Chapter 7: Caring as a Transformative Model for Arts Integration

What is best practice for preparing preservice teachers to succeed in various contexts and transform teaching and learning while creating communities of caring and inclusion? This chapter describes the process of preservice art teachers as they use ideas of care (Noddings, 1984, 2005) alongside art integration practices. According to Noddings (2005) when we engage the whole person in the creative and educational process we expand learning and give value and credence to emotional capacity and embodied knowing, opening to the practices of care that are rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness. We suggest that in preparing preservice teachers to use both ideas of care and art in their teaching we can support and strengthen inclusion and equity of all students through an emotionally supportive education process. We call this art integration process transformative art integration. Transformative art integration is different than traditional art integration models that aim to strengthen teaching and learning by using the arts as a tool for extending content knowledge. Instead, transformative art integration practices are holistically rooted in notions of care and work to offer transformative experiences through the way we design and implement meaningful, rich, emotionally diverse, and socially engaged arts based curriculum. Transformative art integration emphasizes the connections between the body, context, experience, culture, emotion, and high order thinking (Freedman, 2003) while deepening Noddings (1984) themes of care. This model releases art from the traditional role of serving as a handmaiden to content and instead empowers art as the pedagogy from which content is learned. Transformative art integration positions art as a critical process in holistic learning, not merely a product with the primary objective of examining how art serves other academic content areas. Hoffman Davis (2008) explains how art experiences can offer students the chance to see different school subjects through the interrelationship of ideas and feelings: Because of the scope of their integrative nature, the arts open many doors to students and offer unique and important encounters with making sense of learning and putting it to use. But the scope of their integrative nature also makes the arts in education vulnerable open to exploitation and dilution.  This chapter offers a new way of thinking about and applying art integration practices across all content areas through a lens of caring that serves to strengthen learning through the arts. The authors propose a shift away from traditional art integration and towards a transformative art integration intended to specifically address the whole student, through notions of care as it applies to arts based teaching and learning. THE POWER OF ART AS A PRACTICE OF CARE Noddings (1984) claims that the aim of the teacher should be to foster receptivity in children and to encourage them to see, touch, and listen to the world around them. One approach she recommends is to organize curriculum around "caring for self, for intimate others, for strangers and global others, for the natural world and for nonhuman creatures, for the human made world, and for ideas" (p. 1) These notions are rooted in holistic education, where child development is seen as a merging of social, cultural, and personal experiences that are grounded in real world concerns (Miller, 2000) and teaching that emphasizes "interdependence, peace, joy, and love" (Shapiro, 2006, p. 360) According to Noddings (2010) [By] approaching the world through the relational ethic of caring, we are more likely to listen attentively to others. In a caring relation, the care is first of all attentive to the cared for, and this attention is receptive, that is, the carer puts aside her own values and projects, and tries to understand the expressed needs of the cared for.