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Teachers from across Alaska have spent the last two weeks in Juneau learning how to integrate art into their curriculums to help students learn better.
The program, “Basic Arts Institute — An Interdisciplinary Continuum: Storytelling from Ancient Traditions to Modern Tools,” has been going on for eight years here and is organized by the Alaska Arts Education Consortium.
The program encourages rural Alaskan teachers to participate, and more scholarships go to those teachers, but teachers from Juneau and Fairbanks also participate.
Thirty-three teachers, young and old, could be seen dancing around a classroom at University of Alaska Southeast, sometimes forming simple math equations, other times going through waltz moves. They also spent time learning about Eskimo dancing, stitching hackey sacks and beaded fur zipper pulls, picking and stripping devil’s club, creating digital stories and a variety of visual arts projects.
This is the first year the institute has offered digital arts — showing teachers how to create video projects for digital storytelling.
They also created lesson plans that integrated arts into what teachers already are doing.
The intensive two weeks left many of the teachers exhausted, but full of ideas on what to bring back to their classrooms.
Debbie Lorence, from Glennallen (Copper River School District), teaches mostly junior high math, but also language arts and social studies and a couple of high school courses.
She was interested in the program because a few teachers in her district did it last year, and she’s taught art recently.
“I taught high school art last year and was looking for more ideas on how to teach it well,” Lorence said. “I definitely will incorporate more movement in my class. I gained a lot of ideas for materials and techniques. I had good conversations with other teachers and what they do in their rooms.”
The institute also focuses on brain theory — recent research that shows how people learn differently and why it’s important to incorporate learning styles from both the left and right side of the brain.
Shelley Toon Hight, visual arts teacher at the institute, and Suzie Gaffney, dance/movement and brain theory teacher at the institute, said they reference several books on brain theory but particularly focus on Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind.”
Toon Hight said Pink explains the U.S. went from an agrarian society (farmers), to an industrial society, and is now a society of innovation.
“We’ve moved into an era of ideals and thought and innovation,” she explained. “We have to educate children who are innovators and the arts are a natural way to do that. He focuses on the senses and we focused on each of these six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.”
Gaffney explained the six senses Pink refers to: he believes everyone should be a designer — from designing art to designing businesses; story is “what we’re made of,” it’s our history — everyone’s ears perk up when someone is about to tell a story, but they tend to shut down when it becomes a lecture; empathy is putting yourself in the shoes of others; play, “how we truly learn,” or as Albert Einstein was quoted, “Games are the most elevated form of investigation,”; symphony “takes bits and pieces of the whole,” or, conversely takes the whole and morphs it into an ideal (taking what you know and applying it); meaning is what really makes us do things, enjoy things.
“We forget how much we learn when we’re playing,” Gaffney said.
Gaffney said Pink isn’t against linear teaching and thinking, but he believes education systems focus too heavily on them.
She said more research also has been done about the cerebellum, which has long been associated with movement. But recent research, she said, shows that movement connects cognitive skills as well.
“It’s how our brain records things,” she said.
Toon Hight believes it’s important to for teachers to integrate arts.
“We’re trying to help them develop creative thinkers,” she said. “It’s inquiry based learning so it all begins with a question. If you think of it compared to a scientific method. It’s experiential learning.”
She also referenced Howard Gardner’s book, “Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” which she explained as there are multiple ways people learn and how different people benefit more from specific styles of teaching.
“Typically our (school) systems set up for the logical, mathematical learning,” Toon Hight said. “There are ways of teaching that will appeal to a broader student base. It really is centered around the arts, that’s the key.”
Gaffney said they used the research as a template, but integrating movement was also important.
“It becomes a game,” she said. “It doesn’t mean they would never translate it to paper-pencil. Some of the learning, some of the teaching, some of the brain breaks are done with more physical activity. Integration of movement and cognitive skills, that helps cement it. It sends it to different parts of the brain.”
Lorence said she plans on incorporating movement in her classes and believes students will get more out of the classes.
