Three’s Not a Crowd: Plans, Roles, and Focus in the Arts

Colleges and universities, as well as employers, attend to the “extras”—the extracurricular that take place outside and beyond grades and jobs. Final admission judgments and job interview questions often center on the sports, artistic, or service dimensions that individuals include in their applications or resumes. Parents, politicians, and educators know and unquestioningly accept the nonstandard and unquantifiable nature of the social benefits of these extras. Yet almost nothing is known about the learning—cognitive and situative—that actually goes on beyond classroom hours on sports teams, in community organizations, or through voluntary community service. Schools and families, as the critical duo of learning source and assessor of the knowledge and skills of the young, receive the vast majority of public attention and funding initiatives. The third arena of learning, that which takes place beyond classroom and home, is generally left unattended, minimally supported, and almost completely unexamined. Identified here through illustration from arts-based extraschool activities are (1) key features of this third environment and its positive learning opportunities, (2) the creative and critical power of youth work in the arts, particularly the visual arts and dance, and (3) the manifest reasoning and organizing properties of the “extra education” situated in this arena’s coordination of actions and roles.