Multi-arts
Education for the Preschool Classroom
Susan B. Eaton, Ed.D.
There are many and diverse reasons why early arts education is important. First, the arts have a life-long influence on our unique human ability to imagine and create intelligent responses that express our thoughts and feelings. Early arts experiences allow children to begin develop their ability to perceive, evaluate, and manipulate the world around them in original ways. Second, attention to the arts provides a basis for children to understand their own culture and appreciate other cultures. Finally, arts experiences give children the opportunity to develop their physical talents in creating arts products.
In addition, the arts hold strong interest for preschoolers. Young children live “in their bodies.” Think of how often even very young children will use an object or body movements to act out a story he or she has heard. Therefore, we enter the child’s natural environment when we design and teach arts projects. Arts education nurtures the child’s keen interest in nonverbal communication and provides a basis for developing skills in thinking and in social relationships. For example, with the visual arts children learn to classify and compare textures and colors, and to explore rhythmic patterns in music. In dance and drama (storytelling), children explore contrasting movement qualities and the effect of using those qualities in relationship with others.
For the reasons described above, all children benefit from arts education. For children with disabilities, education in the arts is especially important. The fact of possessing a disability means that for that child one or more aspects of physical, cognitive, emotional, or social abilities are lacking. However, the child with disabilities may also possess average or extraordinary talents in particular areas. Therefore, children with disabilities must be given every opportunity to develop their unique strengths and talents. If these talents lie in the arts, the future of the child’s quality of life and future employment may be at stake. Early education programs in the arts for young children with disabilities will help identify and nurture special skills so that the child can develop to the highest level of his or her abilities.
A wide range of activities are classified as “arts education” in the preschool classroom. In most preschool classrooms, teachers provide arts experiences. There is often a “dress-up” center. Music, painting, and crafts are a usual part of the school day. However, such preschool arts experiences often are not able to provide children with a meaningful foundation in the arts.
Characteristics of Effective Arts Education Programs
Breadth, depth, and intensity characterize a successful arts education program. The following is a brief explanation of these terms and examples of how they were implemented in our 2004 preschool project, Ready, Set, Van Gogh!.
BreadthEffective arts education programs provide arts experiences across several disciplines. Breadth in curriculum planning is especially important for children with disabilities. A child may exhibit extraordinary talent in one area of the arts, but not in other areas. How tragic it is to offer a child only visual arts experiences when his or her talents lie in music or drama. Therefore, it is critical for programs to encompass more than one arts discipline. Secondly, sufficient breadth provides experiences with cultural and aesthetic concepts as well as practice in creative arts skills.
Examples of breadth. The breadth of our program was shown in two important ways: 1) Ready, Set, Van Gogh! included learning experiences in visual arts, music, dance, and drama, and 2) cultural, aesthetic, and creative activities were interwoven with the diverse arts disciplines. For example, the children in Ready, Set, Van Gogh! created paintings that reflected their experience with viewing and talking about Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and “Wheatfields” paintings. They also learned the descriptive word “swirly” to describe the type of painting stroke in “Starry Night,” and contrasted this with “short, straight” stokes in Van Gogh’s “Wheatfields” painting. In addition to learning this rudimentary aesthetic vocabulary, they created a short drama that contrasted the dark, gloomy mood of Van Gogh in the Dutch culture of his day in the “Potato Eaters” painting with the sunny mood of “Wheatfields” in southern France.
A curriculum with sufficient breadth provides a solid foundation from which children can make future growth in understanding the arts. However, if the project scope is unlimited, the program will overwhelming to preschoolers. Therefore, the second characteristic of a successful arts education program is depth.
Depth
An arts education curriculum of sufficient depth provides necessary limitation for the curriculum content. A multi-faceted focus on one key subject area allows the children to absorb the material presented and retain essential learning.
Examples of depth. Our focus was a small number of paintings by Van Gogh. This allowed the children to learn and remember Van Gogh’s name and begin to recognize his style when they saw one of his paintings. A charming example is the report of a parent who was with her preschooler at the shopping mall. The child saw an advertisement for an exhibit of Van Gogh’s work, and volunteered, “Look, Mommy, Vincent Van Gogh!” Limiting the focus of an arts education to one artist and a few of his paintings was critical to this child’s learning. It is doubtful the child would have made the spontaneous application of his knowledge of Van Gogh if our lessons had included several impressionistic artists.
