This is the heart of what I do: think less like an educator and more like an artist, or in my case (as tutor), a producer and director. When I worked with project based learning (PBL), I realised that by placing art at the centre of any curriculum, it gives you a pedagogical power far greater than any other approach in education.
I currently pair up with a history department. When I first encounter a Humanities curriculum content, I don't think about the list of names or dates the students need to learn. With my background in professional theatre, I instinctively think about the stories that exist within the content. Approaching the content like an artist, I think about how -- in the real world with an ensemble -- would I bring this idea alive. How will I make it matter to my students? Using theatre in this way not only gives drama students stories to emotionally attach knowledge to, but turning these stories into theater productions provides students with a world in which their knowledge lives on after the life of their play.
To learn content is one thing, but to fuse it with a challenging form of art compels students to research it, know it, and be it enough to reinterpret and communicate it. It brings an enjoyable, engaging process with high outcomes. In a time where arts are being tossed aside in schools, I think it is time to realise that if we place art at the centre of our curriculum, the learning environment transforms classrooms into stages and galleries, facts into stories, and memories into legacies.
If you want to bring real, authentic art into your practice, here are three tips to get you started.
3 Tips to Infuse the Arts Into Your Core Curriculum
1. Approach Your Curriculum Like an Artist
In the first step to creating your curriculum, think less about ‘tick boxes’ or a list of things you want students to learn and more about realising the content. Just like a composer, director, or painter, focus on a way to make it come alive -- literally. Whether it's exploring Medieval Britain through tapestry, fusing the idea of black holes and spacetime with contemporary dance and movement, or expressing memoirs of World War II through cabaret and jive. The links are endless.
The only thing I recommend is don’t be general. Great artists don’t just put on a play or just mould a sculpture; I’d like to think they are inspired. If you make the artform concise and specific, you’ll get your students hungry for outstanding products. Look at what is already out there in the arts, recreate it, or better yet, inspire your own artform.
2. A Rich Process Means a Rich Product
Rather than seeing making your piece of art as a series of lesson plans or a concise rehearsal plan, see it as a project with a loose schedule. Start with a brief, then give your students transparent deadlines for the overall process and milestones that they need to reach to keep on track.
Immerse your students in the genre of the art they are making. Empower them with tools and skills like giving them project timelines to plan their own time, allowing specific management roles within their groups or setting specific harkness debates on targeted knowledge they need to know to work as independent artists; then use critique and authentic audiences to help them redraft their work. These are all ways of making sure the process is as rich as any profession in their field. This is important to ensure the students are engaged throughout the process and that they actually care about needing to know the content in order to make their challenging piece of art.
3. Cultivate Artist-Researchers and Treat the Content and Art as one Subject
It is important that you don’t split up the knowledge-based drama research with the creative devising. I believe all rehearsals, workshops, lectures, and researching should take place in one world. Only then do the students see their learning as a living thing rather than a series of words or numbers on a page.
Through making a piece of art, your students will probably discover that they don’t know enough to carry on or that their knowledge isn’t accurate. When questions arise in the making process, this doesn’t mean that they make up the answers, nor does it mean they need to wait till they're in their knowledge-based lesson to find out. Like all expert actors, artists, or writers, the practitioner needs to become an artist-researcher in their field. Whether it’s independent research or interventions lead by the teacher, what the students do not know points toward what they need to know.
Art Brings Learning to Life
In this political time, the arts are being ‘side-lined’ and it's becoming a shrinking area in education. The fusion of arts with core content is important because rather than humanities or science being knowledge on a page, which will be recited in an exam, art reflects life and makes knowledge, stories, and facts come alive. It brings color and life and interpretation to those things. You get engagement from students. You get students caring about what they're learning about. Because when art is involved, I believe people care about what they're doing. The arts add an emotional, creative response to core content. Transforming learning into making art not only engages students, it allows the content to live through them and provides a purpose to communicating knowledge to the world.
NB. This blog was originally written for Edutopia and has been adapted for this blog. The original can be found here: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/infuse-arts-into-core-curriculum-ahmet-ahmet?utm_campaign=node_author_alert&utm_source=edutopia&utm_medium=email
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