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The Arts and Other Languages: From Elective to Essential
Sidebars:
Results That Matter: Assessment and the Arts
Teaching Other Languagaes in the Essential Schools
Language Students Exploring Ideas and Experience across the Curriculum
Assessing Creativity
One School's Graduation Proficiencies in the Arts
Helpful Resources in Integrating the Arts
What do the arts have to teach us about Essential School change? From cognition and critical thinking to instruction and assessment, they can shed valuable light on teaching and learning across the disciplines, and can lead us in new ways toward understanding, equity, and community.
It does not look like a research project at first, Teri Schrader's class presentation on AIDS at the Watkinson School in Hartford, Connecticut. Students are dancing, for one thing; and not until the wordless staccato rhythms of their steps accumulate beneath the pictures they have mounted, not until they start to sing the love songs they have written, do the numbing statistics of epidemic begin to translate into emerging patterns, bringing artistic intention to bear on this class's research question, "Can money buy a cure?"
"To fashion their responses the kids used journals of science, public health, and medicine; census information; charts and graphs; articles; even the language from the hanging instructions the AIDS quilt came in," says Schrader. "The research went on for a solid month. It moved the class beyond sentiment, providing depth, specificity, and structure."
As each student crafted a character, composed music, and choreographed a dance, their questions multiplied; they began to see AIDS as more than hypothetical to their own lives, and to argue about its political and economic dimensions. "From feeling confused and overwhelmed," Schrader says, "the kids moved toward clarity, action, intention-toward integrity."
This teacher at an Essential school has worked with colleagues in every subject area to bring music, art, drama, and dance into the main-stream of Watkinson's curriculum. Yet her teaching practice, she says, plays out a constant dynamic relationship between "art for art's sake" and "art for school's sake."
"We can tilt the axis of 'material' to teach any subject so it takes on an artistic quality," she says, "and the material will become clearer to kids. Also, we know that a 'pure' artistic venture, whether it involves creating or reflection and analysis, has lessons of its own to teach. Schools that understand the power of the arts really need to balance these two ideals."
Though difficult and political, that tension can help frame our thinking about school change in general, and in particular about the place of the arts in Essential School change. In fact, almost every one of Theodore Sizer's Nine Common Principles reflects an artist's perspective: the philosophy of student as worker and teacher as mentor and coach; the belief that every child can think and express herself well; the use of essential questions that cross fields of inquiry; the conviction that doing one thing well is better than doing many superficially; assessment by performance, portfolio, and exhibition.
As educators learn more about how children make sense of ideas and of their world, the arts provide schools with a powerful alternative model of teaching and learning, points out Bethany Rogers of the Annenberg Institute. Whether one focuses on conceptual understanding, on equity issues, or on the utilitarian concerns of the workplace, their intellectual aims and pedagogical means make equal sense. Yet in an era of fiscal cutbacks, even reform-minded schools often shortchange and marginalize the arts, casting them as elective "extras" outside the controlling blocks of the master schedule. And even as Essential schools struggle toward integrating the curriculum around essential questions, they seldom place the arts at the center of that attempt.
To complicate the issue further, controversy within arts disciplines themselves often inhibits the infusion of arts into the teaching of sciences and humanities. Many arts educators fear that aesthetics, criticism, creation, and art history will be watered down by such means-that the "arts component" of an integrated curriculum will be a mere gesture made of toothpicks and Elmer's glue, without depth, context, and meaning. Backed against the wall this way, it is little wonder that arts educators describe in their 1995 national standards an array of knowledge and skills that would daunt the students of Fame, or that the Getty Center for Educa-tion in the Arts' "discipline-based arts education" movement has drawn to it fervent advocates of integrity and rigor.
Art for Understanding
If these tensions can be balanced at all, it may be through the "best practice" of students and teachers who play them out in changing classrooms. At Chicago's Paul Robeson High School, for example, students and teachers explored the question "Is the Civil War really over?" along with artists from the Urban Gateways Center for Arts in Education. Classes in English, social studies, and visual arts worked with contemporary source documents and literature, and met regularly with a visual artist, a jazz musician, and an actor. With the artists as their coaches, students made instruments, composed music, and presented personal histories in video form. They created a striking ceramic tile mural for the school's lobby, and they worked on photo collages using images of themselves set in Civil War contexts.
