Teaching As A Lively Art

The author, an experienced Waldorf teacher and eurythmist, radiates her enthusiasm and sense for beauty as she takes us through the various stages of development of the child. She shows us that "ripeness is all," that nothing can be taught to the child until it is ready to receive it or knowledge will sprout prematurely and wither early. This book will help us approach the child with sensitivity and insight.

In Lively Learning, long-time educator Linda Crawford offers practical suggestions for bringing the arts into the daily life of the classroom. Written for all classroom teachers, including those without a background in the arts, Lively Learning will help teachers gain comfort with five art forms--drawing, music, movement, theater, and poetry writing--and integrate those art forms into reading, writing, social studies, science, and math. The book includes a sample lesson plan for each content area and a comprehensive resource list.

Both a practitioner’s guide and a school reform model, the new edition of this popular book shares exemplary arts-integration practices across the K–8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, each chapter carefully describes how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn to assist teachers in developing their own philosophy and practice. This updated second edition features scholarship and art at the forefront of contemporary practice and addresses social justice issues such as racial, climate, and economic justice. Chapter authors provide concrete ideas along with lively examples of public-school teachers integrating visual arts, music, drama, and dance with subject matter that includes English, social studies, science, and mathematics. The bookÕs narrative approach makes arts integration accessible and understandable to novice and experts alike. Readers of this new edition will come away with a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts every day, in every school, to reach every child. Book Features: Explains how arts integration across the K–8 curriculum contributes to student learning.Features examples of how integrated arts education functions in classrooms when it is done well. Introduces historical and contemporary artists whose work is transdisciplinary. Brings together and speaks to diverse stakeholders, including classroom teachers, teaching artists, school administrators, and teacher educators. Explores intensive teacher-education and principal-training programs now underway in several higher education institutions. “A thorough guide to integrating art into other disciplinary subjects . . . recommended.” —SchoolArts (for first edition)

An essential refernce for writers—both new and experienced—that will help improve your writing skills and style and help you say exactly what you want to say. Students, teachers, businessmen, aspiring authors, and complaining consumers all have one thing in common—the need to express successfully ideas, opinions, arguments, problems, explanations, or instructions through the medium of the written word. And The Lively Art of Writing is the perfect guide to the mastery of this essential skill. It will answer all of your questions, provide you with the best techniques, and offer important information about: • Choosing a subject • Working with words • The sound of sentences • The power of paragraphs • Essentials of style • Essays, theses, and term papers • And much, much more...

The artist/educators in this book invite you to come with them on a journey of discovery into the meaning of teaching for aesthetic experience. With learning as their art, they create educational encounters with passion and feeling, and leave their students with vivid impressions, growth, and change. Each author engages in aesthetic experience from an individual perspective - as poet, dancer, visual artist, or musician - and each of them engages as an educator who brings art into his or her classroom, no matter what the subject. Inspired by the words of philosopher Maxine Greene, the contributors transform the theoretical into the practical, urging students to look to the arts and nature for simple beauty, and awaken their minds to new possibilities of creative learning.

This engagingly written, research- and practice-based book defines how art teachers can build on students’ creative initiatives without depending on adult-imposed lesson plans and school requirements. In doing so, art educator and author George Szekely explores the role of the arts in developing children’s creativity and sense of purpose, and reminds readers that students in the art classroom are unique artists, designers, and innovators. Against the backdrop of a school culture that over-emphasizes compliance and standardization, Szekely recognizes the importance of the role of the art teacher in supporting the artistic independence and creative flare that occurs naturally in students of all ages in the classroom. Providing real-life examples of classrooms and schools that work towards championing child artists, this text arms teachers with the skills necessary to listen to their students and support them in presenting their ideas in class. Ultimately, Szekely challenges readers to focus the practice of art teaching on the student’s creative process, rather than the teacher’s presentation of art. Written for pre-service and in-service art educators, teacher educators, and researchers, Teaching to Support Children’s Creativity and Artistic Independence demonstrates that an openness to youthful and inquisitive visual expression inspires a more rewarding learning experience for both teacher and child artists that can support a life-long love of art.

This is a book that will be of interest to those who teach, know, care, theorise, administer, set policies and discuss the arts in education. Each chapter in this book makes various references to actual arts teaching practices. Teaching and learning examples figure prominently. Concrete teaching incidents are covered throughout the book. Various actual classroom teaching situations are given. Highlighted, at particular points, are arts teaching practices that demonstrate how the arts drive up standards in education generally and why teaching expertise in the arts can be seen as central to this. Teaching practices and theories in the arts overlap in applied ways. Current teaching and curriculum issues are debated. Teaching explanations expressing the actions, character and skills of an art, the knowledge claims, the truth relationships, ideas and conceptions in student focused contingent ways are discussed. Explored are learner-like, student-teacher dialogues, everyday shared common experiences of art, and the reverent pleasures and insights that correspondingly relate to how things are worked, felt and examined by students. Familiar, ordinary, cherished, touching, sensitive and dignified comprehensions are portrayed. In capacity strengthening ways, the book attends to the elevated, consensual, continuous, broad, united, narrow, enlarged, diverse, open, freed, lively, inventive, imaginative, deeper and richer horizons that exemplify how the arts in education, as a common good, contribute to society. This text argues persuasively why we should be teaching arts education more comprehensively in a public system of education and how we should be doing it.

A practical guide for everyone who must deliver a lecture, lead a discussion, assign a grade, or carry out the hundreds of tasks involved in being a successful teacher from the first day of school to the last.