Category Archives: Arts Education Features

Surfing Safari

Photo Courtesy of the Surfing Heritage Foundation

Start waxing up your virtual surfboards and join us as we explore the roots of California surf music within the context of California history on the Surfing Safari web site. The newest extension of Mapping the Beat, a signature ArtsBridge project linking visual and performing arts with the geography and social studies curriculum, has just been released and is ready for teachers to take on a test ride. Before we take off, we should thank the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the National Geographic Education Foundationn for their generous support as well as Liane Brouillette, the principal investigator at the Center for Learning in the Arts, Sciences and Technology.

More than any other sport, surfing has inspired a broad culture of music, fashion, language, and life style, and it is the history of the music that has propelled our journey. Primarily targeted for 11th-grade high school teachers and students as they teach and learn about California history and popular culture, the web site also has interest for other educational levels, as well as for surfers and music enthusiasts.

Included on this educational web excursion is an extensive historical essay with a focus on surf culture, written by a California historian, Julie Cohen, and UCSB ethnomusicologist, Tim Cooley. From Captain Cook’s travels to the present, historical information is broken into manageable sections to help users navigate quickly to the time periods and topics that interest them the most. The geography section explores California’s physical character and environment to see how it helped to shape these social and cultural trends.

Two lesson plans are provided as well as a document filled with resources for teachers to refer to, use, adjust, and/or build their own lesson plans. We would be happy to consider adding new lesson plans to this section if teachers would like to share them. (Use the feedback link to reach us). Two Powerpoint presentations are provided, one with audio and video links imbedded and another that could be used as a starting point for building your own presentation. Also, visit our other safari pages with suggested student readings, book and article references, film recommendations, and multimedia links.

We suggest you park your woody in front of the local surf museums in southern California, rich in resources, with staff both knowledgeable and generous of spirit. There are web links to these institutions as well as the archives and libraries we found most useful.

Don’t wait ‘til June, surf’s up right now!

Photo Courtesy of the Surfing Heritage Foundation

Arts Education Promotes Emotional Intelligence

Arts Education Promotes Emotional Intelligence: As arts education is pushed further to the margins by the current emphasis on standardized testing, a tool for nurturing children’s social and emotional development is being lost.

A recent article by Dr. Liane Brouillette published in the Arts Education Policy Review is one of two papers cited by Miller-McCune in Arts Education Promotes Emotional Intelligence.  Dr. Liane Brouillette is an Associate Professor of Education at UC Irvine and the Director of the UCI Center for Learning through the Arts and Technology.

Central Elementary teacher, Mike Stanley, leads his kindergarten students in a theatre lesson from the “Teaching Artist Project” developed by the San Diego Unified School District’s Visual and Performing Arts Department, with support from the UCI Center for Learning through the Arts and Technology.

URL: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/arts-education-promotes-emotional-intelligence-6883/

Newcomers Program Helps Elementary Students Develop English Language Skills

Students at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) are working with local elementary teachers to implement the “Reading In Motion” program to help kindergarten students develop their literacy skills by introducing interdisciplinary music activities.

University Park Elementary School in Irvine, California, hosts a Newcomers program that is the recommended program placement for beginning and early intermediate English language learners.  Speaking of the need for early attention to language acquisition skills, Associate Professor Liane Brouillete explains:

In an English immersion classroom, English language learners (ELLs) need exposure to oral English and practice in using oral English to learn the language effectively. One of the most critical pre-reading skills addressed in kindergarten is phonemic awareness. This is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Yet, in most classrooms, the children spend much more time completing worksheets or listening to the teacher than on the types of interpersonal communication that build skills in oral English.

With the assistance of UCI undergraduates Jessica Haugen, Jackie Wang, and Rebecca Wang, doctoral student Shelly VanAmburg is helping kindergartners in the Newcomers classroom at University Park Elementary in Irvine to get a head start in learning literacy skills through setting them to music. She and her team are introducing the children in the Newcomers class to Reading In Motion, a program that uses music to teach initial sound fluency, phoneme segmentation, and nonsense word decoding. Music encourages the children to engage in developing these skills through rhythm, tempo, and call-and-response lyrics.