The Robeson project began partly as an effort to see whether artistic portfolios could prove useful in evaluating higher-order thinking in academic subjects. Teachers hoped to assess students' perceptions, their production, and their reflection-the categories of artistic learning set forth by Project Zero and Arts Propel in a long-term research project involving Harvard University, the Educational Testing Service, and teachers in Pittsburgh and Boston. Using what the project calls "process-folios," students tracked their own work's progress as artists do, from initial ideas through revisions and finished product.
The Robeson project also revealed common ground between the artistic experience and how understanding emerges in other subject areas. Harvard researcher Dennie Wolf writes, for example, about the "invisible dimensions of artistic learning": the way students learn to "walk around a work," examining it and enjoying it from the multiple viewpoints of a maker, an observer, and a reflective inquirer. As they made and reflected on art over the course of ten weeks, recalls teacher Markie Hancock, her Robeson students were also becoming more aware of their own perspec-tives on history and their approaches to historical sources-"more impor-tant," she notes, "than a false pursuit of 'objective truth' about history."
Through studying and practicing the arts, Wolf asserts, students not only become alert to how artists draw on many resources; they also develop the ability to sustain a long arc of work focusing not on particular facts but on the same kind of complex, long-term learning that characterizes "essential questions" in many Essential school curricula.
The Essential school aim of depth over breadth also shows up in arts-based projects like Robeson's. The same things it takes to "worry about art well," Project Zero's David Perkins suggests, are needed to "worry about learning well." When we look at a painting, read a poem, or listen to a symphony, he argues, we build and revise a coherent "web of relations" (such as cause and effect, or symbol and meaning). We "encode, anticipate, project, ponder, conceive," just as when we solve a mathematical or scientific problem.
Across the disciplines and within artistic domains, the arts "release the imagination" to see things as if they could be otherwise, argues Columbia University professor Maxine Greene. "Arts education has to do with the active learner constructing meanings as she or he tries to make sense of the lived world," she wrote to participants in an Annenberg Institute arts seminar. "It has to do with a consciousness of craft and standards, and with an ability to reflect on the processes of attending and shaping . . . the opening of new perspectives in experience."
Reaching All Children
All these theories, of course, have practical and political implications in the trenches of schools. If we aim to teach all children the habits of thoughtful inquiry and expression, we cannot shunt certain children aside because their "ways of knowing" do not fit neatly into the verbal and mathematical domains that dominate our schools. What Harvard University's Howard Gardner has described as "multiple intelligences" include forms of processing information that deal not only with language but with music, bodily-kinesthetic information, spatial information, and other areas. Though Gardner does not posit an "artistic intelligence," many of these forms contribute both to artistic development and to rigorous thinking of a more universal kind.
Teri Schrader uses performing arts at Watkinson to "put science on its feet," or the visual arts to explore statistics, for instance. "Some people are staggered by the number of kids enrolled in our Learning Skills program who excel in the performing and creative arts," she says. "To me it makes perfect sense-the arts require us to honor different ways of learning. When we see our 'brightest' performers, we stop needing to distinguish between our learning lab kids and all the others."
Whether they get it from creating their own art or studying the works of others, not just special cases but all students benefit from what Maxine Greene has called the "shock of awareness" the arts can provide. In New York City, for example, Stephen Yaffe consults with several Coalition member schools to help teachers integrate drama into the curriculum as a teaching and assessment tool. In one exercise, students in two small groups take turns improvising side by side at the front of a class.
"On one side, Columbus is trying again to persuade Isabella to send him to the New World," Yaffe says. "On the other, students are acting out the folk tale 'A Penny a Look,' about two brothers who try to take captives from a land of one-eyed people but end up in cages themselves." As each group improvises its lines, the teacher calls out "Switch!" at key moments, and the second dialogue commences using the line where the first group left off.
"The analogies are experienced seamlessly, which takes issues like imperialism or migrations out of the history books and into the realm of powerful human emotions," Yaffe says. "Later, when you discuss terms like economics, politics, or religious persecution, the students connect with them on a gut level." They are constructing meaning, Maxine Greene would observe, from their encounters with art.
At the same time, using artistic processes enlarges students' sense of the world and of the ways available to understand it. At the Forsyth Street site of Satellite Academy in New York City, Liz Andersen's Urban Video Project asks students to view their world through the lens of a camera. Using "Legacies of the African Diaspora" as their theme and the cultural resources of the city as a classroom, students learn documentary production while developing skills in critical thinking, historical research, cooperative learning, cross-cultural communication, and journalism. Their broadcast-quality tapes have been shown on local and national cable channels and in festivals, often winning awards or scholarships for students.
