ED470524 2002-09-00 Integrating the

Arts into the Curriculum for Gifted

Students. ERIC Digest.

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Integrating the Arts into the Curriculum for Gifted Students. ERIC

Digest...........................................................................1

LANGUAGE ARTS LEARNING GOALS.................................... 2

SOCIAL STUDIES LEARNING GOALS.................................... 4

SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS LEARNING GOALS................... 4

CONCLUSION.................................................................. 6

SOURCES....................................................................... 6

ERIC Identifier: ED470524

Publication Date: 2002-09-00

Author: Smutny, Joan Franklin

Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education Arlington VA.

Integrating the Arts into the Curriculum for

Gifted Students. ERIC Digest.

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Studies have shown that the arts can significantly advance gifted students' academic

ED470524 2002-09-00 Integrating the Arts into the Curriculum for Gifted Students. ERIC

Digest.

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and creative abilities and cognitive functioning (e.g., Hetland, 2000; Seeley, 1994;

Walders, 2002; and Willet, 1992). This is a strong rationale for making the arts an

essential feature of gifted education. Goertz (2002) envisions art instruction as the

"fourth R" in education and demonstrates how it increases the skills of observation,

abstract thinking, and problem analysis.

Education in art is an invitation to use the reasoning skills of an artist. The artist

visualizes and sets goals to find and define the problem, chooses techniques to collect

data, and then evaluates and revises the problem solution with imagination in order to

create....The artist, in his or her creative process, requires a high-order thought process

(p. 476).

When integrating the arts into the curriculum, teachers can design experiences that are

tied to the unique needs, interests, and abilities of gifted students and challenge them to

perform more complex and sophisticated tasks. Teachers can ask themselves: What

needs do my arts activities meet? What precisely do I want my gifted students to learn

and how will I know that these activities are stimulating their growth? Studies on

differentiated instruction and the "parallel curriculum" (Heacox, 2002; Tomlinson et al.,

2002) emphasize the importance of establishing clear learning goals before designing

alternative learning experiences. The following are examples of learning goals and

activities that integrate the arts with the language arts, social studies, and mathematics

and science curricula.

LANGUAGE ARTS LEARNING GOALS

The arts can strengthen all areas of oral and written communication and, for gifted

students, provide more opportunities for creative problem-solving and analytical

thinking.

Reading

* Enhance critical thinking. While reading a story, students draw, sketch, or paint

whatever is most vivid to them. It could be a color, a mood, an image, a symbol, a

scene, or an idea. In small groups, they discuss their artwork and its significance to the

story, and what they think will happen by the end.

* Stimulate analytical thinking and imaginative interpretation. Work with the children to

create a chamber theater piece out of a short story. Ask them to select the most

important scenes and explain why they chose them. Choose students to be narrators

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Digest.
and others to speak and act the parts of the characters.

* Sharpen awareness of motivation and points of view. Children choose a conflict, issue,

or problem raised by the text and stage a debate, with different students assuming the

role of specific characters.

Writing

* Stimulate novel ideas for stories. Provide visual catalysts (e.g., paintings,

photographs) for students to imagine what happened before and after the scenes

depicted. Use the visual image as the climactic moment of a story, the moment after the

climax, or the moment before.

* Undertake investigative research. Children read a story of a painting that disappeared

and imagine how they-the art detectives-tracked it down. Or they can write a fictional

piece on how they discovered a painting and exposed the forgeries. What gave it away?

* Explore multiple points of view. As an extension of the previous activity, the students

could write historical fiction on the extraordinary journey of the Mona Lisa from King

Louis XIV's palace in Versailles to its permanent home in the Louvre. (They could also

choose another famous art piece.) They could write it from the point of view of the

painting, the people who had it, or the people who were looking for it.

* Synthesize different sources for a news story. Drawing on a variety of sources

(photographs, paintings, music, and written material), children write a sketch, poem,

script, or essay about a current event reported in the paper. The children then tell their

story from a variety of viewpoints: this individual's friend, teacher, mother or father,

sister or brother, or the family dog.

