INTEGRATION
The pendulum swings of the currents shaping and criticizing schools, education, and the arts themselves have shaped the case for arts in the curriculum. Sometimes advocates emphasized practical, vocational, and skills-based justifications for arts education. Sometimes they emphasized cultural justifications and focused on moral development, social harmony, and order. Sometimes they emphasized the perspective of individual development, the construction of knowledge, self-knowledge, and creativity. And sometimes they stressed the historical value of great art and the rigors and standards of learning in the arts themselves. As education reform gathered power in the closing years of the twentieth century, a new imperative to provide quality education to all children emerged. Arts integration has been a practical and creative response to the dual challenge of establishing a secure place for the arts in the curriculum and of successfully educating all children. The debate in the world of arts education between integrated and discrete instruction is, in the end, misconstrued.The debate should be about whether art instruction is consistent with the best principles of teaching and learning. The application of those principles in arts education brings the world into the classroom in meaningful ways, and allows students productive opportunities to engage, explore, understand, and represent it. When “discrete” instruction in the arts applies these principles, it becomes indistinguishable from “integrated” instruction. When “integrated” arts instruction applies these principles it challenges students and raises the standards of instruction to higher levels. It becomes a vehicle for applying those principles across the curriculum.
The strategies of arts integration are educationally powerful because they are grounded in deep connections between the arts and cognition, and between learning, social, and emotional development. The biggest obstacles to making arts integration more widespread are beliefs that separate thinking and doing, learning and making, feeling and knowing. The most compelling arguments against these false beliefs are found in arts integrated classrooms.
At its best, arts integration makes the arts an interdisciplinary partner with other subjects. Students receive rigorous instruction in the arts and thoughtful integrated curriculum that makes deep structural connections between the arts and other subjects. This enables students to learn both deeply. The practice of making art, and its performance or exhibition, becomes an essential part of pedagogy and assessment, but not just in art or music class. These activities become part of the routine of studying history, science, reading and writing, and math.
Integrated arts education is not arts education as we generally think of it. It is designed to promote transfer of learning between the arts and other subjects, between the arts and the capacities students need to become successful adults. It is designed to use the emotional, social, and sensory dimensions of the arts to engage students, and leverage development and learning across the curriculum. It is designed to amplify learning in the arts by escaping the confines of formal aesthetic and technical instruction. It connects the content of art to students’ personal experiences and their need to make meaning from the world. It makes creative production a core practice. We might call it the arts for learning’s sake. Arts integration is a pathway toward more creative instruction in all subjects.
Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond, Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century.
Columbia College Chicago, 2004
Interdisciplinary, integrated, and integrative studies represent an opportunity to have more meaningful relations with students, teach cognitive skills associated with 'real life' (e.g., cooperation, problem solving, ability to see connections), motivate students, increase student achievement, promote positive attitudes toward subject matter, create more curricular flexibility, diminish scheduling problems, and integrate new and rapidly changing information with increased time efficiency. The positive educational outcomes for students in an integrated-studies program include:
• an increase in understanding, retention, and application of general concepts
• a better overall comprehension of global interdependencies, along with the development of multiple perspectives, points of view, and values
• an increase in the ability to make decisions, think critically and creatively, and synthesize knowledge beyond the disciplines
• the increased ability to identify, assess, and transfer significant information needed for solving novel problems
• the promotion of cooperative learning, a better attitude toward oneself as a learner and as a meaningful member of a community
• increased motivationSandra Mathison and Melissa Freeman, The Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies, 1997
