Art as a Way of Learning's Journey to ArtsIN: An Arts Integration and Infusion Framework

• In Event: 18.045 - Arts-Integrated Early Childhood Education: Model, Implementation, Impact, and Future

Abstract

This presentation describes a theoretical framework for learning through the arts -- ArtsIN: Arts INtegration and INfusion (Hartle, Pinciotti, & Gorton, 2014). ArtsIN builds on the practices and research conducted through Art as a Way of Learning® (AWL; Pinciotti, Berry, Sterman, & Gorton, 2001). AWL’s intensive professional development for integrating the arts across the curricular domains culminated in robust and transformative experiences due to the deeply collaborative professional preparation of teachers and artists. AWL’s successes grew in tandem with the growing body of research on the impact of arts-infused/-integrated curricula for building the learning and motivational capacities of diverse students (Arts Education Partnership, 2013; Bresler, 2007; Rabkin & Redmond, 2004; Ruppert, 2009).

Presenters will explain why and how ArtsIN enriches and enhances the AWL model through a deeper probe into contemporary research and theory in anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy to provide a unique view of the arts as integral to our humanness and as a universal language that communicates across cultures and time. The results of ArtsIN’s extended exploration necessitated a review and revisiting of AWL’s original model, yielding four organizing principles or key concepts of the ArtsIN framework. This framework supports how the arts:
are universal (culturally, historically),
are embodied (connections of body, brain, & mind),
are language (multi-literacies to understand & communicate), and
advance development (critical & creative thinking).

Examples presented will illustrate how the ArtsIN framework incorporates both arts-infused learning essential for process and skill development in all visual, musical, digital, and performing arts forms and arts-integrated aesthetic learning experiences to generate rich, meaningful connections to other disciplines in the classroom (Aprill, 2010). Dissanayake’s (2007) five aesthetic operations found in the natural environment – repetition, formalization, dynamic variation, exaggeration, surprise -- are harnessed within ArtsIN as a way of seeing, valuing, and communicating knowledge and understanding of and feelings about the world, others, self, and environment. Neuroscientists suggest that these aesthetic capacities are probably hard-wired into humans’ central nervous system and are designed to expand the complexity we encounter and process, and are essential for individual and cultural development (Ramachandran, 2011).

Teachers’ transformation of through their own critical pedagogy and their students’ learning via the ArtsIN framework is predicated on two driving questions. How can teachers capitalize on what the body and brain knows naturally? How can teachers enhance their personal awareness and aesthetic intentionality in their teaching? These questions are addressed through the essential aspects of the ArtsIN framework. This presentation will demonstrate how teachers in ArtsIN classrooms fluidly and dynamically move within five roles -- artist, researcher, designer, co-constructor, and advocate -- to meet students’ learning needs. ArtsIN classrooms also place high priority on student and teacher development of creative, constructive, and collaborative learning processes through connections and collaborations with diverse cultural contexts, including families, artists, and communities.

Author

• Lynn C Hartle, The Pennsylvania State University - Brandywine