Schools save arts by making them a tool for core learning
.JPG "New Stanley student Ebelin Sagastume, 8, was assigned to make a journal about a book she had read. She livened up the journal with some artwork.")
Reading class looks like art class looks like reading class looks like art…
So goes the purposeful confusion at New Stanley Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan.
Same for math, science, social studies.
Eight-year-old Ebelin Sagastume was turning her journal into a picture book this week, swirling blue crayon strokes to color the oceans of the Earth she has drawn, with a moon in its orbit, and a lunar lander.
She’s writing, too. “Neil Armstrong.” “Buzz Aldrin.”
No atmosphere on the moon means no weather, she writes in Keri Landry’s second-grade classroom.
This is how schools are saving the arts.
It’s one of the driving themes as hundreds of school and community arts programmers, artists and their advocates gather in Kansas City this week for Young Audiences’ National Conference. Young Audiences is a 60-year-old nonprofit program that promotes use of the arts in learning.
Schools hit by budget strains — teachers and principals pressed to maximize core instruction — not only preserve art education, but make it a learning strategy.
“Art levels the playing field,” New Stanley principal Ryan Most said.
Children who might otherwise insulate themselves, especially in a school like New Stanley, where 63 percent of children are learning English as a second language, will reach out and create an image or try a dance, Most said.
“And the teacher sees it and knows what questions to ask,” he said. “And you draw their language out.”
Kindergartners in Marna Kerr’s art class go to work with pages of the picture book “Splat the Cat” up on the screen. They’re creating their own images of Splat — cutting up ears and whiskers and eyeballs to paste on the playful cat bodies they already made out of reckless inkblots.
Again and again, the core classroom teachers share lesson goals with teachers in art, music and physical education to help one another propel creative and language-rich students.
At New Stanley, the school also regularly brings in artists through Kansas City Young Audiences to share enlivening arts programs for their classrooms.
Principals and teachers with similar desires to bring arts experiences to their children are constantly challenged for funding and time, said Martin English, executive director of Kansas City Young Audiences, which is co-hosting the conference with the Wichita chapter.
Much of the work of artists, he said, “is sharing winning strategies to get into school buildings.”
Jane Chu, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and the former president and CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, is returning to Kansas City to join in the message.
“The arts teach us how to think creatively and give our brains license to search for color where others might see black and white, or to create music when others might stay silent,” Chu wrote in her Art Works Blog ahead of the conference.
“These are the qualities of leaders and visionaries,” she said.
Chu, who will be the keynote speaker on the second day of the conference, Friday, at the Kansas City Marriott Country Club Plaza, cited research that supports the arts as academic fuel, especially for economically and socially disadvantaged students.
Briana Linden, who will be part of a conference presentation by the Portland, Ore.-based Right Brain Initiative, expects to see and share startling ways that children can express themselves, like re-enacting science’s water cycle of precipitation and evaporation with their bodies.
Or taking the Declaration of Independence into a printmaking class, really examining the text, and then creating student self-portraits with questions in mind:
Am I represented? What would my rights be then and now?
“The arts are the most likely way children can explore their unique voices and ideas and tell their unique stories and grapple with things that are difficult for them,” Linden said.
“They learn there are different ways of thinking,” she said, “and the way I think is powerful.”
Technology is opening even more opportunities.
New Stanley students, now with one-to-one tablet computers in school, read texts, seek out pictures and draw their own with their fingers. They create their own books and posters and even shoot movies.
“Art can be interpreted in different ways,” fifth-grade teacher Mike Jordan said. “It makes it more personal. They create it (a book or a movie) and they share it.”
Eleven-year-old Layla Martinez has led in the writing of a script dramatizing her favorite scene in the book “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle.
The joy in the work is obvious as she and several classmates walk through their acting paces, reading from their copies of the script while another classmate films it with an iPad.
But Layla also sees how much she’s learned — visualizing the scene, mastering the punctuation of dialogue and writing her own story.
“The mistakes we make we try not to do them the next time,” she said. “This helps us be creative.”
Plus they have to gather up the confidence to try acting, she said. Then she says, as if still startled by the sound of it, “I’m the director.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 8:41 PM with the headline "Schools save arts by making them a tool for core learning."