Published On: May 1st, 2016By Leticia Fehling

Eisenhower High School Students, Teachers Create Meaning by Integrating Literature and the Arts

Things that make you go hmmm … The arts technique helps students make literary connections.

Eisenhower-High-School-Arts-English-Integration-Silouette-Project-1

Students look at peers’ artwork based on four short stories by contemporary writers.

[dropcap color=”#888″ type=”square”]E[/dropcap]isenhower High School students learned to dig a little deeper. They used art to connect with and understand the works by contemporary writers.

Kaileigh Rosplohowski, Kelly Turner and Ann Schleeter teamed up. They created a lesson that integrated the visual and literary arts. Rosplohowski is the International Baccalaureate art teacher. Turner and Schleeter are English language arts educators.

They created the unit of study “The Power of Narrative.” This comprises a huge segment of creative writing. A narrative is story. It is a sequence of events with a beginning, middle and an ending. Narrative can be true or fictional. It can be relayed in writing, through photographs, in film, and even in song.

Narrative — spreads a message, cultivates emotional connections and controls a story.

Visual arts IB students along with peers in Art II and Art III studied Kara Walker’s work. Walker is an African-American artist who rose to fame for her use of large paper silhouettes. Her art explores social issues surrounding gender, race and black history.

Students read and discussed four short stories. Classes discussed imagery and emotions evoked by the works.

Selected Narratives

[ul class=”list list-search”] [li]Marigolds by Eugenia Collier[/li] [li]Everyday Use by Alice Walker[/li][/ul]

[ul class=”list list-search”] [li]Thank You Ma’am by Langston Hughes[/li] [li]Dreams by Raymond Carver[/li][/ul]

In 1969, Collier published “Marigolds,” which remains a widely read short story. Collier has written or co-written many other short stories, essays and books. Collier won the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction award in Negro Digest for “Marigolds.”

Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African-American novelist and poet. She is most famous for authoring The Color Purple.

Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Carver was an American short-story writer and poet. He contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s. Carver produced stories and poems. Much of his work is about the other side of the American dream – about the people whose dreams go belly-up. He is quoted as saying, “Dreams, you know, are what we wake up from.”

Where Is Narrative Used

[ul class=”list list-search”] [li]Celebrities excel at using narrative. They use it to build their brands and cultivate emotional connections with their fans.[/li] [li]Politicians also use narrative to forge an emotional connection. They pick and choose which parts to include in revealing their life stories. Politicians tend to forge a selective narrative that emphasizes their strengths.[/li][/ul]

[ul class=”list list-search”] [li]Commercials on television tell a story, evoke emotion or create a connection. These narratives target specific demographics to sell millions of products.[/li][/ul]

The students collaborated in groups and as a class. They used imagery to create storyboard narration. The end result was the creation of silhouettes. The works illustrate a scene from a story or the entire story from the selected pieces of literature.

Everyone at Ike got to see the students’ artwork. The silhouettes hung in several hallways throughout the campus.

The teachers involved in the project are proud of the students’ work.

“Integrating arts into other subjects makes learning come alive,” said Rosplohowski. “Studies show that exposure to the arts can help with academics. We try to weave the arts into everything they do and find that the approach engages our students. They want to take more responsibility of their education. The result is a boost in academic achievement while promoting creativity and self-confidence.“