Arts integration
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arts integration is a term applied to an approach to teaching and learning that uses the arts as primary paths of instruction. Hundreds of schools across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Finland have now chosen to undergo whole school reform using an arts-based model. The impetus for arts integration is a growing body of research that shows how struggling learners, in particular, have success when taught why and how to use music, visual art, drama/dance, theatre and the literary arts to both express and understand thoughts and feelings. In particular, Howard Gardner's Theory of multiple intelligences has been used as part of the rationale for schools that choose integrated arts models.
Central to the concept of arts integration is the view that the arts are fundamentally communication vehicles. The argument is that the first humans used painting, drums, bone flutes, pantomime and dance to communicate ideas and feelings in the same way modern humans have relied on words. Words, however, are limited in their ability to communicate--especially in our technologically changed 21st century. People have gone "back to the future" to rediscover the power of visual images, gestures, movement, and music to express what is inexpressible through words alone. Schools that reorganize for arts integration do so because the arts have shown engagement potential that allows many students to achieve who don't, or won't, in traditional schooling models. Arts engagement activates emotions, intellect and bodily kinesthetic ways of learning.
Arts integration is a philosophy of education that grew out of a long term belief of educators and those in the arts community that the arts are much more than extras when it comes to learning. Fueling the fame of arts integration are a number of research studies and research syntheses that detail the influential role the arts can play in instruction. For example, Critical Links (Deasy, 2002) is a summary of over 60 studies, some of which were meta-analyses of many othere studies, which clearly show the promise of the arts. Highlights include studies of using drama to increase students' reading comprehension and using music to successfully teach math concepts and skills. In 2005 a very different arts integration support document was released that profiled ten integrated arts schools across the United States. The Third Space describes how these diverse schools planned and implemented an arts-based curriculum, thereby turning around lagging achievement patterns of students.
The Kennedy Center Partners in Education, headquarted in Washington, DC, is an important organization that has promoted arts integration for over two decades. The Partners program focuses on helping sites in every state and in Mexico sponsor training for classroom teachers in how to use the arts as teaching tools. The Arts Education Partnership is an advocacy organization for the arts in general and a useful resource for arts integration.
State level models of arts integration now exist throughout the United States. For example, South Carolina has the ABC model, North Carolina and a half dozen other states are using the A Plus model, and Tennessee is implementing Value Plus. All of these models are focused on addressing student achievement using strategies thought to be "outside the box" of traditional education.
