You may remember a teacher handing you construction paper every November and telling you to trace your hand and turn each finger into a colorful feather. Maybe you had permission to pick the colors for each feather. Maybe you glued on a single wobbly eye.
But the product, the process and the definition of success for that project had already been decided. You made a hand turkey.
Here’s why I hate hand turkeys.
I suspect that no one asked what you wanted to create. The point was to follow the steps, fill the wall with 25 near-identical Stepford birds and call it art.
I am 100 percent sure that no one explained how or why a construction-paper turkey became the elementary-school-age equivalent of a meditation on Thanksgiving gratitude.
This wasn’t an accident of a holiday tradition run amok or even poor practice on anyone’s part. It reflects the residue of dated arts education policies.
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Visual art and music have been a formal part of the American public education system since the 19th century. However, for most of that history, they were treated as “specials” or were relegated to “extracurricular engagement.” That began to shift in 1994, when arts educators authored the first national arts standards and federal law named the arts a core academic subject.
Still, the standards were voluntary, and the accountability systems that reshaped math and reading never extended to the arts. Most states went on to adopt their own arts learning standards. In Illinois, where I worked in arts education, the standards boiled down to three concepts: know the vocabulary of the arts, understand how art is made and understand the arts’ role in history.
That sounds reasonable enough on paper. But when you step back and consider how that works in practice, it comes down to an exercise in compliance: rote skill and knowledge replicated correctly. Think of every student squeaking through “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder or every kid reciting their assigned “Romeo and Juliet” balcony monologue. These are activities that prize conformity over curiosity, mimicry over meaning.
This approach treats the arts as linear: Children are taught a technique or fact, and their job is to faithfully generate the desired product.
It took until the National Core Arts Standards were collaboratively developed and released in 2014 for the field to formally reimagine that model. The holistic new framework asks students to move through the full artistic process: generate and develop an idea; create and present that idea in some manner; analyze and receive feedback on their creation; and draw connections between themselves and the choices they have made.
Creating, performing, responding, connecting. This is a loop that can be repeated from kindergarten through high school, with increasing sophistication, collaboration and independence, always keeping the student’s unique artistic point of view at the center.
Hand turkeys, both literally and figuratively, represent what happens when schools skip this loop and focus only on product-based arts education. This still happens in classrooms every day. Examples of hand turkeys litter education far beyond what is currently gracing November bulletin boards nationwide.
The issue isn’t the turkey itself; I’m not here to vilify all poultry-based art. The issue is whether a student has any hand in deciding what they explore.
Definitions of the “right” arts education techniques and artifacts are often rooted in narrow, Eurocentric ideas about what counts as art, theater, literature or success. Students are at risk of being taught that replicating the work of people and traditions far removed from their own lived experience is good.
We send the message, either implicitly or explicitly, that the closer you can come to tracing someone else’s outline, the better you are.
With this model, so many kids (who grow into adults, some of whom may be reading this) come to believe they aren’t artistic. They internalize the idea that artistry is defined by what they produce, rather than by the thinking, imagination and ingenuity they bring to a problem.
They come to accept the message that creativity is about getting it “right” instead of daring to see and make something new. How many people have told you, unprompted, that they’re “not an arts person” or that they can’t draw, sing or dance? Chances are, they were educated to believe that if they couldn’t successfully produce whatever version of a hand turkey they were handed, they weren’t creative at all.
Parents: Do you have a hand turkey taped to your fridge right now?
Arts education was never meant simply to teach students to draw, sing or dance. I believe it exists to teach students that their perspective is unique, powerful and worth defending.
Related: PROOF POINTS: The lesson the arts teach
To fully shift to a focus on the artistic process, the entire arts education sector needs to move together. We can encourage this in three ways.
First: Teacher preparation programs need to reimagine their curricula to ensure that new arts educators recognize and can apply this iterative approach across artistic disciplines, rather than focusing on skills specific to one discipline.
Second: Access to arts instruction, which remains wildly uneven across schools, grades and districts, must be championed even amid competing priorities and challenging fiscal realities.
Third: Perhaps most importantly, it’s time to remove the pressure on arts teachers to produce something shiny for the hallway or the spring concert. Let arts rooms be boisterous laboratories focused on process.
We need K-12 schools in which bold ideas are welcomed; end products can look a little messy; feedback is generative; and students and teachers alike can defend their choices without fear of being told they didn’t trace their hand correctly or that they colored outside the lines.
Julia deBettencourt is chief of staff, portfolios, at Bellwether. She previously worked as the executive director of arts education for Chicago Public Schools.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about arts education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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