Of Paint and Pantomime

A Principal's Point of View—from Creative Teachers, Creative Students: Arts-Infused Learning Experiences for Early Childhood Education, Hofstra University

The Lost Curriculum

As a result of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the pressure of high-stakes testing is intensifying in schools, stifling the already marginalized field of arts education. A survey funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York found that of all the content areas included in the survey, the arts appear to be at greatest risk, especially in schools that serve high percentages of minority students (National Art Education Association, 2004). The Council of Chief State School Officers has referred to those subjects that schools are not required to test—such as art, foreign languages, humanities, and social studies—as the lost curriculum (Chapman, 2005).

In an effort to bolster the arts in public schools, Hofstra University supported a two-year professional development program in three high-needs Long Island, New York, school districts—Roosevelt, Westbury, and Uniondale—as well as in the Diane Lindner-Goldberg Child Care Institute on the Hofstra campus in Hempstead, New York. These suburban districts are considered high-needs because 50 percent or more of students receive free or reduced-price lunch. Students represent diverse populations: One district is primarily African American; others include high numbers of Latino students and new immigrant groups.

As part of the grant, specialists guided early childhood teachers in artistic development in four areas: the visual arts, drama, dance, and music. They also suggested specific methods for integrating the arts into the content areas to help teachers meet their academic objectives in new and creative ways. The grant provided funds for the four specialist instructors, curriculum materials, art supplies, musical instruments, and production of a culminating DVD.

Workshops and In-Class Coaching

The focus of the grant was the professional development of early childhood teachers through workshops for teachers and in-class coaching sessions. In the workshops, teachers assumed a dual existence: They learned to think like teachers of the arts and, as proxies for their students, they experienced learning as a child does. They reveled in the joy of creating a piece of art, of organizing their thoughts and feelings in a way that successfully communicated and demonstrated their new-found knowledge. They took the risks associated with encountering a blank canvas or a lump of clay or with moving, singing, and speaking in front of their peers.

The dual role as both teacher and student helped the teachers to focus on a basic challenge: how to connect abstract ideas to a student's experience. For example, in a discussion of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, teachers asked students, "Have you or your friends ever cooperated to outwit a bully? What did it look and feel like?" Students explored the characters' emotions and explained why they did or didn't empathize with the characters.

In coaching sessions, the specialist first clarified the activity for both the teacher and students through demonstration. The specialist modeled the creative process, as well as the problem-solving skills and perseverance required to create art (Lazaroff, 2001). Subsequent in-class coaching sessions involved a more collaborative approach that encouraged the teacher to direct the arts activity.

Spatial Reasoning and the Visual Arts

The philosopher Susanne Langer (1924/1971) maintains that visual forms of thinking are more effective for certain kinds of expression because some ideas are too subtle for speech. For children who are early language or second-language learners, this subtlety makes the visual arts a brilliant medium for conveying ideas.

As teachers developed fluency in painting, collage, and sculpture in the visual arts workshops, they learned many approaches to help students master mathematical or spatial concepts. As teachers sculpted, for example, they demonstrated their understanding of height, depth, and width as well as their knowledge of balance, angle, and intersection. Working with clay, they learned about mass, shape, and structure. They also created collages, which reinforced learning about negative space, patterns, measurement, fractions, and numeration.

The teachers studied Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences—focusing on spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and mathematical intelligences—and children's perceptual stages of development (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1987). They explored the underlying principles of art materials, design, composition, and color and examined prints from diverse cultures to explore how art reveals history and the values and rituals of culture. Teachers developed ways to question students about their art, stimulating them to think more deeply about their topic.

For example, instead of asking students to simply describe their creation, be it a sculpture, a dance, or a dramatic performance, teachers asked questions like, How does your sculpture express the three dimensions? How would you describe the angles you've created at the intersections? How does your dance reveal the metamorphosis in a butterfly's life cycle?

Visual Arts: Workshop for Teachers—from Creative Teachers, Creative Students: Arts-Infused Learning Experiences for Early Childhood Education, Hofstra University

Literacy and Drama

During the drama workshops, the teachers developed a sense of community as they engaged in dramatic enactments. The workshops targeted three key areas: language development, problem solving, and social/emotional development.

Drawing on a large body of research that demonstrates the impact that drama in the classroom has on literacy (Ackroyd & Boulton, 2001; McCaslin, 2004), the workshops focused on the interrelated strands of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The instructor guided the teachers in how to use children's dramatization of stories, particularly traditional fables, as a means to understand characterization and thematic development.

A central irony of drama is that stories deal with characters in conflict, and yet children in a play must work together to convey ideas and problem solve. We explored how characters in stories solve problems: Why can't the troll achieve his objective of gobbling up a goat? How do the three little pigs work together to defeat the wolf?

As with the other art forms, the teachers learned by creating and dramatizing. For example, the teachers participated in the ancient art of shadow theater, which integrates drama (enacting the story), art (making the shadow puppets), music (in this case, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring), and movement (moving the puppets). Later on, in the classroom, students created their own shadow play. After engaging in a dramatic enactment, a boy remarked, "We get to think like the people in the story." Another student added, "People get to watch us be the story."