Both as an art in itself and as a way to assess learning in other fields, videography offers a unique learning opportunity to schools. In New York City, the Educational Video Center has contributed a groundbreaking model to educators by describing the elements of a successful video project-research, writing, interviewing, technology use, critical viewing, review and reflection, teamwork, and presentation-and outlining a practical and authentic portfolio process for assessing such projects.
Amy Mulvihill's ninth-grade students at New York's Coalition School for Social Change worked with the Center to create a video documentary about the civil rights movement. They recorded photos of the era and oral histories from participants in the movement including a local folk singer, then came up with a collective vision of what they were going to say. Using imagery, sounds and music, original documents, and their own artwork, over the course of a semester they completed one rough edit and one revision, then presented and reflected on their work in individual portfolios that were assessed by a panel of professionals, teachers, peers, and community members.
Though studying "mechanical" as opposed to "manual" art forms may raise eyebrows with some purists, others point out not only their usefulness in engaging student interest but their historical roots. "The Impressionist period was a time of technological revolution not unlike our own computer age, where new tools and discoveries caused us to question the nature of art," one teacher wrote to one of the many on-line discussion groups the Internet offers to arts educators. "Maybe we could ask students to think about the ways in which the computer has revolutionized our lives and why some people dislike or distrust it. What are our views on computer-generated images?"
Urging that students address both "high" and "low" forms of art with equal intensity, Brown Univer-sity semiotician Robert Scholes makes much the same point. "I imagine a music course beginning with students' own passionate concern over the virtues of various kinds of popular music, looking first at specific musical texts and then move toward a disciplined command of musicology," he wrote to the Annenberg arts forum. "The arts can help students understand aspects of culture that really matter to them now, and expand the range of things that may matter to them in the future. All students will ultimately become consumers-and to some degree producers-of culture. The goal of schooling should be to make them more critical consumers and more creative producers."
A Matter of Community
Finally, many educators argue, the arts foster a vigorous sense of collaboration, equity, and community. Artists and performers come together with students, as mentors and as participants in reflection. Musicians, dancers, and actors work in sustained groups toward common goals. Students and professionals express themselves in ways that reflect their diverse cultures and perspectives. The arts make the outsider visible, give the minority a voice, refuse the tyranny of the norm, speak people's unspoken dreams. They honor heterogeneity; they break down barriers.
Partnerships between schools and the arts community have flourished in recent years, both on the local level and through electronic networks.
(See below) At Satellite Academy, for instance, Liz Ander-son's Visual Thinking students work closely with artists, museum curators, and gallery professionals. Artists come into the school, and students also visit galleries, museums, and studios. "Students experience all kinds of contemporary art, write about their experiences, and share their observations," Anderson says; then they curate a show of their own at a participating gallery-interviewing the artists, selecting the works, and hanging them with the artists.
Such arts partnerships work best when the partners work as a team from the start, setting clear goals that meet the students' needs and the school's objectives, writes Michelle Audet in a College Board working paper on the arts in the high school curriculum. Maintaining both the integrity of the art form and the pedagogy of the related discipline is also a critical factor. Finally, teachers need the chance to extend beyond themselves in exploring art forms, while participating artists should reflect "the best attributes of the creative process," the report notes. "Both teams of players must inform each other and learn each other's languages . . . a process that will change them both for the better."
The business community has also proved an important arts advocate in many communities. In its pragmatic and utilitarian view, the arts are both a good way to keep disaffected kids in school and a fertile training ground for the kind of creativity and leadership that industry rewards. The president of a major software company recently told U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley that he favored music majors over math and science graduates when making hiring decisions, because they "catch on the quickest." And in its report "Arts Education for the 21st Century," the American Council for the Arts argues that the global economy depends on "teamwork, design, innovation, communication, thinking critically, developing discipline, and the role of effort, hard work."
The Generalist and the Arts
Given all this, why do so many schools have trouble keeping the arts as a major player in their reform plans, let alone at center stage? Money and time, not surprisingly, prove the stumbling blocks; and innovative schools often step outside conventional school structures for solutions.
