Artful Teaching

Both a practitioner’s guide and a school reform model, the new edition of this popular book shares exemplary arts-integration practices across the K–8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, each chapter carefully describes how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn to assist teachers in developing their own philosophy and practice. This updated second edition features scholarship and art at the forefront of contemporary practice and addresses social justice issues such as racial, climate, and economic justice. Chapter authors provide concrete ideas along with lively examples of public school teachers integrating visual arts, music, drama, and dance with subject matter that includes English, social studies, science, and mathematics. The book’s narrative approach makes arts integration accessible and understandable to novice and experts alike. Readers of this new edition will come away with a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts every day, in every school, to reach every child.

Book Features:

• Explains how arts integration across the K–8 curriculum contributes to student learning.
• Features examples of how integrated arts education functions in classrooms when it is done well.
• Introduces historical and contemporary artists whose work is transdisciplinary.
• Brings together and speaks to diverse stakeholders, including classroom teachers, teaching artists, school administrators, and teacher educators.
• Explores intensive teacher-education and principal-training programs now underway in several higher education institutions.

David M. Donahue is a professor of education at the University of San Francisco. Jennifer B. Stuart is an artist and educator who has worked for over 30 years developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary curriculum.

Praise for the First Edition:

“Provides a thorough guide to integrating art into other disciplinary subjects...recommended.”

—SchoolArts

“Recommended.”

—Choice

“It is a privilege to reread these chapters and to look back on their wisdom from the vantage point of our present time. More than a decade later, there is still so much relevance and wisdom in the chapters of Artful Teaching. This book is a resource for teachers in the field today and those who are preparing to enter the field. It is the spirit of this publication, a spirit that urges us to share practice and connect with each other, that is the real hope for all of us.”
—From the Foreword by Louise Music, arts educator

“Artful Teaching’s second edition updates a friendly cyclone that swept many educators from the dreary slog of ‘doing school’ into the generative and rigorous act of artistic research. Current, pertinent examples and sage advice from an array of arts-integration protagonists scaffold learning experiences that are deep, contextual, connected, and optimistic. This pedagogy will cultivate imagination and hope in students and equip them to find and solve complex problems in their ever-challenging worlds.”
—Anne Thulson, art education professor, Metropolitan State University of Denver

“The second edition of Artful Teaching comes at just the right time. Although so much has occurred in the world since the first edition, the articles remain vital and useful to our work as arts educators. In many ways and given the situation today, they are even more important. Rereading these, I am reminded how germane this research is and how necessary it is for new teachers. I kept thinking as I read, ‘Whoa, this is great, how did I forget about it? I need to use it in class with preservice teaching students.’ I am pleased that Artful Teaching is coming out in a second edition so that a new generation can have it as a resource.”
—Eric Engdahl, professor and chair, Department of Teacher Education, Cal State East Bay

Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition Louise Music  v

Introduction: Questions to Ask Yourself About Arts Integration: What to Ask Before You Start David M. Donahue and Jennifer B. Stuart (with Todd Elkin and Arzu Mistry)  1

PART I: ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ARTS AND INTEGRATION

1.  What Is Art?  23
Laurie Polster

2.  How Does Art Connect to Social Justice?  36
David M. Donahue, Jennifer B. Stuart, Todd Elkin, and Arzu Mistry

PART II: ART FOR EVERY CHILD

3.  Creating Alliances for Arts Learning and Arts Integration  55
Louise Music

4.  Seeing Is Believing: Making Our Learning Through the Arts Visible  68
Violet Harlo

PART III: ART IN EVERY SCHOOL

5.  Leadership for and in the Arts  83
Lynda Tredway and Rebecca Wheat

6.  Arts Integration: One School, One Step at a Time  91
Debra Koppman

7.  Musical People, a Musical School  102
Sarah Willner

PART IV: ART EVERY DAY

8.  Visual Prompts in Writing Instruction: Working with Multilingual Middle Schoolers  119
Dafney Blanca Dabach

9.  Creativity as Classroom Management: Using Drama and Hip-Hop  128
Evan Hastings

10.  Keeping Reading and Writing Personal and Powerful: Bringing Poetry and Bookmaking Together  139
Cathleen Micheaels

11.  Learning and Teaching Dance in the Elementary Classroom  157
Patty Yancey

12.  Teaching Artists—A Vital Link Toward a Thriving Ecosystem  166
Ann Wettrich

Afterword Lois Hetland  177

About the Editors and Contributors  187

Index  191