About the Author: Mary Jager currently teaches art in the Deubrook Area Schools. She is President of the South Dakota Art Education Association. Last summer Jager co-taught at the Summer Arts Education Institute for K-12 classroom teachers, visual arts specialists, and school administrators. She can be contacted at jagerm@deubrook.com.

As an art educator, I fully believe that students learn best through an experiential approach. Annie Smith (1993) states this best in her book Getting into Art History. She wrote that teachers should make the learning of art a living and meaningful experience. Students learn best through engaged-learning experiences as participants in the learning, not as an audience. Hands-on learning allows students to learn and be assessed according to their learning style. Writing across the curriculum allows the students the opportunity to see how learning in all areas is related, how it reinforces concepts that have been learned, and how it builds on their prior knowledge. Since implementing integrated units of study with writing and other content areas, I have observed a marked improvement in the amount of information students retain from year to year and an increased number of students using higher order thinking skills to solve creative problems within my classroom. An added benefit has been an increased excitement for learning.

Background

In the past decade, I have had the opportunity to be involved with various programs for school and curriculum reform. One such program, the ABC (Arts as Basic Curriculum) Grant Program was a part of the South Dakota Arts Council’s (SDAC) Arts in Education programming. The overall goals of the ABC Program were to develop a practical, sequential K-12 arts education curriculum encompassing the five art disciplines (visual art, music, drama, dance, and creative writing) and to develop practical examples of expanded school and community commitment to the arts as a feature of basic education. The South Dakota ABC Program initially provided funding and other support to six pilot sites over five years including urban, rural, and Native American schools. The curriculum developed at the six pilot sites continues to be shared among the original school sites as well as with other interested school districts throughout South Dakota. Two schools that participated in the ABC program were Deubrook Area School District and Sioux Valley School District. The participants in these districts selected, modified, and adopted arts curricula; created integrated arts units; provided inservice activities; collaborated with local arts councils to provide art experiences in the schools; created "Arts in a Trunk" traveling thematic units; promoted networking among staff through the "Visual Art Teachers Share Day;" and helped develop preservice teacher training at state universities. Here is their story.

Sioux Valley School - Elementary School Examples

The Sioux Valley (SD) School District was one of the NESC members that became a pilot school, implementing the sequential arts curriculum developed collaboratively by the ABC curriculum team leaders and district teachers. Jeanne Winter, ABC Curriculum Team Leader for Creative Writing and Integration and third grade teacher at Sioux Valley, collaborated with ABC team leaders and Sioux Valley staff in the development and implementation of the first integrated unit. Her success and excitement led to the entire school's commitment to this new approach to learning. Each grade level went on to develop five integrated units of study. Remembering When, Native Americans of North America, Endangered Animals, and Watery World are several of the very successful units designed by Jeanne and the third grade staff. These units integrate the five arts with existing core curriculum, adding sequential skills as well as exciting hands-projects. These units are described below:

Remember When - In this unit, students interviewed elderly neighbors or friends to find out about the past. Using these interviews as an authentic task, students described their findings using word processing skills. The written interviews were then mounted in the center of individual quilt squares created by students in art class while studying color theory. Twelve geometric shapes surround the edges of the individual quilt squares, and students were required to mix and paint the secondary and tertiary colors using tempera paint.

Native Americans of North America - During this unit, students learned to work cooperatively with a partner to research, write a paper, and give a presentation on an Indian tribe of their choice. Students learned how to use the Internet to access information on topics such as environment, food, homes, and cultural activities. In addition, art projects were integrated into the unit. Student projects included drawing their selected Native American tribe in their environment; creating a three-dimensional pueblo embellished with oil-based modeling clay figures; creating parflesche bags from paper grocery bags; and weaving dream catchers with help from junior high art students. Based upon their research notes and projects, students used the "writing process" to develop both a research paper and an oral presentation. The oral presentation allowed students to teach others about what they had learned while, at the same time, providing them with an opportunity to practice public speaking.

Watery World - In this unit, elementary students wrote and illustrated their own books. Assisted by high school sophomores, third graders typed and edited their own books. Students made a life-sized inflatable whale from 4mm black plastic. It was an awesome sculpture when it was completed and inflated. They learned and applied many skills from art class that were integrated within this unit. In one activity, students wrote a description about an imaginary sea creature, used clay to create the sea creature, and created a diorama of its imaginary environment from paper and watercolors. A highlight for the students was displaying their huge whale, books, and other artwork at the Big Sioux Water Festival held at South Dakota State University for 1,500 fourth graders and dignitaries from the area.

