Links Mentioned In This Episode:

• The Arts Educate the Whole Child

An Unusual Route to Becoming a Visual Arts Educator

“Being in the arts endorsement course saved my life.”

Marie Mattinson, visual arts educator at Edgemont Elementary School, is this week’s guest. Marie graduated with a bachelor's in psychology. She worked as a PE teacher and loved working as an aide for an autistic student. She completed the requirements for a teaching license while teaching part time (including special ed math, third-grade, and after-school programs). After teaching third-grade full-time for 12 years, Marie hit burnout because of testing and expectations. Colleagues

Lisa Gardner and Diane Ames convinced her to enroll in the BYU ARTS Partnership’s Arts Integration Endorsement program. “Being in the arts endorsement course  saved my life, really. I was happy again. I was happy to be with the kids and as I was happier, and we were creating things together in all art forms the kids were happy, and it created a cycle of everybody being better and happier.”

After being hired as a visual art teacher, Marie earned her master's in Art Education. She works to integrate science and math into the visual arts curriculum in all kinds of ways. Marie is a recent recipient of the Beverley Taylor Sorenson’s Legacy Award for Excellence in arts education for elementary visual arts instruction in the state of Utah.

An Arts-Integrative Pedagogy Actively Engages Struggling Students

Marie shares how the arts deeply impacted the learning of her own child: 
“My son was struggling with long-term memory, retrieval, processing and comprehension. His comprehension is really low. He has ADHD and I just watched him crumble as a first grader. As a second grader, he struggled to write and stay engaged; he hated school, he cried every day. PJ day was the best day because it was the one day we didn't have to have a tantrum about clothes. We had tantrums about everything else.

When he learned his vowels, he was in Miss Gardner's class. They learned through songs, so he can decode and read so well because of music. Then in third grade, our music teacher taught him multiplication through songs, and he can do multiplication because of songs. His French third-grade teacher used movement and dance, (she was also in the Arts Integration Endorsement class) and he learned French that way, because he's in the French immersion program. 

Then, I realized that I needed to be more patient and engage all the kids because if my kid was struggling, I needed to be a better teacher and be more patient. I watched him do so many things that he couldn't control. Instead of, ‘Why won't you just sit and listen?’ ‘Why won't you just do this?’ He can't. Before my lived experience with my son, I didn't realize that kids who struggle with ADHD and other things, they can't. They don't mean to be like that. Yet, the pedagogy that creates confidence in learning, connections, and success are the arts.”

Educate the Whole Child: Teach Social-Emotional Skills

Marie is passionate about educating the whole child. Students need to learn the skill of knowing how to care for other people, be empathetic and good listeners. Marie believes these skills are just as important as any academic curriculum you could ever put in front of them. Many lessons in her third-grade classroom focus on people: “Let’s look at cultures, let’s look at who is in our class. How can we learn more about them? How can we represent their beliefs and their interests in an authentic, empathetic way that celebrates them?” 

For example, including this social-emotional learning during math class: students can practice empathy and listening skills, collaboration skills. When students start breaking down or showing frustration because the math concept isn’t landing, teachers can help support that student’s emotions first, then work together on the math concept: “It all matters.”

Using Art to Celebrate Diversity and Create Culturally-Responsive Classrooms: Puzzling Out Students’ Ancestral Countries

Marie’s school is extremely diverse: the French dual-immersion teachers hail from Rwanda, Spain, Austria, Ukraine, Switzerland, Morocco, and two are from France; students are comprised of all different socio-economic backgrounds and neighborhoods, and include a lot of second-language learners, and students from Columbia, Brazil, Uruguay, Congo, and Haiti. 

Second graders are given a puzzle piece made from paper. They find out which country their ancestors came from. Students learn about their ancestors, where they came from: students find a picture of a monument or landmark from that country. Marie helps each of her 650 students—some of whom are first-generation immigrants—make a contour line of the monument on their puzzle piece, paint a value-scale, and fit all the puzzle pieces together. A discussion is next: “students talk about how different and diverse we all are, and yet! We all fit together, and we live together. We can share these great things with each other.”

Arts Educator Collaborates with Classroom Teachers

Because Marie was first a classroom teacher before becoming a visual art educator, her collaboration with classroom teachers carries weight: “When I say, ‘I promise, trust me, this is going to work and it's going to engage your kids and you will be happier,’ teachers believe me. I do a lot of the work for them in the beginning. In fact, I dragged them. I've dragged a lot of people along. I'm happy to do it, because it takes a few years. I think one of the fifth-grade teachers, she took over one of the integrated projects that we'd been doing and did it on her own in her classroom. I mean, how great is that? She's doing it herself now.”

Successful STEM Arts-Integration Collaborations: The Importance of Planning Ahead

As the arts educator who chooses projects and curriculum and teaches visual art skills Monday-Thursday, sometimes teachers ask Marie, “Hey, we're learning this in science, do you think you could do that in your classroom? and I'll respond, “I'll see if I can fit it in, or no, we've got to do that on a Friday.” Fridays are for integrated projects—sometimes students spend two hours in the art room making clay ocarinas as part of an integrated project to complement the classroom curriculum.

Co-teaching is an effective way to integrate the arts with STEM: the classroom teacher reminds the students what was talked about in science or math and asks, “Why is that working?” Marie asks questions to relate the science or math topic to a visual art theme, so that the kids find the connections between the art and the science, or the art and the math.  

