Being an English teacher at an arts magnet school has made me become more appreciative of the benefits of using art in the academic classroom. Having recently moved into a brand new, state-of-the-art facility, the teachers and students of Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School have begun anew their relationship with the arts in the classroom. Students are encouraged to express themselves through the arts in all of their classrooms. Both students and teachers come in contact with professional artists in six areas; visual arts, theater, dance, music, creative writing and photography. Within a month of moving into the new facility the walls of the school were decorated with various pieces of artwork the students had created in preparation for the annual “As Far as the Eye Can See” student art opening. It was clear from those first months at the new facility that the students and teachers at Betsy Ross had renewed their dedication to the arts. The school has also renewed its partnerships and affiliations with the city’s cultural and artistic nerve centers; the Neighborhood School of Music, The Shubert Theater, Long Wharf Theater and the Yale Center for British Art. Academic teachers are encouraged to interact with the arts and artists in the school as we develop and work on our curriculums for the classrooms. English classes on grammar become exciting and intriguing when we add colors or illustrations to a poster on adverbs. Sentence diagrams come to life when color is added to them. All the academic lessons take on a new life and aspect when art is introduced into the lesson. Students’ differing learning abilities are reached on a more widespread basis through the arts. Art makes all subjects interesting and exciting. Art touches us all in different ways and invites all students to explore the academics in a different and more personal way.
In this unit I will be focusing on visual art and its connection with personal written expression. Creative writing and the visual arts are naturally linked in their ability to bring out personal qualities in the reader or the viewer. An interpretation of a work of art is different to each person who observes a painting just as the interpretation of or interaction with the written word can be a very personal and individual experience. Numerous authors are also painters or illustrators. William Blake’s engravings are artistic masterpieces. Edgar Allan Poe did sketches of himself and of loved ones. Alexander Pushkin regularly garnished his work with doodles, sketches and comical self-portraits. The list goes on and on: O.Henry, Winston Churchill, Mikhail Lermontov, John Ruskin, D.H. Lawrence, the Bronte sisters, Henry Miller, E.E. Cummings, Hermann Hesse and James Thurber were all both writers and authors to a certain degree.
Students will begin this unit in the Yale Center for British Art, where they will be led through and encouraged to interpret artwork in the museum. Using a method of interpretation introduced to New Haven teachers in a workshop given by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, students will be encouraged to voice their own interpretations of the artwork as a class. On their third visit to the museum (the program Betsy Ross is involved in with the museum is divided into three visits yearly) students will be given clipboards to take notes on and will be encouraged to take notes on their own and their classmates’ observations in the museum. The knowledge and comfort established orally in the museum will then be applied to written work back in the classroom. Students will then be introduced to a writer/artist through classroom reading. Students will be asked to mimic the writer/artist in both the written and visual art. Finally students will be encouraged to utilize the art facilities available to them at Betsy Ross in order to create their own artwork for oral and written interpretation by their classmates.