Rationale
The Edgewood staff is committed to teaching our students through visual literacy. Edgewood Magnet School's vision is to utilize an arts-integrated curriculum and partnership with the community to provide a positive learning environment that encourages inquiry, self discovery, and independent thinking. This approach to visual learning inherently allows, supports and encourages cross-curricular teaching and embraces all types of learners. Our neighborhood/magnet school setting is a rewarding environment, with students coming to school each day from a variety of home circumstances and with differences in academic levels. As a result of these variables, the children have differing levels of background knowledge and life experiences. Teaching through the arts opens the doors and minds to learning opportunities.
We are fortunate to have a partnership with the Yale Center for British Art and it is this alliance that I would like to use, as well as other museums and historic sites in New Haven, to support a curriculum unit that uses tableaux vivants, living pictures, as a strategy for teaching history and historic events. The students will recreate paintings, posing in costume as the subjects in the paintings. Although specific paintings are identified as the teaching platform for this unit, the bigger idea is the method and approach used to reach students through art. These particular paintings support the themes and standards, as students learn the similarities and differences between society as it seems in the historical images and society today. Students will use their learning to create stories and plays.
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