Focus Questions
This resource was designed to prompt deeper reflection, focus reading, and support learning. Discuss these questions with colleagues who might stimulate new ideas and insights.
- Elliot Eisner pointed out that we humans learn by forming representations of our experiences. The mental images children form enable them to represent an experience in their minds, so that they can remember it. Arts integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. How might this approach provide an appealing and effective means of helping children represent concepts to themselves? Looking back on your own school days, what mental pictures still stay with you? How were they formed?
- How might an over-emphasis on standardized testing end up under-cutting learning, even in the areas of language arts and mathematics that are a central focus test-based accountability?
- Albert Einstein did not follow a linear path to success. He once said that, if he had not been a scientist, he would have been a musician, asserting: “I get most joy in life out of music.” His wife Elsa later wrote: “Music helps him when he is thinking of his theories.” How might juxtaposition of different disciplinary ways of perceiving things have helped Einstein when he ran into a blockage while thinking through problem? How might exposure to the arts nourish children later in life?