Arts Integration
Arts Integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. Students engage in a creative process which connects an art form and another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both.
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Changing Education Through the Arts definition.
Arts Integration
- Increases motivation, engagement, and challenge for diverse learners from delayed to gifted
- Facilitates differentiated instruction
- Connects to brain research: students make more connections by incorporating the multiple intelligences
- Increases rigor through critical thinking
- Makes the curriculum more authentic, hands‐on and project based, interdisciplinary
- Fosters collaboration between teachers and content areas
- Creates opportunities for varied assessment
From: David Sousa’s “How the Arts Develop the Young Brain” in The School Administrator, Dec. 2006
Arts Integration aligns with 21st Century Skills and best practice strategies such as differentiation, multiple intelligences, and so on. Arts integration provides hands on learning with authentic problems for students to solve. There are ample opportunities for collaboration and learning from each other as they learn understandings in the arts and another content area. Students draw from their prior knowledge and are constantly in a spiral of experimentation and reflection and they revise and improve their work. They learn how to be creative through this process that includes examining, imagining, exploring, experimenting, creating and reflecting. Building understanding in arts integration relies on learning that is active, experiential, reflective and evolving.
Workshops
Quality Arts Integration
This workshop defines arts integration, presents research from schools and programs showing the results in school culture, learning, community and parent partnerships, gains in core content and student engagement and happiness. The workshop also discusses the style of teaching, best practices included in arts integration and the processes of developing lesson plans, and shows examples of well-planned arts integration lessons.
Arts Integration Toolkit
Arts Integration Toolkit is a workshop that introduces arts integration, research that shows the strength and advantages of integrating the arts and then spends time going through activities of integrated lessons using the art forms of drama, movement, artful thinking, visual art, music integrated with literacy, social studies, mathematics and more. The length of the workshop determines the number of lessons and strategies presented. This workshop is valuable for a school planning to infuse the arts as an introduction to the possibilities and to determine what area of arts integration to focus on for staff training and implementation.
Resources
ArtsEdge – Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Arts Integration – The Kennedy Center’s perspective
Visist this site to explore the what and why of arts integration, examples of arts integration in practice, a range of arts integration resources.
Common Core and The Arts Mapping Projects
The Arts and the Common Core Curriculum Mapping Project
A site that integrates the arts at each grade level, has links to the art work and give suggestions for curricular lessons in literacy and social studies K-12