User:Rjxue/sandbox

Article Evaluations

Sector: Arts Integration

Everything in the article is relevant to arts integration and nothing outstanding strays from the topic at hand. The article seems neutral for the most part, touching on the history of arts education, different US organizations that research and advocate for arts integration, the obstacles standing in the way of integrating arts in education, and the effects that arts integration has on students.

There does seem to be a thread of support for the concept throughout the article and nothing from the perspective against arts integration. Though this positive viewpoint seems dominant, in the universe of education discourse, there is an almost unanimous sentiment that arts integration is objectively beneficial (but costly and perhaps not top priority), so I don’t think that this article purposely promotes the idea without regard for another viewpoint. Everything is presented as facts and research, not opinionated statements of persuasion.

The citations present do work and link to sources that support the specific claims in the article for the most part. There is one section about Lesley University’s program for teaching classroom teachers how to integrate the arts into their curriculum that is missing a linked citation. When spot-checking these sources, the reference material does seem appropriate and reliable, coming from academic journals and research from education centers on the space.

The information is up-to-date, discussing the effects of the current legislation, No Child Left Behind, as well as a 2013 congressional resolution to change STEM to STEAM. However, there is not much about developments in the last half decade. Additionally, the page is very focused on the state of affairs in the United States, and it could be interesting to understand if and how that differs from arts integration elsewhere. The research and advocacy section is quite long and devotes short paragraphs to various organizations. This could potentially be split up into non-profit work vs. government initiatives or something of a similar vein.

In the article’s Talk page, there is also mention of expanding to include community art and institutions outside of formal schooling since arts education can occur informally as well. The article is part of WikiProject Education, but has no quality nor importance rating. It was also an assigned topic for Cal State Fullerton’s Fall 2016 Critical Arts in Education course. We have not discussed arts education in class, so I cannot compare this article to our discussions.

Area: Art Education in the United States

Everything in this article does relate to the topic of art education in the United States. After a brief introduction, the article takes readers through the history of movements and arts education models before touching on organizations such as the NEA and their initiatives, then lightly mentioning arts integration.

Something that stood out to me was the heavy focus on historical movements with less emphasis on modern art education and funding. Though claims are factual and neutral, I don’t think the article fully encapsulates the realm of art education in the United States.

The citations do work and are sound, drawing from various art associations, journals, and scholarly works. Some facts have a listed citation, but those sources, while appropriate and reliable, are not hyperlinked. The many that are, do support the facts in the article and are unbiased.

The information is accurate and chronological, but there could be more recent information that is missing, such as a section on contemporary efforts and today’s art education landscape. I believe there could also be work done on funding because that is a large aspect to arts education and is only briefly mentioned in the introduction. A new section could potentially be added for this purpose.

On this article’s Talk page, there is discussion regarding contributors to the field, prominent educators in US history who have added to the research and advocacy surrounding art education. Otherwise, the comments around adding arts integration and chronological history seem to have been incorporated already.

The article is part of three WikiProjects: Education, Visual arts, and United States. On the quality scale, it is rated “Start-class” under all three projects and unrated in terms of importance for all the projects but for United States, under which it is of low importance. Again, we have not discussed education in class, so there is no available comparison between this article’s content and the scope of our course.

Scholarly Sources and Summaries

Sector: Arts Integration

No Child Left With Crayons: The Imperative of Arts-Based Education and Research With Language ‘Minority’ and Other Minoritized Communities

This journal article explains the disproportionate effect of NCLB on minoritized youth and how a focus on arts education can restore the engagement of these students. The interplay of arts education, diversity education, and arts-based research culminate in arts integration making education more equitable. This (both a more in-depth look at the effects of NCLB as well as how arts integration combats the adverse consequences) can be better explained in the article, in the NCLB sub-section under Obstacles or even in a new Cultural Effects sub-section under Contributions.

A View into a Decade of Arts Integration

This journal article looks at the impact of the CETA program (a whole school reform method of arts integration) on students, teachers, and partner schools. It addresses specific areas of success and areas of improvement, as well as resulting impact of the program. This source adds to the discussion of best practices or ways to integrate the arts into education - a section I hope to add - and provides a great example and place to start when considering how arts integration actually works.

Questioning the Role of ‘21st-Century Skills’ in Arts Education Advocacy Discourse

This journal article discusses advocacy for arts in education as it relates to the National Core Arts Standards. It provides two perspectives of advocacy -- one that emphasizes the individual benefits of arts integration as lifelong skills in inquiry (what the Core Standards are based on) and one more common view that emphasizes economic gains for the workforce -- and explains how the bridging of the two could lead to more implementation of arts integration. These alternate positions could add color to the current article, bringing in multiple viewpoints on the issue.

