Integrating Arts

      Life introduces us to instances every day where we must apply our knowledge. I strongly believe that in order to fully benefit from our education it is important that we practice merging and making connections between various subjects and disciplines. Integration is the practice of combining things to make a whole. By bridging the boundaries that some people believe exist between math, science, technology, and engineering students can make associations and relationships that build on their previous knowledge in order to develop concepts more thoroughly. However these boundaries seem to overlap from the beginning when you account for the similarities that link the fields. I know how powerful it is to reinforce content knowledge with practice and incorporating ideas, theories, and skills from other fields. Not only does this emphasize the importance of learning but also it enhances this experience. Hands-on learning is beneficial for twenty-first century learners because it encourages the students’ participation, and does not enable them to be idle learners.

            I am lucky to have the opportunity to work with Mrs. Migliore’s classes this fall because of Mrs. Migliore’s eagerness to integrate arts. I work hard to craft lesson plans that are able to incorporate other subjects and strive to adapt content knowledge so that it is relevant to my twenty first century learners.

           

            After working on portraits I wanted to students to feel accomplished and have tangible work to show. My goal was to cover the blank bulletin board with the photo booth style photo strips with portraits of the students. I felt that it would inspire a sense of pride and community in the classroom. In order to create unity, we all followed a specific format for matting.  Each portrait had to be cropped and re-sized to print as a five by five inch square. This process was accomplished on the computer in Photoshop and afterwards the students printed the image out. At first I was shocked that high school students struggled to use a ruler, when a group of students handed in a photo strip with crooked borders and an irregularly sized matte. I addressed my concern to the whole class and we brought up an image of a ruler on the board. After reviewing measurements and how to matte an image the students’ work improved. Without incorporating mathematics and measurement into this class period the lesson would not have been successful. This lesson helped to stress the importance of measurement to the students, and demonstrate why these concepts are important for them to learn and practice. The best integration is that which reinforces skills, ideas, and theories that can later be applied to the students’ lives to improve their livelihoods.

            This semester in the three digital photography classes and the digital communication class we are focusing on how to manually control our cameras to achieve a broader range of photographic techniques and effects. I wanted to break the material into bite-sized pieces for the students, so that we could build upon a strong foundation. First we focused on shutter speed, and I wanted the students to understand why their digital cameras should be used in modes besides automatic or point and shoot. We talked about manual cameras and how an exposure is created based on the amount of light the camera lens allows inside. The students and I discussed what effect the different shutter speeds will have on the exposure. After they had hypothesized and thought more deeply about shutter speeds, they were able to experiment with them hands-on. My students were in groups of two or three and used tables as tri-pods to capture images of two LED hula-hoops. With longer shutter speeds the students captured more light and longer light trails, a visual metaphor of the concept I wanted them to understand. While the students took photos I heard their excitement and could tell that they were engrossed.

            The most rewarding part of this lesson was the astonishing results.  My students were proud of their images, and with reason, these photos were spectacular and each one was unique despite the single subject matter. Most importantly, as I looked through the photographs with each group, the students were able to distinguish without being prompted the different shutter speeds. The science of photography seemed demystified by hands-on experimenting and problem solving. One student said, “This shutter speed was too slow.” As I glanced over her shoulder to see their work, I asked how she knew this, and she said, “There is not enough light.” I could not have said it better myself, or lectured for an hour to better explain what she had explored for herself. I am excited for the opportunities that integrating the arts introduces to the art classroom, and to further explore these possibilities with my students.