Teaching Through The Arts

Click on the title of this post to view Cape Cod Times photographer Steve Heaslip's photo gallery of Provincetown's elementary school using the arts to learn the global education curriculum. Photo credit: Steve Heaslip/Cape Cod Times

A recent article in the Cape Cod Times reports on how the Veteran's Memorial Elementary School in Provincetown, Massachusetts uses the arts in a day-long celebration aimed at teaching African culture. Click on the title of this post to read the article.

What is poem? Don’t give me some long, convoluted definition. Just answer the question. Could you? Don’t worry, I can’t either. I can’t say definitively what poetry is and I can’t say with certainty what poetry isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you and I don’t understand the general concept of poetry. I know we do. All I am saying is that neither you nor I, not even the Poet Laureate, has the ability to say that something is or isn’t a poem unless we have written it ourselves. (If you happen to meet him, please don’t tell him I said he couldn’t!) One of the first things that I try to drive home with my students is that if they say that something they have written is a poem, then it’s a poem, and no one has the right to tell them otherwise! Around Christmas time, I was invited by the parent council to perform a poetry/storytelling evening at my school. About 200 students and parents (Grades 5-8) came back to school on a Thursday night to take in the show, have some hot coco...

You know what I’m talking about! Everything is perfectly normal in your classroom (well… I mean as normal as it can be). Suddenly the atmosphere is sucked out of your room leaving a soundless, scentless (OK, maybe not scentless if your kids had gym that day) vacuum. The cause? It wasn’t a star burning out and leaving a dense black hole in its wake. It wasn’t the hole in our ozone layer expanding to the point where all oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, and whatever else you science teachers know is up there, is violently ripped from our world’s grasp. (If that’s even possible, I don’t know. I don’t teach science.) This catastrophic shift has not been caused by anything even remotely close to that magnitude. No. It has been caused by the utterance of one seemingly harmless, yet somehow daunting, four-letter word. You know the one. P-O-E-M! AAAAaaaahhhhh! (Insert the “Kill” theme music from PSYCHO here.) You know you just found yourself going, “Ree Ree Ree Ree...” all alone in front of your computer...

Have you ever sat through a course or in-service training where the instructor or facilitator talked at you for the majority of the time? How long did it take for you to zone out? How much of the information do you think you retained? That answer will vary depending on where you are stronger in the Multiple Intelligences. If you are stronger in linguistic intelligence, then you may have gotten something out of it, but if you are stronger in spatial or bodily-kinesthetic, then you may have gotten little or nothing from it. Now think of this in terms of your own classroom. Are you teaching to the different intelligences of the students who are sitting in your room or are you primarily teaching to the linguistic? Thomas Armstrong in his book Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom cites John Goodlad's "A Study in Schooling" project which puts "teacher talk" at taking up "nearly 70 percent of classroom time." Something to ponder as we move forward. One of...

Armstrong, T. (2000). Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom . Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Diaz, D., & McKenna, M. B. (Eds.). (2004). Teaching for the aesthetic experience: The art of learning . New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang. Edwards, L., & Nabors, M. (1993, March). The creative arts process: What it is and what it is not . Young Children, 77-81. Frostig, K. (2006). The permeable classroom or the tilted arc revisited . Journal of Social Theory in Art Education. 26 (1), 174-196. Goldberg, M. (1997). Art as knowing: A methodology for learning . Boston: Pearson Education. Jensen, E. (2001). Arts with the brain in mind . Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Verlee-Williams, L. (1983). Teaching for the two sided mind . Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster.

Why teach the arts in our schools? Why is it essential that school systems as well as individual classroom teachers make the arts an integral part of the curriculum for students at all grade levels? In short, an important outcome of education is for students to be aware of, to be enriched by, and to appreciate the shared human experience within the diversity of a multi-cultural world. That is, the desired outcomes of education must go beyond simple recall and identification. Rather, students must be trained to be independent, critical thinkers and problem solvers who can tap their creative and imaginative potential. Such outcomes cannot be realized if the arts modalities are not used in teaching. After all, the visual and performing arts, music, and literature teach us most profoundly about the human condition. Using the arts to teach children of all ages makes sense because the arts appeal to the multiple intelligences, the arts are a universal tool for communicating, the arts encoura...