The Elusive Sentence by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Arts-Integrated Instruction and Cognition

To answer Arthur Efland’s (2002) question, “What cognitive abilities do the arts provide that other subjects cannot?” we respond in concert with Rinne, Gregory, Yarmolinskaya, and Hardiman (2011): “The use of the arts as a teaching methodology throughout curriculum has the cognitive ability to improve long-term retention of other academic content areas” (p. 89). By taking advantage of what neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists know about the eight special memory effects, our writing intervention teaches the craft of constructing sentences using a pedagogical model based on the idea that arts integration serves as a powerful tool for translating academic content into the natural learning languages of all learners.

Common Core State Standards, with their emphasis on standardized testing and increased accountability, have placed tremendous demands on students and teachers to master skills, content, and concepts, and to show adequate yearly progress. With the increased demands placed on students to retain content comes an increased responsibility on the part of teachers and administrators to use teaching techniques that fully appropriate the brain’s learning and memory capacities, so students are offered every possible advantage when test time arrives.

Arts advocates may have noticed that we have not presented the traditional cognitive arguments for retaining the arts in schools. Although we agree that professional training in the artistic disciplines is essential to the development of the whole child, arts integration—using the arts as a teaching methodology—is not the same as dedicated classes in the arts. Teaching through the arts is a didactic technique used to support learning of grade-level content. We do recognize and acknowledge that a serious study of the arts may produce the following results:

• Studying a musical discipline builds a better brain; skilled musicians develop a thicker corpus callosum and show improved spatial-temporal reasoning, which may help with certain forms of math (Vaughn, 2000).

• Exercising regularly oxygenates and fuels the brain, allowing the brain to access more long-term memory areas (Fedewa & Ahn, 2011). David Sousa (2011), an educational consultant in educational neuroscience and prolific author, reports:

Exercise was shown to be strongly correlated with increases in brain mass and cell production as well as in improved cognitive processing and mood regulation. These findings should encourage teachers to get students up and moving in their classrooms. It also should discourage administrators from eliminating recess and physical education classes, a common practice in the current era of high-stakes testing. (p. 15)

• Training in the visual arts cultivates the imaginative mind (Eisner, 2002), which will be an in-demand trait as we enter the conceptual age of the twenty-first century (Hardiman, 2010, p. 227; Pink, 2006, pp. 49–51).

• The transforming nature of the arts positively affects school culture, climate, and community (Catterall & Waldorf, 1999).

• Engaging in the arts enhances cultural understanding among diverse groups (Burstein & Knotts, 2010; Mandell & Wolf, 2003).

• Participating in the performing arts enhances verbal skills and reading achievement (Podlozny, 2000).

For a thorough exposition of the historical arguments supporting the arts, one may read the literature review by Burnaford, Brown, Doherty, and McLaughlin (2007).

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