Ensuring that students receive a well-rounded education can be daunting for overwhelmed elementary school teachers, who must cover a wide range of subjects while also preparing students for countless assessments. With the education emphasis moving toward math and reading instruction, other subjects are getting pushed aside, but in Ontario a group of teachers have found a way to teach exciting arts lessons across the curriculum.
Hilary Inwood, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education, worked with four elementary school teachers to integrate eco-art education into their curricula. Eco-art education merges traditional arts instruction with environmental education, teaching students new skills and helping them appreciate the importance of the natural environment.
Inwood, who has been researching eco-art education for about 12 years, notes that it is a relatively new field of study for educators. "I worked with four teachers here in Toronto, and they devised all sorts of creative and unique ways of bringing environmental education into their classrooms through art education," Inwood says.
Over the course of one year, Inwood asked the teachers to come up with around 9 lessons that integrated art across the curriculum that they could use for their classes; they ended up developing more than 50 lessons. These inspired ideas laid the groundwork for the lesson plans the teachers used throughout the school year.
Teachers got creative when thinking of how to integrate art and allowed students to take ownership of their learning. "In one school that I worked with, I watched students build a giant grapevine around part of the garden that was getting trampled," Inwood says. "I saw another class building an environmental art garden, which was really wonderful. … I learned that they can use plants as art materials."
Many of the eco-arts lessons are applied in classes such as science and math. Instead of writing science reports or graphing, students create a work of art. Inwood feels that this is a good way to make learning fun for the students.
"For many students, the arts—any of the arts, whether it's drama or dance or music—that's the fun part of learning," Inwood says. "When you bring that to a science class or a math class or environmental education, all of a sudden the positive feeling they have toward art education plays out in those other subjects as well."
Inwood hopes that teaching students about environmental issues will lead young people to think and act differently as they become more environmentally aware. "We need to touch people's hearts," Inwood says. "And if we can touch their hearts, then we're much more likely to cause behavioral change as well as attitudinal change."
