Inquiry II Seminar

Inquiry Project

Proposal:

I will be doing my practicum at Beattie Arts High School in Kamloops, teaching English 11 and 12 (as well as Socials 9). The school incorporates various creative arts into the curriculum and all students take several full year intensive arts courses.

My concern for teaching senior English is how I will be able to use arts in the classroom and how I will be able to assess the students’ learning through their arts based projects in addition to the traditional writing assignments.

What creative arts activities can be used with senior English students to assess their comprehension of and their ability to interpret literature?

Context/Methods

Before getting my practicum assignment, my knowledge of arts in high schools was very limited and I hadn’t really known anything about arts integrated schools. The two week short practicum involved a lot of learning about the differences between my school, Beattie School of the Arts, and other high schools. I became familiar with the system of arts study at Beattie, the major and minor fine arts classes that students took during the year, and the way that teachers were involved with the artistic growth of their students.

At the classroom level, I also observed how different teachers, in various subjects, were incorporating the arts into their teaching and into the projects they assigned. My inquiry topic grew out of those observations, and has also expanded to include an examination of the theory of arts-based curriculum as well as specific projects and assessment tools, with a focus on English Language Arts.

My approach to this inquiry has consisted primarily of literature review. I’ve also used my own observations from my short practicum to supplement the specific activities and methods recommended in the books and articles.

Findings

Arts integrated schools combine fine arts with academic content subjects to “create a deeper, richer educational experience” (Burnaford et al., xxxix). The history of public education in North America is filled with shifts between valuing and devaluing arts as part of the curriculum. Many theorists and educators now believe that “arts integration and school improvement go hand in hand” (Burnaford et al., xlii). The core curriculum and standards at fine arts schools are exactly the same as any other school, but the approach to teaching incorporates drama, music, dance and visual arts as a way of engaging students and exploring the learning styles that fit best with individual students.

My observations of Math, Social Studies and English classes showed me that, for the students at Beattie, being involved in the classroom and the learning process is an everyday occurrence. In addition to their academic achievements, students have certain artistic goals that they are working towards and projects that they are involved in, including the juried portfolio presentation in the senior grades.

There also seems to be a great deal of research into the statistics of how arts teaching can specifically benefit students’ test scores in the academic subjects – and that seems to be one of the main reasons that arts integration happens. Anecdotal evidence suggests that with arts-based learning students are more engaged and are better able to “think metaphorically” (Burnaford et al., 17), and test score analysis of schools involved in the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education shows that in comparison to other schools the ‘CAPE’ schools did just as well or better.

On the other hand, I also found that arts for sake of art is also an important factor in curriculum changes. Nick Rabin writes that the two arguments for including more arts in schools are essentialist and instrumental. The first states that arts are “such an important dimension of life that they must be included among core academic subjects” (par. 2) while the instrumental argument says that “the arts are connected to a wide range of benefits to students beyond their learning in the arts — academic achievement, positive social development, habits of mind, and inclinations of thought” (par. 4). The instrumental argument seems to hold a great deal of weight and is mentioned often in writings that I have encountered on the subject. As a reason for including more arts in the curriculum, the instrumental approach seems to be exactly what sceptics want to hear. And, there are definitely sceptics in this area. Rabin points out that “there is disagreement among the experts” (par. 11) on whether or not it is actually arts that are responsible for the improvements that some educators and researchers see in students, or if a direct link between the two can even be accurately measured.

However, I get the feeling, from my observations and from my readings, that arts-based schools are actually leaning more to the essentialist point of view. My own perception is that regular schools may decide to have more arts added in to the curriculum, whereas the arts-based schools are using arts as the base for the school and the curriculum; they’re making art part of the whole school.

Another important part of arts integration seems to be the focus on projects, or “The Project Approach” (18) as Nancy Lee Cecil and Phyllis Lauritzen call it. Using projects in the classroom means “active inquiry, discovery learning, and problem solving in a meaningful context” (18). Many of the activities and methods that I have read about involve project-based learning and my observations from the short practicum also support that this is a regular part of arts-based teaching. Projects move the focus of learning from the teacher to the student, incorporate different learning styles and types of intelligence, and often encourage students to work collaboratively with their peers, with other educators and community members.

