Michael Chilcutt

This was originally posted on May 29, 2020, while I was serving as the Assistant Superintendent for the Arts in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. One of the priorities of CMS Arts was to expand the effective use of arts integration throughout the school system. This post summarized some of the research that informed those efforts.

I am reposting this mildly updated version now as a starting point for my continued work in the area of arts integration.

I often take the power of art and artistic thinking for granted. I am so convinced of the potential for the arts to improve our lives that I sometimes forget that others, working from different frameworks for understanding the world, may not see what I see. For that reason, it is important to continually refine and communicate the case for integrating the arts into our lives and our schools.

I feel compelled to circle back and articulate the fundamental question: Why the arts?

Creating and making meaning are at the core of what it means to be human. Some of our earliest records of human history exist as centuries-old cave paintings, and we have evidence of musical instruments created more than 40,000 years ago—during a time when much of human effort was necessarily dedicated to survival. Humans would not have devoted precious time and energy to artistic activity if creating and making meaning were not somehow essential to the human experience.

Learning is also natural. At its most basic level, learning is an adaptation to a new stimulus, experience, or challenge. Over time, however, we have created systems that divide and compartmentalize knowledge to make it more manageable. This approach has created efficiencies, but sometimes at the expense of effectiveness. In the process, we have often lost touch with the natural, interconnected, and holistic nature of human learning and experience.

Using the arts in schools to build, transfer, and demonstrate knowledge across content areas may seem like a departure from the approaches prevalent in education today. Yet arts integration can add value by creating multiple—and more democratic—pathways to standards while tapping into students’ natural capacities and their need to create, make meaning, and express understanding.

Integrating the arts with other content areas adds value to students’ lives in several important ways.

Engagement

We have a crisis of engagement in our schools. Most students indicate that they want to be engaged in learning, yet many are not. The problem often increases as students progress through school, with high school students reporting some of the lowest levels of engagement.

Students are often most fully engaged across the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains while participating in the arts. This simultaneous engagement of mind, body, and emotion should be leveraged to maximize learning across all content areas.

Arts integration can create learning experiences organized around enduring Big Ideas and essential questions. When students use multiple forms of inquiry and expression to pursue important questions and demonstrate what they have learned, the result can be a more authentic and meaningful learning experience.

Access and Inclusion

We have a responsibility to meet the needs of all learners, yet we are not always successful in doing so. Persistent achievement gaps among many groups of students demonstrate the need for more flexible and responsive approaches to teaching and learning.

The arts can provide additional pathways for students to access, process, and demonstrate learning. Drawing on the principles of Universal Design for Learning, arts integration can engage learners through affective, recognition, and strategic networks. This approach leverages individual capacities while creating greater curricular flexibility and accessibility.

While this way of thinking can benefit all learners, it may be particularly valuable for students who need additional scaffolding to access the curriculum (Diaz & McKenna, 2017).

Equity and Access

Just as cognitive diversity presents challenges for traditional approaches to education, racial, cultural, and economic inequities continue to limit opportunities for many students.

Arts integration has the potential to support greater equity because the arts naturally allow for differentiation. Students can engage with ideas and demonstrate understanding in ways that build upon their individual strengths and needs (Harvey B. Gantt Center, 2019).

Access to arts and cultural experiences is not equally distributed. Integrating the arts across content areas can increase students’ access to artistic experiences during the school day while also strengthening their ability to engage with and appreciate arts and culture more broadly (Bowen, Kisida, & Rice University, H.E.R.C., 2019).

Research also suggests that arts experiences can help challenge stereotypes and other negative influences (de Silva & Villa-Boas, 2006), potentially contributing to more positive attitudes toward diversity and equity.

Critical Thinking

In a world increasingly characterized by misinformation, information overload, and competing perspectives, it can sometimes be difficult to determine what is true and trustworthy. Our young people need to become sophisticated critical thinkers.

Critical thinking is frequently identified by employers as an essential skill, but it is also necessary for thoughtful participation in life. Arts integration can support the development of critical thinking by extending the deep reflection that is common in the arts across other areas of learning.

It is difficult to do meaningful work in any discipline without reflection, yet schools do not always explicitly expect students to reflect on their thinking and learning (Hetland et al., 2013).

