Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA)
Arts integrated instruction
Charles Barrett Elementary School is a demonstration school in the Washington, DC metropolitan area that partners with Kennedy Center's Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA) program. Our school's partnership with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which began in 2012, helps teachers develop their expertise in integrating the arts with both social-emotional learning and the teaching of other school subjects (such as history, language arts, and science). This focus on arts-integrated instruction is aligned with our equity vision and designed to help all students learn with greater motivation and ease. To that end, the Kennedy Center and the schools work together to develop, implement, and evaluate an in-depth staff development program of courses, workshops, coaching, and study groups.
The CETA program uses a comprehensive definition of arts integration as its foundation. This definition helps teachers, administrators, and teaching artists know exactly what arts integration is and how it differs from teaching the arts or just using the arts in the classroom. Arts integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. Students engage in a creative process that connects an art form and another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both.
Our resources and partnership with the Kennedy Center allows our staff to host courses at Charles Barrett, take field trips to the Kennedy Center to view performances, and visit other CETA schools to learn more about arts integration.
We also host small performances for our students from members of the National Symphony Orchestra. From our relationship with the Kennedy Center, classes take field trips to the National Portrait Gallery where they use their arts integration strategies to read portraits, paintings and sculptures.
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