Assessment is a related area of the arts curriculum that I was interested to look into. The main idea that came from my research was that arts-based learning does use some methods of assessment that are different from the more well known approaches, but that these are “meant to complement traditional means of scoring and assessing, not replace them” (Burnaford et al., 89). It is readily acknowledged that assessment of the arts cannot be completed with only paper and pencil tests, but must also involve reflection on process and performance or exhibition. It also seems a given that students involved in arts-based learning will also have to complete tests, often standardised tests, that indicate their level of achievement in the academic areas. Without these tests it would impossible to know that arts-based curriculum is in fact helping students to be better at things like math and reading.

Implications

If English is, as David Stevens writes, a “fundamentally arts-based discipline” (viii), then there should be little difficulty teaching English with an arts focus. The research I’ve done, and further reflection on my own observations have shown me that an arts-based approach to teaching English is very different from how I was taught in high school, but is not all that different from the methods and ideas that have been presented and discussed during the past two terms of the Education program. In that sense, I feel less nervous about teaching in the arts rich environment of my practicum school – after all, I am much closer in time to my education at UBC than I am to my lessons in high school.

I have also created a sort of checklist or set of reminders for myself that I hope to use during the long practicum to keep myself on track in terms of what and how I’m teaching. These are things that struck a chord with me during my research, or that seemed to be important messages for teaching and learning, and I would like to keep them in mind especially while I’m planning.

1. Make use of collaboration among students for learning and assessment.
2. Use reflection during and after the artistic process.
3. Look to the community for resources. (including the school community)
4. Draw on what the students already know/can do. In terms of arts it may help with suiting the lessons to learning styles to investigate what areas of art the students study (what are their major and minor arts?).
5. Ask questions. Encourage students to ask questions. Base projects on inquiry.
6. Plan from a point of combined perspective of arts and content. The desired end result is not just a high test score achieved by doing some art and then taking a test.
7. Try new things, but don’t implement activities unless they align with objectives. Arts-based learning isn’t just about doing art.
8. Remember that assessment (and self-evaluation) should be ongoing during the process of learning as well as a part of the final product.
9. ”Emotion drives attention, which drives learning and memory” (Sylwester, quoted in Gamwell, pg. 4) -maybe try for the positive emotions as much as possible!

Essentially, I would like to use the things I’ve learned, even if it’s just by keeping them in mind while planning and teaching, during the long practicum. That way I can evaluate which were helpful, which might have direct relevance to the classroom and which ones I would want to take with me as part of my regular teaching practice in the future. I will also be interested to observe which parts of the arts-based curriculum seem like they could be utilised in a non-arts school – the methods, the activities, the philosophy, or some combination. By keeping my own reflective journal I will be able to make these observations and answer some other questions that have come up during my research. For example, on which side of the essentialist vs. instrumental argument do I fall? By the end of the practicum I hope to have used some of the theoretical ideas I have explored in this research in a more concrete and hands-on way.

Works Cited

Burnaford, Gail, Arnold Aprill, and Cynthia Weiss, eds. Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning.Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum & Assocciates, 2001. Print.

Cecil, Nancy Lee, and Phyllis Lauritzen. Literacy and the Arts for the Integrated Classroom. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1994. Print.

 Gamwell, Peter. “Intermediate Students’ Experiences with an Arts-Based Unit: An Action Research.” Canadian Journal of Education. 28.3 (2005): 359-383. Web.

 Rabin, Nick. “A New Compendium of Research.” GIA Reader 13.3 (2002). Web.

 Stevens, David. The art of teaching secondary English: innovative and creative approaches. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004. Web.

Bibliography

Barnes, Natalie Selden. “Hands-on Writing: An Alternative Approach to Understanding Art.” Art education 62.3 (2009): 40-46. Web.

 Cornett, Claudia E. “Center Stage: Arts-Based Read-Alouds.” The Reading Teacher. 60.3 (2006): 234-240. Web.

 Dakin, Mary Ellen. Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2009. Print.

 Hetland, Lois and Ellen Winner. “The Arts and Academic Achievement: What the Evidence Shows.” Arts Education Policy Review. 102.5 (2001): 3-6. Web.

 Vaughn, T., Harris, J., & Caldwell, B.J. “Bridging the Gap in School Achievement Through the Arts.” Educational Transformations Pty Ltd. (2011) Web.

 Whitin, Phyllis. Sketching Stories, Stretching Minds: responding visually to literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. Print.