Artful Teaching: Integrating the Arts for Understanding Across the Curriculum, K-8

Both a practitioner’s guide and a school reform model, the new edition of this popular book shares exemplary arts-integration practices across the K-8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, each chapter carefully describes how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn to assist teachers in developing their own philosophy and practice. This updated second edition features scholarship and art at the forefront of contemporary practice and addresses social justice issues such as racial, climate, and economic justice. Chapter authors provide concrete ideas along with lively examples of public school teachers integrating visual arts, music, drama, and dance with subject matter that includes English, social studies, science, and mathematics. The book’s narrative approach makes arts integration accessible and understandable to novice and experts alike. Readers of this new edition will come away with a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts every day, in every school, to reach every child.

Book Features:

• Explains how arts integration across the K-8 curriculum contributes to student learning.
• Features examples of how integrated arts education functions in classrooms when it is done well.
• Introduces historical and contemporary artists whose work is transdisciplinary.
• Brings together and speaks to diverse stakeholders, including classroom teachers, teaching artists, school administrators, and teacher educators.
• Explores intensive teacher-education and principal-training programs now underway in several higher education institutions.

David M. Donahue is a professor of education at the University of San Francisco. Jennifer B. Stuart is an artist and educator who has worked for over 30 years developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary curriculum.