In the following article from the current issue of Saint David's Magazine, Art Curriculum Chair Jenna Boccella considers how boys' engagement and understanding are increased through the integration of art and academics.
The headmaster’s theme of “Joyful Balance” resonates strongly throughout the art, woodworking, and ceramics studios at Saint David’s daily. At every grade level and in each visual arts class that boys attend at Saint David’s, there are opportunities to look, create, think critically, and express themselves through visual modes.
Our visual arts curriculum aims to balance mastery of skills, media, and techniques specific to each artistic discipline, while developing habits of mind that extend outside of the school’s walls and beyond graduation. Essential to preparing boys for meaningful, productive lives in the 21st century, they include creative problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking, and understanding and honoring multiple points of view.
In our studios, boys develop self-confidence. They are encouraged to take risks and make “mistakes” in the service of learning and discovering novel solutions to challenges, and learn to look closely beyond the surface for deeper insight and understanding of ideas.
In the fourth grade, scholar-artists and potters enjoy a particularly strong and joyfully balanced immersion in these skills due to the thoughtful integration of the visual arts and classroom history curriculums.
Students’ active engagement with their study of the Ancient Civilizations of Egypt, China, and Greece in the classroom are richly illuminated, elevated, and magnified in the art and pottery studios. Mrs. da Silva and I engage students deeply and authentically with masterworks of art and ceramics from the cultures that they are studying through the application of Visual Thinking Routines developed by Project Zero at Harvard. These exercises are not just fun and gratifying for students but are effective because they engage all types of learners (We as humans are by nature visual thinkers). Focused inquiry into extant masterpieces of arts and crafts from these cultures offer powerful lenses into ideas and insights that cannot be communicated by other means.
Close looking paired with hands-on art-making builds skills and develops deep and authentic appreciation of the artistic output of these cultures. Studying the art of any culture, Ancient or contemporary, has been shown in research to increase empathy and an ability to understand others’ perspectives. These routines encourage boys to “dig deeper” and think critically about issues and ideas.
Coming to the art or pottery studio with knowledge obtained in history class informs their art studies and vice-versa. A current fourth grader in Mrs. Molinari’s history class commented, “I love art, and I love history. When I come to art knowing things about the history of the people who made the art that we’re looking at, it makes me feel confident to put my own ideas into my artwork.”
Research demonstrates that student engagement and enjoyment of subject matter is increased, as is their understanding, when arts are integrated skillfully and in a balanced way with academics. In the visual arts at Saint David’s we strive to encourage joyful balances between skill and creativity; fact and understanding; content and meaning.
This fact is expressed succinctly by another current fourth grader, who, when asked about joyful balance through history and art studies, said, “Combining art and history helps you connect to your soul. When I’m moving my brush around, I can feel how people in Ancient Egypt expressed their feelings. It’s like traveling around the world while staying in place. Art makes me feel calm and confident. It can change someone’s life.”