Excerpted from chapter 3 of The Power of the Arts: Creative Strategies for Teaching Exceptional Learners, by Sally L. Smith.

Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Learning by Doing

Children with learning disabilities and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience neurologically based disorganization. The child with learning disabilities usually has difficulty beginning a project because he does not know how to break it down into meaningful chunks: first, next, and last. This is true in the arts as well as in the classroom. These children do not have the organizational skills necessary for learning.

Young children understand touch, gesture, rhythm, tone, and movement before they understand words. They babble, croon, and sing before they speak. They color, draw, and paint before they form letters. They dance and leap and act out stories before they can read. Young children use the arts — pretending, constructing, dancing, and doing — to make sense of their environment.

As a young child learns from doing, a child who is neurologically immature must be given the same opportunities before she can handle abstractions. What happens first, next, and last is crucial in a woodworking or crafts project as well as in drama or dance. The same neurological organization is necessary for reading — for looking at the beginning, middle, and end of a word, phrase, or sentence.

Through each of the art forms, a child can learn to distinguish colors, shapes, forms, and sounds; discrimination through the use of the child's hands, body, eyes, ears, and senses is part of the artistic experience. Learning to look and to listen and remembering what has been seen and heard — problem areas for students with learning disabilities — are emphasized in the arts. The arts help children organize experiences. They help make sense of the world and the messages that come in through the senses. The arts can help students with learning disabilities develop and strengthen the perceptual skills that form the foundation for further learning.

Discipline underlies every artistic endeavor. There is an order — a progression of steps — to every creation. People think of the arts as being very free; they are, but they only become so after one has mastered a set of basic skills. The student with learning disabilities or ADHD, who is consumed by indiscriminate attention and over-reactiveness, needs experiences that have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Understanding sequences is vital for the child who can talk to you about Homer or gravity but cannot tell you the order of the days of the week or the seasons, count to 20, or say the alphabet in the proper sequence. What happens first, next, and last is as crucial in a painting or crafts project as it is in drama or dance. Organizing oneself is mandatory.

Most exceptional learners can learn very sophisticated material as long as the teacher thoroughly understands it, breaks it down into simple parts, and teaches it step by step. Very elementary skills that are ordinarily introduced to much younger children can be presented to older children with learning disabilities in a sophisticated way so as to lure them into mastering these skills. When a group of 10-year-olds needed the experience of touching and discriminating among textures, a typical nursery school experience, The Lab School of Washington set up a "tactile museum" that included a wide variety of materials for touching, including Styrofoam, sponge, velvet, fur, and metal. Because no other school had a tactile museum, the students who set up the museum were very proud of their accomplishment and felt they were performing an adult activity; at the same time, their teachers were able to give them the exact experience they needed. The arts lend themselves to the imaginative use of concrete materials and experiences to teach organizational skills.

Establishing Order in Space and Time

When structure is provided from the outside, children who experience disorganization are set free and given the safety to learn. Establishing a time, a space, and a place for all things is the key. This is why the woodwork shop has a pegboard with tools hanging from it, each one fitting into the thick shape of its outline. For the student who has little understanding of his body in space, there is a big masking-tape square labeled "your space" in front of a woodworking table. There are children who have no concept of their own parameters or borders; therefore, teachers have to be guided to design the arts in a way to put boundaries around the children. For many, photography and videography — looking through a camera to frame and focus — provide the necessary structure.

The arts can help build organizational skills, which can further the process of neural maturation. Too often, children who are failing in academics are placed in clinical settings or schools where they are given more academics — more attention to the reading, writing, and arithmetic they cannot do. Increasing the workload does not help, and at the same time, these children lose the opportunity to have experiences in which they can feel competent or can learn facts to build huge storehouses of information.

Students work as hard in the arts as they do in traditional classrooms; the work is just different. When doing collages, some students cannot see the difference between the foreground and the background. Collages can be used to teach just that. These are special problems, and they often arise in printmaking as well. Printmaking can be taught so that a child must print left to right and look for and recreate patterns. At The Lab School, we used potato prints to sequence a mammoth hunt. One student sequenced them perfectly, but all backwards.

Typical in exceptional learners is a lack of a sense of time. For example, the only way 8-year-old Eric understood the concept of a short amount of time was when his mother explained that the time it takes to eat one bowl of cereal is a short time, and the time it takes to eat ten bowls of cereal is a long time. In art class, Eric would begin working when three-quarters of the class was over, and then he didn't want to leave when the class ended. The teacher/artist who taught Eric found a special place for him to sit and left a picture schedule at his desk for him to study each day. The picture schedule showed Eric going to get paper, then finding his paints, and finally painting a picture. After a few months, Eric was able to draw his own schedules and manage his time better, despite the fact that his internal clock was still not working properly.

Discovering Relationships, Sequence, and Logic

In addition to having difficulties with organization and focus, many exceptional learners experience difficulty with abstract concepts and social relationships. They may not be able to link cause and effect and often have trouble understanding relationships between people, predicting the consequences of their own behavior on others, and understanding the relationship of one set of behaviors to a broader pattern of behaviors.

Just as young children use only what is directly in front of them to learn and to grow, children who have neurological delays understand and learn best from direct interaction with materials and objects. Concrete materials allow them to discover relationships, draw inferences, and make abstractions on their own. Often such experiential learning is the only way these children can begin to grasp abstract concepts and higher thinking operations.

Consider the learning styles of Bennett, age 8, and Rick, age 10. Bennett understands such concepts as truth, honesty, equality, and integrity just from hearing about these concepts from his parents and teachers and from books he reads. Rick does not. Rick understands these concepts only through playing games, playing with objects, role playing, looking at pictures, watching videos, and participating in discussions. For example, when Rick's teachers were trying to explain to Rick the concept of truth, they asked him to fold a piece of paper into three equal parts. Rick saw that Harry and Carolyn each folded their papers differently from the way he folded his, but they still ended up with three equal parts. Using this model, Rick was taught that despite the fact that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all had different theories, they were the same in that they all were seeking the truth. Although Bennett enjoys learning about these three philosophers in this way, he does not need this approach to understand the concept. Rick cannot understand the concept unless he is taught experientially.

When working with children with learning disabilities, it is important to keep in mind each child's particular experience and to create an environment in which the child may learn from further experiences. Given a structured environment and materials that will prompt the discovery of relationships, nuances, and concepts, children with learning disabilities can bridge the gulf between the world of literal meanings and the world of the abstract. The child, however, cannot be told how to bridge the gulf; he has to bridge it on his own. Teachers have to provide alluring, enticing materials that will attract his attention and excite him into making connections and discovering relationships.