Teachers' willingness to learn outside their area of expertise, for instance, can make possible a richly integrated experience. Ted Graf's humanities students at Heathwood Hall in Columbia, South Carolina use Hyperstudio software in a research project to make connections among a piece of visual art, a novel, a poem, or an excerpt of music in a certain historical period. And at the Francis W. Parker School in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, students used "The Great Migration" series by painter Jacob Lawrence in a major research project exploring the question, "How do communities deal with difference?"
The Lawrence series prompted not only artistic and historical analysis and interpretation but also artistic production; each student painted a three-panel series telling a story about a community they had indiv-idually researched, as well as writing an "artist's statement." Most of the teachers leading this unit had never taught the visual arts, but Parker's art teacher, Suzy Becker, coached them on the vocabulary and concepts they and their students would need, and they jointly developed artistic as well as academic assessment rubrics.
(See below)
"Less is more" applies in the arts just as in the rest of the curriculum, Essential schools are finding. Rather than studying all the art forms in a superficial way, Howard Gardner of Project Zero suggests, students should become well versed in one, whether it be visual arts, music, dance, or drama. At the same time, curriculum should honor the deep knowledge essential to artistic disciplines-by organizing learning around long-term projects, and by revisiting core concepts and recurrent problems at various developmental levels.
Though production alone will not suffice, Gardner adds, experiences that involve art history, perception, and criticism should if possible begin with the child's own art works-nurturing the kind of "deep knowledge" that comes from "thinking" in an artistic medium.
Good teachers have this ability already; they need only extend it. Just as the artist does, the generalist teacher wonders and questions, collaborates with others, discovers and communicates meaning, transforms and reflects on experience. "No curriculum teaches itself," Stanford's Elliot Eisner reminds us. "It must always be mediated. . . . This process of mediation, at its best, is an artistic activity. We call it teaching."
Results That Matter: Assessment and the Arts
Using arts processes to teach academic subjects results not only in improved understanding of content but in greatly improved self-regulatory behavior, a forthcoming three-year study sponsored by the United States Department of Education demonstrates. Barry Oreck of ArtsConnection and Susan Baum from the College of New Rochelle observed integrated arts lessons in all major subject areas in fourteen New York City elementary and secondary public school classrooms. Student behavior improved strikingly in such areas as taking risks, cooperating, solving problems, taking initiative for learning, and being prepared, Oreck says; and content-related achievement also rose.
"This answers our key question: whether skills from the arts transfer to other areas," Oreck says. "But we also found that this transfer cannot occur unless teachers change their classroom's structureótheir use of time, grouping, instructional strategies, active and participatory learning for all kidsóto allow those skills and abilities to come out and be used."
For students who struggle in schools with curricula based primarily on verbal proficiency, the study found, using arts processes proved extremely powerful. "We saw huge changes for those with more kinesthetic, musical, and artistic tendencies," Oreck notes. His continuing research deals with developing arts assessments to evaluate learning in non-arts areasóusing dance, for instance, to assess students' understanding of molecular bonding. "We have found that if you learn something through a theater game, you can still answer a straight test question," he says. "Does it work the other way around?"
For a summary of research findings on the arts in education, see Schools, Communities, and the Arts: A Research Compendium, by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University (June 1995); tel.: 602-965-4525.
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Teaching Other Languagaes in the Essential Schools
You teach in a subject area that opens doors to a whole world of ideas and experience, and connects to every area of the curriculum. But no one in your school community treats it that way. Instead, they insist that your students accumulate and regurgitate great quantities of dry facts, without learning their context or how to apply them in any practical way. They assign you short blocks of time to teach in, and though you have ideas about how to transform your curriculum, you don't get time to talk to other teachers or plan out new strategies. Your state has finally agreed that your subject is important enough to require for graduation, but they only require a token number of credits and students can slide by with no real proficiency. You think there are teachers at the elementary and middle school who might share your interest in a new approach, but it would take a huge political effort to make anything happen district-wide.
Are you an arts teacher? Or do you teach not music or drawing or dance but another world languageótypically Spanish, French, German, Latin, or even Englishóto a generation of students who need its skills more now than ever? In matters of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, the parallels between the arts and language education are striking, and not least is the stepchild's place they share in the forgotten corners of school reform.
