This graduate course is built on the premise that developing critical arts-based praxis and pedagogies deepens art and academic learning for both students and teachers. In this course, you will explore the critical role that arts-based learning can play in education across the disciplines. You will also develop a deep understanding of what it means to implement arts integration in education settings from a systems approach. We will do this together through building a collaborative art inquiry into teaching and learning. Our work together will combine arts-based educational scholarship with artmaking itself: through guided lessons, you will learn visual art techniques you can bring back to the classroom, but will also serve as the materials for your own visual teaching philosophies.

I revised the syllabus for EDUC5930: Arts-Based Pedagogy, Practices, & Research. This is a core elective within the Literacy Studies department. I wrote the course and it’s based on my research using an arts-based approach in an early pre-service teacher program. This is a relatively new course that I taught in the spring of 2023 & 2024, and again in the spring of 2025 while going through the syllabus revision process. My aim in revising the course was to explicitly integrate and tie the CRSE competencies to the course syllabus. I believe the course was strong, but originally lacked the explicit critical lens that aligns with the CRSE Competencies.