integrated curriculum
...rts are affective and participatory. They celebrate feelings and imagination. Science is objective, detached, precise and rational; and the humanities deal with the analysis of moral actions. His conclusion is that each family of study has its own essential forms of cognition and therefore the arts have a distinct role to play in general education. Throughout Brewer’s research of articles on integrated art curricula he found a distinct pattern, the value of art taught on its own is diminishing. He also found that research on basic art learning and its integration is still severely lacking. More over he found that the research that justifies art, based on support from other disciplines, may in fact diminish the disciplinary and academic integrity of art education. It also makes art education fall short of the guidelines set before us in the state and national standards for the visual arts. Reflection: The debate of integrated art curricula is one that I personally fight on a daily basis. On one hand, I have fellow educators that feel as I do, that the arts need to be taught as a distinct discipline, allowing art educators the freedom that classroom teachers have to teach lessons that are independent from the stipulations and criticism of other teachers. On the other hand, I find that most classroom teachers wish to use art as a tool to emphasize classroom teachings. For those teachers, I will try to plan lessons that will correspond to their lessons without sacrificing my obligation to teach from the Art Education Standard Course of Study guidelines. I have found that many art educators refuse to even try to do the same. I feel that if we as art educators do not begin to integrate and learn how to do so without leaving the Arts Education Standard Course of Study guidelines filed away in our desk, we will slowly begin to see school systems combining the arts under the classroom teachers responsibilities, in turn loosing art education teaching positions. As an art educator I found this article both uplifting and disturbing. It is uplifting to find that research is still being considered for integrating the arts. As a child I found my art education to be a very positive influence in my life. It was an area I could succeed in. Art gave me the security to know that I was good at something and that positive influence overflowed into other areas of my education. I had art teachers who taught using the Discipline Based Art Education plan. These teachers taught from the four areas, art making, art history, art criticism and aesthetics, in a very distinct art class, free from the i...