Sneak Peek: James Rees Podcast

James Rees: The arts help us to see how another person thinks and feels and see. And it does it so immediately, right? The visual arts, especially, and music, you feel it immediately. And so the arts have that power of boundless opportunity for students to learn, to express, it promotes open-ended thinking and helps students to engage in contemporary topics that are happening around them. I think there's sometimes the impression that the classroom is separate from community, that it's not porous, that the events, the good and the bad things happening outside the walls of a school don't find their way in there. But they do, and so I think helping students have a space and place to express that through the arts, to examine and re-examine who they are and explore that through their own learning creative journey is great.