Alanna Gaylord's Art Education Portfolio

Description:

            Arts integration refers to a fusion of the arts and other subject area in order to increase knowledge of a general subject area while concurrently fostering a greater understanding and appreciation of the fine and performing arts. In arts integration, students engage in the creative process, which connects an art form and another subject and meets the goals and objectives in both areas. Literacy integration, on the other hand, refers to a coalition of literacy and the art classroom to develop vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  

 

Analysis: 

            Arts integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. In arts integration, art becomes the approach to teaching and the vehicle for learning. Students meet dual learning objectives when they engage in the creative process to explore connections between an art form and another subject area to gain greater understanding in both. In addition, art integration techniques, such as using multiple senses or making connections to students’ prior knowledge, can help students store more information in their long-term memory and thus result in deeper understanding. Art make content more accessible, it encourages joyful, active learning, it stimulates higher-level thinking, and develops collaborative work skills. The arts also help students understand and express abstract concepts, as well as help students make and express personal connections to content. Arts integration can be as simple as utilizing images in the science classroom to illustrate subject matter to deepen students’ understanding. Another example in the math classroom would be to analyze the work of Wassily Kandinsky in order for students to develop math skills of identifying line, color, and shape and spatial relationships. Another example that integrates Social Studies with art, is a lesson where students study historical scenes and then are asked to illustrate the scenes through drama performances, visual arts, or writing. The arts motivate students to engage more fully with the related subject area as well as help students develop abilities to apply learning to new situations and experiences.

            Literacy, which can be defined as the ability to read and write, is intrinsically linked to the visual arts. The creation of art is parallel to the writing process as they both involve experimentation, drafting, revising, editing, and sharing of ideas. Literacy integration strategies can help to develop vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, as well as help students feel a desire to express oneself, ask questions, and take risks. When students are introduced to the integration of literacy and the arts, they begin to use the language of the arts to critique their own work and work of others, as well as they begin to use the elements and principles of the language of arts to connect various forms of creative communication.

 

Reflection:

            Through my teaching experiences at Albert D. Lawton Intermediate School I had many experiences integrating other disciplines into my lessons and vice versa. For instance during my student teaching, I teamed up with a science teacher to teach an interdisciplinary lesson. The lesson began as a science project where students were required to choose and research a microorganism and learn about how their microorganism physically moves, how it eats, and about its habitat. Then, the science teacher and I worked together to create a lesson that would enable students to demonstrate their new knowledge of their Microorganisms in an artistic way. We designed a lesson where students would use Google Chrome’s program Stop Animation to create stop animation videos that portrayed the characteristics of their microorganisms. In the end, this interdisciplinary lesson allowed students to make vast connections between science and art and also helped students realize that art, in one way or another, can always be used as a means of presenting information. Without collaborative interdisciplinary lessons, students would lack experiences like these where they are able make broad, cross-disciplinary connections that help them better understand the world around them.

            In addition, I find that it is important to integrate literacy opportunities into  almost all of my lessons. For instance, on the back of every assessment rubric, I either ask students to tell me about what they learned from the lesson or ask them to explain their process. I have found that is important to provide process-related questions because it provokes artist-statement-like writing and provokes students to describe their artistic process and explain in words their knowledge of the content and/or media.