Making Meaning Many Ways: An Exploratory Look at Integrating the Arts with Classroom Curriculum

This is a really robust journal article that presents a study on arts integration, its multi-faceted purposes, methods by which it is executed, and the resulting effects on learning. Integrating arts into traditional classroom education acts as a different way to present and engage with material, with both linguistic and socio-cultural contexts. This could be valuable in adding detail to both how art can be integrated and how arts integration contributes to a well-rounded education.

Implications for Art Education in the Third Millennium: Art Technology Integration

This journal article speaks to technology's role in arts education, specifically how computer technology creates problems and opportunities. It could be interesting to incorporate the implications of technology as it relates to the arts, especially when thinking about how best to implement the integration of arts in classrooms. Today's education so heavily relies on technological advances, so effective arts integration is undoubtedly also affected.

Enhancing Student Learning through Arts Integration: Implications for the Profession

This journal article explains the benefits of arts integration from the perspective of teaching as a profession. It draws on the various developmental advantageous of arts education, but frames it as enhancing the teacher's ability to teach students in an interactive and more effective way. Because art impacts thought processing, it also affects each of the more traditional, not-budget-cut-affected subjects taught in classrooms. The article also brings in non-school arts programs as examples as well as proposing methods of classroom arts integration.

The Support Infrastructure for Youth Arts Learning

This chapter from a book about arts learning and state policy examines the infrastructure around arts education, identifying public schools, public after-school programs, community arts, and higher education as four key components in the space. Structure, reach, and content are discussed as criteria for the efficacy of each institution, and the role that each plays in youth arts could be an important addition to the main article. Overall, the existing infrastructure is still weak with most room for engagement and growth in the K-12 public schooling system.

Arts Integration, Common Core, and Cultural Wealth: An Ethnographic Case Study of a Title I Elementary School

This case study is a really interesting look at the results of implementing an arts integration program compliant to Common Core standards. The development and sustained execution of integrating arts into the curriculum actually supported the student-centered approach of arts education which yielded more empowered and confidents students who were not distinguishable by their cultural wealth, while a non-arts integrated curriculum would show evidence of the discrepancy.

The Arts and Achievement in At-risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies

This report authored by the NEA finds that at-risk students benefit most from arts education. It explains the correlation between arts programs and increased academic performance and civil engagement, collecting evidence from multiple longitudinal studies.

Reinvesting in arts education: Winning America’s future through creative schools

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) published this report that emphasizes the role of arts education in educational improvement, student engagement, and building critical skills. It would help bolster the section on effects of arts integration, including academic, socio-emotional, and socio-cultural.

Nowhere, Somewhere, Everywhere: The Arts in Education

Davis presents different roles and places where the arts might fit into education, taking into account cultural context and other implications. This is a great source to add to the conversation about the effect of art as expression and how it fits into curricula.

Area: Art Education in the United States

The Evolving Ecology of Arts Education

This scholarly book chapter discusses the history of art education in the United States (a perfect match for what I'm aiming to contribute to this article). It advances chronologically, beginning with the lack of public funding for the arts in the 1970s, then taking us through the growing goals around art education in the decades following and how these changes tie to other education reform initiatives and were themselves a point of reform in the 1980s, and then concludes with a look at how K-12 arts education is organized today with involvement from an array of groups (government, community-based organizations, private philanthropic entities, etc.). This is a great source to reference in order to flesh out the history of art education in the US.

My Taxes Paid for That?! or Why the Past Is Prologue for Public Arts Funding

This journal article is a worthy source to cite for adding more detail on the history of budget cuts at different levels of government in the US. It touches on the debate surrounding public funding for the arts in the US and how it is both a matter of morality (is it effective/gainful/worthwhile to fund the arts) and of maintaining a balanced budget, and will be useful to expand on policy and regulations around art education.

JEE SELECTS: GETTING AHEAD OF S.T.E.A.M.

This journal article could be used to talk about the rise of STEAM schools in the US, an initiative that advocates for the arts as just as essential a part of the core curriculum as any component of the original STEM. (Might also bleed into sector article?)

The eugenics movement and its impact on art education in the United States

This article outlined three main effects that the eugenics movement had on American education: a segregation between college-bound and vocational students, a hierarchical curriculum in public schools, and a heavy emphasis on standardized testing. All these have pushed arts education, namely visual arts, to the background. This is an important development in the fabric of United States arts education, as a sociopolitical movement caused the suppression of arts education.