Creativity and imagination – typically associated with the arts and which the arts encourage – are critical to so many aspects of life, in and out of school. Study in the arts affects the way we learn and develops skills that will last a lifetime. The arts themselves can teach thinking methods that result in more than one correct answer, and they offer development of skills in perception, hand-eye coordination, decision-making, risk taking and innovative thinking. They provide a cultural context that lends meaning to the study of other subjects. For instance, one can hardly study history, geography, and social studies without also studying the arts and cultures within the region of study. By integrating the arts throughout other subject areas, students can learn how music from an earlier era might have affected the social atmosphere and attitudes of the people who lived at that time. Students studying history can learn a lot from the arts. Using words alone is akin to presenting material in only two dimensions, whereas the same words accompanied by paintings and music, with students describing and analyzing what they are viewing, transform the presentation into three dimensions.National Task Force on the Arts in Education, Arts at the Core: Recommendations for Advancing the State of Arts Education in the 21st Century. Report Presented to The Board of Trustees, The College Board, Fall 2009
Perhaps the most ambitious form of synthesis occurs in interdisciplinary work, which should not be invoked lightly. We would not consider an individual to be bilingual unless he or she had mastered more than one language. By the same token, it is inappropriate to characterize work as genuinely interdisciplinary unless it entails the proper combination of at least two disciplines. Moreover, the two disciplines should not merely be juxtaposed; they should be genuinely integrated. Such integration should yield understandings that could not have been achieved solely within either of the parent disciplines.The dangers of inadequate synthesis are perhaps most manifest in interdisciplinary work. Much activity in the early years of schooling is misleadingly labeled as “interdisciplinary.” Children may well benefit from carrying out evocative classroom projects or from pursuing a unit on generative topics like “patterns” or “water” or the “cradle of civilization.” But these endeavors to not involve disciplines in any legitimate sense of that term. In making a diorama or a dance, in thinking of water or cities in a variety of ways, students are drawing on common sense, common experiences, or common terminology and examples. If no single discipline is being applied, then clearly interdisciplinary thinking cannot be at work.
Even when students have begun to master the disciplines singularly, there is no guarantee that a combination of disciplines will be appropriately or productively linked. Courses may well and appropriately involve both history and the arts. One can read about the battles of the Spanish Civil War in a history text and one can also look at Picasso’s painting Guernica, or read the novels of Ernest Hemingway, without making any particular effort to link or compare these sources. We might term this approach “disciplinary juxtaposition” – a failure to realize the illumination that may accrue when different perspectives are synergistically joined.
Interdisciplinary investigation is very important, and the best interdisciplinary work is at a distinct premium in our era.
Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business Press, 2008
The word integration comes from the Latin word integrare, which means to make something whole. When we speak of arts integration, we are speaking of a process of curriculum development and instruction that enriches relationships among students, teachers, and parents, as well as relationships within each of these groups. Arts integration is an approach to teaching and learning that lives in lessons and curriculum. When a teaching community embraces arts integration, and children meet it in different classes and experience it with various teachers over time, arts integration is a process that profoundly changes schools embracing its approaches to instruction, and assessment, to individualization and differentiation, to values, community relations, and ultimately, to spirit.Contemporary cognitive theory is persuaded that learning involves developing webs of concepts and categories we need to interpret and order our experience. Concept formation requires analysis – pulling things apart to know and name them – and synthesis – bringing things together. The complementary processes of noting differences and similarities, of separation and connection, are rhythms that pulse through our identities, our politics, and our cognition.
The conventional patterns of school are precisely backwards. In most schools, most of the time, students are expected to acquire knowledge – from texts or teacher’s lectures – and then think with and about that knowledge. But David Perkins reminds us that “learning is a consequence of thinking. Retention, understanding, and the active use of knowledge can be brought about only by learning experiences in which learners think about and think with what they are learning.” For Perkins, thinking comes first, and knowledge is its consequence.
When the arts are integrated with other subjects, students make things that express their understanding of the phenomenon being studied. Even when students perform a dramatic text word for word, they are not performing the text; they are performing their understanding and interpretation of it. We know that when we want to test students’ understanding of instruction, we often ask them to describe the content they are learning in their own words. That work of translation from one code to another, anchors their understanding. When students have the opportunity to encode their understandings in something they make – a play, a mural, a sculpture, a dance – they bring their thoughts and feelings together in a cultural object that they and their classmates can think about, for thought, translated into art, provides experience. Arts integration enables students to experience each other’s ideas.
Madeleine Grumet, Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century.
Columbia College Chicago, 2004
