Arts Unite

Fewer and fewer people are involved in classical music today. At the same time, contemporary composers are exploring the vast range of techniques available to them. Including contemporary music in education can help to make a generation of people informed about the arts, willing and able to understand and support the future of music. But what can contemporary music do for a curriculum?

TAEA Dallas -Artistic Foundations

This weekend will be the Texas Art Education Association's annual conference for visual art educators. One of the calls of leaders in the arts is to do research that is important to the field and to present it. Being a student I have not felt the need to step outside of my comfort zone and present up until now.

I participated in a class held in Second Life by Dr. B. Stephen Carpenter, II who is at Texas A&M in Fall 2008. He asked our class to participate in the creation of the presentation for this conference entitled "Real World Reflections on Virtual World Instruction: An Autobiographical Discussion About Distance Education, On-Line Learning, and Visual Culture." Each of the presenters will give a narrative about our experiences in the class and how it has impacted our thinking and research.

I will not give my complete narrative of experiences or the complete impact on my thinking and research because this would be too lengthy for a blog post. But I will pause to say that the experience has profoundly changed my educational experience. As an educator who focuses on the development of middle school curriculum I now believe firmly that students would benefit from a virtual world environment, and I will briefly lay out a few of the components I think are benefits to virtual world instruction to the middle school curriculum. These benefits can be applied to any discipline.

Why Students Need a Virtual Classroom
While art educators are focusing on exercises intended to help students achieve higher level thinking skills centered on the canon, students are examining television, movies, music, fashion, advertisements, video games, and technology (Tavin, 2003). Virtual world technologies are excellent examples of not only how visual culture and technology can be utilized to provide an environment where student learning and experiences can transcend a single discipline, but also that learning can be meaningful, integrated, and relevant! I propose that it is possible to create a virtual learning environment for students, and note that examples of such environments already exist in virtual worlds such as Second Life*.

*disclaimer -While Second Life is presently being used for the creation of virtual learning environments at the higher education level it is not currently "safe" for instructional use at the lower levels

Time/Place Factor
Using Second Life virtual classrooms, institutes of higher education have been able to link students in a variety of locations and enhance learning. Students are not limited to interfacing with local peers; a new cultural interface built from the whole world is opened to them. For example, your Spanish-speaking students in Florida can attend class with students in Mexico City.

Student Identity
Students with extreme social difficulties also have a more difficult time achieving higher level thinking skills. In education we often attribute this to concepts like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where, unless the students’ emotional needs are being met, the attainment of self actualization is impossible. Some students will find a freedom that did not exist in the real world. Avatar creation allows for crafting an alternate, if only temporary, identity that may not have a physical disability or other issuer they must deal with in the real world. Avatars can have “dream” hair and clothes, “talk” in any way the student sees fit, and even change gender. For some students this may be an educational benefit allowing them to become who they have been unable to become in real life, and after the initial avatar is designed, focus shifts off of identity and is, perhaps for the first time, on learning.

Field Trips
Perhaps the most exciting possibilities of virtual worlds lie in experiential qualities. Students are no longer limited to experiences in their own cities or things that they can afford to visit, thanks to “virtual field trips.”
Historically significant places where you can take your students are already in Second Life. For example, there is a reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre where visitors can watch a production of a Shakespeare play preformed by costumed avatars. There are virtual reproductions of the Alamo, the Vietnam Memorial, the Temple of Isis, and even ancient Rome. Students can visit all of these places from their homes or classrooms and experience the associated history, art, literature, and political science curriculum in a new way. The technology already exists; if you can dream it and have the resources, it can be created!

Check out this wiki for more information about Second Life in education.

References:
Tavin, K. (2003). Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Visual Culture. Studies in Art Education, 44(3). 197-213.

We don't yet have a regular contributor for Theater Thursday, so in the meantime we will take a look at the work of some others in the field of theater education.
Our first post will be into the private sector looking at the Young Actors' Theatre Camp, which is a week-long overnight theatre training camp in San Francisco. Students are 8 - 18 years of age, and all the teachers are working professionals from Los Angeles and New York who work in Film, Television and on Broadway, the focus is on the development of career skills in theater and acting for the students.
This video shows the day in the life of a camper:



This video shows the "product" of the camp experience



What are your thoughts?

Since this is my first time posting I will introduce myself. I am Jennifer Hartman. I have a BFA in Studio Art, my emphasis was painting and digital media. After earning my degree I chose an alternative certification program and I am certified to teach Visual Art K-12. I taught middle school art for 3 years before beginning work on my Masters degree in Art Education with my research area in curriculum integration.

For our Visual Arts Wednesday post today I thought I would share some lesson planning resources with you for creating integrated units for your students. For myself I felt totally comfortable integrating some disciplines into my lesson plans (like math and science) because they were subjects that I knew a lot about. But there were other areas (like music and theater) that I avoided entirely, or I integrated on a very surface level because I did not have a deep understanding of the subject matter myself. These resources are places where you can go and find lesson plan ideas from the different arts and bring those ideas back and incorporate them into the visual arts classroom.

I hope you find them useful!

General Arts Integration:

ArtsEdge - the National Arts and Education Network

ArtsWork

AEP - Arts Education Partnership

Music Integration:

MENC: The National Association for Music Education

Play Me a Picture -Integrating Music and Art

Theater Integration:

EdTA - Educational Theater Association

Dance Integration:

NDA - National Dance Association

Visual Arts Integration:

The Getty

NAEA - National Art Education Association

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments, it will help me decide on topics for future posts!

We don't yet have a regular contributor for Dance Tuesday, so in the meantime we will take a look at the work of some others in the field of dance education.
In this video ballet graduate student Justine Sheedy teaches world dances to elementary students. Arts, crafts, and cultural lessons are taught alongside choreography.

Watch the video and see what you think about the integration of the arts into the first grade classroom.



What are your thoughts?

Hello! This is my first time on the blog. Let me tell you a little about my background: I am currently working on my Masters' degree in music theory, I play cello and piano, I also compose and am interested in including contemporary classical music in music education. I currently teach private pre-school music and piano lessons.