Art classes can level the playing field when it's at the center of the learning experience. The focus helps kids with learning disabilities, students still learning English, or others with less background knowledge about a topic.
When I visited Maya Lin, an elementary school in Alameda, California where art is at the center of learning, third graders were in the middle of a multi-week project on climate change. Pairs of students had chosen climates around the world and researched them to learn about the weather, flora and fauna.
In art class, they created artistic representations of their climates using either a torn-paper collage technique or oil pastels. They also wrote books about how climate change will affect their climates and the animals that live there. In the process, they learned what fossil fuels are, where they come from, and how they’re extracted. They studied how the greenhouse gas effect works and made a visual model of it.“I made a project with one of my friends about the greenhouse effect and how the sun’s heat rays go in, and the heat gets trapped inside the atmosphere and heats up the earth,” said John.“I saw a picture of the sun to try and draw it and there were spots where it was really really bright. So I drew those spots in and then I put tape over it and then I dabbed the paintbrush so it looked like spots, and then the spots where I put tape were still paper white,” he explained. He’d also used collage to create a translucent effect for the atmosphere.I was struck by how much John could tell me both about the iterative creative process he went through, and the science his work represented. He described several early attempts at creating effects that didn’t work – at first, he wanted his sun to be three-dimensional, but couldn’t get it to stay up. He says he was frustrated, but he pushed through those feelings and tried something different. John’s persistence – and the sheer number of hours he was allotted for artwork during school hours – stood out to me. At a lot of schools I’ve visited, art is relegated to a separate class once a week. The fact that students were showing their knowledge of science through their artwork here struck me as unique. Over the past two decades, policies focused on math and reading test scores, along with a global recession, have pushed many schools to cut what they considered to be “extras.” In many places, that has meant visual art, music, drama, and dance. These subjects became afterthoughts as school leaders put pressure on teachers to raise kids’ scores in the ‘focus’ subjects – math and reading.increasingly robust body of researchJohns Hopkins University professor Mariale Hardiman published a 2019 paper in Trends in Neuroscience and Education describing the results of ashe conducted in fifth grade science classrooms. She and her team found that arts integration instruction led to long-term retention of science concepts at least as successfully as conventional science teaching. Arts integration was particularly helpful for students with the lowest reading scores., a pedagogy that uses art as a vehicle for learning about any subject. This isn’t a new idea – some educators have long believed in and used art as part of their practice – but now there’s more research to back it up, including work out of. Several schools have led this movement, going all in on art at a time when many schools around the country were slashing their arts budgets. Maya Lin is one of them. For teachers at Maya Lin, integrating art throughout the curriculum and the school day is about making learning fun, multi-disciplinary, connected and creative. It gives students a way to think about the world differently, to make connections, and to contemplate their place within it. Thinking like an artist helps them develop habits that they’ll use no matter what they go on to do, and it has helped inculcate an ethic of perseverance, challenge, and craft to everything students do.“At its core, arts integration is social justice,” Maya Lin art teacher Constance Moore told me. “It’s a way of creating equity, it's a way of looking at the world and thinking about different perspectives, and centering ideas and people who have not been in the center. Art is such a great way to do that for kids because it makes it accessible to them.”Before it was called Maya Lin, this school was known as Washington Elementary. Back then, Washington served a mostly low-income population and over a third of its students were designated English language learners. And, like many schools, it was a mainstay of the local community with many committed teachers. But the school’s test scores weren’t great, and enrollment was low, so when Alameda Unified School District started feeling the pinch of the recession in 2009 and 2010, Washington was a prime candidate for closure. A dedicated group of parents and teachers fought hard to stop the district’s closure plans and to keep a school in the community. They applied for an innovation grant from the district, emphasizing that if they won, they would build a school centered around art. Students would learn all the required standards, but art would be a critical way for teachers to evaluate what students understand. The district accepted the proposal. Washington Elementary closed in the spring of 2011, but reopened again as Maya Lin School in the fall of 2012 with a new focus on arts integration. District officials told the principal, Judy Goodwin, that she could hire her own staff. She first invited the teachers at Washington to join the project. About half of them did, and the other half were transferred to other jobs in the district.Integrated Learning Specialist Program at the Alameda County Office of Education. They learned how to build arts-centered projects collaboratively with other teachers, how to assess learning through art, and they figured out ways to integrate state standards from disparate disciplines – like science and social studies – using art in everyday learning and the habits of successful artists to guide the way. “The arts provide an access point for everyone,” said Caitlin Gordon, a third grade teacher at Maya Lin. She has found that when art is at the center of the learning experience, it evens the playing field for kids with learning disabilities, or those who are still learning English, or who have less background knowledge about a topic. “I think it's a way for kids to take some really meaty and intense concepts and process them. I think it allows children to learn about how the process of something is just as important, if not more important, than the product. I think it just really helps create more of that well-balanced, critical-thinking person that we want for our future.” Gordon is always impressed by how thoughtfully her students approach their own work and that of their peers. They ask good questions and are willing to stretch when a concept doesn’t come easily.When Principal Judy Goodwin and her staff committed to this work seven years ago, they wanted to build a school that would highlight the strengths of the students in it, not just the areas of weakness that test scores showed. And, just as important, they wanted teaching to be a collaborative and creative experience for the adults too. The art teacher, Constance Moore, is grateful for that collaborative spirit. She says usually the art teacher is relegated to an out-of-the-way classroom where no one bothers them. Teachers are grateful they can send their kids to her for awhile, but other than that, what happens in the art room is separate from other learning.For example, Moore helped plan the climate change project. The three third grade teachers, Caitlin Gordon, Brian Dodson, and Sharon Jackson, developed this project together with Moore’s artistic knowledge guiding them. They discussed the learning goals, developed a thematic through line, and mapped out the science, social studies, and writing standards they’d be covering. And they talked through how students would demonstrate their understanding through art.Some of the work takes place in their classrooms, but it often crosses over into the art studio, where Moore makes sure students are learning specific artistic techniques, the life and history of the artists themselves, and most importantly theReminders of the Studio Habits of Mind are everywhere: on classroom doors, in charts, in the conversations students and teachers have with each other.
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