Reflections on my arts integration journey, adapted from a paper written in February 2018.
My passion for arts integration began in 2009 when I joined an educational outreach dance company at BYU called Kinnect. We developed lecture-demonstrations to perform in elementary schools and taught creative dance workshops to children. We began shows with "We're Kinnect, and we like to connect dance to everything and everyone in the world around us."
My first year we created “Ordinary Magic" and danced a children’s book (language arts) and simple machines (science). My second year we created “Klassroom Kinnections" with a dance for science, math, language arts, social studies, and of course, recess. I recall lessons centered around prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, simple machines, the water cycle, Newton’s laws of motion, nocturnal animals, U.S. history, and the topography of Egypt. It was a transformational period of my life that changed the direction of my studies and set me up for a future career as a teaching artist. As a member of this company, and under the mentorship of our founding director, Marilyn Berrett, I fell in love with creative dance for children and began having nightmares about the arts being removed from schools.
I saw how dance served student learning and it changed my course from planning to be a math teacher or engineer to a dance educator. Through performing, choreographing, and teaching with Kinnect I began to see a vision for my future and knew my future career would include arts integration. I also felt strongly about getting a minor in mathematics education, because I wasn’t completed sold on the security of a dance education degree, and because I loved math. Important at this point in the story is the description of my first interview with the boss I had during college. As we ate lunch at Chili’s in the spring after my first season on Kinnect, I told her of my dreams of integrating math and dance in public education. She thought, “I can’t see how that is going to work, but I love people with a dream,” and she hired me.
When I graduated with my degree in dance education I planned to teach dance full-time in secondary schools. I was offered math teaching positions –everyone needs math teachers–but I was set on getting a full-time dance position. I didn’t know it at the time, but I got my dream job at a Title I junior high school in 2013. I taught dance full-time for two years, and my third year when they added an extra class period to the schedule I offered to teach a dance-integrated math elective as a remediation math course. My principal’s eyes glistened in response to this idea, then opened wider as he took my idea further and invited me to teach a full-year 8th-grade math class. I accepted on the condition that I could teach math in my dance studio.
In the pilot year of my 8th grade, dance-integrated math class student’s grew 8-20% more on their end of level test scores than their peers receiving math instruction in other classrooms. The district awarded me with a certificate, Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt awarded me 1st place in their Creative Classrooms Contest, and I met the requirements for student growth to receive a bonus offered by the State Legislature. As a result of this successful year, I sold my prep period for the next year and taught two full-year 8th-grade math classes the next year.
It was in these years of teaching math and dance in the secondary public school setting that my ideas on arts integration evolved from the theories and practices I was originally taught as an undergraduate student. When I was first introduced to arts integration, and in the following years of pedagogy courses and student teaching, I was taught that true and meaningful integration gave equal weight and emphasis to both topics being integrated: one subject is not to overpower or dumb down the other, and the art standards are addressed with as much authenticity as the other content standards. I still believe this is a good goal to strive for in integration practices but as I taught in public schools, both elementary and secondary, I learned that this ideal is not easily achieved, and rarely, if ever.
Continue here to read more about my dancing math story and my thoughts on arts integration.
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