* Analyze a music composition (e.g., classical, rock, folk) and create a short script that

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follows the tone, pace, movements, etc. of this music. Students select a piece of music,

listen to the different instruments and elements, and assess how the music could be a

conversation.

SOCIAL STUDIES LEARNING GOALS

Studying history, geography, and other social studies subjects through the arts (and

vice versa) enables gifted students to investigate topics from multiple viewpoints and in

more depth. As they create vivid representations of significant events, processes, and

people, they analyze, assess, and interpret the facts and images before them. Activities

such as the following use imagination and analytical abilities in new ways:

* Analyze the life of a famous historical figure. Students study the portraits of this

person, musical pieces composed for them, stories told about them, and films made in

their honor along with textual sources. What do visual representations tell them about

this person? Students pretend to be this historical figure, choose an issue that they feel

passionate about and write a speech as this person. They can express their ideas

through visual art, mime, or dramatics.

* Apply an art phenomenon to social/historical reality. Students act as reporters who

travel back in time to cover important events in an artistic movement. They analyze a

phenomenon (such as impressionism) and write a newspaper article about how this

phenomenon responds to certain social, political, and historical conditions. What does

impressionism tell the students about this time? How was the technique of

impressionism a break with what existed before and how did this relate to the time?

* Investigate and analyze the contrasting views of two sides of a conflict, issue, or

struggle. Students examine the art of 19th century western artists versus that of African

populations and grapple with the European belief in African "primitivism." How are the

colonizers and colonized represented and why? What does this tell students about the

artists and their world? How does the art of the colonized Africans express their social

and political condition? Students write a position paper on 19th century European views

of Africans and Africa, as seen through their art and writing (they can also do the

reverse). They create an art gallery for student work that depicts their ideas.

SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS LEARNING

GOALS

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Page 4 of 7 ED470524 2002-09-00 Integrating the Arts into the Curriculum for Gifted Students. ERIC

Digest.
Science and mathematics have immediate ties to the arts. Pop art's Roy Liechtenstein

said, "Organized perception is what art is all about" (Piper 1981, p. 95). Leonardo Da

Vinci studied perspective and depth in painting, applied mathematics and the science of

color to every aspect of his work, explored anatomy, invented machines and sketched

designs for technology far in advance of his time. Thomas Locker, a contemporary

artist, has integrated science and art in a format designed especially for teachers'

classrooms. His Sky Tree Portfolio (1995), Cloud Dance (2000), and Water Dance

(1997) contain exquisite paintings of nature with information and activities that promote

scientific inquiry.

Science, mathematics, and art all concern themselves with the true nature of things. Are

things what they seem? Should the arts depict things as people experience them or as

they are? The following activities suggest ways to blend the arts with math and science

in such a way that gifted students can examine real-world applications of fundamental

concepts and ideas (such as distance, color, perspective, proportion).

* Apply a scientific concept to a problem in art. Have students explore a scientific

subject (such as light). Place paintings together that seem particularly suited to this

subject and ask children to discuss how artists represent the science of light-its

directions, color at different times of the day, its interaction with water and color, etc.

Students can select some aspect of light that interests them scientifically and, like

artists, think of ways to represent this visually through painting, collage, or sketches.

* Analyze the nature of matter using the arts and physics as sources. Both science and

art deal with illusion-what seems to be but is not. Using visual art (e.g., surrealists),

modern dance performance and other sources, students write down the assumptions

artists (particularly experimental artists) are making about the nature of matter. (Is it

always in motion? Is it static? Is it solid and impenetrable as it appears?) Investigate

one or more of these assumptions in physics and write an essay justifying or

questioning artistic representations.

* Sharpen visual perception and increase ability to estimate accurately. Artists often test

their perceptions by estimating distances and heights. Students can test their

perceptions by putting a stick into the ground (so that six inches show) on a sunny day

and measure the length of the shadow cast by the six-inch stick. Next, measure the

length of the shadow of a nearby tree. How would the students calculate the height of

the tree in inches? In feet? Let them devise their own system for figuring this out. They

can diagram, use paintings, photographs, etc.

