THE ART OF TEACHING: ARTS HELP STUDENTS GRASP OTHER SUBJECTS

Exposing students to the arts helps them do better in other subjects, recent studies have found.

The arts also can be a life preserver for students who otherwise would not succeed in school, says Dr. Robert Gifford, a local music professor.

"It attracts the interest of students who otherwise would be lost," he said. "It keeps certain students in school."

Some students can learn through the arts what they cannot learn from a teacher speaking at the front of a classroom. The geometry in math translates to the geometric designs found in art. Mathematical proportions are essential to music. "For some students it's a different way of learning," says Gifford, who works at Southeast Missouri State University and is co-director of a grant program aimed at finding ways to integrate the arts into the school curriculum.

In 1996, new state-education standards raised the arts to the status of core subjects. The same year, the federal government approved Goals 2000: Fine Arts Grant, an arts curriculum partnership between Southeast Missouri State University and the Cape Girardeau public schools. The grant provided just over $1 million used to bring to the area international artists and leading arts educators and to train teachers in techniques for integrating the arts into the curriculum.

Teachers and students from 30 different school districts in Southeast Missouri were exposed to some or all of the arts programs presented during the five years.

Among the artists brought in were a composer form Norway, a 40-member dance troupe from Austria, and an engraver and writer from Vermont. The last, Gary Bowen, helped students at Blanchard Elementary School paint a mural in the cafeteria.

Five years of pumping new arts experiences into the schools brought an inescapable conclusion, says Gifford.

"It confirms what the research has told us. Many students learn faster through the arts. Some learners, that's the way they learn, through visual arts or dance or music."

Final conference

With the grant ending in September, a final conference titled "Integrating the Arts Into the Curriculum" will draw nationally recognized teachers and artists and state arts and education administrators to Southeast next week to provide conclusions and discuss strategies for continuing the work.

The grant brought about the creation of a course at Southeast, Children and the Arts, that all education students now are required to take. Four hundred graduate students, many of them current teachers, have taken the course at Southeast. The purpose was not to replace the arts specialist but to help elementary classroom teachers become more comfortable with the arts, Gifford said.

Five different departments at the university -- music, art, dance, theater, and elementary, early and special education -- teamed up to teach graduate courses in arts integration. Gifford's wife, Ann Porter Gifford, is co-director of the arts grant. She is a professor of elementary early and special education.

"I think the fine arts are key to a well-balanced curriculum," says Dr. Barb Kohlfeld, principal at Blanchard Elementary School and a speaker at the conference.

Sometimes students have a gift for an art, a good ear for music or good eye for drawing, she said. "And sometimes you can acquire it through education and experiences."

A Blanchard student who has had no formal training recently scored 100 percent on the music test students take before entering Schultz School.

Integrating the arts into the curriculum means teaching students the state song when the fourth-graders are learning about state history or Civil War-era songs when the sixth-graders take on the War Between the States.

"I try to teach literature and poetry in my music class," says Jeanette Engelhart, a music teacher at Blanchard. "I use poetry to develop rhythms for teaching notation reading.

"It's like going through the back door," she says. "They're enjoying what they're learning and go, Oh, that's all tied together after all.' It's definitely making more of an impression."

Diverse projects

Engelhart also co-taught the grant-sponsored After School Arts Project with art teacher Becky Coleman. Students who volunteered for the program and qualified on the basis of good behavior made mosaic-tiled flower pots, they drummed, they made silkstone sculptures, they did folk dancing, they played recorders provided by the university. Class sizes ranged from 6 to 20 students.

Now that the grant is ending, the educators hope to be able to continue some of the programs.

The speakers and presenters at the conference will include: Gary Dulabaum, a songwriter and former elementary teacher form Vermont: Kim Abler, art curriculum specialist for the Milwaukee public schools; Noree Boyd, executive director of the Missouri Arts Council; Craig Rector of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education; Dr. Shirley Stennis-Williams, dean of the College of Education at Southeast; and Dr. Eleanor Duff, chairwoman of the Department of Elementary, Early and Special Education at Southeast.