Beyond Identity Politics: The New Culture Wars and Art Education

This article is a recent look at cultural debates between conservative republican policy and liberal social values. It discusses art education in the context of today's contentious political climate, how multicultural art education clashes with the systems of power and production, how differences in race/class/gender/etc. has caused hostility and exclusion of marginalized populations, and how we can work toward a more intersectional approach to art education amidst these wars.

A New Vision for Arts Education

This article describes the efforts of the NEA to emphasize arts education in primary and secondary schooling. It is a perfect source for my intended contribution of detailing the movements between actors in the national conversation around arts education as it expands on various plans that the NEA has to increase arts education (including more investments, and collaboration with education leaders at all levels of government).

Arts education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation

This report could be used to discuss the relationship between arts education and participation, especially in the context of the decline in arts education in the United States, which disproportionately effect learning across different racial and ethnic groups.

The Sound of Silence: The Unprecedented Decline of Music Education in California Public Schools, A Statistical Review

I used this report to provide examples of the decline of arts provisions in the early 2000s due to budget cuts as well as new legislation on school achievement requirements, which pushed the arts to the background.

Summarizing and Synthesizing

Sector: Arts Integration

When looking at the aggregate of all my sources, there seems to be a wide variety of valuable topics that are missing from the article or able to be expanded on. For one, there are many discussions on the impact and effectiveness of arts integration and its affect on student learning. Currently, the article has a section on how arts education affects development, but there are sentences I can add from these sources. In addition, there are a lot of specific methods of implementing arts integration which could be added to the main article to explain how arts can be integrated with education, whether through technology in the classroom, through community programs, or other.

Additions to Sector Article

[To Research and Advocacy Section]

Arts advocacy discourse currently presents two main opposing views in support of arts in education. The first points to economic grounds that art teaches "21st-century skills" like collaboration and innovation, which are necessary only as a means to breed productivity for the growth of the market. The second, alternative approach focuses instead on the philosophical value of creative inquiry that art instills in students, arguing lifelong development with no end in mind as a necessary habit borne out of an arts education. Tension between the utilitarian, workplace-focused view and the educational, growth-centered framework on advocacy continues to shape and reshape the arts education universe as revisions to the National Core Arts Standards reflect fluctuations in advocacy rhetoric.

[To Contributions > Academic Effects Section]

Participation in arts programs is positively correlated with increased academic achievement, including higher math and verbal SAT scores, when compared to the performance of students without arts education.

An exploratory study concluded that the integration of arts in classroom curriculum enhances academic learning because of the fully-immersive engagement of the arts, which allows students to understand different perspectives, safely take risks, express feelings through less restrictive modes, and draw parallels between the arts and traditional core subject areas.

[To Contributions > Socio-emotional Development Section]

The confidence, collaboration, and creativity that arts education fosters has a circular, positive effect on academics as well as cultural engagement.

[To Contributions > Socio-cultural Development Section]

Longitudinal studies have shown that students with arts education are more civically engaged. This socio-cultural effect of arts integration is disproportionately stronger for at-risk students.

[New Section: Integration of arts in classroom curriculum]

Jessica Davis presents eight different frameworks for considering the role of the arts in education. Her categories and methods are as follows:

1. Arts-Based - Art is at the core of learning, providing a lens through which students can understand other subjects. Art serves as the basic threshold for general learning.
2. Arts-Injected (or Infused) - Art is "injected" from the outside as a matter of enrichment (e.g., a period of music, visiting artists, etc.)
3. Arts-Included - Art is offered alongside traditional curriculum, not necessarily for interdisciplinary purposes but rather as its own course of study.
4. Arts-Expansion - Art is an exploratory adventure that takes students outside of school (e.g., field trips to a museum, concert hall, etc.)
5. Arts-Professional - This approach treats art training as a means for a professional career in the arts, and turning students into artists is the primary goal.
6. Arts-Extras - Art is sometimes offered as an additional commitment outside of regular school curriculum (e.g., school newspaper, after-school dance clubs, etc.).
7. Arts-Education - Referred to by some as aesthetic education, this approach uses art as a way of knowing, turning its study more philosophical to interpret and apply to experiences.
8. Arts-Cultura - Art connects individual students' "culture" to collective community "cultures" to more structured racial/national "Cultures" to the ultimate universal "Culture." It is through this interplay that art encourages students to take risks, think critically, and make meaning.

It is often difficult to fully integrate the arts with traditional classroom instruction in a way that allows for the arts-cultura model. This is largely due to the disconnect between art teachers and teachers of other subjects, who are not given the time or ability to coordinate and interweave lesson plans that apply art to core subjects and vice versa.