“I think that people have an inborn need to create,” she said. “I think it’s important to have a chance to create. So do something everyday in your life to be creative. I’ve really enjoyed the movement things we’ve done because it’s not something I get to do at home on my own.”
Danny Hodge, from Tununak (Lower Kuskokwim School District), was interested in the program because of the cultural arts. What he enjoyed the most was the digital storytelling, being able to create a video that explained from his brother’s death in a plane crash, he changed from wanting to go into ministry to teaching.
“I already have plans to do some of the visual arts with my students,” Hodge said. “I’m really excited about using the movement to enhance what the students are already learning. Well, for language arts I’m going to have the students actually make journals with an embossing technique. That will be their journal for the year. With movement, we’ll actually create movements with the different processes like the water cycle.”
Marcella Wickland, also from Tununak, has been to all the arts-related in-services her district has offered and wanted to be able to integrate arts more.
“It gives student ownership and it helps with self discovery,” she said. “I think art can boost confidence levels and help students express what they can’t say. A lot of our students are so young or have been through traumatic experiences they can’t say through words. I think art can be that form of expression as well as motivation to be a positive influence.”
Mary Huntington, one of the institute’s cultural arts teachers, said it’s also important to integrate culture into the classroom.
“It brings a closer tie to how students, whether they recognize it or not, how students learn naturally,” she said. “It validates the importance of the cultures. That it also has its own rigor and own standards and there are lots of skills that it involves. They are not simply lesser skills.”
Betsy Brenneman, institute coordinator, said they also held a session in Kenai for the first year and had its third year in Fairbanks. Normally the institute also is held in Anchorage, but was not this year.
For more information on the Alaska Arts Education Consortium see: www.akartsed.org.
• Contact reporter Sarah Day at 523-2279 or at sarah.day@juneauempire.com.
Comments (93)
Add commentA dance depicting the salmon
A dance depicting the salmon life cycle? And we paid for that. How special!
How did you pay for it?
How did you pay for it?
Who do you think funds the
Who do you think funds the universitiey and public education? Is Rapunzel stashed somewhere creating gold to pay for these programs? Tax dollars. That is what funds these programs. My money, forcefully removed from me by Big Brother to go into the collective pot and be doled out to this and many other worthless programs.
It's an Alaskan consortium,
funded, as far as I can tell, by the State. KP, if you think you're paying State income tax, "forcefully removed" from you, I'd like to know what you're smoking. In fact, the State GIVES YOU money every year in the form of a PFD check. Do they have to "forcibly" put it in your bank account?
And where do you think the
And where do you think the state gets education funds from? Oh my, its the feds again, from taxes. Your teachers must have taught you economics through interpretive dance huh?
arts integrated curriculum has a proven track record
The article doesn't make clear where this program gets its funding, though I wouldn't be surprised to find the teachers ponied up to be part of it. Maybe their districts sponsor their attendance---If so, I view it as a good investment.
There is no greater or more important investment that we as a society can make than the education of our children. I'd rather broaden our teachers' collective toolboxes and increase their ability to communicate and identify with their students, than sit on the sidelines sniping and whining about what portion of my tax dollars go to fund public education---I'd much rather pay to educate a child than to drop a bomb on one!
"The intensive two weeks left
"The intensive two weeks left many of the teachers exhausted".
Laughable.
It's just amazing how we old folks even know how to read and write. No one was analyzing our brainwaves to figure out the best way to get the synapses functioning. What a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
What's with all this "collective" teaching - I thought teachers went to college to learn how to teach. They should put on their "thinking caps" and come up with ways on their very own to keep the students engaged and learning. Too much wringing of the hands in the faculty lounges.
This is another thing that fires me up - our busted, broken education system.
And jamison, how much is just enough for this wonderful "collective" education that doesn't seem to be working very well?
Employers used to pay for
Employers used to pay for this kind of training. However, now with the economy being what it is and budgets being tighter every year, and the fact that the employee can take those CE units with them if they decide to teach someplace else, more employers are requiring the employee to pay for their continuing education. Makes sense.
on the plus side, let's hope
on the plus side, let's hope a bunch of these visiting teachers left behind a sizable chunk of change during their visit.