Depth was also developed by keeping the focus on Van Gogh while incorporating several arts disciplines. For example, the children painted a 4-ft by 8-ft canvas mural based on “Wheatfields.” We used this mural later as the backdrop when we videotaped the children dancing the French folk dance “Sur Le Pont D’Avignon” as part of a short musical drama contrasting Van Gogh’s life in Holland and France.
Sufficient depth may be fostered by focus on a single visual artist, as in our program. Or, the lesson content may be built around a poet, a musician, a story, or other inspiration. Taking depth into account depth yields another advantage: it allows sufficient intensity and repetition of key concepts for effective learning.
Intensity
The characteristic of intensity is often overlooked in arts education programs. Instead, there is a widespread, deceptive idea that occasional arts experiences constitute an adequate arts education curriculum. This idea has become increasingly popular in recent years in the United States, and is the subject of lively discussion in the current arts education literature. The notion is that scattered arts experiences—for example, student visits to an art museum or a monthly artist-in-residence project—provide an adequate arts education. Although such arts experiences can be wonderful supplements to a viable arts education curriculum, they cannot by themselves constitute an adequate arts education program. After all, no one would pretend that a school had provided adequate math education if students watched a couple of videos about math and a math professor lectured to them a few times. In the same way, brief arts experiences cannot substitute for the intensity of an arts education curriculum that provides the opportunity for substantive learning.
Examples of intensity. The Ready, Set, Van Gogh! curriculum consisted of short lessons (15-20 minutes) scheduled 3 times per week over a two-month period. In addition, teachers practiced the Van Gogh rhythmic poetry chant with their students, read storybooks about Van Gogh to their classes, and hung Van Gogh prints in their classroom. We also took a field trip to our local art museum to see three of the Van Gogh pictures we studied. In addition, we videotaped the dance/drama portions of the project so that children could view the video as a review of the life and work of Van Gogh. These variety and frequency of these activities provided sufficient intensity for effective learning.
In summary, our model included cultural and aesthetic components as well as creative experience in arts skills in several arts disciplines. In addition, we intensively focused on one artist, Vincent Van Gogh, and his era. This clear focus allowed the children to learn deeply about Van Gogh and recognize his name and his work independently. The intensive curriculum helped children build a base from which to learn about other artists in future years. The children mastered a few, meaningful concepts that they can later apply to other art themes.
Developing an Effective Arts Education Curriculum Examples of Multi-arts ProjectsFrom 2000-2004, I developed three different types of multi-arts projects. The first, Touch the Sky, was a dance/drama with varied ages of students; the second, Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #1 was a pilot project; and the third, Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #2, expanded and intensified the curriculum. Each of these projects had different curriculum designs, with different challenges and benefits.
1. A yearlong multi-arts curriculum. Our first project took place during the 1999-2000 school year. Touch the Sky was a collaboration between arts education teachers, general education teachers, and professional artists at a local elementary school in a community close to Nashville. The theme was an original story, Touch the Sky. The project involved students from kindergarten through high school. Throughout the school year, the visual arts and music teachers at the school gave their students assignments related to the project theme. Staging and choreography for Touch the Sky was created by professional artists.
2. An intensive, sequential model. Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #1 was the second project, conducted in 2001-2002 with preschoolers at a private preschool in Nashville. The curriculum model was based on 6-week segments in the fall and spring. Each segment included weekly presentations to teachers on aesthetics, cultural elements, and three 20-minute lessons for the children. The fall segment focused on visual arts lessons about the painter Vincent Van Gogh. The spring segment focused on lessons with music related to Van Gogh’s paintings.
3. An intensive, integrated model. Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #2 was our 2004 mulit-arts project. The 8-week curriculum incorporated visual arts, music, dance, poetry, and drama in overlapping lessons among the arts disciplines. We chose to continue with the Van Gogh theme because the teachers were familiar with Van Gogh from the earlier project. Also, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville was exhibiting three original works by Van Gogh during our project time.
