Morgan,+Carol


 * Beyond Arts Integration: Defining Learning in Arts Education Partnerships.** //**Closing Remarks of Carol Morgan, Deputy Director for Education, ArtsConnection. March 11, 2005.**//

ABSTRACT The address, delivered by Carol Morgan expresses a summarization of a symposium ArtsConnection hosted in 2005. She answered the question “What comes next?” when programs want to take the arts “beyond illustration” when the intention is to use the arts as a way to illustrate another subject area.

Through the research from arts integration projects in New York City Public Schools on arts integrated with the Balanced Literacy Curriculum findings included: the arts helped students express themselves verbally and in writing, to develop a voice based on their individual experience, experienced the awakening of a passion in which building stamina is not in questions because their arts experiences were compelling. Teachers also reported that arts experiences taught students respect for the art form, respect for learning and how to take ownership of their learning.

Morgan’s closing comments also cited a RAND Corporation study that stated, “Arts Benefits are grounded in compelling arts experiences” What makes an arts experience compelling? The cognitive, personal, and social aspects of learning plus the aesthetic-the parts of the arts experience that engages the child’s body, mind, emotions and imagination, that transports the child to another world and brings him back again somehow changed or, at the very least, having expanded his sense of what is possible.

QUESTIONS: · How do we measure imagination and the ability to “willingly suspend disbelief” · Why do we teach the arts? · Why do we think it is useful and important to integrate the arts with other subject matters? · What might learning in and through the arts have to contribute to our ideas about how we learn those things we think are worth learning?