Since Americans for the Arts is having a blog salon on Arts Education, this seems like a good opportunity to call attention to one possible solution to the question of how you integrate the arts and creativity into academic subjects.
While he isn’t specifically integrating the arts into instruction, teacher Larry Ferlazzo is using episodes from the National Geographic show Crowd Control to inspire his students’ projects.
His goal is to get his students to investigate a question and create their own evidence.
“Another that is considering the role of imagination in art talked about their creating various items and having people evaluate them using an imagination “criteria.” One other group taking on the topic of if technology is truly necessary in order to “advance” society said they might come up with a list of technology achievements and ask people which one they think would be most important if they had to choose one for a brand new country they were creating.”
This approach gets students invested a project they care about and helps them learn from the experience. The questions they ask and the results they receive might be flawed, but the process they engage in will inform future learning.
Besides, arts organizations can’t cast too many aspersions. The questions and methodologies used in audience/community surveys are frequently just as flawed.
A creative approach and an empirical approach to problem solving are not mutually exclusive. The poop-o-meter in the Crowd Control video Ferlazzo uses in his post could have been just as easily used to incentivize the submission of samples for a canine health study instead of getting people to clean up after their dogs.