Arts Integration Synthesis

The term, arts integration, can evoke a wide range of responses, ranging from the emotional, to practical questions which will arise as educators sense the variety of ways integration is viewed within the educational community. Administrators are too often looking at arts educators as a way to fill in the schedule, allowing classroom teachers access to common planning time with little or no regard for what impacts the arts specialist’s work.

Arts education was prescribed as far back as 1899, when Utah founded the first state arts agency. It was not much later in our history that museums and symphony orchestras included an educational component to their mission statements. John F. Kennedy, along with the Rockefeller family brought arts education to the fore, which eventually led to the formation of National Foundation for the Arts. Beginning in the 1960’s, the charge of providing arts appreciation for all children, not just those of the wealthy, began to lay the groundwork for arts integration, which was theorized in 1918 by William Heard Kilpatrick in his article, The Project Method and in a report with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), A Correlated Curriculum,1 his idea of “the interrelation of subjects with one another” marked the beginning of an idea that eventually would be called arts integration (AI)

My formal experience with AI occurred in 1997, at Wang Center for the Performing Arts (now Citi Center) through a program of the Kennedy Center the Education Department offered called, “Artists as Teachers” to Boston educators. Though my access to arts integration, at this point was limited to reading reports, curriculums and articles, this time I had direct instruction in crafting lessons and more specifically, creating workshops for teachers about how to integrate the arts into other subjects. Two years later the Wang gave arts educators an opportunity to profligate these integration lesson plans by hiring a select number of people to teach in an outreach program, through their education department, called “Artists Teach”. I participated in a small town five miles north of Boston in an idyllic elementary school. I was placed in a school whose calm and compliant children, giving me an unrealistic sense of what it was like to teach arts integration within the public schools. The teachers, though open to the idea of integration, were very much in control of what we did together and very controlling of the children. There was no collaboration, even though we both went through training as to how the trajectory of this partnership was expected to play out. And that was my initial experience as an arts integration specialist.

The report, Arts Integration Frameworks, Research & Practice, a Literature Review outlines many of the developments in AI between the years 1998 to 2007. Ironically, the topic of integration was hardly talked about in Arts Curriculums at a College level, for teachers of the arts. As began the case in the intervening years, much of the research occurred in teaching artist practices, through larger (though often smaller) organizations and agencies that included an outreach component in their education departments, such as my experience with the Wang. The report focuses primarily on the programs that have been specifically used to develop arts integration as a arts education strategy.

The development of my work paralleled the years of this report. It was during those years that I began to hone my craft as a TA and an AI specialist, though in mostly a vacuum. By 2004, I had created my own business called Story In a Box, working as a storyteller and dance integration specialist. Being an independent contractor allowed me the freedom to pick and choose what work I wanted to do; one summer I worked in a city run storytelling program and shortly thereafter, as a TA in a small dance company.

The 1990 were years of growth for the integration of art into the curriculum. Not only were there many large companies that offering artists who taught the subjects through their discipline, but also there were numerous independent programs to teach artists how to do so. The year 2003, Eric Booth began the Teaching Artist Journal, which gave a newly minted sense of legitimacy. Finally there seemed to be a ground swell of information, training and experience to support the efforts of those who worked under the mantle of Arts Education. Writing the common core also further supported an arts integration movement, and was launched in 2009.

Arts integration, being an inclusive theory of practice, has failed to produce consensus among arts educators. Sometimes referred to as interdisciplinary or project based learning its critics are among those arts teachers who see it as a new way of marginalizing their practice. We can’t even agree as to whether we are learning through, with or in the arts. One of the ways in which we all agree is that arts learning makes a significant contribution to an ability to collaborate and problem solve. Put in simple terms, arts integration is scaffolding that works for all subjects. 2

My opinion of arts integration continues to shift, grow and change. In many ways, I have been conducting my own informal case studies.3. As in the report, Art Education in the Public Schools created by Chicago Public School district, Arts Integration is a broad approach that can have a variety of outcomes. There are arts integrations which I have conducted that really feel full of value, and that I have executed not just properly but extremely skillfully. Other times, like a recent attempt to connect Taino culture to dance, not realized, because I had to fit it in during my planning time and without the grade band for which I had planned. No assurances are ever given about a consistent grade band from year to year. As a public school art specialist, it is hard to predict what grades you will teach from year to year. A clear sign that arts education is an after thought is the very fact that you don’t have a grade band consistency. In the report, I noted the following series of best practices. (219)

1. Clear instructional goals

2. Collaborate

3. Take notes

4. Support and enhance sequential learning

5. Assess outcomes for all integrated instructional areas

6. Communicate plan to students

7. Engage educators school-wide

8. Be flexible

9. Choose theme or question

10. Process over product

11. Align with standards and benchmarks

Though each of these above practices I have addressed at one time or another, my work as a teacher sometimes falls short of implementing the practices consistently. My instructional goals are usually very clear and I have always been very effective at engaging other educators by collaborating informally and wrapping them in my enthusiasm for a specific integration. As I begin a specific integration, flexibility becomes tantamount to creativity. Part of that flexibility is a both a belief in the process (I know it can be messy and inconclusive at times) as well as self-reflection every step of the way. One of my most successful types of integrations is linked to literacy and science. Science is an easy match because it is so concrete. With the early childhood strand, classroom teachers are still engaged in their own science units in the classroom, as opposed to it being taught by the science specialist teacher. Because of that structure, it is effective to collaborate with that teacher by creating clear curriculum goals aligned to both movement and literacy. Because process is so important to teaching science concepts it is therefore one of the other reasons that arts integration works seamlessly in that setting. Students learn sequence, through the sequence of a dance and a series of creative movement activities. For younger dancers, I do an Eric Carle series (Very Busy Spider, Very Hungry Caterpillar, and The Tiny Seed) for a study in life cycles. This is best for Early Childhood, Kindergarten through first grade. For second through fourth, I have a successful unit on the water cycle and dance that I teach through the book, Water Dance by Thomas Locker. In both of these integrations, learning is primarily about the sequencing of events that explains why the subject can be taught authentically. Other subjects it does feel as though you are just “dancing” the content (including some literacy integrations) and though I don’t believe that is a bad thing, per se, it doesn’t exactly hold our dance content in high regard.

One of the most exciting advancements of Arts Integration, is the development of STEAM to show that the arts can and will be a force with which to be reckoned.

References

1. Burnaford, Gail. Arts Integration Frameworks, Research & Practice: A Literature Review. Rep. Washington D.C.: Arts Education Partnership, 2007. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED516744. Print.

2. Silverstein, Lynn, and Sean Layne. "Defining Arts Integration." Arts Edge (2010): 1-10. Print.

3. Roche, David. The Chicago Guide for Teaching and Learning in the Arts . pp. 220–232, The Chicago Guide for Teaching and Learning in the Arts .

Other Readings

Greene, Maxine. Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001