Drama: Workshop for Teachers—from Creative Teachers, Creative Students: Arts-Infused Learning Experiences for Early Childhood Education, Hofstra University

Solving Problems Through Dance

Howard Gardner (1983) states that movement can be a form of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. The goal of the dance workshops was not to show teachers how to teach specific dance steps, but rather to encourage them to create problems that students could solve with their bodies. For example, teachers asked students to make a symmetrical shape with a partner. By integrating movement in other curriculum areas, teachers learned how to make learning concrete, physical, and active.

The basic components of dance—pattern, form, shape, time, space, energy, and relationship—are pivotal concepts in many curricular areas (Fowler, 1978). Creating dances alone and in groups, the teachers discovered ways to use movement to dance a story or an idea. They explored ways that young children might use dance in various content areas.

For example, in reading and writing instruction, students can assume the shapes of letters; create movements to illustrate long and short vowel sounds, syllabication, and rhyming; and interpret stories through dance. In the mathematics class, students can joyously explore shapes, dimensions, and sequencing with and without music. The teachers learned how to teach number and pattern sequences through movement during drumbeats, isolating and responding with different body parts. They also explored kinesthetic ways to teach science concepts. Through movement, students illustrated the rotation of the planets around the sun and the metamorphosis of the butterfly.

Dance: In-Class Coaching—from Creative Teachers, Creative Students: Arts-Infused Learning Experiences for Early Childhood Education, Hofstra University

The Generative Power of Music

In the music workshops, the teachers learned ways to help students musically engage with their voices, their bodies, and musical instruments. They explored such musical concepts as rhythm, tempo, dynamics, style, range inflection, and pitch and developed these concepts through improvised singing, chanting, stories, and games. The teachers experimented with vocal range and songs by telling stories through the representative sounds of characters and events. They created music with their voices and with instruments. Music in the workshops was not about teachers directing songs or instrumentation, but about stimulating students to create their own music. Improvisations like these provide opportunities for students to express the musical grammar of their culture.

As the teachers turned from the voice to the body as the focus of musical engagement, they noted that children easily grasp mathematical ideas, such as counting and sequencing, through music. The teachers studied various musical recordings with a clearly distinguished formal structure, highlighting pattern and repetition. They wove songs, movement, and instrument playing into reading and writing and engaged in several strategies for multidisciplinary teaching—such as having students use their bodies to represent words and punctuation and then order themselves into sentences. Teachers familiarized themselves with an extensive selection of children's literature and discovered stories—such as Van Laan's Possum Come A-Knockin' (Knopf, 1990) and Arlen's Somewhere Over the Rainbow (Harper Collins, 2002)—that emphasize the power of sound and offer wonderful reading opportunities.

Introducing music into the classroom helped humanize the day and created a joyful atmosphere in which students connected sound to emotional expression. For example, in one class students simulated plant growth by moving their bodies to music: Slowly and tentatively they "grew" from tiny seed to full-fledged plant.

Music: Coaching—from Creative Teachers, Creative Students: Arts-Infused Learning Experiences for Early Childhood Education, Hofstra University

Blooming with the Arts

The rigidity of many current school curriculums, with their focus on teaching to the test, often discourages these kinds of engagement with materials. Several teachers who participated in the arts-integration program were in schools that required them to teach fully scripted programs. The teachers explained that integrating the arts into their classrooms freed them to explore creative ideas with their students.

Although addressing students with special needs was not a stated goal of the grant, teaching with the arts notably engaged some of these children. According to her teacher, a 1st grader challenged by cerebral palsy "opened up like a rose." Moreover, the English as a Second Language teacher noted the positive effects that the nonverbal and verbal dramatic exercises had on her kindergarten students. "The students owned the stories they acted," she said.

Administrators overseeing early childhood programs are often more flexible in encouraging such creative and expressive teaching approaches than are administrators in upper grades. The school principals involved, although eager to see that their teachers met their testing goals, were supportive of the arts integration.

Keeping the Arts Alive

As university educators, we need to maintain a close alliance with public schools to support teachers in furthering both artistic development and arts-infused curriculums at a time when schools are allocating resources elsewhere for testing. The Hofstra program has enabled university faculty to support the arts, particularly in contexts where the arts are most vulnerable to disappearance—in high-needs school districts. In today's education environment, the survival of the arts depends on such efforts.

References

Ackroyd, J., & Boulton, J. (2001). Drama lessons for five to eleven-year-olds. London: David Fulton Publishers.

Chapman, L. (2005). Status of elementary art education: 1997–2004. Studies in Art Education, 46(2), 118–137.

Fowler, C. (1978). Dance as education. Washington, DC: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Langer, S. (1924/1971). Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lazaroff, E. M. (2001). Performance and motivation in dance education. Arts Education Policy Review, 103(2).

Lowenfeld, V., & Brittain, W. L. (1987). Creative and mental growth (8th ed.). New York: MacMillan Publishing Company.

McCaslin, N. (2004). Creative dance in the classroom. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

National Art Education Association. (2004). NAEA News, 46(3), 1.