STEM + Arts Series | Visual Arts and STEM with District Arts Coach | Robert Smith

09/06/22 • 26 min

Links Mentioned In This Episode:

Bob Smith, Alpine School District Elementary Arts Coach

The last episode featured Mr. Dance, Provo City School District’s Arts Coach. This time, we highlight the Alpine School District. Bob Smith works with all the district’s arts educators in all 62 elementary schools. Arts coaches support these teachers in their development and growth and coach classroom teachers who are new to the arts. Coaches like Bob help teachers understand meaningful ways that they can connect to their students through the arts.

From Teacher & After-School Drama Director to District Arts Instructional Coach

Like Mr. Dance, Bob stumbled into the arts. His teammate said, “Hey, the principal signed me up for this weird program. It's got a lot of art stuff, I don't really understand it. Would you take it for me?” Bob came to the BYU ARTS Partnership Arts Academy and “found [his] people.”

“We were drawing, we were dancing and singing and playing drums, and connecting to a really awesome curriculum. At the same time, we were diving into books, looking deeply into science, exploring different social studies topics, all in day one at the Arts Academy, and I was hooked.”

Bob finished the Arts Integration Endorsement and continues his work with the BYU ARTS Partnership.

The arts enlivened Bob as a teacher and after-school musical theater program director. He has always used the arts in his teaching: turning on music for writing, drawing every day—discovering a whole group of people who were teaching in an arts-integrated way, helped him become a better teacher and then a coach.

Artful Tip for Classroom Teachers: Draw Everyday With Your Kids

Only half of Alpine schools are privileged to have the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Progra, grant. In order to increase access to the arts, Bob creates simple resources that teachers can easily see, connect with, understand and apply to transform their classroom.

Bob creates lesson plans, sends them through the arts teachers, and sends an invitation to classroom teachers to co-teach with Bob in their classrooms. For example, recently he sent out a lesson called “Draw the name of your favorite animal” with an invitation: “If you would like me to come and demonstrate this for you in your classroom, send me an email.” Since then, and after visiting five or six schools, similar projects in other classrooms are popping up. Other teachers are emailing, “We decided to take it on.” “We decided to give it a try.” Find the lesson plan here.

Arts Integration is the Learning

Bob describes the magic that happens in these art rooms and these dance and music and drama rooms. Someone who is trained in art forms—like dance, music, drama, and visual arts—can make magic almost effortlessly. The Arts Integration Endorsement offers teachers just enough to know it's important to know that it can be magic, but when they get back to the classroom by themselves, it feels... “Oh, what did they say?” “What did they do?” “What was that exactly? I don't know that I'm super skilled yet.”

Making bite-size chunks means that integrating the arts feels easy to use: draw every day! Turn on a video tutorial—teachers don’t have to be an artist or the teaching artist for this skill—students can work on developing hand-eye coordination, creating visual connections to a topic, and from there teachers can move right into writing. Instead of only drawing on Fun Friday, begin each week with a meaningful drawing project centered on a learning topic for the week, and add details to it every day. Then, ...

Links Mentioned In This Episode:

Bob Smith, Alpine School District Elementary Arts Coach

From Teacher & After-School Drama Director to District Arts Instructional Coach

Bob finished the Arts Integration Endorsement and continues his work with the BYU ARTS Partnership.

Artful Tip for Classroom Teachers: Draw Everyday With Your Kids

Arts Integration is the Learning

Previous Episode

Native American Series 2 | Frog’s Teeth | Dovie Thomason, Storyteller

Dovie Thomason at the Arts Express Summer Conference 2022

Today, we have a treat for you—-a sneak peek of what you’ll get at Arts Express Summer Conference from one of our fabulous presenters, Dovie Thomason, a Native American storyteller and author. After we tell you a bit more about Dovie and her experiences, we will share a recording of one of the stories she performed and recorded for the Utah Division of Arts and Museums in 2020, titled “Frog’s Teeth.”

The Story Behind the Story “Frog’s Teeth”

This story comes from a series titled “Stories Grandma Told Me.” This is not a story Dovie heard from her grandma. It was a story given to her when she was the mother of a child beginning to lose their teeth. The person who gave Dovie this story received it from her father’s traditions as part of the Oneida First Nation in Ontario, Canada.

We thank Jean Tokuda Irwin and our partners at the Utah Division of Arts and Museums for granting permission to use this recording and for introducing us to Dovie and sponsoring her at Arts Express this summer as a keynote speaker and presenter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGD_KkI4Ibg

Dovie Thomason Biography

Coming from the rich oral tradition of her Lakota and Plains Apache family, Dovie Thomason has had a lifetime of listening and telling the traditional Native stories that are the cultural “heartsong” of community values and memory. Both wise and mischievous, Dovie unfolds the layers of her indigenous worldview and teachings with respect, sly humor and rich vocal transformations.

