Integrating the Arts: Educational Entrepreneurship in a School Setting

What qualities make for successful integration of the arts and the so-called core curriculum? Clearly, integration requires more than scheduling changes, and results in substantial learning well beyond drawing snowflakes in science or singing patriotic songs in social studies. This paper presents one case of arts integration in a Texan high school, where the project coordinator was the music teacher. I examine those qualities that made it a successful integration, including the curriculum, the institutional structures, and some of the characteristics and background of the project coordinator. Based on this and other cases of successful integration of the arts into the academic curriculum (and as important, cases where such integration failed despite seemingly promising conditions), I identify some characteristics that are important to arts integration. These characteristics include: (1) going beyond the traditional disciplinary knowledge to creatively reflect ownership and personal commitments; (i2) being able to listen to others and to collaborate in what I refer to as transformative practice zone (TZP); and (3) perseverance in a process of experiential learning of the innovation. These characteristics, I suggest, constitute educational entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on the social and the intellectual.