Integrated curriculum for arts and culture: more than mixing subjects and merging content?

Do the arts and cultural subjects overarch other curriculum areas? If so, should the different art forms be integrated in the general curriculum and how far should such an integration reach? The fact that these question are still unanswered today shows that researchers, policy makers and practitioners are still looking for the best or most efficient way to insert arts and cultural education into the general curriculum of compulsory education. Furthermore, the questions reflect the worries of practitioners and policy makers about the role and place and reputation of arts and culture in the general curriculum. Put simply, there are three different ways of shaping a curriculum for arts and culture. All three of them have arguments for and against. The first model sees all art forms as distinctive areas in the curriculum, separated and often rather isolated from each other. In this approach there is little scope for cross-curricular work. This curriculum model builds on the idea that art forms contain important domain-specific knowledge and thinking proceeds differently in different disciplines. This view is firmly defended by specialist arts teachers. Secondly, there is the partly integrated curriculum. This curriculum approach states the art forms should not be viewed and studied separately, simply because they belong together in a broader ‘arts’ area. The third model is the fully integrated curriculum. This approach is based on the idea that arts and culture can and should be weaved into the curriculum wherever and whenever possible. Through doing so, combinations of subjects and areas of learning are used in the classroom(s) (mostly within project or thematic work), thereby dissolving and eliminating subject barriers and combining relevant parts of each subject area into a composite whole. We still lack fundamental empirical research on which curriculum model is the most efficient. Nevertheless, we notice that in today’s scientific literature the arguments in favor of an integrated curriculum are predominant and, to some, overemphasized, probably because a lot of countries are in the process of narrowing their curriculum. All curricula are of course related to certain assumptions about schooling and learning. Therefore, before answering the question which model is the best, we have to answer this question: the best for what? What is the ultimate goal arts and cultural education in primary education should aim for? Furthermore, the pedagogy, and basically the question “how are things taught?”, is more important than the efficiency of a curriculum model. Therefore this paper argues that primary education needs an more integrative pedagogy with teachers making meaningful connections between different subjects but without making the arts just “a servant to other subjects” such as history and social studies.status: publishe