge of rethinking art classrooms as choice-based arenas of self-initiated learning, distributed problem solving, de-centralized leadership, and the indiscernible modes of communication that propel students “from one swarm of creative activity to the next, gathering advantages along the way” (CitationRolling, 2016, p. 6).
Finally, Diane Kuthy confronts the social entrenchment against change in Baltimore, Maryland as evidenced in the arts-based research of multimedia artist Olivia Robinson in her documentation of the legacy of redlining and other discriminatory housing practices through a series of electronic quilts titled Near and Far Enemies.
Ighner concludes the song “Everything Must Change” with these verses:
There are not many things in life
You can be sure of
Except rain comes from the clouds
Sun lights up the sky
And hummingbirds do fly
Rain comes from the clouds
Sun lights up the sky
And music
And music
Makes me cry
The display of any emotion, even crying, is a social cue to behave and emote likewise. The challenge of change is lessened when we as social creatures work to effect the surrounding world and our common relationships for our mutual gain. The challenge of change is elevated when we recognize that our most enduring achievements as a human race have always been collaboratively attained. Every culture, community, or nation is an amalgamation of compounding individual and networked achievements.
We follow up the ideas of those who have gone before us and move in pace with the discoveries of those alongside us; we share the mass and momentum of a mighty assembly. The result of every swarm of creative activity is incremental but consistent: Change renewed.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James Haywood Rolling
James Haywood Rolling Jr. is Dual Professor and Chair of Art Education in the School of Art/College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Department of Teaching and Leadership/School of Education, Syracuse University, New York. E-mail: [email protected]
References
- Ely, M., Vinz, R., Downing, M., & Anzul, M. (1997). On writing qualitative research: Living by words. London, England/Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press.
- Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company.
- Rolling, J. H., Jr. (2016). Swarm intelligence and collaboration. Art Education, 69(5), 4-6.
- Stevens, W. (1982). The collected poems of Wallace Stevens. New York, NY: Knopf.