Holistic Learning

POETRY AND MUSIC AS COLOURS OF THE WORLD

http://www.eqa.edu.au/site/poetryandmusicascolours.html

Holistic and interdisciplinary learning, long understood as central to early years education, has gained support in all levels of education through explicit recognition in state curriculum standards throughout Australia. Schools now strive to meaningfully balance the lifelong learning needs of children and young adults, including the development of positive values, personal and social skills, cross-curriculum skills, and discipline-based knowledge. In this educational climate, the arts provide significant ways of knowing that support integrated, student-centred and authentic learning (Hunter, 2005).

There is currently considerable scholarly support that links student ‘engagement’ with arts practices that encourage student motivation, active participation, heightened awareness and animation, deep thinking strategies and expressions of enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity and emotional connection. Engagement with the arts is considered in terms of ‘flow’ or optimal experience and as an attitude, or way of seeing the world. Through arts participation, children not only acquire arts knowledge and skills but also develop personal and social capacities, positive attitudes to learning, enhanced literacy and numeracy outcomes and improve a range of generic competencies, including problem-solving and communication skills (Hunter, 2005).