Art Integration History

Art has always been a large part of my life. As a young girl, I always looked forward to receiving kits for watercoloring or a new set of colored pencils. I’d doodle on my papers in class to pass the time. I yearned for opportunities to express my creativity even doing so on poster board projects where I’d spend hours creating borders and framing my information with various colored papers. However, it was not until I began to take art courses at the high school did I recognize the value that creativity and art hold as a means of learning and expression. Through this recognition, it also occurred to me that not many outside the art room view art in the same light. If I brought up the topic, I usually received mixed reactions. For the most part,

Reformer such as Horace Mann in the 1800’s and John Dewey in the early 1900’s tried to mandate the arts and in order to further the educations of students, however, with the every changing industries throughout the world and in the US, these mandates were not maintained and art was often pushed to the side in order to focus on the “core subjects”, maintain a competitive global workforce, and keep up with technological advancements (“Renaissance in the Classroom.”). In recent years, the United States educational system is operating under the same ideas with the former “No Child Left Behind Act” now entitled the “Every Student Succeeds Act” which put a focus on the teaching of core subjects, including art education, and pushes standardized test scores (“Arts Integration.”). The inclusion of art as a core subject is a huge improvement in the field of art integration, however, as standardized tests are pushed and art itself is subjective, it cannot be tested on a standardized level, it therefore remains less of a focus and is provided with less funding (“Arts Integration.”). Some question the value of the integration of art into core subjects without seeing the effect that creativity and creative freedom can have on students. A study by the Dana foundation concluded that “ arts training should exercise the executive attention network

One large scale art integration program is called CAPE - Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. It is programmed based in Chicago and has collaborated with over 90 public and private schools in the area (“Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education | CAPE.”). The program pairs up working artists with teachers and together they collaborate to bring art and creative thinking into the curriculum, “Together, they address academic and artistic questions and challenges. Building on these ideas, they plan an arts integrated curriculum that moves in and out of arts and non-arts subjects as the project progresses. “(“Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education | CAPE.”). This program allows the students to personalize their learning and create meaning to the subjects they learn as well as grow an appreciation for the arts. In terms of creating art based curriculums, one can look no further than an experimental school called IAA - Integrated Art Academy located in Vermont. Talked about in an article by Katrina Schwartz, the school was created in reaction to high levels of poverty and failing standardized test scores, “Before IAA became an arts-integrated magnet school, only 17 percent of its third-graders were