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CONCLUSION

The activities described here open the door to a new kind of learning experience for

gifted students. Integrating the arts into the academic curriculum and the academic

curriculum into the arts enable gifted children to make unique discoveries and

innovations. Because the arts immerse them in the creative process, they can apply

their advanced reasoning and problem-solving abilities in new ways. As previous

examples show, these processes also offer an even greater opportunity to the gifted: to

bring more of themselves-their own unique insight, ability, and vision-to a subject.

Gifted children, many of whom are artistically and/or creatively gifted, are not a

dispensable population. They need to feel that their talents can create for them a unique

and enduring place in the world. The talented young painter, Alexandra Nechita put it

well:

"Sometimes I get so immersed in my paintings I'm just somewhere else. I create my

own universe that you get to see little by little through every painting I work at. And

every painting I create is part of me going out little by little to all of you." (Nechita 1996,

p. 80)

SOURCES

Goertz, J. (2002). Searching for talent through the visual arts. In J. F. Smutny (Ed.),

Underserved gifted populations. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Heacox, D. (2002). Differentiating instruction in the regular classroom: How to reach

and teach all learners, grades 3-12. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing.

Hetland, L. (2000). Music instruction enhances spatial-temporal reasoning. Journal of

Aesthetic Education.

Locker, T., & Christensen, C. (1995). Sky tree portfolio. Stuyvesant, NY: Sky Tree

Press. (Available at the Center for Gifted, National-Louis University, 847.251.2661.)

Locker, T. (1997). Water dance. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co.

Locker, T. (2000). Cloud dance. San Diego: Silver Whistle Harcourt, Inc.

Nechita, A. (1996). Outside the lines: Paintings by Alexandra Nechita. Atlanta, GA:

Longstreet Press.

Piper, D. (Ed.). (1981). Random House history of painting and sculpture. New York:

Random House.

Seeley, K. (1994). Arts curriculum for the gifted. In J. VanTassel-Baska (Ed.),

Comprehensive curriculum for gifted learners (pp. 282-300). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

www.eric.ed.gov ERIC Custom Transformations Team

Page 6 of 7 ED470524 2002-09-00 Integrating the Arts into the Curriculum for Gifted Students. ERIC

Digest.
Smutny, J. F., Walker, S. Y., & Meckstroth, E. A. (1997). Teaching young gifted children

in the regular classroom. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing.

Tomlinson, C. A., Kaplan, S. N., Renzulli, J. S., Purcell, J., Leppien, J., & Burns, D.

(2002). The parallel curriculum: A design to develop high potential and challenge

high-ability learners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.

Walders, D. (2002). Poetry and science education. ERIC Document EDO-SE-00-03.

ERIC Clearinghouse on Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Education.

Willett, L. V. (1992). The efficacy of using the visual arts to teach math and reading

concepts. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational

Research Association (73rd, San Francisco, CA, April 20-24). ERIC Document ED 348

171.

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but please acknowledge your source. This digest was prepared with funding from the

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Education.

Title: Integrating the Arts into the Curriculum for Gifted Students. ERIC Digest.

Note: Digest number E631.

Document Type: Information Analyses---ERIC Information Analysis Products (IAPs)

(071); Information Analyses---ERIC Digests (Selected) in Full Text (073);

Available From: ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education, 1110 N.

Glebe Rd., Arlington, VA 22201-5704. Tel: 800-328-0272 (Toll Free); Fax:

703-620-4334; e-mail: ericec@cec.sped.org. For full text: http://ericec.org.

Descriptors: Art Activities, Art Expression, Curriculum Design, Curriculum

Development, Elementary Secondary Education, Gifted, Integrated Activities, Integrated

Curriculum, Language Arts, Mathematics Instruction, Science Instruction, Social Studies

Identifiers: ERIC Digests

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