And the money from their
And the money from their districts is mostly federal money. I'd rather educate kid than drop a bomb on one too, but I don't see interpretive dance as a means of teaching anything useful. We wonder why our kids are lagging so far behing even third world countries like India in education. Its becase while we are teaching them interpretive dance, they are focusing on math and science.
Calypso....spoken
....exactly like someone with ZERO experience trying to get 32 Third or 4th graders at widely varying levels of academic prowess and basic manners all focused on a single lesson.
Teaching reading, for example, is much more complex than people think, particularly for students who are having difficulty. It takes a fair amount of knowledge and lots of practice to learn to design a lesson that is engaging, reinforces previous learning, teaches a new concept in a variety of ways, and provides for enough practice to begin cementing that concept, in addition to making sure you are assessing correctly whether or not students have actually leaned the concept in question.
Anyone who questions how difficult teaching is, based solely on their experience 40 years ago as a student, should volunteer at a Title I school for half a day.
Well, swimmer, if teaching is
Well, swimmer, if teaching is so hard, then perhaps the "teacher" should find a new profession. I thought they went to college to learn how to be a teacher and then get certified to teach. Doesn't speak very well for the profession.
I'm so mad that these
I'm so mad that these teachers used their paychecks to pay for these classes. They should talk to us about how they should spend their wages!
Home School Parent
All this article is really about is classroom management. Teaching reading is easy as long as you stick to the basics and do not have to deal with other drugged up disobedient kids. Teachers have to deal with classroom management more than education. Separate all ill behaved disruptive students teach them to learn through songs. That way the teachers and students can spend more time on education.
Where did it say they used
Where did it say they used their paychecks? I missed that part of the article Droog. When I was at the university there were these types of things all summer long. Most of the teachers were getting paid, getting per diem etc. Maybe that has changed but probably not that much. They are university classes. Heavily subsidized by state and federal monies. Then the school district pays for it, out of mostly federal monies, and a lot of it is paid for with federal grants.
There's a misconception at work here...
Kpawsuh, the point of arts-integrated techniques is to increase the communication with students. This added dimension of interaction has been used with great success to teach everything from language skills, physical education, to, yes, basic concepts of math and science to young minds who would otherwise be disengaged in a sit-down-and-shut-up classroom.
It's the one-size-fits-all method, coupled with continued efforts to defund public education, that has resulted in the poorly prepared students and largely uneducated workforce we see today. It doesn't make sense to me to denigrate these efforts to reach students in what can only be described as a faltering and fractured system.
Exactly Thislittlepiggie. My
Exactly Thislittlepiggie. My grandmother was a schoolmarm in a one room schoolhouse. Every student, yes every student succeeded. If that meant she went to their house after school and helped them with their homework, thats what she did. It was a calling for her. She lived to teach others to be better. Its what she loved. It wasn't a 40 hr a week job for her. She never went on strike to demand better pay. She even did it for free for a while when the school district couldn't afford it. And the community supported her. She never wanted for anything. When she was donating her time, people propped off chickens or produce to make sure she didn't go hungry. There were also no unruly kids. She would flail the skin right off you, then the parents would to if you stepped out of line. Which they still did on occasion, because they were kids. All of her students were excellent readers, and understood at least rudimentary latin. They could do math in their heads, without using fingers, and learned through algebra. They had a solid understanding of physics, and could write very well. Not only could the write, but they had neat penmanship so you could actually read it!
But no, she didn't teach to their personal styles through interpretive dance or the atest psychobabble. I'm sure there were emotional scars, which is why they went on to be the greatest generation in the history of our country. If only she had done the salmon lifecycle dance with them...
jamison - maybe it's because
jamison - maybe it's because of our shared experience at JCCS - but I agree with you 100%!! We have seen first-hand how well it works to integrate arts into the classroom. My son is still reaping the benefits!
calypso...as usual
You missed the point. I'm not complaining about teaching being difficult, most teachers don't. I just get sick and tired of people like you, who clearly know absolutely nothing about teaching bashing teaching as if it is some super-easy, eating bon-bons profession. An idea that is apparently based on some antiquated view of 'little red school house' combined with almost as old memories of ourselves as students.
