Toward a Holistic Pedagogy of Art Integration

As a conceptual study, this thesis aims to establish a holistic pedagogy of art integration that would address nurturing the whole child as the goal of education. Over the last few decades, art integration has become an important academic issue in curriculum studies, particularly at the early and primary levels of childhood education. Many have entertained various modes of art integration to promote their personal or institutional philosophies and goals of schooling. As a result, we see some popular arts-integrated programs which can be characterized as ‘interdisciplinary,’ ‘cognitive,’ ‘social,’ or ‘cultural.’ Those programs and approaches suggest, in one way or another, that there are good reasons why we need to be more active in including the arts into curriculum. Our schools would be better off with a well-thought-out arts-integrated curriculum. In this movement, however, there is a critical problem: many have come to believe that the arts are useful in so far as they are good for brain development and academic improvement. This mechanistic or cause-effect view of the relevance of the arts to education has gained solid support and is becoming the major focus when teachers and schools try to integrate the arts into their curricula. Facing this situation, this study proposes a holistic pedagogy of art integration through 1) refining the holistic curriculum with the help of process thought, 2) conceptualizing natural spirituality and its relevance to the whole child, 3) establishing the holistic ways of doing the arts in curriculum, 4) building holistic models of art integration, and 5) discussing some working programs and designing one that best exemplifies the holistic models. The holistic pedagogy of art integration to be established in this study is, then, intended to be one that would remedy some critical issues like reductionism and dualism engrained in the conventional view of art integration that currently dominates our school culture. The holistic ways of the arts developed in this thesis are suggested as one of the more promising ways of transforming our schools into learning and caring communities where our children will have a better chance to thrive as ‘whole persons.’Ph