In previous posts, we’ve touched on the idea that Art in schools currently is not accessible to students. Generally speaking, it is low-income students who are the most excluded when it comes to creative spaces, Arts integration, and STEAM in education. Despite this, if the Arts were given a fair chance in K-12 schools, education could become more accessible to low-income communities as a whole.

From personal experience, I know what limited funding looks like when it comes to public education. I grew up in rural schools that had to decide if they wanted their budget to go towards making repairs to the school or buying textbooks that weren’t from twenty years ago. It can be difficult for students to get the level of attention they need since teachers are working with so little. Students fall behind their peers in higher-income communities because teachers don’t have access to educational resources that are constantly changing. This often results in teachers sticking to one type of teaching method that excludes many students’ thought processes and preferred ways of learning.

The National Education Association (nea) finds that Arts integration might just be the answer to offering a more accessible and equitable education to low-income/low-socioeconomic (SES) students. In their article on what Arts integration looks like in classrooms, they describe how introducing the Arts in classrooms over many topics of education helps to create multiple access points to the lessons. By offering more ways to interact with lessons from many different perspectives the content is made more approachable to students who don’t learn their best in traditional ways and improves overall engagement for all students. Edutopia, a blog on modern education trends, and Education Week, a news site by and for teachers on K-12 education, both agree with the nea and report that low-SES students preform just as well if not better than their peers when given higher access to Art. Education Week describes how this creates equal opportunity in their article, and Edutopia explains how this closes a national achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers, leveling the playing field in their post on closing the achievement.

The funding to create seperate Art and STEM lessons just isn’t present in low-income schools, but by intergrating the two ideas and using STEAM to teach students we can offer the Arts to our students and improve their overall education all at once.

As discussed in a previous post, accessibility does not just account for students with disabilities. Classrooms within the US need to be accessible to non-English speaking students and English-learning students. This poses a challenge to many educators since most lessons, textbooks, curriculum, and traditional methods of teaching are written strictly with English speaking students in mind.

The Institute for Arts Intergration and STEAM, a professional development organization focused on providing teachers with the means to integrate the Arts into accessible lessons for their students, finds that using the Arts to teach common core makes all students able to engage with the lesson regardless of personal educational needs. In their article on Arts and English learners, they state that English-learning students learn STEM based lessons better when they’re taught with the Arts. The inclusion of the Arts helps expand English-learning students vocabulary by connecting words to images in a way that’s simple to comprehend.

Pairing visual, musical, and preforming Arts with STEM also helps non-English and English-learning students grasp abstract concepts without needing to rely on proficiency in English for lessons to make sense, according to the Spanish-American Institute. They found in their study done on Art as a tool that English-learning students are able to connect more personally to lessons through Art.

By intergrating Art into lessons in classrooms, English-learning students are able to egage with lessons on the same level as their English speaking peers.

When addressing how to make a classroom accessible, introducing Arts to the curriculum might not seem like the most obvious answer. Most ideas around accessibility that advocate for one group of people end up making something even less accessible to another group. Think about introducing computers and online lessons to students- sure more kids with computers are able to access educational content outside of the classroom but kids with limited internet access or no personal computers are suddenly left out of the loop. The same idea applies to most other ways of tackling accessibility. Art, however, might be the exception and could work as a way of bridging education to as many students as possible.

Alpha School, a special education school for students with disablities, found that in their classrooms using visual and tactile Arts improved their students engagment with STEM topics. Alpha School reported in their article on STEM and Art intergration, that by using the Arts, students learned and engaged with topics on a personal level that created a positive connection between education and the students. The lessons that included the Arts allowed for more self-emotional regulation and helped studented connect their lived experiences to the classroom in ways that are typically difficult.

The Kennedy Center similarly found in their education and Art integration report for STEAM that using the Arts in classrooms clarified abstract and complex concepts that typically were difficult to understand to student who didn’t have access to educational resources outside of school. This type of Art integration in classrooms is connected to the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) which is a type of learning, which is a standard of education that attempts to offer equal access to all students. By using Art to meet current UDL standards, classrooms can include as many students as possible in lessons.

Currently all over the United States there is a push towards better quality education for more students. By using the Arts as a way to improve accessability in classrooms, students of all kinds are able to get involved in education in ways that were previously impossible.

Since February, we’ve looked at the crossroad of education, accessibility, and the Arts. We discussed the importance of STEAM and art integration in k-12 classrooms; including the positive impact that the Arts has on academic achievement and how Art shapes good futures for our children. We touched upon education, what STEAM looks like within the United States today, and who is excluded from a quality public education. We used our definition of accessibility to assess current school standards and what organizations, foundations, and Universities are doing to improve accessibility.

But why? Reading research and collecting articles and resources for what? How can this information be used?

By following these stories and collecting the data that might be overlooked, we can closely examine the way our education, the Arts, and access to these things are intertwined with one another. The connections we’ve researched opens up new questions and begs us to find a way to stop separating the issues of Art, education, and access. By looking at what we have discovered and recorded, I wonder how we can connect these ideas even more.

So, I hope to look at my research through the lens of answering this question:

How can schools use the Arts and Art integration as an accessibility tool to teach other STEAM topics?

Art can look like a lot of different things. Most think of the Arts as drawing, painting, acting, singing, dancing, and other ‘fine Arts’. The broader definition used in STEAM includes the fine Arts and writing, reading, history, psychology, and many other topics excluded by the strict term, STEM (Which is just Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).

But how can Art be accessible, and how can it make other aspects of education more
accessible? Typically when we think about the Arts, accessibility isn’t the first thing to come to mind. After all, not everyone is a masterful painter, a lively musician, or a natural-born historian, so just like STEM topics, the Arts shouldn’t necessarily be accessible, right?

To understand how Art can help schools be more accessible to a variety of students, we must first understand the differences between Art and typical STEM standards. Unlike STEM, where there is normally just one right answer to a given problem, the Arts engage with subjective matters that can’t easily be boiled down to one thing. Art allows for many different perspectives to be correct, allowing for a space that feels more safe to students. Children can explore many different ideas and topics in Art without having to be worried about being wrong. Not only this, but Art also engages with more students’ personal lived experiences and backgrounds, unlike STEM which might not be as personal to kids. Art, especially historical topics, constantly engage with lots of cultures which can make students feel more seen and represented. STEM on the other hand rarely expands on topics about the history and culture of what it is teaching, meaning unless the students have a connection and history with Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math, they aren’t going to feel well represented in the classroom.

Now back to accessibility; Art can be used as a tool for accessibility because of the ideas mentioned above. Art creates inclusive spaces that encourage students of many backgrounds to participate in lessons and interact with educational content.

Art can be used in many ways to cater to a lot of different students. One example being plain old coloring sheets. I’m sure many of us recall the days of elementary school where a teacher would explain the water cycle, or something of that sort, and they’d pass out a coloring sheet directing students to color one part a certain color and another part something else. This is an example of Art integration and STEAM in the classroom. Not everyone might understand what is being told to them, whether that be because of a mental or physical disability or because they don’t speak the language or understand it very well, but regardless of that almost every kid is capable of coloring on a sheet of paper. When the main ideas of a lesson are drawn out for students, it can become easier for a larger number of kids to understand and grasp the ideas. The use of Art and STEAM makes the classroom more accessible to students and helps kids engage with educational content on a personal level.