Integrating The Arts in Generalist Areas

How can teachers develop inquiry questions that leads to arts integration?

Allowing students to process subject matter through role play, drawing, creating, dancing and music leads to deeper questioning, thought and communication.  The outcomes of these integrative practices is fresh and surprising. One way I can build and improve on some of these processes is by developing inquiry questions, as discussed today, that draw out exciting learning for teachers and students. 

Discussion and Reflection

Arts and creativity appear in many classroom settings and I have been told my colleague teachers that they find this approach more effective when teaching as students lose interest quickly with knowledge delivery without meaning or experience.I always had this idea with my own learning as I have a strong visual background and today it was fantastic to watch a presentation on how to integrate the arts into generalist learning areas.

Tanya, what did you think about the lesson today?  It is great to work with someone who has a strong interest in art.  You also come from a high school 'art' subject teaching.  To me the above practices that Arnold discussed are very artistic processes. Some-one said to me today when I was discussing integrative art - "but, that is not really art", it sounded so limiting and I guess some people have very fixed ideas of what art is and can be.  What do you think?  What would you say if a colleague teacher said that to you? (Catherine)

I would be shocked if a colleague teacher told me that it wasn't really art!  My colleague teachers insisted that the art lessons I ran included art skills, experimentation and also new knowledge of the marine science unit they were studying. I was so happy to make connections between Arnold's presentation and things I had seen in the classroom a week before. (I felt proud of my colleague teachers!) One of the teachers was teaching a dance to the students, this teacher also used a lot of multimedia for presentation and encouraged the students to also use multimedia daily. (Tanya)

Toolkit - for the classroom

Class-room Space game

Students are standing up in an open space.  They are asked to move into an empty space and then another. Speed of this can be changed by assigning 1 as the slowest (calm walking) and 10 as the fastest (slow run)The person calls out the numbers, counting up and down. A variation of this game includes sequences and building shapes within groups.

Arnold Aprill

website: http://www.capeweb.org/who-we-are/staff

blog: http://www.capeconslts.org/arnies-blog