Endangered Animals - Objectives of this unit were that students would learn research skills through the Thea Holtan mode, write a research paper and poem, create a quality art project, and serve the community. Students researched an endangered animal of their choice and wrote research papers. In art class, students created a quilt that was later raffled by the elementary student council to raise money for a worthy cause. Students drew and colored their endangered animal on newsprint using fabric crayons and transferred the image to a cloth square. They wrote a cinquain about their animal, printed it on the cloth via computer, and hand stitched it onto the quilt. Volunteers sewed the quilt squares together and taught the students how to tie the quilt. In 1997 and 1998, the students raised $1,200 to purchase two new swing sets for the school playground.

The Deubrook Area School - Secondary School Examples

Successful integration and writing across the curriculum is not limited to the elementary level. With direct correlation between the development of integrated arts curriculum and successful student learning, writing and the integration of other core content areas have become commonplace in my secondary art classroom at the Deubrook Area School. Students write assessments, reflections, create poetry and short stories, compare and contrast artwork, and create PowerPoint presentations. Consistently, I have found that the quality of students’ artwork and their creative thinking and problem solving skills have improved by integrating writing into the art curriculum. Students write self and peer assessments after every unit. I have found that periodic group critiques held during the creative process help students to become familiar with and develop a deeper understanding of the language of art. This understanding tends to produce more successful solutions to art problems and is reflected in more thorough and detailed written assessments at the end of each project unit. Writing reflections about their work enables students to more clearly internalize what they have learned and to articulate the relevance of these skills to their daily lives.

High school sketchbook assignments have evolved over time to include journal reflections as well as visual images. Students’ thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are written throughout their sketchbooks, many times becoming an integral part of the images themselves. When students integrate writing into their art units, I find their work has greater meaning for them and is of higher quality.

In graphic arts class, students do two integrated art units. When studying how to design a tri-fold brochure using Adobe PageMaker, students visit a local zoo, take pictures with digital cameras, and write copy for brochures on the zoo--keeping in mind successful design techniques. While studying calligraphy, students write an original poem or short story and produce a beautiful, brightly colored illuminated script on vellum paper. I have found students work more intensely and become more immersed in the creation of their artwork when they use their own creative writing pieces, and the added excitement of fieldtrips doesn’t hurt either!

One of my more successful integrated projects is taught in Introduction to Art. The Famous Artist PowerPoint Project involves a multitude of skills related to art, technology, and writing. Students work in small groups to produce a PowerPoint presentation on a famous artist of their choice. They spend a week in the library and computer labs researching and two weeks writing and designing their PowerPoint presentation. During their presentation on a specific artist, they must dress up in the persona of their artist or represent the artist’s work. When presenting on Picasso’s Blue Period, for example, one group of students dressed completely in blue, including painting their skin and hair.

Additionally, students must integrate a food into their presentation, connecting it to their artist in some way. This is a hit with all the classes. One group’s presentation on Monet had a picnic spread out in front of the classroom, complete with tablecloth, wicker basket, fruit, French bread, cheese and wine--non-alcoholic of course! Students are encouraged to present in a dramatic way, not to read off the monitors or note cards. Groups have performed in Readers’ Theater style, used television newscast formats, and performed raps. Students were also required to teach an art lesson focused on their artist. I assisted them in writing their lesson plans and gave suggestions on how to effectively teach the art lesson to the other students. Students learned that teaching wasn’t as easy as it looked. Students were required to create a graphic organizer and a 10 question quiz for their presentation. Students found that writing clear and concise questions was difficult, and they spent a lot of time revising them.

Conclusions

Students who are given the opportunity to be responsible engaged learners, tend to see and understand how their learning in all areas is related. They are able to reinforce concepts they have learned as well as build on prior knowledge. Writing across the curriculum enables students to develop a deeper understanding of art which, in turn, is reflected in more meaningful, higher-quality artwork produced. Standardized test scores have shown that writing across the curriculum works. Sioux Valley School District’s standardized test scores, which are higher than the state and national averages, have been improving consistently since the addition of integrated arts units and writing across the curriculum. Since implementation of the state writing assessment, Deubrook student scores have continued to show a marked improvement due to the infusion of writing in all content areas. Throughout these successful units, integrating the arts and writing across the curriculum has allowed all children to experience success.

References

Smith, A. (1993). Getting into art history. Toronto, Canada: Barn Press.