Follow these Tips For Teaching With Art In Any Subject Area

Art inquiry is a strong and effective way to engage students with diverse learning requirements, improve critical thinking and social-emotional skills and make learning engaging to the lives of students. Yet many teachers shy away from teaching with art. This causes their students to miss out on these potentially transformative learning experiences. Teaching with art generates opportunities for novelty in the classroom, stimulating the minds of students and activating different ways of thinking and learning.

While working with teachers, the emphasis is always on the teaching with works of art which don’t need specialized knowledge in the field of art. It does need the willingness to look at your curriculum through a creative lens in order to find new and unexpected connections to the content that is taught. Here are the steps which will help to leverage the power of art for improving your teaching practice and the learning of your students.

1. Choosing a Work of Art: As art tells the story of human history, there is no curriculum topic which can’t be supported by works of art. With the curriculum in mind, you can explore museum websites. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, metmuseum.org are a great place to start. Here, you can download high-resolution pictures of thousands of works of art from their encyclopedic collection. Brooklynmuseum.org and moma.org are also superb and very helpful resources for art images. When selecting works of art to teach from, you can consider these three questions:

Does this artwork provide limelight to my interest?

How do I relate it to the lives of my students?

How do I can relate it to our curriculum?

2. Think Thematically: You can use a theme or essential question for supporting connections between the work of art, your students’ lives and your curriculum. Engaging themes and necessary questions are intellectually engaging and universal; they give an entry point into challenging content by giving support to personal connections between students’ experiences and academic content. In the classroom, she showcased her class portraits in which the artist and the subject had a complicated relationship. Exploring the theme with the help of paintings while making connections to their own lives deepened the understanding of her students.

3. Develop Open-Ended Questions: Critical and creative thinking is inspired by open-ended questions. By engaging your students in open-ended inquiry with the help of works of art, you affirm their unique ways of seeing the world while teaching them to value the diverse viewpoints of their classmates. To make sure that your questions are open-ended, you challenge yourself to think of multiple responses to each question.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/5-tips-for-teaching-with-art-in-any-subject-area/