Lessons · Teaching · integrating the arts without making them decoration
Integrating the arts without turning them into decoration
An arts activity inside another subject is integrated when it teaches something in both. Drawing a poster about the Romans while learning nothing about art is decoration: it consumes an art lesson and returns a display board.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
In beta. This lesson was written for Hone and has not yet been checked by a state certification officer. Practice material, not professional advice. What that means.
What it is for
This distinction is on the examination and it matters far more in a real timetable, where the arts are the first thing squeezed. A teacher who can defend an arts activity on both subjects' terms keeps it in the week. One who cannot loses it by February.
How to think about it
Before planning an integrated activity, write the two objectives separately: what is learned about the other subject, and what is learned about the art form. If the second one is blank, it is decoration, and either give it a real arts objective or do something else.
Worked example
Illustrating a story: decoration, unless the illustration task teaches composition or valueAdd 'show who matters most by where you put them' and it teaches emphasis.
Setting a poem to a rhythm teaches metre in both subjects at onceGenuine integration: the syllables and the beats are the same idea seen twice.
A freeze-frame of a historical moment teaches inference and teaches still imageBoth objectives are real and both are assessable.
Write the two objectives before planning; a blank second one is the testWhich takes a minute and settles the question honestly.
Your turn
Name what makes an arts activity integration rather than decoration.
It teaches something in subjects
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Counting time spent as arts provision. Forty minutes of colouring inside a history lesson is not forty minutes of art, and returning it as such on a curriculum plan is how a school ends up with no art at all.