Bringing Arts Integration to Youth (BRAINY) at Colorado State University

In this chapter, the authors demonstrate how a university Art Education program assists the university art museum and trains students to lead tours for BRAINY (BRinging Arts INtegration to Youth), the museum's educational program for Title I schools. The authors present how they guide student educators to develop tours for BRAINY by applying different interpretive strategies. The impacts that BRAINY creates for the visiting students and local communities include 1) the enhancement of civic engagement for young citizens, 2) high-quality art experiences for Title I schools, 3) the extended community program—Family Day. The impacts on student art educators are 1) knowing how to teach art in different learning contexts that are outside of the classroom, 2) applying the questioning strategies to their classroom teaching for probing art dialogues with students, 3) learning to be prepared but also flexible for unexpected situations. This chapter provides a practical and positive example to address a wonderful collaboration between an art museum, community members, and higher education.

Key principles for an integrated intercultural literary pedagogy: An educational design research project on arts integration for intercultural competence

Intercultural competence in foreign language teaching has gained importance in recent times. Although current work has highlighted the advantages of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) for intercultural development, little is known about its potential for teaching literature in secondary schools. Treating literature itself as an art form, the aim of this article is to formulate research-based design principles for an integrated intercultural literary pedagogy (IILP) that may foster intercultural competence through arts integration in foreign language classes. This article reports on the process of evaluating IILP-based pilot lesson materials in pre-university education in the Netherlands. Educational design research was applied as a method that encompasses the systematic study of designing, developing, and evaluating educational interventions through an iterative process of evaluation with stakeholders. Three iterations of formative evaluation were conducted, with additions to the tentative design principles following each of the first two iterations. The process resulted in a set of four refined principles. Results also illustrated the effectiveness of IILP-based lesson materials for intercultural competence. Although participating students encountered some difficulties relating to the functionality of the design, the students appreciated its social relevance and reported that the processing of literary texts through dialogic tasks with peers in the target language fostered intercultural language learning.

STEAM – Arts Integration Frameworks for Transdisciplinarity

Whether for 21st century skills development such as creativity, communication, and collaboration orfor transdisciplinary knowledge creation leading to innovation, the integration of Arts with STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields is gaining popularity in higher education. However, a comprehensive survey of proven methodologies to integrate Arts with STEM disciplines (referred to as STEAM) currently does not exist. This paper presents the preliminary results of asystematized literature review done to characterize the integration of arts with STEM disciplines in higher education. It also uses these findings to analyze the most recent STEAM initiative of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa. This research finds three main rationales to integrate arts with STEM and presents the frameworks discussed in the literature to do this integration. It also examines how creativity is assessed and developed within STEAM higher education contexts. This research contributes a reference of validated arts integration and creativity frameworks which can be used to setup STEAM projects or evaluate them in relation to proven methodologies. The frameworks presented in this research can be used in classrooms and professional environments.

Meeting the Unique Needs of Gifted Students Through an Arts-Integrated, Project-Based Learning Opportunity: The EncycloMEdia Project

The “EncycloMEdia” project provides a stimulating project-based opportunity for gifted and talented students in the middle and upper grades. Its first component is an arts-integration piece in the form of an altered book. The second component is a cumulative assessment document containing students’ text-based analyses that correspond to the entries in the altered book. Both components of the project require students to develop valuable critical thinking and writing skills. This integrated, project-based unit can be modified to address any subject area. Detailed descriptions of the content, process, and product are included so educators can implement this idea with their own gifted students.

The suitcase project: Historical inquiry, arts integration and the Holocaust

In this article, we – a history teacher and visual art educator – present a unique, arts-integrated history project that engaged grade eleven history students in creating an installation of suitcase assemblages exploring the lives of young victims of the Holocaust. While we recognize that there exist numerous strategies for teaching about the Holocaust, we assert not only that arts integration is useful in enhancing student learning and engagement in history but also that the curricular approach is ideally suited for the teaching of difficult history such as the history of the Holocaust. In addition to examples of the student artworks produced, we provide evidence of the project’s success in increasing students’ understandings of the assigned historical content as well as its success in complicating two dominant Holocaust narratives. In sharing our own experiences of using an arts-integrated approach to teaching the history of the Holocaust, we hope to inspire both history teachers who are looking for alternative ways to tackle the complex challenge of teaching difficult history as well as art teachers who are looking to integrate sound historical inquiry into their issues-based art projects.

The Notion of Arts in STEAM Concept: A Semi-Systematic Literature Review

STEAM education has been developed in search of ways how to prepare students to live and build their lives in the knowledge society of the future. The paper, by applying to the methodology of a semi-systematic literature review, aims to reveal the notion of arts in the STEAM concept. Thirty-three articles published from of 2010 to 2019 were selected for the performance of a thematic analysis of the notion of arts in the concept of STEAM education in five aspects: Purpose of Arts, Notion and Inclusion of Arts, Arts Integration Process and Results, Arts Integration Models, and Arts Integration Contexts.A review of the literature demonstrated that the inclusion of arts in STEAM education is ambiguous because of the diversity of both the notions of the arts and interpretations of the purpose of arts integration. Arts in STEAM education are associated with the improvement of students’ academic results, the development of students’ creativity, critical thinking, and cooperation skills, and thus highlighting the instrumental significance of arts education. The instrumental and internal concepts of the purpose of the arts are to be related to the equivalent and arts-supplemented integrative STEAM models. Therefore, research with the aim at deepening the notion of interdisciplinary integration in terms of diversity of the inclusion of the arts, substantiating the effectiveness of arts-integrating STEAM programmes with the identification of the process and result evaluation variables, and analysing specific cases of the STEAM programme implementation through revealing forms and ways of arts inclusion are especially relevant.