Integrated Curriculum and Our Paradigm of Cognition in the Arts

Abstract

I begin with growing interest in integrating arts with other subjects in school curriculum. There are a number of phrases associated with this interest: integrated curriculum, interdisciplinary study, cross-disciplinary study, arts-centered curriculum, integrated learning (e.g., Jacobs, 1989; Bresler, 1995). These phrases represent a significant shift of emphasis in art education, away from preoccupation with integrity of disciplines and differences between arts and other subjects, toward making connections between them. I see this as an important change. It is not sudden or revolutionary, but I think it represents developments that run deep. Integrated learning is a topic of interest not only in art education but throughout educational spectrum, and there are many other current signs and slogans of same impulse, such as service learning, authentic assessment, whole-language instruction, school-university collaborations, and school-to-work programs. Fundamentally, change seems to be driven by a renewed desire to make school learning meaningful. In attempt to teach rigor-accuracy of knowledge, carefulness of thought, systematic relatedness of ideas-we have emphasized unique structures of disciplines; their integrity and differences between them. That, unfortunately, has promoted an isolation of school subjects which, combined with growing information overload that our students face (Koroscik, 1996), has tended to dry up sources of meaning in curriculum. One sign of change in art education is recent monograph Connections, significant in part because it was issued jointly by The College Board and Getty Institute for Education in Arts (Boston, 1997). It says, for example, that idea of the academic discipline, once itself an agent of educational reform, has ironically given birth to intellectual fragmentation that creates confusion for many of today's high school And it adds that tendency in American education has been...to create curriculum by accretion, by adding on with little concern about how subjects are related, thus producing curricula that are...lacking in any informing sense of large questions, agreements, and disputes that drive learning in world...Learning is often mechanical, routine, and viewed as preparatory for some later task that will somehow... make use of all disconnected facts, figures and algorithms that students encounter in course of schooling. (pp. 4-5) John Dewey wrote about meaning and school curriculum. He held that meaning comes from purposes: that we make sense of elements of school subjects-what he tended to call 'facts'-including bits of knowledge, new ideas, procedures, methods of inquiry-by relating them to purposes, personal or collective, real or imagined. The nature of purposes determines quality of meanings. Our purposes in learning determine which facts we remember, how we organize them, and future contexts in which we will use them. If purposes are limited-as are some of purposes fostered in school today, such as getting better grades, pleasing teacher-so also will be meanings. On Dewey's account, there is a reciprocal relationship between purposes and facts (what we would now call information). Purposes lead us to find, organize, remember and use information, and information helps us to reach or modify our purposes. Purposes lend meaning and information provides accuracy. They are mutually dependent and both necessary. So it is not a question of giving up our concern for subject matter in favor of students' purposes, or of abandoning disciplines in favor of psychology. It is a question of paying attention to both and of promoting a fruitful relation between them.3 The reference to Dewey seems appropriate because change, if indeed it is deep seated, represents a revival of concerns of progressive era, which was also a reaction to a period of over-emphasis on subject matter and relative neglect of students. …

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