Arts-based practices such as critique can provide useful structures for this work. Protocols that ask students to describe, analyze, interpret, and judge, along with approaches such as Visual Thinking Strategies, can be used across content areas to help students critically assess both their own work and the work of others.

Creativity

Today’s world increasingly demands creativity. Too often, however, we mistake novelty for creativity. We sometimes apply other people’s solutions to our own problems—even when those solutions have not worked—and hope for different outcomes.

The late education leader Ken Robinson famously argued that creativity is as important as literacy. Like critical thinking, creativity is frequently identified as an essential skill for the workplace and for life.

While creativity can involve making tangible things, it is ultimately about developing new and meaningful responses to real problems. The design process, which is embedded in many arts disciplines, is now used across a wide range of industries and fields.

This process can include developing empathy, defining problems, collaborating, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and revising. Applying these processes across the curriculum can animate learning for students while helping them develop essential creative and problem-solving capacities.

The Whole Child

Too often, the accountability movement has reduced children to test scores and schools to testing centers, with standardized assessments becoming the metric that appears to matter most.

It is essential that we develop every child to their fullest potential. A genuine commitment to educating the whole child must include attention to students’ social and emotional development.

Integrating the arts across content areas can support this work by deeply engaging students and providing opportunities to access and develop the affective domain. Work from the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) identifies several ways the arts can contribute to social and emotional learning, including the development of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship skills.

The idea that the arts contribute to human wholeness is not new. John Dewey, for example, wrote about the power of art to revitalize the human capacity for creative life.

Teaching the whole child does not mean that academic achievement is unimportant. On the contrary, academic learning remains a critical component of a person’s ability to thrive in life.

Academic Achievement

Arts integration can also support academic achievement. During the past several decades, education scholars and researchers have argued that connecting arts strategies and activities with curriculum and instruction in other subjects—including mathematics, reading, science, and social studies—can improve student learning in those areas (Arts Education Partnership, 2004; Burnaford, Brown, Doherty, & McLaughlin, 2007; Deasy, 2002).

Studies have also indicated that arts integration may improve students’ long-term retention of content (Rinne, Gregory, Yarmolinskaya, & Hardiman, 2011).

Toward a More Integrated Education

The Latin root of the word integration is connected to the idea of making whole.

If we are serious about educating the whole child—every child—we must think more intentionally about connecting learning experiences across the content areas traditionally separated in schools.

The arts are universal to the human experience. They engage the mind, body, and emotions. They provide opportunities for creativity, reflection, expression, problem-solving, and meaning-making.

For these reasons, the arts offer a natural foundation for organizing a more integrated, connected, and holistic approach to education.

The question, then, may not simply be whether the arts belong in education. The more important question may be: How can we better leverage the arts as a fundamental part of how human beings learn, make meaning, and understand the world?

Bowen, D. H., Kisida, B., & Rice University, H. E. R. C. (HERC). (2019). Investigating Causal Effects of Arts Education Experiences: Experimental Evidence from Houston’s Arts Access Initiative. Research Report for the Houston Independent School District. Volume 7, Issue 4. In Houston Education Research Consortium. Houston Education Research Consortium.

Burnaford, G., Brown, S., Doherty, J., & McLaughlin, J. (2007). Arts Integration Frameworks, Research & Practice: A Literature Review. Washington DC: Arts Education Partnership.

Deasy, R. J. (2002). Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development. Washington DC: Arts Education Partnership.

Da Silva, J. L., & Villas Boas, M. A. (2006). Promoting intercultural education through art education. Intercultural Education, 17(1), 95.

Diaz, G., In McKenna, M., & Best, J. R. (2017). Preparing educators for arts integration: Placing creativity at the center of learning.

Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture. (2019). Arts Integration. Author

Hetland, L. (2013). Studio thinking 2: The real benefits of visual arts education.

Rinne, L., Gregory, E., Yarmolinskaya, J., & Hardiman, M. (2011). Why Arts Integration Improves Long-Term Retention of Content. Mind, Brain, and Education, 5, 89-96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01114.x

Rowe, Melissa, Laura Werber, Tessa Kaganoff, and Abby Robyn, Arts Education Partnerships: Lessons Learned from One School District’s Experience. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2004. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG222.html. Also available in print form.