Introducing Building Academic Communities Through the Arts

What is Building Academic Communities Through the Arts (BACTA)?

BACTA is a weeklong workshop for teachers to practice ideas for integrating storytelling, drawing and other visual art-making, casual singing, movement, and poetry into the learning day. We affectionately refer to the workshop as “Back ta basics” to stress the basic importance of differentiating curriculum and instruction so that all children can learn in the way they learn best. The point of the workshop is to engage and empower children towards high achievement by providing them multiple, attractive doorways into learning. BACTA is designed for teachers who may feel that they have no particular strength in any art form, but wish to add the appeal of the arts to their instruction. Responsive Classroom 1 or Developmental Designs 1 is a prerequisite for this workshop.

How BACTA came to be

Since the early years of its formation, Origins has placed the arts at the center of its mission to create programs that generate and nurture community and academic success. We saw that along with the powerful possibilities for community building within the imaginative mode of the arts, student engagement increased the moment someone started to draw or tell a story. We began to regularly offer programs for children and adults through arts residencies during the school year, and summer workshops for teachers to develop their own arts capabilities and encourage their students to do the same. BACTA was developed on the evidence that the arts strengthen community and increase engagement and achievement in learning.

The importance of the arts in learning

The arts are a necessity for school excellence. They are perceived as a “frill” only if you ignore all that we now know about the brain and learning, about the need to reach different learners through different means of instruction, about thinking skills and creativity. If we really want children to become skillful, inventive problem-solvers, if we really want them to learn for their own reasons and continue learning after their school years, and if we want them to use what they’ve learned, then we must invite them to sing and move and write and draw while they gather skills and knowledge in subject areas.

Teachers find that using the arts makes difficult content more accessible and allows them to achieve some of their most important academic objectives. It is no small thing to increase the joy of learning each day!

Principles and Practices of Building Academic Communities Through the Arts

• Active, joyful learning positively impacts students’ engagement, cognitive growth, and general academic success.

The arts require the use of hands, heart, and head. They have a way of inviting a learner into learning so that resistance is minimal or non-existent. Drawing on the kind of active learning that John Dewey described, BACTA demonstrates for teachers how subject matter can be taught in a lively way that motivates students to participate and achieve by providing a project, choice-based, expressive aspect to the curriculum.

• Differentiation of instruction is necessary if we are to teach to the wide varieties of learners and learning modes.

When students are able to use the visual and kinesthetic means the arts present to explore, practice, and represent their understanding, they have a variety of tools sufficient to match their learning needs and preferences. One size never fits all, and the arts provide a whole wardrobe of sizes, colors, and styles. BACTA is organized to maximize the possibility that everyone in a class will succeed, because everyone is offered doorways into learning that allow them to use their greatest strengths.

• The brain builds cognitive strength through the integration of past and present learning. The arts foster that integration.

The arts often serve as a bridge between islands of learning. The arts make it possible for the student traveler to see relationships and make meaning out of what we offer them. Seeing life in its complexity challenges any learner. To address the challenges, we need help in perceiving clearly and deeply. Drawing and singing and storytelling and movement often open our eyes to the richness that lies around all the information we give students. The arts take them beyond skills and facts to exploration, imagination, and wonder.

• Good teaching is largely a matter of good questions that stimulate student inquiry. Inquiry is at the heart of imaginative work.

The Quest component of BACTA encourages a cycle of planning, doing, and reflecting. This reflection is modeled within the course as each component, each arts medium, each project is approached through an awareness experience, after which there is inquiry and planning, followed by experiential work on a task, culminating in a sharing of the work and reflecting upon it. Great effort is made to see to it that the questions posed during the reflection period are important, open-ended ones.

• Safe, respectful, cooperative communities are fundamental to academic success. The arts provide rich opportunities for collaboration.

The course ensures the kind of success in performance that can come only in a climate of safety and respect for everyone. The emphasis BACTA places on social skills and building respectful communities is fundamental to academic success. The arts activities occur within a social context of collective planning, collaboration, and group reflection.

• It is fundamentally important that learners make and express personal connections to content and use it in the real world to solve problems that matter to them.

The arts demand this process. “ The real test [of good teaching and learning] is understanding.” Andrea Downs says in the Harvard Education Letter (March/April, 2000), “Can a youngster take what he’s learned and apply it powerfully? That’s how it is in the real world.” When part of the process of learning involves making an artistic product or performance, problem-solving and applied learning are built into the process.

Join us for a week of learning to build your classroom community with what could become your favorite teaching tools: drawing, storytelling, simulations, music, visual thinking skills, poetry, and movement.

Register for BACTA