SAIL: What is arts integration?

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Arts integration is the classroom practice of using the arts as an instructional tool to help students develop competence in other curricular areas. The personal and expressive nature of the arts engages a child's interest and attention and becomes the consistent means by which students become personally connected to—and invested in—ideas and content in a range of subject areas. To see what arts integration “looks like” in practice, we can consider an example. The nationally validated program Picturing Writing: Fostering Literacy Through Art uses art-making as a fundamental tool in developing the ability to write among children at risk—a skill essential to participation in the humanities as well as most other pursuits in school and the world beyond.

In Deborah Rowen's second-grade class, students are writing stories. But they begin by making textured paper—paper daubed with paint from a sponge, swirled with paint blown through a straw, and given intriguing appearances through other creative techniques. As they create their textured papers, a Bach concerto plays in the background to suggest moods that often are expressed in the movements the children make in applying paint to page. Then, inspired by their papers' varying textures, the children cut shapes from the papers to represent animals, trees, people, buildings, and other elements in their stories.

After looking at his textured papers, Ross leans on the back of his chair, looking forlorn. Having difficulty crating a bridge between his ideas and the blank piece of paper before him, Ross watches other children making their stories. Suddenly, his eyes light up. He picks up a sheet of paper marbeled in blue. “I think I found something,” he says. “A thing with two eyes and a mouth.” He ponders a while and then smiles. “I know what my story is called—Do You Know What an Animal Is? I'm gonna try to find all kinds of strange things to be animals. The animals that do exist don't exist. I want to say that the strange animals are the real ones.”

Ross begins to cut out shapes from various sheets of paper. “This one is a Frost Cackelor,” he explains. “He spits out ice from his mouth after he swishes water inside his mouth. Inside his mouth is very cold. He doesn't like to be disturbed while he's making his ice.”

Jared has made pictures that portray a yellow-eyed coyote stalking a fox pup which is rescued by its mother. Not only did Jared bring the reader face-to-face with a starving coyote, but he also darkened the sky to make his “problem picture” scarier. After creating his pictures, Jared chose language specific to the purpose of each page of his story. To accompany his problem picture, he wrote, “Suddenly, he came out to an open field, where there was a coyote that was hungrily staring at the pup with his golden eyes. The starving coyote was ready to charge at the young pup.” Jared purposefully chose words and phrases like suddenly, hungrily staring, golden eyes, starving, and charge to make his story scarier; from the reading he had done, he understood that exciting words heighten drama and suspense.

David took time from making his pictures to say, “Writing used to be hard, but now it is easy. All I have to do is look at each picture and describe some things I see. I listen to my words to see if they match with my story and they always do.”

In Picturing Writing, pictures help capture and focus the child's attention and support the child's search for accurate words to write the story. In talking about the process, Hannah said, “I always make my pictures first because then I can look at my pictures to help me with my describing words. If I wrote my words first, I wouldn't be able to see my describing words in my pictures.” Kelsey expressed the same thought. “The pictures gave me all the right ideas to put in the sentence,” she said. As Serena put it, “The pictures paint the words on paper for you, so your words are more descriptive.”

What are the benefits of arts integration?

The benefits of arts integration are documented. In the academic year 1997-1998, the University of New Hampshire conducted an evaluation of a year-long course of Picturing Writing, which was then being used in 39 states. The results documented significant gains in the writing skills of students who were taught consistently through this model, compared with a demographically matched comparison group. In 1999, the Main Street School in Exeter, New Hampshire, adopted Picturing Writing school-wide and integrated this visual approach into its language arts and science curriculum. Main Street has continued implementing the model, which has resulted in impressive standardized test score data over time.¹ Since 2000, Main Street's third-grade Title 1 students have scored above the state average of all 3rd grade students. Susan O'Connor, Director of Instruction for Language Arts and Science at Main Street School, stated that “(arts integration) has given our teachers the tools they need to move our lowest-performing students forward.”

Similar conclusions have been reached by other studies. The 1999 report Involvement in the Arts and Human Development (Catterall et. al., UCLA) showed that students participating in the arts show stronger academic achievement in the humanities and other subjects than students who do not participate in the arts. The study Learning in and Through the Arts: Curriculum Implications (Burton et. al., Columbia University, 1999) concluded that students with greater involvement in the arts showed not only greater academic achievement, but also greater self-confidence in their studies. Other investigations have returned evidence of the connection between academic achievement and arts integration.

In “Arts in the Basic Curriculum,” a statewide arts integration program in South Carolina, the percentage of students in an arts-based curriculum rated higher in scores on standardized tests than did students in non-arts-based schools. The study showed that an arts-based curriculum does not harm students' scores on standardized tests, which had been a fear.
In Chicago, the 30 public schools taking part in a citywide arts partnership found evidence that an arts-based curriculum can raise student achievement levels in the aggregate.
The Minneapolis program “Arts for Academic Achievement”, conducted under an Annenberg Foundation grant, indicated that professional development of teachers could lead to improved student academic performances in an arts-based curriculum.
New York City public schools participating in a program of the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that an arts-based curriculum can raise reading scores for disadvantaged students.

The mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act threaten to push humanities and the arts to the margins of the curriculum. SAIL's purpose is to place the arts at the center of the curriculum as not only content areas, but also as instructional frameworks that will allow each student to construct personal meaning in the humanities and other content areas.

Last Updated: 12/7/09