Why arts-infused?

  We consider the study of the arts important for these reasons:

  • It engages students and opens them to learning about themselves and their world

  • Literacy in the arts is necessary to function effectively in today's world

  • It provides a powerful context for learning in all disciplines

  • It transforms the learning environment by fostering independence and collaboration

Teaching through the arts promotes competencies for children across the curriculum. Evidence shows that teaching through the arts can also increase positive social and civic engagement. This new century needs people who think like artists; people who are creative and critical thinkers, risk-takers, able to work alone or in groups, self-motivated, and open to new experiences. It requires people who have faith in themselves and the future, and who want to make a difference.

Students will be offered a comprehensive and connected educational program that reflects the philosophy of educating the whole child and recognizes that individuals learn in different ways.  The use of the arts-infused instruction will engage and stimulate learners.  This balanced curriculum will incorporate exposure to each area of study in relation to all others.  All areas are considered essential to learning in school and beyond.  The arts -infused, balanced curriculum will challenge students and allow them to demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of ways.  Students will be involved in project-based work within and across the core academic subjects.  Projects within disciplines will reflect curriculum guidelines for that subject and incorporate guidelines from other subject areas as well.  It is important that content be taught in context in order for students to find meaning in and relevance in their learning. Therefore, no teacher will teach in isolation and no course offered without reference or connection to other courses of study.  Teachers will plan together, creating more comprehensive lessons for their discipline and designing joint projects that pull together skills and knowledge from other areas of instruction.  In planning the projects, teachers will determine when and how best to use block periods for separate instruction or in combination with each other for integrated teaching and learning.

Students highly involved in the arts are more likely to have higher grades, better standardized test scores, and lower dropout rates; the connection is particularly strong among low-income students (Catterall et al., 1999; Heath, 1998). Arts education also develops valuable skills for the workplace such as creativity, organization and collaboration (Ohler, 2000). Finally, the arts are a defining feature of culture; study of the arts helps students understand their own identities and provides a window into other historic and contemporary cultures (Ballengee-Morris & Stuhr, 2001; McCullough, 1995).

The curriculum will focus on the natural connections between learning concepts and skills as defined in national and state content standards for the core subject areas of reading/language arts, mathematics, social studies, geography, science, the visual and performing arts, world languages (Spanish), and health and physical education.  

Community Public Charter's arts-infused and arts discipline-based curriculum and instruction reflects recent research from the arts education field that provides significant evidence of the value of the arts in the learning process, and places the arts "firmly within current discussions and debates about the education policies and practices that will best bring about school reform and improvement and high achievement for students" (Deasy, 2002).  Burton, Horowitz, and Abeles (1999) found that student learning and achievement in non-arts domains is heightened in environments featuring high quality arts education programs and a school climate supportive of active and participatory learning.

School curricula have traditionally been structured to provide students with opportunities to study separately each of the disciplines (e.g., history, literature, mathematics, science).  There is great merit to this specialization and work within a discipline.  Equally important, however, is to bring wholeness to students' study.  Students must have opportunities to see how disciplines meet, overlap, and inform each other.  The arts provide an excellent vehicle for exploring these connections.  In particular, the arts offer aesthetic, personal, and creative dimensions to various disciplines included in the curriculum.  (Kennedy Center Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA) program, unpublished paper, 2004).

DuPont (1993) found that sixth grade remedial readers using creative drama as a learning strategy scored consistently higher on the Metropolitan Reading Comprehension Test.  In a national longitudinal study of 920 high-risk elementary school students in the arts-infused Different Ways of Knowing Program, Catterall (1995) reported an 8 percentile-point gain on standardized tests for one year of participation and a 16 point gain after two years.

We believe that arts education benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication. This process requires not merely an active mind but a trained one.