Arts-Integration

In March 2020, I was teaching tenth-grade English to a section of emergent multilingual students who spoke languages such as Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, and Vietnamese. The students were facing harsh obstacles and inequities—inconsistent technology access, language barriers, family responsibilities, the number of people in one household, fear of speaking during remote learning, and the necessity to turn to full-time work to make ends meet. More than ever, I was challenged to meet students’ individual needs based on their widely varying participation during lessons I taught remotely.

In the fall of 2020, I enrolled in a class with my mentor Dr. James Chisholm, that introduced me to arts-integrated literacy methods for teaching adolescent readers. I learned about and experienced the numerous possibilities for arts-integration practices, such as using multiple literacies to represent the meaning of texts, incorporating the arts to work with emotionally charged content, and providing opportunities for students to express their unique cultural perspectives.

Arts integration as a pedagogical perspective inspired me to pilot an arts-based literacy class for emergent multilingual students in the 2021/2022 school year. I presented at the 2021 National Conference of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention about the pilot and was invited to write a column in NCTE’s English Journal. Louisville Magazine’s editor, Josh Moss, also visited our class and featured students from the pilot in his weekly communication, FIVE. OH! TOO... (No. 91).

The pilot was based on Reading Challenging Texts: Layering Literacies Through the Arts (Chisholm & Whitmore), and the ArtsLit project at Brown University and ¡Habla! Teacher Institute in Mérida, México.