Artful Teaching: Integrating the Arts for Understanding Across the Curriculum, K–8

The authors in this volume share exemplary arts-integration practices across the K–8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, they carefully describe how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn. The book includes rich and lively examples of public school teachers integrating visual arts, music, drama, and dance with subject matter, including English, social studies, science, and mathematics. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts every day, in every school, to reach every child. Both a practitioner’s guide and a school reform model, this important book:

• Explains how arts integration across the K–8 curriculum contributes to student learning.
• Features examples of how integrated arts education functions in classrooms when it is done well.
• Explores intensive teacher-education and principal-training programs now underway in several higher education institutions.
• Offers concrete ideas for educators who are looking to strengthen their own skills and improve student opportunities for learning.

David M. Donahue is associate professor of education at Mills College, Oakland, California. Jennifer Stuart is arts coordinator at San Francisco Friends School.