University of Arkansas Conference to Show Teachers Ways to Integrate Literacy with Arts

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Enriching literacy with arts and arts with literacy can give teachers additional tools in their arsenal to help students learn, and teachers will learn to use those tools at a conference Feb. 19 sponsored by the University of Arkansas.

Research shows that children exposed to an arts-enriched curriculum score higher on literacy tests than students not exposed to the arts, according to David Jolliffe, holder of the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the university. Marsha Jones, chair of the advisory board of the Center for Children and Youth at the university and an administrator in the Springdale school district, has seen students flourish in an arts environment who had been struggling in a standard classroom.

The Brown chair, which was established in 2005 in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Children and Youth, formed last year in the College of Education and Health Professions, are co-sponsoring the one-day conference titled "Enriching Literacy with Arts, Enriching Arts with Literacy" on Friday, Feb. 19, at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale. The cost is $10 per person. Download or print the registration form on the curriculum and instruction department's events and symposia Web page.

Jolliffe serves on the center's advisory board with Jones, who is assistant superintendent for curriculum and K-5 instruction for Springdale public schools.

The conference will offer teachers specific, concrete approaches for integrating literacy and the arts in their classrooms, Jones said. In addition to encouraging teachers to attend, organizers said education students, university faculty and people involved in the arts would also benefit from the conference. The theme of the conference, which includes presentations by national and local education and arts representatives, mirrors the mission statement of the Center for Children and Youth, Jones explained: "Developing successful students through creative learning."

"This is exactly what the center stands for," she said. "As a longtime patron of the arts and an educator who has seen how arts education can benefit students, I was very interested when I was asked to serve on a committee to develop the center.

 "Our mission is to develop the whole child. You hear that and it may sound like rhetoric, but the way a child grows and learns doesn't follow a single academic path," she continued. "Making connections between content areas and the arts supports the development of the right brain as well as the left brain. These connections also appeal to the senses and foster emotional development. This helps some students build enthusiasm for what they are learning."

The inaugural event will be a celebration of the center, Jones said.

Presenters are coming from Temple University in Philadelphia, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, Kansas State University, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Grace Hill Elementary School in Bentonville, the University of Arkansas, the Arts Center of the Ozarks in Springdale, Trike Theatre in Bentonville, TheatreSquared in Fayetteville and the Springdale School District. Sessions will cover art, creative writing, dance, drama and music. The conference program provides descriptions of sessions.

Jolliffe, a professor of English who teaches in both Fulbright College and the College of Education and Health Professions, said he's been forging strong connections between the arts and literacy since his days as a high school teacher. Since coming to Arkansas, he had been meeting informally with Kassie Misiewicz, executive artistic director for Trike Theatre, and local educators before he began serving on the Center for Children and Youth board.

"Our informal group had been talking about what we could do to be at the center of gravity of connecting the arts and literacy," he recalled. "We talked about having a conference for teachers. The center was looking for an inaugural event so it all came together."

Jolliffe described one approach for enriching literacy with arts and arts with literacy that he and Misiewicz use in a gifted and talented program offered at the university each summer.

"We asked junior high students to read a challenging piece of literature by Shakespeare – 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' one summer and 'Much Ado About Nothing' another summer," he said. "They began to comprehend the plays by putting themselves into a tableau. They studied the plot and characterization and developed them just as they would in a traditional literature class. This can be done with poetry or prose or nonfiction; they put their whole bodies and selves into the lesson and learned to write imaginatively about the themes in the play and created a play of their own."

Organizers said the event can also provide networking opportunities for teachers and arts providers to get to know one another and brainstorm ideas for collaboration. As for the center itself, Jones said, the future is wide open.

"The center will be a catalyst for activities such as this," she said. "We don’t know all the possibilities."

The ultimate goal is for educators and the public to understand that the arts and literacy are both modes of reacting symbolically to the world, Jolliffe said.

"You enrich the reading and writing experience by connecting it to the arts and vice versa," he said. "We have looked at research nationally, and any standardized test of literacy shows that students who are exposed to an arts-enriched curriculum do better than other students who are not. The idea that high-stakes assessments and eliminating arts programs go hand in hand needs to be addressed. Students will do better when the arts are a part of the curriculum. That’s the best possible world."