Welcome to this addition of my website.  The purpose of the NewsFlash is to share information about the power of arts education; including research, resources, arts and academic achievements, and arts education policy.  Also,  I will share programs and activities that demonstrate "arts connected teaching" at NBCS.
 

Arts Integration

What is Integrated Arts Education? Integrated arts education is a pedagogy in which the arts are deeply embedded within the core of interdisciplinary learning and affirms the indispensability of arts as a core curriculum subject and concurrently a catalyst to learn other subjects. 

With integrated arts education arts play a major role in helping students address broad curriculum themes and achieve robust habits of mind including such characteristics as imagination, discipline, collaboration, inquiry, divergent problem solving, empathy, and making connections. The focus is on enriching students’ abilities to attain, analyze, discern, and invent knowledge. Integrated arts education acknowledges and fosters Multiple Intelligences.  An Integrated arts education ranges from a single lesson to an entire curricula framework. 

The emphasis is on both content and learning skills.  Critical to integrated arts education is a commitment to learning objectives in the arts and therefore, the arts are assessed with integrity like other fields of knowledge and vital results. Criteria for assessing the arts should include elements and principles of art media, point of view and intent, aesthetic judgment, and critique and reflection.

Basic Characteristics of an Integrated Arts Education:

·    Requires in depth study of dance, music, theater, and/or visual arts involving students in processes that are authentic to the arts (creating, performing, and responding);

·    Involves teaching for deeper understanding of other subjects with the arts;

·    Promotes students’ abilities to solve problems, analyze knowledge, generate insights, use their imaginations and curiosity, synthesize new relationships among ideas, and make meaningful connections across subjects;

·    Is standards-based and requires forms of standards-based assessment that address the arts;

·    Consciously applies methodology and language from complementary subjects, including the arts, to examine a central theme, issue, problem, topic or experience;

·    Engages all students in active learning, providing a forum for them to create, perform and respond artistically in core subject areas;

·    Involves community resources (such as performing arts centers, museums, galleries, and artists) in and out of school;

·    Acknowledges and fosters multiple intelligences in students.

What are the steps in working toward Integrated Arts Education? Teaching with an integrated arts approach is satisfying but challenging. It requires new ways of thinking about content, student engagement, and often, collaborative planning with other teachers. Arts integration is more than simply inserting an arts activity into an existing unit.  It involves rethinking how movement, visuals, theater, or music are vehicles for entering, studying, and showing understanding of learning in other academic disciplines.  For example, in English/language arts, students might read and respond to published critiques, or write their own criticism of a work of art. The following conditions support teachers to create and implement strong integrated arts education programs:

·    administrative support and involvement;

·    common planning time and/or sufficient opportunities to collaborate with other teachers;

·    ongoing professional development;

·    flexible scheduling;

·    appropriate resources;

·    access to local, state, and national standards and curriculum;

·    community support and involvement.

What are the criteria that help guide the creation and evaluation of arts integrated units?

·    Is in-depth student-centered learning promoted?

·    Are clear expectations for student artistic work articulated?

·    Are meaningful connections made between or among the arts and other content areas?

·    Is diversity of learners acknowledged and respected?

·    Does the instruction and assessment maintain the integrity of the art form and the other integrated subjects?

·    Is the appropriate artistic terminology used?

·    Are the artistic processes of creating, performing, and responding incorporated?

·    Is standards-based and authentic arts assessment embedded and ongoing?

·    Is professional development for teachers embedded and ongoing?

Research in Support of Arts Learning: Champions of Change: The impact of the Arts on Learning (Fiske, 1999) highlights some of the nonacademic benefits of the arts that carefully controlled studies demonstrate:

·    The arts reach students not ordinarily reached, with methods not normally used, which keeps tardy, truancy, and dropout rates down.

·    Students connect to one another better and experience greater camaraderie, fewer fights, and less prejudice when the arts are central to their learning.

·    Arts education requires an environment of discovery that can rekindle the love of learning in students who are tired of being filled up with facts.

·    The arts provide challenges for students at all levels.  In the arts, all students can find their own level of performance.

·    The arts connect learners to the world of real work in which theater, music, visual arts and dance appeal to a growing consumer public.

Critical Links, a research compendium, cites examples of research that indicated that the arts cultivate skills and foster desired outcomes in many areas such as literacy, mathematics, and science. According to James S. Catterall, Professor of Education, UCLA, and contributing researcher/author of Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Social and Academic Development, arts integration increases student motivation and social competence. Economically disadvantaged children show improved basic reading comprehension when the arts are integrated with their other lessons.

In The Science of the Arts, Principal Leadership Magazine (November 2001), Eric Jensen writes: “Because the value of the arts is both generally distributed across the range of human performance and because they are time–consuming, they are effective, not efficient. Students of the arts develop neural systems that often take months and years to fine tune, and the benefits students experience range from enhancement in fine motor skills to better emotional regulation…. This…is often considered sinful in a climate that treats student test scores as products and looks for cost-cutting measures at every corner.”