". . . ARTStem had an immediate impact on our work . . ."

This post is by Angell Caudill, ARTStem participant and Director of the Arts for Academics magnet school at R.J. Reynolds High School

ARTStemming at R.J. Reynolds High School—Wordles Gone Wild and Much, Much More!

As a magnet school, R.J. Reynolds “Arts for Academics” offers a student greater opportunities for creativity, originality and critical thinking by integrating the arts into math, science, social studies, English Language arts, and all elective courses. Numerous studies have shown that schools integrating arts into the core curriculum experience academic gains across subject areas. Last March, thirty large display boards were placed throughout the campus to showcase evidence of students’ integrated curriculum and have become a source of pride for students, parents and faculty. Only one problem, at the beginning of this year, of course, there was no student work! Since the Magnet Office Staff did not want thirty blank boards for our school opening, we took on the task of coming up with the displays. Wordles to the Rescue!!! Having talked about different ways to visualize information in the ARTStem summer institute and seen a demonstration of Wordles, or word clouds, we realized we could create attractive, meaningful displays by feeding in articles about our progam elements. The text we used included writing about Arts Integration, ARTStem, the Winston-Salem Arts Council, R.J. Reynolds High School, and Professional Learning Communities. We placed a word cloud on each board and surrounded the graphic with photographs of currents students and additional graphics depicting various content areas. The displays look great and convey information about our program and intent to all our stakeholders. Additionally, we included wordles as part of our staff development on creating Professional Learning Communities and several teachers have also reported using wordles in their academic classes. For now, R.J. Reynolds – “Arts for Academics” is a Wordles Gone Wild environment!

Not only has ARTStem had an immediate impact on our work, but as teachers plan their arts integrated units for this term, I have often heard our ARTStem faculty members describing this summer’s activities to colleagues. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more origami, discussion of virtual reality, movement/sound interpretation, or parallel universe theory discussions in some of our classrooms. As to complexity theory – I’m not even ruling that out!

—Angell Caudill