Getting the Right Metaphor for the Field of Teaching Artistry
By Eric Booth
To help the field of teaching artistry grow, I have long sought an analogous profession as a comparative example, to clarify our identity and potential. Teaching artistry is a hybrid, and as a field it is disconnected, overlooked, undersupported—yet powerful. I still can’t identify that analogous field, but I did find a helpful metaphor while reading Michael McCarthy’s ecology book The Moth Snowstorm. Teaching artistry is the mudflat. More poetically, let’s call teaching artistry the estuary.
Estuaries form where sea meets land, where freshwater from land flows into saltwater in a somewhat protected space. The freshwater brings nutrients and soil to the life-abundant sea. These brackish, hybrid places, which disappear at high tide, are perhaps the most productive natural habitats on earth. Most major fish and shellfish species spend some part of their lifecycle in the mudflats; many migrating bird species rely on estuaries as feeding stopovers; hundreds of species of plankton, mollusks, and crustaceans grow in these “nurseries of the sea.”
Yet no one writes songs of the estuary. Paintings of mudflats do not hang beside landscapes and seascapes on living room walls. They are overlooked, unloved (except by those who know them), and not only unprotected in many countries, but under assault. Sixty percent of the earth’s population lives near coastlines, so estuaries are under assault from pollution and development, with China and South Korea having destroyed some of the planet’s richest estuaries for industrial development in recent years—in South Korea, the magnificent Saemangeum they destroyed was killed for a road that blocked the tide, without any development emerging on the thirty-plus miles of new deadscape.
Teachings artistry lives in the hybrid zone, where two essential human realms meet—art and learning—to enrich one another and create the most fecund human space. Indeed, there is a tidal element to a teaching artist’s career as it ebbs and flows between the two kinds of projects. Teaching artistry is an incubator for innovation in other great industries, is nourishment for those who stop to feed, is abundant because of its hybridity. Yet it’s overlooked by those who depend on it and drive by it. Uncelebrated in spite of its bounty, unloved except by those who participate directly. Frequently unprotected and even exploited.
The future of the arts and pioneering experiments in many fields depend on the skills of artists who can work in participatory settings, but few cultural environmentalists fight for these estuaries of their world. Few arts ecosystem activists fight for the health of teaching artistry, few study or write about the field, and fewer invest money to protect it and help it grow.
In the last two decades, environmentalists and their strong organizations have recognized the importance of these overlooked intertidal zones and are rising to support them—to provide our planet a future. Those who care about cultural ecology, those strong arts organizations whose future depends on teaching artists—please rise to support the nurseries of our arts future.