The Department of Education and museum directors gathered last week to discuss how museums can be helpful in teaching art instruction beyond just the one-time field trip to help teach all subjects in the classroom.

Educators alike feel that art instruction is not just limited to specifically art class, but can be integrated in all subjects, including typically thought-to-be unrelated subjects like math.

“'It’s not just a separate set of skills,' said Jackye Zimmermann, director of the student art exhibition for the Education Department.

'It’s an integrated set of skills that teaches you about your culture and your history ... it’s a recognition that everything around you is a combination of the arts and some form of math, technology and engineering,'" she said, according to The Washington Post.

All over the country, the results from school partnerships with museums have been good and have helped students produce creative and unique projects.

In one high school, the partnership even helped students deal with an emotional time.

"Anne Henderson of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville said the museum helped a nearby high school create a campaign on pedestrian safety — using Banksy-inspired street art — after one of their own classmates was killed crossing the street," according to the Post.

One of the main focuses of museum partnerships is to reach the end goal of blending art instruction across all subjects for a more complete and balanced curriculum.

In one Arlington middle school, the partnership "helped build three separate lessons around a Man Ray exhibit...One played off the artist’s process of photographing mathematical models and then creating a painting based on the photographs. Instead, students invented superheroes, built them using a three-dimensional printer, photographed them and then set them against landscapes created in Photoshop," the article said.

To showcase the work that museum and school partnerships have been able to produce in schools, the ground floor of the Education Department building, will feature "works from dozens of students whose teachers partnered with the nation’s museums, large and small" in a student exhibit that is set to open in June.

Read the full article here share news about your museum partnerships below in the comments.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

05/19/2015