Prism.K12: Creativity and Curriculum
Education & Community Engagement
Hilary Katz, Manager of Teacher initiatives, shares insights on the arts integration course offered by the University of Maryland and The Phillips Collection. “Connecting to the Core Curriculum” provides PreK-12 educators with the opportunity to blend the visual arts seamlessly into the core curriculum, using the Phillips’s Prism.K12 arts integration strategies and resources.
“This course allowed me to step back and evaluate how I use art in my classroom and gave me different perspectives on WHY I should be using art that I had not considered before.”-Teacher-participant
From October 2019 through February 2020, teachers from across DC and Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties participated in the Connecting to the Core Curriculum arts integration course. I co-taught this hybrid-learning course with Kenna Hernly, PhD Candidate in Museum Education at University of Maryland. We worked with educators teaching grades PreK to 12, and subjects ranging from dance, music, English, and history to art, ceramics, math, and robotics. A teacher-participant reflected, “Taking this course with teachers from different kinds of schools and grade levels gave me new ideas and perspectives about teaching, and now we have a collection of shared lessons I can use. It also helped challenge me to try out new ideas with my students and take risks.”
Teachers engage in group discussions about strategies for developing arts integration lesson plans. Photo: Travis Houze
Throughout the course, the educators learned and practiced techniques for integrating the arts into the curriculum to reach students with multiple learning styles. To dive deeper into a particular subject area, the educators engaged in several art techniques, including stop motion animation and contour line drawings.
Participants learn about the art of Los Carpinteros in the galleries. Photo: Travis Houze
Participants execute contour line drawings based on the artwork of Los Carpinteros. Photo: Travis Houze
Art and Ceramics teacher Christina Kunze then taught her high school students how to make contour line sculptures of their own heroes and revolutionaries, teaching students how to empathize with their subjects and express their choices. Photo: Michael McSorley
As the culminating project for the course, the educators designed and facilitated arts-integrated lessons in their classrooms using the Prism.K12 strategies and artwork from The Phillips Collection. Many of them collaborated with other teachers at their schools to integrate multiple subject areas. Discover the results in the exhibition Energizing Education: Teaching through the PRISM of Arts Integration.
Teacher participants learn how to use stop-motion animation to link the visual arts with core curriculum subjects. Photo: Travis Houze
Teacher participants learn how to use stop-motion animation to link the visual arts with core curriculum subjects. Photo: Travis Houze
The participants then taught their students how to synthesize math equations using stop-motion animation by re-creating artworks by John Graham in the Phillipsâs collection. Photo: Nicole Entwistle
Moving forward, we plan to continue to offer this arts integration course for local and regional teachers. As a result of participating in this course, a teacher described the benefits experienced by her students: “joy and wonder of the creation process, less anxiety while solving math problems,” demonstrating the potential of arts integration to break down barriers in the classroom and open up new avenues for creation.
Read about the course from a teacher’s perspective here.
