What Are We Doing? Questioning Learning Expectations of Undergraduate Arts-Integration Courses for Preservice Teachers

• In Event: Reimagining Arts Integration Course Content and Instruction: A/r/tography in Search of Equity and Belonging

Abstract

Despite numerous studies linking arts education with student success in K-12 schooling (e.g. Bowen and Kisidia, 2019; Huser et al., 2020), public schools rarely have the financial capacity or facilities to support K-12 dance, music, theatre, and visual arts education. Access to robust arts education is generally available only to students in the most well-funded school districts. Other districts offer limited numbers of arts courses in elementary, middle, and high schools, and some choose to address budget shortfalls by cutting certified arts educators from district payrolls.

In response to this lack of arts education access and to provide comprehensive preparation for the field, some elementary teacher education programs require preservice teachers (PSTs) to take an arts integration (AI) course. AI is commonly seen as a dynamic and engaging approach to instruction that bolsters student learning in disciplines like math, science, and English, while also ensuring that students are exposed to the arts. AI coursework makes an important contribution to PST’s professional preparation. However, there is little critical examination of the assumption that one AI course is sufficient to give PSTs the arts subject area(s) content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge needed to teach AI lessons in the field.

In this a/r/tographic vox autobiographia poetic inquiry, the author examines the space between the AI training her undergraduate students receive in a single required AI course and the years of postsecondary training she has in the arts that qualifies her to teach AI courses. This stanza is part of a poetic inquiry into her disquiet about the impact these courses for certified non-arts educators may have on K-12 arts education more broadly:

The arts enrich one’s life experience
But schools lack funds to give them to children
Integrate the arts for expedience!
Arts subject area content built in
To teacher prep: one semester will do
To teach art forms that took me years to learn
Teacher ed students’ arts knowledge varies
Fifteen weeks to give four art forms their due
Can they devise AI lessons in turn?
Is AI arts teachers’ adversary?

The poem continues for ten more stanzas with descriptions of the complexity of AI as compared to arts-enhanced and discipline-based arts education. The poet reflects on the quantity of arts subject area content knowledge required to fully integrate arts content with other school subject as compared to the smattering of arts content knowledge PSTs typically bring to AI courses. This study concludes by questioning how AI courses for non-arts educators might serve to deprofessionalize the work of certified arts educators and potentially diminish access to robust K-12 arts education across districts. This study is designed not to draw conclusions, but to enliven understandings of what AI is and how it is discussed in the field. It aims to inspire dialogue about achievable learning goals of AI coursework in teacher preparation programs for certified non-arts educators.

Author

• Karenanna Boyle Creps, Michigan State University