The Arts Group minor introduces prospective teachers to the multiple roles of the arts as languages of learning and methods for teaching in multicultural and multilingual classrooms. The Arts Group faculty offers courses in the Fine Arts, Music, and Technology Education. The Arts Group faculty do not offer courses in Theater Arts Education, per se.

Members of the Arts Group faculty are aware of the conceptual framework of the College of Education. Art and music are empathic disciplines that acknowledge individual expression and response yet promote cultural sharing and solidarity. Artists and musicians use a variety of tools to create products and performances.

The overarching philosophy of the Arts Group is that the arts are fundamental to human knowledge, culture, expression, and communication. Artistic methods and activities encourage creative and critical thinking while cultivating imagination and humanity. In the Arts Group program prospective teachers learn about the arts, with the arts, and through the arts. Art education allows prospective teachers to build bridges between verbal and nonverbal ways of interacting with the world. The arts enable people to celebrate connections across disciplines, continents, and across differences.

The Arts Group acknowledges the multifaceted nature of art. Art can be viewed alternatively as a symbolic making or doing activity, as a vehicle for transmitting cultural traditions, as a process for creating new cultural traditions and new knowledge, as craft, as a means of communication over time and space, as a cultural product or artifact, as aesthetic experience, as a mode of self-expression, as an historical construct, as commodity, as play, and as experience.

Art involves the intellect. People who make and view art are able to express ideas and feelings creatively, as well as critically. Teachers with a background in the arts are likely to recognize the importance of the affective a well as the cognitive dimensions of teaching and learning. Teachers who are able to use imagery and metaphor to enhance their teaching provide students with alternative ways of knowing and understanding concepts.

Technology has increased the potential of the arts to represent ideas and emotions in new and exciting ways. Using traditional medium and technologies, teachers and students can create attractive environments. In wired classrooms, teachers and students can create multimedia presentations that integrate sound, images, and words.

The core courses are taught as separate entities. Students do have some opportunities to relate what they are learning in the Arts Group courses. Gender equity, multi-cultural, and global perspectives are incorporated into the Arts Group program. In the Arts Group program, prospective teachers work on integrated projects and performances that enable them to integrate multicultural content, use a variety of tools, demonstrate skill, and design curriculum that is appropriate for use in an elementary classroom. In one recent project, prospective teachers read literature related to the Underground Railroad. They located and compared versions of a song and story of a family escaping from the south via the Underground Railroad. They learned the song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which is a part of the fifth grade music curriculum in Michigan schools. They analyzed the illustrations and design elements in a children’s book by the same title. They formed groups. In one group the students used instruments and body percussion to develop a score for a musical production of the story. In a second group, the students practiced singing the song. In a third group, they wrote a script, assumed roles, and dramatized the story. They located props. Ultimately, they did a performance. Those projects enable prospective teachers to integrate knowledge, skill, and action by planning and executing a performance, similar to one they might do with elementary-level students.

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