Notes on Chapter 9: Art and Social Studies

General Strategies for Art and Social Studies Integration

Personalized Responses

• Motivate student's personal experiences
• Involve student's from differing cultural backgrounds, but do not stereotype cultures by expecting students to express particular preferences

Hands-on art activities

• Murals promote social intelligence
• Promote cultural understanding through puppets and dioramas
• Discuss sociopolitical issues when doing artwork in the style of another culture

Drawing still-life arrangements about a culture

• Borrow items from a children's museum
• Ask parents to loan items from their culture

Using models or speakers

• When studying a region, invite someone from that region to come and talk while wearing an ethnic costume
• Invite parents or guests with interesting occupations or hobbies
• Have students take turns wearing special hats or clothing

Sketching trips

• Can help students gain insight into issues of historic preservation, trade, technological innovation, and community growth
• Discuss background or sociopolitical issues that you want students to understand
• While at the site, point out aesthetic qualities

Using art reproductions

• Use hypothesizing, evaluating, and synthesizing when discussing reproductions
• Use posters, postcards, or photographs

A Danger of Social Studies/Art Integration

avoid stereotypes and look-alike art projects

Social Studies Disciplines

Anthropology - the study of a people's symbols

• It is disrespectful to emphasize just one aspect of a group's culture
• It is not helpful to exoticise a culture or people
• Do not homogenize many national groups into one (i.e. lumping Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and Cubans into a single category of Latino or Hispanic)

Economics/Vocations - deals with both the structures that exist to provide jobs and services and also with the distribution of wealth

Geography - have students compare geographic areas including differences in climate, transportation, foods, customs, and home architecture

History - make history vivid through art projects

Political science and law-related education

• Law-related education deals with concepts such as equality, fairness, honesty, justice, power, property, responsibility, and tolerance
• Include issues such as family law (i.e. beatings), community-safety law (i.e. bike helmets), and consumer law (i.e. shoplifting)
• Political science is concerned with examining rules, both good and bad, and taking the rights of others into account

Psychology - concerned with how an individual perceives the world or behaves based on those perceptions

• Use art to build self-respect and positive self-concept
• Celebrate individual differences through art

Sociology - the study of how people function in groups

• Encourage students to think about such concepts as norms, society, values, competition, status, and change
• Use art reproduction to discuss sociological issues

Multicultural Understanding through Art - we can help children to understand and acquire the shared knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes common to both our nation's culture and their specific group

Multiculturalism in the postmodern art world

• Recently art has moved away from abstract art elements and toward exploring social, political, and environmental world problems through combining historical and popular images and new mixed-media techniques

Multiculturalism through a thematic approach

• Focuses on cultural differences and commonalities through exploration of concepts such as adaptation, survival, environment, time, space, and motion
• In teaching thematic units, relate material to the students' own personal experiences

Multiculturalism using contestable issues

• Another approach is to use issues about which students can debate