When she adds personal stories and untold histories, the result is a contemporary narrative of Indigenous North America told with elegance, wit, and passion. Her programs are a heartfelt sharing of Native stories she has had the privilege of hearing from Elders of many nations and are woven with why we need stories, how stories are a cultural guide in shaping values and making responsible choices, how stories build communities and celebrates our relationship with the Earth and all living beings.

The oral tradition she gifts to listeners inspires delight in spoken language arts, encourages reading, supports literacy, can be used in classrooms to motivate better writing as students experience storytelling techniques, literary devices and effective communication. All of this takes place while they are exploring their own narratives and family values. Dovie has represented the U.S. as the featured storyteller throughout the world.

In 2015, she was honored as the storyteller-writer in residence at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Dovie has used her storytelling to advise the UCLA Film School on narrative in modern film, NASA on indigenous views of technology, the Smithsonian Associates’ Scholars Program and the premier TEDx Leadership Conference. Her role as a traditional cultural artist and educator has been honored by the National Storytelling Network’s ORACLE: Circle of Excellence Award and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers’ Traditional Storyteller Award.

Links Mentioned:

Register for Arts Express
Dovie Thomason’s Website
More stories by Dovie on the Utah Division of Arts and Museums YouTube Channel

Next Episode

STEM + Arts Series | Integration Energized My Students’ Interest | Lisa Galindo, Elicia Gray, & Jennifer Heldenbrand

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

University of Utah’s Marriott Library Book Arts Program for Teachers
Peter and the Wolf
Flight of the Bumblebee
William Tell Overture
Arts Express Summer Conference

Three STEM + Arts Research Participants Share Their Educational Experience and Backgrounds

Today’s guests are arts integrators in the research practice partnership through BYU and the Provo City School District: a visual art teacher, a teacher from a Title 1 school, and a teacher in a dual language immersion program (DLI). Welcome to Elicia Gray, Lisa Galindo, and Jennifer Hildebrand. To learn more about this research partnership, please listen to episode 28.

(Elicia Gray) I'm Elicia Gray, and I teach K-12. I mostly spend my time at elementary school teaching art integrated with other subjects, but visual art is my primary subject. I was interested in this research project because I seek collaboration with other teachers who know more about science than I do. I wanted to understand authentic science connections that I could make with visual art projects in the classroom.

(Lisa Galindo) I'm Lisa Galindo. I teach third grade at Provo Peaks Elementary. I just finished my masters of STEM education. I have always loved the arts, was invited to the group, and want to learn how to integrate arts with STEM.

(Jennifer Heldenbrand) I'm Jennifer Heldenbrand and I teach sixth grade at Canyon Crest Elementary. I have been teaching for several years and have always enjoyed doing art projects with my kids, but wanted to have a better understanding of how to pull art and science topics together.

(Tina McCulloch) Okay, well, what a nice diversity of backgrounds. . All of us together really do have some interesting backgrounds. But also that idea of I can take my STEM core and add some arts or as Elicia says I can take my arts and add some STEM into it. It's all for the betterment of our teaching and to engage our students. So I would just like you to share a story of an experience that you've had in your classroom where you engaged your students in an arts integration and what extra outcomes happened. Whether it was you got to know your students a little bit differently or the content really came alive.

Engaging Students in Arts Integration Creates Deeper Learning

Moon Phases Cyclical Bookmaking

(Jennifer Hildenbrand) Our class looked at the phases of the moon. One of the things that I did was show a picture of the moon, probably a vintage 1930’s or 1920’s picture of the moon, maybe with a scarf around its head as if it were not feeling very well and looking a little pensive. That visual opened the door to a lot of discussion. One student in particular said, “I think I'm seeing a crescent moon. I think it's a waxing crescent moon.” The class stopped and thought: “Where does this come from? What's giving you this idea?” There was a shadow around the edge of that picture that was able to help the student think through tha ideat. From there, we learned the moon phases; we talked about why they occur; and students’ questions became quite intricate. The students wanted to know more—they were practicing inquiry-based learning. From there, we created some lovely, cyclical books that allowed them to create their own version of the moon phases.

Create your own Bioluminescent Fish to Adapt to the Deep Sea Environs

(Elicia Gray) I think people forget that artists and scientists have a lot in common. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my students, I tried to approach these scientific principles the same way as I would approach art principles. For example: “Let's discover something new. Let's notice something new. Let's try to solve a problem.” Both artists and scientists are problem solvers.

During the unit on ecosystems, my students studied deep sea fish. We started with this question: “What would keep an organism alive in the deep sea?” I was really fascinated by the idea of bioluminescence. That's one of the fun things that I get to do as an art teacher: I get to just really explore something that I want to know about and then share what I find fascinating with the students. I wanted to learn about bioluminescent fish: Why do they light up in the dark? What artistic principles would be similar to or evident in that process?

We watched a lot of videos about what deep sea organisms did. We found out why they glow in the dark. Sometimes it was to attract food or to attr...