What Is Integrated Arts Education?
Integrated Arts Education is an approach to learning that engages students in a creative learning process, connecting the Arts with traditional subjects like English, math, history and science. This approach enhances the learning experience as a whole, helping students achieve greater comprehension of traditional subject matter. It also allows them to experience the joy of expressing themselves through music, theatre, dance and the visual arts.
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WHY DO WE NEED INTEGRATED ARTS?
Two factors that are seldom part of the conversation about the condition of public school education in the US are the joyless environments for learning and the fragmentation of the instruction. We find these to be powerful predictors of the poor results that are being seen on standardized tests.
If a student finds little joy in learning in school, that student is not likely to feel a sense of commitment to performing well on any test, and especially not on a test that will be used to judge the quality of that school.
As high stakes testing creates pressure to deliver high scores, teachers have a tendency to “teach to the test,” reducing concepts to discrete bits of information that can be readily measured. Research has shown that such fragments are much less likely to be retained than learning that is connected in larger patterns, particularly patterns that can be associated in some way with the reality of the learner’s life.
Working in the Arts – music, theatre, dance and visual arts -- is a joyful experience. It is also an integrative one. It involves the mind, body and spirit, and it crosses both hemispheres of the brain. The Harmony Project, a joint venture of the Langberg Foundation and the Denver Musicians Association, is attempt to return music and the arts to the important place they once held in the school curriculum.
HOW IT WORKS
Walk into the building and you hear music. Children’s voices echo down one hall and in another direction a flute ensemble plays a sea chantey. A group of students move from one room to another, faces beaming with anticipation. Teachers with relaxed smiles pass by and nod hello. You feel it – something is different about this school!
In each class there a classroom teacher guiding their students through standard curriculum. There is also a dancer, a painter, an architect, a singer, an actor. A fifth grade class creates dance steps for the Haiku poetry they have written. A fourth grade class rehearses the lines of their play about immigrants. A third grade class sings a blues song they have composed. A second grade class draws pictures of animals who live in, of all places, their own city! A first grade class claps in rhythm as they read aloud together from a very big book. A guitarist sings about snakes, entrancing a group of kindergarteners.
In every classroom, students are engaged in learning the usual stuff of school – math, science, reading and writing – but they are doing it through the Arts! This is the arts-infused curriculum of The Harmony Project!
To learn more about what the Harmony Project is doing in local schools, please feel free to … CONTACT US