Creative Arts Integration in Childhood Education

Aims to help teacher-candidates learn and develop strategies to integrate the arts such as Music, Visual Art, Movement, and Drama in the childhood general education curriculum. Teacher candidates will experience arts integration as they explore ways of making, offering, and appreciating artistic experiences and explorations. Throughout the course, students will learn different art forms and materials and explore ways of incorporating them into their teaching. In this way, teacher candidates will develop an understanding of the benefits that integrating the arts into the curriculum may bring to their classrooms and their students, cultivating competencies such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and cultural literacy. Learning strategies for creative arts integration will help teacher candidates learn ways to utilize various creative media and methods to help young learners better engage with and explore academic concepts. However, this course is based on the assumption that the Arts are part of life and all people have the right to experience art-making processes and experiences - namely school children. The Arts are not just a means for entertainment or expression but a unique way to experience, think, learn, and live. More than expressing ideas through art, we think those ideas, we create and develop understandings of the world around us and our roles in it.

Fall, Spring

037111