Across Canada, the arts disciplines -dance, drama, music and visual arts -are integral to the school curriculum. However, there is neither a consensus on the knowledge and instructional skills required of practitioners to effectively implement arts lessons, nor agreement on approaches to teaching the arts in teacher education and professional development programs. In this paper, I discuss a policy Delphi undertaken for the purpose of developing a curricular image for the arts in a faculty of education. My motivation for this study derives from previous research which indicates that effectively designed and delivered arts education programs can enhance teachers' confidence and willingness to the arts in their own classrooms. Findings from this study indicate that elementary teachers need a level of comfort with the arts to teach them. They require the expertise to apply generic instructional skills in the arts, a desire to play and experiment with artistic processes, an appreciation of the importance of the arts, and an understanding of basic arts concepts. Specialist secondary arts teachers should foster creativity in their classrooms. They require expertise in two arts disciplines and a broad knowledge of the others, an understanding of outcomes-based learning and how to organize appropriate activities, and an ability to motivate and inspire young people to participate in the arts. Teacher educators need to re-focus the arts curriculum to emphasize personal expertise, comfort level, creativity, experimentation, and conceptual knowledge across the arts disciplines. Professional development programs in the arts should emphasize outcomes-based learning, generic instructional strategies, integration, and assessment strategies. theatre group arrived in the gymnasium, a fresh, bright collection of actors who dramatized our concerns -finding relationships which mattered, facing the pain of a home life fraught with violence, confronting the sense of inadequacy which children and adolescents of every generation music bear -and we were touched. In days past, the play might have been about alcohol abuse -today it more likely about drugs and the dangers of indiscriminate sex.
This inquiry examined teachers' perspectives on learning to teach in and through the arts by administering multiple protocols - a focus group, questionnaire and survey - throughout an integrated arts professional development program involving artists. Findings indicate that when artists are involved in professional upgrading, teachers acquire the confidence to express themselves freely, they are willing to teach the arts in their own classrooms, they realize the potential and value of the arts within the school curriculum, and they develop arts-specific teaching expertise. Further, the teachers' sensitivity to their own creativity and openness to experimentation is heightened, and an awareness of the potential of the arts to develop a student's imagination, intuition and personal expressiveness is developed.
Le champ de rêves is an example of proestry, which is a new scholastic art-from that integrates different literary conventions, such as verse, voice (e.g., quotations), narrative or commentary, to provide an audience with a multi-dimensional perspective. Prosetry provides a forum for a writer to develop ideational relationships among different forms of communication, and to convey a holistic understanding of phenomenon to a reader. It can be read silently by an individual, or with partners in the manner of chamber music with each person reading a different part. Alternately, it can be performed on stage for an audience solo or with partners. Further, there are different approaches to proestry. One may use commentary to inform the verse, 1 voices from the field to illuminate the narrative and verse, 2 or text to elaborate on the poetry and prose. 3 In this article, the narrative conveys the personal experience of the writer on the Plains of Abraham, and the poetry captures the feelings of the experience. 4 Proestry has it roots in the notion of alternating poetry and prose which originated in Ancient Rome and was called "manipian satire." The combining of different forms of communication within one art form reappeared with the performance of the first opera, Jacopo Peri's Dafne, in Florence in 1597. Opera evolved into oratorio and music drama, and on the lighter side, into comic opera and musical theatre. 5 Two diverse means of communicating musical ideas-jazz improvisation and Western European musical notationwere integrated to create the swing band of the 1930's and 1940's. Combining poetry, quotations and text appeared in the work of Marshall McLuhan, although predominantly as an explanatory exercise rather than an artistic one. 6 Patrick Diamond and Carol Mullen went further and experimented with a form they refer to as "palimpsest" which involves using text to represent different voices and arranging them in a variety of ways, for example by alternating columns, juxtaposition, and writing in circles and spirals. 7 Most recently, the
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