Though speaking, listening, reading, and writing have emerged in the last decade as the chief goals of second language instruction, surveys indicate that administrators see only a weak relationship between foreign language goals and the goals of the total school curriculum. Common sense and school reform philosophy agree that other languages are a communicative toolónot an end in themselves but a means to exploring ideas and experiences across the disciplines. But instead of placing communication at the heart of the foreign language curriculum, most schools still emphasize what they call "basic skills"óby which they mean grammar, translation, and parrot-like memorization rather than a more fluid receiving and producing of meaning in engaging and relevant contexts.
Despite these obstacles, many teachers of foreign languages in Essential schools, like their colleagues in the arts, can offer powerful models of the Nine Common Principles in action.
For instance, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
(ACTFL) provided educators in the early 1980s with a set of standards, rubrics, and proficiency assessments that broke new ground in their usefulness to ongoing instruction. Its Oral Proficiency Interview, in which the interviewer evaluates a student on a range of near-natural communication tasks, tests language performance in an authentic context and provides very specific guidelines for distinguishing between various degrees of novice, intermediate, advanced, and superior competence.
In classroom instruction, teachers of second languages were among the first to adopt active learning strategies like cooperative learning, hands-on projects, dramatic simulations and role-plays, and experiential learning. In pioneering programs at the elementary school level, some have teamed with teachers of other subjects to integrate the study of language and other content areas. And a few rare secondary schools are trying "partial immersion" programs, which use a second language as the medium of instruction in one or more subject areas, sometimes at the same time that they enhance the literacy and communication skills of native speakers of that language.
The teaching of other languages has special importance in American schools as immigration increases from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2000, studies show, most schoolchildren in major metropolitan areas will come from homes where a language other than English is spoken. Hispanic students, the largest language minority group in North America, also top the high school dropout list, partly because of the extra burden of taking subjects like math and science in a language not their own.
Establishing bilingual competence for all students necessarily begins with those who have limited English proficiency. But students whose native language is English must also leave high school able to speak another language well. Incorporating language-minority students into second language programs as role models and peer tutors offers a supportive and cooperative learning environment for both groups, and can provide academic content and purpose as well. Such programs take careful planning and teacher development; their number is small.
Recommended Readings
Helena A. Curtain and C. A. Pesola,
Languages and Children: Making the Match. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988.
Robin Scarcella, E. A. Andersen, and S. Krashen, eds.,
Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language. New York: Newbury House, 1990.
Tongues Untied: A Collaborative Forum for Modern Language Teachers, $30
(10 issues); Box 4300, George School, Newtown PA 18940; 215-860-6811.
Omaggio, Alice, Teaching Language in Context. Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 1983.
American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL)
Proficiency Guidelines
(1986)
Center for Language Education and Research
(CLEAR) reports available through ERIC Clearinghouse database. For a listing, contact Craig Packard at 800-276-9834.
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Language Students Exploring Ideas and Experience across the Curriculum
Content-enriched instruction: teaching math, science, and social studies in other languages.
At Collins Middle School in Salem, Massachusetts, Spanish teacher Margaret Arnold works with science teacher Nancy Pelletier and special needs teacher Victoria Waterbury on a unit about infectious disease and its effects on human history. Along with their English-language instruction, eighth graders relatively new to Spanish learn the Spanish terms for diseases, symptoms, and treatments; collect data in Spanish on a disease they choose to research; do readings and keep journals in Spanish; write and illustrate a Spanish children's book about their topic (as well as writing an English essay); and design a public health survey for a Spanish-speaking community. They use an inductive approach to understanding and analyzing the Spanish grammar and scientific vocabularyóa method that reinforces the science curriculum as it develops proficiency.
Whole-school involvement in learning the same second language. All students take Spanish at the Parker School in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and this fall the school sponsored "La Copa Parker," a soccer tournament among advisory groups conducted entirely in Spanish.
(The rules of the game were altered so that speaking in English meant forfeiting the ball.)
For a week in January, the whole school studied Spanish in an "intensive accelerated" week of music, art, games, and drama; two native-speaking consultants led 120 students with the help of Spanish-speaking teachers from several disciplines. Teacher Dave Berkley tailored a unit on cultural stereotypes to the new school's Essential Question, "What is community?"; students visit elderly Latino residents in a nearby care center; parents serve as in-class aides; and from bookcases to medicine cabinets, everyday objects in all school classrooms and offices are labeled with their Spanish names.
