Second and third grade teachers integrate a visual art and literacy curriculum

This study investigates how 2nd and 3 rd grade teachers in an urban University-affiliated public school collaborated with me as participant-researcher to design and enact an integrated visual art and literacy curriculum. Seeking to fill gaps in our understanding of how visual art might be integrated with other disciplines in the public school setting, the research examines how these teachers conceptualize literacy, text, and modality in the current educational environment where literacy is narrowly defined as a discrete set of skills. Drawing on interpretive-hermeneutic and critical-theoretic paradigms in art education, these teachers designed, and with their students, enacted an integrated curriculum around Dewey\u27s notion of art as everyday experience. A central thrust of the curriculum is the exploration of intertextual connections as a means of literacy learning and literary understanding through the use of text sets comprised of local public murals, works of fine art, picturebook art parody, and artist biography. The study employs ethnographic method and grounded theory in the analysis of the interconnected pathways teachers took in curriculum design, uncovering eight diffuse stances that teachers stepped in and stepped out of at various times. The dynamic interrelationships of these design stances highlight three influential pedagogical orientations: perceived risk, mindfulness, and teacher as knower and learner, where I use mindfulness to mean both intentionality, in the sense of purposefulness, and attentive awareness of teachers\u27 and students\u27 interests and learning. Additionally, through eight assertions regarding the enacted curriculum, I both argue for and illuminate the epistemological and ontological significance of visual art integration, intertextuality, and art parody in fostering literary understanding, sophisticated cognitive functions, and the human experience. This research has significant pedagogical implications for integrated arts curricula, including how rich integrated arts curricula are conceptualized and designed, the tensions involved in creating integrated curricula, even with administration support, and the value of teacher and student autonomy as an integrated curriculum unfolds