Alliance for Catholic Education
In this fifth installment of Teachers Helping Teachers, Tim Hankins (ACE 22, Memphis) discusses how he uses art in his social studies and religion classes at Memphis Catholic Middle & High School to practice different modes of analysis for students. He uses this type of work during bellwork, as an introduction to a topic, and as a performance assessment at the end of a unit.
Art, while perhaps intimidating for students at the outset, can serve as an invaluable way to help students visually enhance their knowledge of a certain topic or theme and draw connections between other things they have learned. Tim discusses the way he scaffolds this for his students, first by having them describe what they see, and then moving deeper into what they think the artist wanted to portray.
This clip illustrates the way Tim includes art in the middle of one of his lessons.
Tim has also graciously provided the documents for a performance assessment he has used that uses an artistic medium.