Strategies for Effective Multi-Arts Project Design
Curriculum design for a multi-arts project is a complex creative project in itself. Each school and community will offer unique opportunities and challenges. Advance planning is essential to take advantage of talented people and art events in your community. Also, planning in sufficient detail before beginning the project with students will prove valuable. However, plans should be flexible enough to allow for some “happy surprises.” The following are some guiding principles that we found helpful in planning our multi-arts projects.
1) Identify materials and resources before choosing the theme. A mulit-arts project involves the collaboration of talented people from different arts disciplines. The success of the project will depend to a great degree on the resources and materials available at the time of the project. For example, as noted above, we decided to continue studying Van Gogh in Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #2 because our local art museum was sponsoring an exhibit. Our
planning involved assessing our “people resources” and integrating their volunteer and professional contributions into our project.
The visual arts activities were greatly helped by collaboration with the Frist Center for the Visual Arts arts education coordinator, and the parent of a student who was a professional artist. Also, we were fortunate to have a talented songwriter who provided monthly sessions with the children. We contracted with him to write three original songs based on our story about Van Gogh. In addition, our assistant director was an accomplished musician who volunteered her talents for the video soundtrack, and we used other volunteers for short narrated comments about Van Gogh’s life. The dance lessons were provided by a member of the advisory board who had worked as a professional dancer. Another strength of our situation was access to the in-house video services of a professional videographer, so that the end product videotape was of high quality.
2) Focus on the end products early in the planning. Preschool children will benefit from tangible end products from a multi-arts project. These products allow them to review their experiences during the project and recall the information they learned. In Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #2 our end products were individual children’s fingerpaintings based on Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” a group project that produced a large canvas mural based on “Wheatfields,” and a videotape of the dance, music, and poetry performance in which the mural became part of the stage set. Making a video, rather than staging a live performance, allowed the children to show what they had learned in small segments. Each teacher and class worked on a part of the dance drama, and we videotaped each class’s performance. Copies of the videotape were made available to parents so that children could review their performance and the information about Van Gogh in later years.
These products allowed the children to review their experiences during the project and recall the information they learned after the project ended.
3)Define scope and sequence of lessons. Take care to design the curriculum with sufficient depth, breadth, and intensity for effective learning. Ready, Set, Van Gogh! #2 was divided into three phases. The 20-minute lessons were scheduled 3 times per week to provide sufficient intensity for effective learning during each phase.
During the first phase, classroom teachers read aloud storybooks about Van Gogh to their classes during a 2-week period. One book used Van Gogh’s paintings to illustrate color names. For example, yellow was shown as a predominant color in “Wheatfields.” The other book was about Van Gogh’s life and showed the dark, gloomy subjects of his early works in Holland in contrast to the colorful French paintings in his later years. The children also began to learn a simple poem that they chanted in a group “call and response” form.
The second 2-week phase involved the children in visual arts activities in collaboration with the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. During this time, the children made individual pictures based on “Starry Night” and also completed a 4-ft. by 8-ft. canvas mural based on “Wheatfields.”
The final four weeks were devoted to music, dance, and drama activities that reinforced learning about Van Gogh’s paintings and his life. I wrote a script for a musical dance drama contrasting Van Gogh’s dark, gloomy early work with his later colorful paintings. As noted in the first section above, we gathered other talented people in our school community to produce the music, dance and drama performances that were then videotaped and viewed by the children.
Future plans: The Harlem RenaissancePlans for a new mulit-arts project will incorporate visual arts, music, poetry, and drama in a 4-week curriculum. This project will be carried out with preschoolers and their teachers who will be assisted and encouraged by elderly residents of a retirement home near the preschool.
The project theme is based on the life and work of painter Aaron Douglas, musician Louis Armstrong, poet Langston Hughes, and dramatist James Weldon Johnson. These artists were active in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City during the 1920s. This period is often referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. We chose the Harlem Renaissance theme because Black History is popular topic in the United States. Also, Fisk University in Nashville has wonderful murals and other works of art by prominent Harlem Renaissance artists.