Accelerated language instruction using a long-block schedule. Foreign language teacher Bev Blackburn at Reynoldsburg (OH)
High School worried at first about her school's new double-blocked schedules, but now says it has only helped her students. "It gave me insight on how to be a coach," she says. "To get more mastery, at the same time I had to pare down to what was most essential. But now I have time to touch all learning styles to get across a concept. And I don't spend so much time reviewing. No one says, ëI didn't get it yesterday.'" If they choose, students can complete four years of language in two under the new schedule, then either move on to advanced levels or begin the study of another language.
(Robert Canady, the author of Block Scheduling, suggests that every two or four years schools might offer an intensive full-semester schedule of a language, in which students could compress four years of study into one, or even conduct their study in another country.)
Coaching students to infer grammar rules on their own. At Whitfield School in St. Louis, Missouri, Veronique Vallerie-Lynch uses "guessing games" to get students to come up with the mechanisms of French grammar. "I ask students to look at the language as an analyst, the way they would look at a frog in a science labóto collect data and eventually write a report," she says. In pairs, students work through a progressive series of prompts, which lead them to discover a particular linguistic pattern in grammar (such as the use of future tense), write it down in their own words, and finally apply it to a new situation. "It may be time consuming for the teacher to write this type of exercise, but the reward is great in class," says Vallerie-Lynch. "The most satisfying part for both teacher and students is to see them come up with their own explanations, in words they can relate to and understand. It places them on the same level as other subjects; they have the language to talk about the discipline even if they do not have the discipline's skills."
Using technology to learn other languages.
In addition to the growing number of interactive software options for language tutoring, the Internet is an excellent curriculum resource. By e-mail, students can communicate in other languages with peers worldwide. On the Web one can also find interactive programs like Virtual Frog Dissection in various world languages; joint projects for schoolchildren such as the International Orillas Proverbs Project; and much more. Language teachers can subscribe to the discussion group "FLTeach" by e-mailing "subscribe FLTeach Donald Houghton Jr." to listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu
Fostering minority students' language while developing skills in the majority language. A significant number of American students are at risk of losing skills in their first language because schools emphasize English at its expense. "Two-way immersion" programs, which foster academic skills in both languages by turn, are one way to address this. A program at Rhode Island School for the Deaf, for example, is working toward centering academic classes around linguistic skills in both American Sign Language and English (with an emphasis on reading and writing). Barbara Simon-Olsen's students in transition between middle and high school research and present a weekly videotaped news program, soon to be captioned in English. The transition program aims, she says, "to identify the communication style that works best for each student's learning needs, then to use it in coaching them to use their minds well." Some high school students even study Latin to support their English and literacy skills.
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Assessing Creativity
How do you evaluate a student's artisitc expression? Parker School arts and humanities teachers drafted these common "criteria for excellence," then used them to create holistic rubrics with which to assess creative work in each of the school's two-year Divisions.
Preparation
- You develop your own message. (Note: The message could be the medium.)
- You use an art form (visual art, music, dance/movement, drama, writing, other)
that communicates your message.
- You research your message and art form and apply it to your process. ï You gather the materials you need.
- You plan your process.
Presentation
- Your art work has an impact on its audience.
- You use the techniques of your art form effectively.
- You can answer questions about your art work and process.
Process
- You plan and manage your time effectively.
- Your plan is open to inspiration and suggestion.
- You complete your plan.
- You get feedback from others.
- You revise as necessary.
- You reflect on your art work, process, and presentation.
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One School's Graduation Proficiencies in the Arts
New York City's Urban Academy includes two art-related proficiencies in its requirements for graduation. "We try to make sure kids have a breadth of work in different areas," says director Ann Cook, "a range of experiences through which they develop skills, attitudes, subject exposure, and ways of looking at ideas." The actual courses emerge from the skills and interests of the Urban Academy faculty, and include workshops in play writing and production, film, poetry, photography, and chamber music.
Creative Arts. The candidate selects outstanding work completed in an area of the creative arts and presents, exhibits or publishes that work. The work selected for presentation must demonstrate growth over time in one of the following areas: art, photography, creative writing, drama, video, or computer design. Before any work is presented, the student and mentor must agree that the work demonstrates proficiency in the area selected. In addition, the student must analyze his or her own work and demonstrate an understanding of his or her strengths and weaknesses in the area. If a student has been working in an artistic area that Urban Academy does not offer, he or she with faculty approval may work with a member of the UA staff for at least one semester to develop the proficiency in the student's area of artistic talent and skill. Students are expected to meet with a mentor to select an area in which to develop an exhibit. In this meeting they will discuss what the focus will be and how the work will proceed. Following this meeting, the student must submit a written proposal and receive approval in order to begin work.