Marie explains the value of co-teaching, planning, and arts integration with STEM: “Why are we doing this? We could make a pretty picture if we wanted to, but that's not our goal. Our goal is to help students understand science. What is art doing to help you understand science or social studies? As other teachers see the artwork go up around the school, they talk and they're like, ‘How do we get in there? How do we get scheduled?’ And I say, ‘Well, we have to sit and plan because if we don't sit and plan, it ends up being me doing a whole bunch of extra artwork.’”

Strengthen Student Learning by Inviting Various Art-Form Educators to Co-Create with Classroom Teachers

Professional development with arts integration strengthens student learning by cultivating arts skills and offering resources to teachers. The BYU ARTS Partnership sends a music educator, a drama educator, a dance educator, or a different visual art educator, to Marie’s school. The school’s teachers decide which units are not as strong or lacking some sort of integration with any art form. We send those ideas to those arts educators and they come with prepared lessons and ideas on how to integrate those. The arts educators work with each and talk them through the lesson and help create the unit’s lessons. The educators practice the lessons so that the classroom teachers feel more confident. Ideas start flowing from the teachers: “Oh, maybe I could do this!” “This gives me a little bit of a start.” The best part about this process is that the classroom teachers didn't have to come up with it all on their own, since classroom teachers are always short on time. The synergy among the classroom teachers, whole grade-level teams, and the arts educators creates a beautiful synergy of ideas and a product that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Amy Rosenvall is the district science educator who is part of this research. Amy says, “Well, the science piece actually means this. So how can we really make it authentic science and art?” So integration isn’t, “Here's this art project that represents the science, but the art is actually doing the science.”

Research Shows 100% Engagement in Science + Arts Lessons

For Marie’s master degree, she created a capstone study focusing on the ecosystems unit from the sixth-grade curriculum. She integrated every art form into that entire unit. Marie explains: “The data showed 100% engagement, every single time, whenever we integrated with an art form. This is a class that had 70% low economic status, seven IEPs out of 18 students, three students with autism. I think maybe three were gifted, which has their own needs to be challenged. So very, it was a really challenging class with 100% engagement. One particular student struggled with depression—his head was down on the desk all the time. Yet, he danced with Mr. Roberts, he painted with me, he did music with Mrs. Lee, and he did drama with Mr. Roberts. Even if the effort had been to engage this one depressed student, it is totally worth it.” 

Classroom Teachers Do Not Have to Be Arts Experts

Marie shares a story about her experience with an art form she isn’t strong in: “In the Arts Integration Endorsement, I loved the singing—I struggle with singing, I'm not confident. I remember one time when I was teaching third grade, I was trying to teach my students a song. They said, “Mrs. M, can you just go get the music teacher?” I was like, “No, thanks a lot.” I remember Jen Purdy saying “You don't have to sing to do music.” That gave me confidence. Likewise, dance and drama don’t have to be a production. The integration endorsement was eye-opening: I learned to engage people in all the art forms without having expertise in all the art forms. When my students learned about ecosystems with the music, they didn't sing, they followed the flow of energy while Mrs. Lee ate a piece of cheese, drank some water, started playing her cello, and began walking around. It was incredible. Then students played the cups and did rhythms. Arts integration is much more than just being an expert in one form of art.

Because arts integration can create 100% engagement in the classroom, students deserve the arts. They deserve engaged learning—not the non-interactional learning that happens when reading a book and answering questions on a Chromebook—but the kind that happens when the class reads together and has a discussion, the kind that happens when Marie’s daughter sits in the backseat of the car and says,  “Mom, did you know this about molecules?” And I was like, “How did you know that?” Because Mr. Robertson taught us and we were bumping around and we were doing that.” This is the kind of learning that fills students’ cups, reduces isolation, increases engagement, and creates shared learning. The arts are socially interacting, collaborating, letting us see our humaneness.  

Artful Teaching is Vital for Teachers’ Sanity + Resilience

Marie tells a story of collaborating with a former middle-school math teacher who came to elementary school because of licensing issues. This teacher had taught only math for years and years. Marie explains: “She was terrified of literacy and I said, ‘No, no, literacy can be fun. I also struggled in the beginning. But teaching can be fun. We just need to integrate.’ She said, ‘I don't know…What about Disney shorts? Those are empathetic. They always have a lesson and they're engaging. They're colorful, you can teach all of the art forms, and you can get so much out of literacy.’  After watching the shorts, I came in and I taught and the class did a mind map of three different Disney shorts. Then she just said, ‘I didn't know literacy could be fun for me. This is the first time this entire year I've been excited to come to school. Because I can't wait to share this with the kids. And it's fun. It's a fun way to do literacy.’

How to mind-map:

• Mind Mapping with Tony Buzan (video)
• Mind Maps for Kids: An Introduction (book)
• The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Unlock Your Brain’s Untapped Potential (book)

Disney short films for mind-mapping:

• Lou (requires fee to watch)
• For the Birds

Disney is good at making social issues feel applicable and personal—students can empathize with topics like a lost sweater in “Lou.” Incorporating media arts into literacy and social-emotional learning becomes easy when difficult topics become humanized and real. Marie recounts that the teacher struggling with literacy felt surprised that sixth-graders could discuss topics like these, and Marie reminds listeners that third-graders are capable of meaningful conversations about difficult social topics, because it helps them become better people. Tina recalls that a professor of hers “never calls them children, instead she says they're ‘little humans.’ 
They are little and we're all having this experience together. What a beautiful way to think about that.”

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Don't forget to peruse the bank of lesson plans produced by the BYU ARTS Partnership Arts in dance, drama, music, visual arts, media arts, and more. Search by grade-level, art form, or subject area at www.education.byu.edu/arts/lessons.