[New subsection: Arts Technology Integration]

As technology continually advances, arts integration evolves to match. The challenge in integrating arts in today's technology-first education lies not in implementing production labs on school campuses or accessing the latest computer software, but rather in effectively managing the sheer amount of information that technology makes available. Students must learn to select relevant data, assess these data, and draw critically from them in order to make meaning, answer questions, or form new ones. Technology also presents more channels of expression, whether through digital art or artificial intelligence, which, if supported by arts-technology integration, can cultivate the experimentation and inquiry that arts education champions.

Area: Art Education in the United States

The compilation of these sources all point to a possible contribution in the context of more postmodern ideals of art education, how recent policy or sociopolitical factors have affected art education in the United States. Specifically, different initiatives and movements have added to a complex debate: should the United States put more of a focus on art education, and how have past decisions or the current state of affairs impacted the course of art education?

Additions to Area Article

[To Arts Integration Section]

Arts integration is especially important today when some schools no longer have or have small arts education programs due to significant budget cuts, including the federal budget agreement that took $12.5 million from the NEA, the United State's largest public arts funder, in 2011.

[New Section: History of Arts Education Provisions]

In the 1970s, provisions for arts in education were limited, at the discretion of individual states. Local schools, school boards, and districts were the main actors in deciding whether arts education was provided. Where art education was offered, it consisted of exposure-based experiences with cultural organizations outside of the school and was not integrated into classroom curriculum. In the next couple decades, budget cuts as a result of fiscal crises heavily stripped school budgets to the point where positions for art teachers were essentially eliminated in order to retain core subjects. At this time, arts was seen as nonessential to the development of critical thinking and there did not exist a standard curriculum for teaching art in public schools. As such, provisions were scarce if at all present in the 1980s and 1990s.

However, the significance of an arts education emerged as data found academic performance improvements and socio-emotional and socio-cultural benefits, among other positive effects, stemming from the stimulative nature of the arts. Key players in advocating for and providing art education included a blend of public entities (school, government agencies, etc.), private organizations, and community centers.

This emerging acknowledgement of the importance of art education was matched by a decline in provisions at the beginning of the 19th century. With the implementation of NCLB, public schools prioritized meeting Academic Performance Index (API) growth targets, downgrading the emphasis on non-core subjects. For example, in California public schools, while enrollment increased by 5.8% from 1999 to 2004, music education decreased by 50% in the same 5-year period. On a national level, data from the Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPAAs) showed that in 2008, 18-24 year olds were less likely to have had an arts education than in 1982. Low-income and low-performing public schools disproportionately struggled with this decline, and African-American and Latino students are generally less able to access the arts when compared to their White counterparts.

These findings of drastic declines in art education provisions spurred efforts for reinvestment. The NEA declared goals including maximizing investment impact, collaboration with local education across levels of government, and offering guidance and leadership support for art education.

My Contributions

Sector: Arts Integration

• Total sources added/used: 8 (from sources listed and explained in Scholarly Sources section above)
• Added missing citation for Bellisario and Donovan's Lesley University study
• Posted 2 paragraphs to talk page outlining overlap and potential additions/improvements to the article's mainpage
• Added 4-sentence paragraph introduction and citation to "Research and Advocacy" section about debate in advocacy discourse (including link to National Core Arts Standards)
• Created "Key Players" sub-heading to break up section
• Added 1 sentence and citation under "Academic effects" section (including link to National Art Education Association)
• Added link to "Art education in the United States" in "See Also" section
• Added 1 sentence and citation to start of "Academic effects" subsection
• Added 1 sentence and citation to end of "Socio-emotional development" subsection
• Added 2 sentences and citation to end of "Socio-cultural development" subsection
• Created new "Integration of arts in classroom curriculum" section including "Arts Technology Integration" subsection and 3 citations

***See above section for original content added to article, see article mainpage for reorganizations/added citations/other edits

Area: Art Education in the United States

• Total sources added/used: 6 (from sources listed and explained in Scholarly Sources section above)
• Added missing citation for Howard Gardner under "Arts Integration" section
• Added 1 sentence and citation about 2011 $12.5M NEA budget cut under "Arts Integration" section
• Added 1 paragraph to talk page outlining potential additions/improvements to the article's mainpage
• Created new "History of art education provisions" section with 4 paragraphs and citations
• Reorganized part of introduction and transferred to new section
• Created "See Also" section with links to 8 other relevant Wikipedia articles

***See above section for original content added to article, see article mainpage for reorganizations/added citations/other edits