Criticism. The candidate chooses an artistic piece that he or she does not like. The piece of art must be in a medium (e.g. painting, play, poem, film, building) that the student has studied in a course. The work of art must have documented artistic merit coming from a number of different sources. The student's analysis must include interviews with a supporter of the piece (and detractors, if desired). The candidate will make a presentation to an audience of students and adults, which involves the audience in a process designed to help them understand the artistic piece selected.
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Helpful Resources in Integrating the Arts
Readings
"Arts Education for the 21st Century," American Council for the Arts, 1 E. 53rd St. New York, NY 10022; 212-223-2787.
Ernest Boyer, "Making the Connections: The Arts and School Reform," in Why We Need the Arts (New York: ACA Books, 1989).
College Board and Getty Center joint project,
The Role of the Arts in Unifying the High School Curriculum. Contact Karen Wicks, College Board, 45 Columbus Ave., New York, NY 10023; 212-713-8215.
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Howard Gardner, "Zero-Based Arts Education: An Introduction to Arts Propel," Studies in Art Education 1989, 30 (2).
Getty Center for Education in the Arts, Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in American Schools. Santa Monica, CA: 1986.
David N. Perkins, "Art as Understand-ing," Journal of Aesthetic Education, Spring 1988.
Dennie Wolf, "Artistic Learning: What and Where Is It?" Journal of Aesthetic Education, Spring 1988.
National Endowment for the Arts, "Toward Civilization: A Report on Arts Education." Washington, DC: 1988.
National Standards for Arts Education; Education Reform, Standards, and the Arts; and The Vision for Arts Education in the 21st Century. Available from Music Educators National Conference, 1806 Robert Fulton Dr., Reston, VA 22091; 703-860-4000 or 800-828-0229.
Curriculum Resources
Arts Propel and Project Zero, 323 Longfellow Hall, Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-495-4342.
ArtsConnection (120 W. 46th St, New York, NY 10036, 212-302-7433)
conducts research and develops and publishes curriculum materials for use in the general classroom.
Arts Learning Link
(ALL), an Internet site, coordinates arts education activities among schools, arts organizations, social service agencies, parents, teachers, legislators and continuing educators. Contact artsnet.heinz.cmu.edu/artsed
Educational Video Center
(55 E. 25th St., New York, NY 10010, 212-725-3534) helps teachers incorporate media production and analysis into other content areas. Provides professional development.
Galef Institute (11150 Santa Monica Boulevard, 14th floor, Los Angeles, CA 90025; 310-479-8883)
targets elementary schools in its "Different Ways of Know-ing" program, promoting teacher collaboration; thematic integration of social studies with literature, math, science, and the arts. Includes professional development and model curriculum materials.
Getty Center for Education in the Arts (401 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 950, Santa Monica, CA 90401; 310-274-8787) offers summer seminars throughout the country on arts education, including discipline-based art education; collaborative efforts, teaching contemporary art; professional development in the visual arts, music, and theater; thematic interdisciplinary instruction and assessment; and leadership skills. ArtsEdNet is Getty's online service for the K?12 arts education community, with a focus on discipline-based art education. Web: http://www.artednet.getty.edu/
Integrated Drama Curriculum
(262 West 107 Street, 5A, New York, NY 10025; 212-865-5076)
brings artists and teachers together for professional development and classroom-based programs that use the arts as teaching tools and integrate them with other curriculum areas.
John F. Kennedy Center for the Perform-ing Arts in Washington, D.C. provides arts education and professional development opportunities for teachers, students, adults and other arts organizations; 32 states participate in its Partners in Education training program. On the Internet, its ArtsEdge (http://artsedge. kennedycenter.org)
provides a collection of professional development resources, program information, and research on arts and education; and highlights the arts at work in specific classrooms.
National Art Education Association, 1916 Association Dr., Reston, VA 22091; 703-860-8000.
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Price: $5
Code: H12:5
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This resource last updated: May 14, 2002
Database Information:
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Source: Horace. Vol. 12, #5. May 1996.
Publication Year: 1996
Publisher: CES National
Type: Horace Feature, Horace Sidebar
School Level: All
Issue: 12.5
Focus Area: Classroom Practice
STRAND: Classroom Practice: curriculum
Curriculum: Subject Integration
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