Elementary Education: Integrating the Arts

Explores how the arts, with a focus on theater and creative movement, can actively engage students in learning, improve literacy, enrich the curriculum, and deepen students' understanding of complex concepts.

Open to Degree and PACE students

Integrating the Arts Across the Curriculum explores how the arts, with a focus on justice-oriented theater and creative movement, can be used in your classroom to actively engage students in learning, improve literacy, enrich and enliven the curriculum, and deepen students’ understanding of complex concepts. Participants will engage in hands-on activities that will increase their knowledge of the performing arts and improve their comfort level participating in and leading arts-based activities. All activities are standards based and can be taken directly into the classroom. Goals: The main goal of the course is for teachers to expand their creative capacity, which will act to help them be more creative in their teaching. Teachers will engage in theater, movement, music and arts related activities that will not only encourage them to get out of their own comfort zone, but lay the foundation for more active and creative learning opportunities for their students. Teachers will attain tools for bringing the arts into the classroom to differentiate instruction, to experience how theatre can be an effective model for teaching and learning, and to reinvigorate the creative side of their teaching.

This course will assess for each student’s learning and growth across the semester, oriented around the course learning pursuits. There are five modes of participation and projects that students are required to engage in to demonstrate their learning towards these pursuits. Assessments will be based on dialogic feedback between Alexia, each student, the whole class, and between peers. In lieu of individual grades or points during the semester, each student will be notified if their work is “complete” or “incomplete.” If “complete,” students have demonstrated enough of their growth towards the learning goals of that project. If “incomplete,” students will have the opportunity to revise their work to better work towards the goals of the project. Students will organize their learning processes and products in a final professional portfolio at the end of the semester to specify and showcase their successes, challenges, and new understandings from the course as they map back to the learning pursuits of the course.