Teaching is always evolving, as the science of brain research and teaching gets better. It is amazing how complex it is to actually assess what it is you want to achieve, for example - are the directions clear, are you asking the right questions, in the correct way.....it's like writing a survey. If the questions are too leading, it's not valid. If they are too vague, it's not helpful. If they are worded incorrectly, people may not respond within the intended parameters, which is also not helpful. If you ask the wrong people, or not enough people, that also affects the results.
I've taught both children and adults in my career, in a variety of settings. I am continually taking classes to update and expand my knowledge of assessment, statistics, and teaching methods. Because teaching today is not the same as teaching 30 years ago.
I'm curious what you do for a living?
The reason teaching today is
The reason teaching today is not like teaching 30 yrs ago is that you waste all your time trying to get the students to pay attention instead of demanding respect and attention or sending the perp to the pricipal's office for an introduction into the properties of wood. Parents also no longer have respect for the education system. We would get spanked by the principal, but the worst thing they could do was call your parents. Then you were gonna catch hell!
What do you do swimmergirl ?
I am a manager of many employees in a private for profit corporation. I am what you or your parents probably refer to as "The Man".
Having had to try and deal with what the state "education" system turns out is very tough. These kids come out of school with no marketable skills. They can't do simple math, they can't talk in public, they can't put a sentence together without using the word "like" several times. I will say that our school system is beyond broken and this type of exercise is another waste of tax dollars. These kids are being set up for failure and that is directly due to our liberal teachers dancing and preaching against what this country used to stand for.
JNUFFWC, Swimmergirl has said
JNUFFWC, Swimmergirl has said many times, including here, that she is a teacher. It takes just a minute attention to detail to gather that.
Kpawsuh, I agree to some extent with you; accountability is missing in our education system today. Not teacher accountability -they are the first to be blamed when anything goes wrong- but student and parent accountability. Parenting has become a laissez-faire practice for many people. When TV is just as good as a babysitter, and meals can be microwaved and forgotten about, there's a loss in family dynamic. I don't agree that draconian punishments are the answer, but I do think parents ought to be more aware, at least, of their child's school life.
It wasn't so many years ago that I was a student myself. I remember a great number of my peers absolutely hated school, didn't see any value in education, and just wanted to get drunk/stoned and go snowboarding/play video games. That's a problem that teachers alone can't solve.
I deal with kids on a regular
I deal with kids on a regular basis. One good example was teaching orienteering. Pretty simple, you divide the 360 degrees on a compass into 90 degree quadrants. If North is 0/360 then what would east be? 90. About half the kids can figure that out. Due south would be? No answers. I spoon feed them that it would be E or 90 degrees plus another 90. There were several kids in the course that just couldn't do the math. It isn't even getting into anything remotely complex. Its basic arithmatic. I had to spend an entire day teaching them how to do arithmatic before I could teach them any thing else. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event.
Wow, kp, sounds like you're a
Wow, kp, sounds like you're a great teacher!
I believe it, Kpawsuh. Have
I believe it, Kpawsuh. Have you seen the high school exit exam our high schoolers aren't passing? I thought it was an insult to my intelligence when I took it; at least a few questions simply required me to measure a line with a ruler.
The point is, droog, he
The point is, droog, he wasn't there to teach them arithmetic. He was there to teach them orienteering.
What, exactly...
is arethmatic? And, why should I be concerned if kids don't know how to do it?
afishisborn
I did notice she said she was a teacher. My question was what does she do?
I apologize. I suppose, then,
I apologize. I suppose, then, that I misunderstood the question. Actually, I guess I still don't. Do you mean what does she do in her spare time? What specifically does she teach? What does she do to combat this problem? Some clarification, I'm sure, would be appreciated.
I'll humor you, droog.
I'll humor you, droog. Arithmetic [sic] is very basic math. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It is important to learn not only because a calculator is not always on hand, but because if you do not know what to enter into the calculator, then it is useless to you.