Southeast Center for Education in the Arts

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