Artist in the Classroom - Nancy Robb Dunst
The Artist-In –The-Classroom program has been up and running since September in the Sedona Oak Creek School District. And what an exciting program it is. It combines artists in the community with teachers in the schools, using art as a teaching tool for academic studies in the classroom. The program runs through out the school year at West Sedona Elementary, Big Park Elementary, Red Rock High and the Sedona Charter Schools and was developed ten years ago by the Sedona Arts & Culture Department.
This program might bring a poet into the English classrooms to inspire students to write about simple everyday events that they observe, or unforgettable moments in their lives, or rantings that have been reverberating around in their heads, but they are afraid to say. It might bring in a sculptor to work with children in the elementary schools about the lives of Dinosaurs; and sculpt them so that they can really get an idea of their proportions, or draw out their footprints in the schoolyard so that they can feel just how big a dinosaur could be. Or this program might bring in a mural artist to help students understand the concepts of Math and Science by drawing and painting images about them on the classroom walls. Or an actor might meet with a teacher and together they would work with the children to develop a play about a certain time period in history so that the students could actually understand what it was like to live in that time period This program brings unforgettable learning moments into the classroom.
The purpose of this program is to help students acquire knowledge, as there are many ways that students absorb information: taste, touch, smell, sight, sound, and emotion. It is well known that the more senses involved in learning, the stronger the memory associations develop in the brain. According to the Dana Consortium study, Learning, Arts, and the Brain (2008) children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas. Other research shows that Cognitive neuroscientists at seven major universities have found strong links between arts education and cognitive development (e.g. thinking, problem solving, concept understanding, information processing and overall intelligence.)
In an Arts Education Partnership publication, Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning (1999), a compilation of studies on the impact of arts on learning, students who participate in the arts outperform their peers on virtually every measure. Researchers also found that “sustained learning” in music and theater correlates to greater success in math and reading. Using the art in the classroom is clearly a necessary academic tool, not simply an educational enhancement
The Sedona Artist In The Classroom program involves approximately 25 artists (visual, performing, and literary) in the community and is funded by the City of Sedona. Nancy Robb Dunst is the Arts Education Coordinator working with the City of Sedona and the Sedona/Oak Creek School District, and can be reached for more information at 282-0776 or ndunst@yahoo.com. Photo by Janice Witt.
