TPCK Chapter 8

TPACK Chapter 8

Art Education

            Before I began reading this chapter, I initially thought that incorporating the arts into a mathematics class would be difficult to do. I did not have a clue where to even begin integrating art into my classes. Yet as I continued to read through the chapter, I was amazed to see how many different ideas it gave, as well as different websites it mentioned to help assist teacher. I had no idea that so many resources were available to teachers for assisting with incorporating arts into your everyday curriculum. I feel that in all content areas and classrooms, the only way for students to truly show that they understand the material being taught, is by expressing the knowledge through reflection, evaluation, and/or synthesizing. Incorporating art into a class would allow that to happen and would give students a visual of why and where the content material is being used in everyday life.

            I feel that the quote “learning is a process of self-discovery” (pg. 167) is absolutely true. I definitely think learning happens the best when students can explore and examine material to make it more realistic and applicable to their own lives. The arts help students find their way to that possibility. The arts constantly reinforce the idea of self-exploration and self-expression and it is important that all content classrooms are doing the same thing. Since the arts are being slowly cut more and more out of the curriculum in schools, it is extremely important that teachers try to personally incorporate it into their lessons. This is difficult, however, because teachers are already pressed for time and struggle to teach the required material as it is. Perhaps training teachers in ways to integrate the arts into classrooms would definitely make it easier and more attainable.