And they want to study dance or theater or music or art and use that as a springboard for their advanced work. With Project ARTS, every school and district is responsible for creating a plan to provide instruction in the arts such that all students benefit, K-12. We're trying to help schools figure out how to put the arts back when they have so many demands on them, particularly the underachieving schools. You have an issue of a very limited amount of time in any day. To help principals and teachers understand how the arts could be taught, we try to help them see how they can integrate them into the subject areas and have the subject areas be integrated into the arts.
Integration means collaboration across disciplines rather than one person teaching everything.
If a good art teacher teaches a good art lesson, then I'm very pleased with that. If the context of that art lesson relates to a period of history that's studied in social studies, or a series of characters in a piece of literature, or is a scientific inquiry related to botanical drawings or marine life or plant life or anything like that, the art must be strong for its own sake, but the subject matter which can be connected to the art should be equally as strong. Or you're giving lip service to science and really teaching art. What we want are teachers who come together and plan curriculum experiences for students that teach them what they need to know in the art world and what they need to know in science. Then they can move up and continue to build up their repertoire of understanding, their knowledge base, the skills that they need to have, the vocabulary that they will experience.