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What it is.how to document it!

The visual below demonstrates the three ways that the Arts can
be represented within a school; Arts as Curriculum, Arts-Enhanced
Curriculum, and Arts-Integrated Curriculum. All three are
wonderful assets to any school setting, but its important to
recognize the difference, especially when Arts-Integration is your
goal.

In the past, many of us have used songs as a way to reinforce


content objectives. As an educator, this is a great way to use one
artistic medium to reinforce a concept. This is defined as Arts-
Enhancement. An example that may help explain this to a greater
extent would be when you sing the ABCs to reinforce letter
recognition. Your content objective is strictly letter recognition. You
are not teaching a specific musical objective as well. With an Arts-
Enhanced Curriculum, your objective is in one specific content area
and you are using an art form to reinforce the concept.
An Arts-Integrated Curriculum involves explicitly teaching a
specific art form and an objective within a specific subject area,
simultaneously. Therefore, you have an objective in the art form

Marshall 07/13
and an objective within a content area. There is generally shared
vocabulary between the two and a meaningful/natural
connection. As stated on the ARTS EDGE website, 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. For example,
students meet objectives in theater (characterization, stage
composition, action, expression) and in social studies. The
experience is mutually reinforcingcreating a dramatization
provides an authentic context for students to learn more about
the social studies content and as students delve deeper into the
social studies content their growing understandings impact
their dramatizations. For Arts- Integrated Curriculum to result
in deep student understanding in both the art form and the other
curriculum area, it requires that teachers engage in professional
development to learn about arts standards and how to connect
the arts to the curriculum they
teach.

The key question to ponder as you develop an Arts-Integrated


lesson is .
Are the students creating?
The students need to be engaged in the creative process. Its not
about the teachers engagement or performance, but instead its
about the students engagement.

Documentation of Student Learning

Documentation of student learning is very important to the


success of Arts- Integration within a school. Documentation does
not just include the final product, but more importantly, the process
in creating the final product. Rather than the teacher creating a
bulletin board displaying the final product for people to view,
successful Arts-Integration classroom teachers will create a bulletin
board that displays not only the final product, but the objectives,
process, product, and reflections. Documentation is generally
created in three formats; bulletin boards (as previously stated),
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digital narratives, and publications. All three formats include; the
dual-objectives, documentation of the process (generally pictures
of students creating), the final products, and reflections
(student and/or teacher). This will be very important in
showing what Arts-Integration truly is..

-Kennedy Center

Marshall 07/13
Marshall 07/13

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