Reading In Motion (RIM) was developed by a non-profit organization founded in 1983 to assist at-risk inner city Chicago, Illinois students in high-poverty neighborhood schools. The sequential curriculum was developed from years of experience working with students.  For more information on Reading In Motion, please visit http://readinginmotion.org/.

ArtsBridge America is delighted to be partnering with Reading In Motion to introduce the kindergarten curriculum in classrooms across the country. The multi-campus initiative involves the University of Delaware, Utah State University, Lawrence University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Irvine.

In Spring 2009, a 7-hour workshop was offered at the ArtsBridge America conference, held at UC Irvine, for university students interested in learning the Reading in Motion teaching methods. The UCI team at University Park finished their first term of implementation in December 2009.

For the 2009-2010 academic year, Jessica Haugen, Jackie Wang, and Rebecca Wang have been appointed Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Fellows and will receive a $500 stipend in support of their research project to be carried out in conjunction with their University Park activities: “Reading In Motion: Using Music and Dance to Teach Phonemic Awareness.” Dr. Brouillette will be serving as their advisor.

Shelly VanAmburg is helping kindergartners in the Newcomers classroom at University Park Elementary in Irvine to get a head start in learning literacy skills through setting them to music.

Shelly VanAmburg is helping kindergartners in the Newcomers classroom at University Park Elementary in Irvine to get a head start in learning literacy skills through setting them to music.

Teaching K-2 Literacy through the Arts

The Teaching Artist Project, a partnership between the San Diego Unified School District and the University of California, Irvine, uses the arts to boost language skills of K-2 students in 14 schools located in San Diego’s least affluent neighborhoods. Instead of asking children to sit quietly at desks, teachers co-teach 27 arts lessons (9 in theater, 9 in dance, 9 visual art) with teaching artists in their own classrooms. While co-teaching with the teaching artists, the teachers learn the content knowledge, key concepts, and skills of the three arts disciplines. As part of the arts lessons, the children are able to hear, see, respond, and demonstrate what they have learned at the same time. This boosts vocabulary and facility in the use of oral language.

In Year 1 of the program, 180 teachers and 3600 students were served. During Year 2, the school year following the weekly visits with teaching artists, teachers continue to teach the academically rigorous, standards-based arts lessons on their own. Teachers continue to get support, as needed, from San Diego arts resource teachers and teaching artists. Enthusiasm is high as teachers who worked with teaching artists last year approach the end of their first term of teaching the arts on their own. To assist teachers in remembering important aspects of the lessons, video versions of the theater lessons have been made available on-line: http://www.clta.uci.edu/Theatre_1.html

The Teaching Artist Program is funded by an $828,000 Improving Teacher Quality grant administered by the California Postsecondary Education Commission. In 2009-10, three more schools joined the program, bringing the number of schools to 15.

Over a million children who are unfamiliar with English attend California schools. English learners make up a quarter of K-12 students, state-wide; in the San Diego Unified School District 30.2 % of students are English learners. If these students are to achieve to their full potential, they will need direct and frequent interaction with individuals who know the language of instruction well and can provide English learners with accurate feedback.

As budget cuts force class sizes higher, (K-2 class size in San Diego could be as high as 30 next year), one-on-one verbal interactions between teachers and individual pupils become more limited. Arts activities that allow for the use of nonverbal communication in combination with verbal interactions can be an effective way for teachers to directly interact with many children at once, providing feedback and building vocabulary.

Please see photos on the following pages. For more information please call:

Denise Lynne, Coordinator
ITQ Teaching Artist Program
Phone: 858-539-5350
E-mail: dlynne@sandi.net

Liane Brouillette, Principal Investigator
ITQ Teaching Artist Program
Phone: 949-824-4317