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Running head: COLLABORATIVE ARTS INTEGRATION

Collaborative Arts Integration Planning for Powerful Lessons

Morgan Bamberger

Lebanon Valley College

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Teaching is an evolving career that goes through many different trends and new research

comes out all of the time to support new strategies or claims for what the best practices are for

our students. Through our undergraduate courses, we have been taught the importance of

integrating the arts into our core teaching, so it did not surprise me the amount of articles out

there that support the use of arts integration. Arts integration is “an approach to teaching in

which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. Students engage in

a creative process which connects an art form and another subject area and meets evolving

objectives in both” according to the Kennedy Center (Carpenter and Gandara, 2018). I chose to

focus on this topic because it is important to find techniques that are proven to be successful in

order to prepare for my teaching career and arts integration seems to be something that has

improved learning for elementary students across several different studies.

I chose a 2018 article called “Collaborative Arts Integration Planning for Powerful

Lessons” which came from an assistant professor of Art Education at Brigham Young University

and a fourth grade generalist teacher. This article addresses a few misconceptions about arts

integration and explains some reasons they feel arts integration is not taking a larger role in

elementary schools. The article states that there is a disconnect between what is learned in the

college setting and what is applied in the classroom. Teachers trained in early childhood

education feel uncomfortable and not sure where to start. On the other hand, professors who have

the education in visual arts don’t have the background in lesson planning and grade specific

materials. The major misconception stated is that teachers feel arts integration to be a waste of

time when a student is struggling. In reality, holding a student’s attention and using motivating,

engaging lessons helps them develop a deeper understanding of the material in front of them.
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They are partaking in hands-on, collaborative, and creative learning that builds a deeper

understanding in the core material.

The project that these two educators worked on focused on the collaboration between the

elementary teacher and college arts professor, but could easily be similarly implemented with an

elementary teacher and the art/music teacher at the school. Collaboration is important amongst

colleagues, especially colleagues with different focuses. Everyone in the school has the common

interest of providing the best practices for the students, so putting everyone’s heads together to

figure out the best way students learn is what we should be doing. I think that educators in the

school should collaborate more often to make lessons more engaging and motivating for the

students.

At my student teaching placement, there was a STEM class where the third, fourth, and

fifth grade students would get to go to as a related arts course. The first and second grade

students were not able to use the STEM class as a related arts course so the STEM teacher would

schedule collaboration and push-in times in their classes. I liked this form of collaboration

because it got the students excited, had them work on important skills like problem solving and

teamwork, and had relevance to their other subjects. I think that it would be very beneficial to

work with the related arts teachers to use each other’s strengths to build integrated lessons that

tie directly into the content in class. A lot of the time when a related arts teacher comes in, they

teach a lesson that is not tied to the content the students have been learning and while it is a good

tool, it may be viewed as wasting core content time. My vision is collaborating to work the arts

and music into the core content so that the students are receiving the learning standards and

objectives that they need but in a different, more attention grabbing way. The article states,

“together, we can utilize our strengths and experience to build integrated lessons that are exciting
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for students, that help them gain a deeper understanding of art and other subject areas, and that

allow them to express themselves in the process” (Carpenter and Gandara, 2018) which I think

sums up what I would want a portion of my instruction to consist of when I have my own

classroom.
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Carpenter, T., & Gandara, J. (2018). Making Connections: Collaborative Arts Integration

Planning for Powerful Lesson. Art Education, 71(4), 8-13.