Welcome to our blog on arts integration! Carolyn brings the grounded perspective from the classroom and Rob brings the research and theory side of things. We love to talk about ideas around integrating the arts and invite you to join us in this conversation. This time Rob will throw out some beginning ideas for the conversation:
Some people think that arts integration
is the use of the arts in core curriculum classrooms. And they are sort
of right, but with this distinction: classrooms that use arts as a
resource and classrooms that fully integrate art in the planning and
implementation of curriculum. The latter definition is the one more
favored by the famous education philosopher, John Dewey, who thinks that art's greatest validation is to engage students in the "growing edge of things" (Check out Daniel Green's Blog on Dewey and Art As s Experience ).
The reason why arts integration holds so much potential for the
classroom is the power of art to engage students in experiential
learning which is the process for making meaning directly from the learning experience (Itin, 1999).
As opposed to academic learning, the study of a subject without the
direct learning from experiencing that subject, experiental learning in
the arts is the "hands-on" experience that most students love. The arts
are inherently engaging and that is both a blessing and a curse. A
blessing in that they help students engage with challenging curriculum
and a curse in that the arts can be taken for granted, used as a quick
resource of engagement in classroom planning and quickly discarded for
the drier parts of curriculum.
When used well, arts integration is seamless—the interplay between
the art and subject is fluid as one flows into the other—and students
advance their knowledge along the growing edge of things. I look
forward to continuing the conversation and if you have a need or an
idea, drop us a line. Watch for Carolyn's blog next!
All the best, Rob
References
Itin, C. M. (1999). Reasserting the Philosophy of Experiential
Education as a Vehicle for Change in the 21st Century. The Journal of
Experiential Education, 22(2), 91-98.
