Culture Shock: Understanding World Cultures through Arts Integration

摘要

Teachers often have difficulty engaging students in arts and humanities classes. To aid in this struggle, a series of lesson plans applicable for kindergarten through twelfth grade students in music and arts and humanities classes will be presented. These lesson plans will teach students about world cultures, such as West African, Appalachian, and Latin America, through arts integration. In order to reach this goal, there will be a component on student development in order to match the units with students’ developmental levels. From there, the lesson plans will be developed to incorporate all of the art forms, with an emphasis in music, reflecting world cultures. The students will understand these topics through a variety of products and performances that they will create. With the development of these lesson plans, students should become more culturally aware. They will have an understanding of people that are not like them, but realize that they are just as alike as they are different because of the cultures’ contribution to the arts.