Five Ways to Integrate: Using Strategies from Contemporary Art

Julia Marshall writes this article for teachers as a means of demonstrating how to integrate art teachings with other academic disciplines. In doing this, Marshall presents five strategies: Depiction, Extension/Projection, Reformatting, Mimicry, and Metaphor. She explains each extensively with examples and lists their benefits to helping students think critically.

This article tries to  convince the reader that studying about art is useful and also easily compatible with other disciplines of general education. In response to the question of whether art and academic discipline can exist without shadowing one another, Julia Marshall lists five strategies that show how this is possible and beneficial to students. A key point stressed by Marshall is that art is connected to in some cases directly addresses information from all disciplines.

The first of these strategies is Depiction. The process of depiction involves rendering a given subject from observation. An example given by Marshall is the work of medical illustrators and other artists take an active role in the science and medical field such as work done for botany or astrology. In listing these examples, Marshall notes how the

           Next, Marshall explains the strategy of Extension or Projection. This strategy entail of speculating all the possible outcomes of a given idea and considering their impact. In the science field this would be akin to creating a hypothesis. This method places heavy emphasis on imagination and the understanding required in accurately executing this.

           The third model Julia Marshall lists is the strategy of reformatting. This strategy is described as reformatting a topic by “picturing it mapping it in a new visual format.” As explained near the beginning of the article, many of these strategies interrelate with each other. This strategy could be assumed to heavily depend on the strategy of Extension/Projection and is also very similar to Metaphor, another strategy we will talk about later. Involving reformatting in the integration process typically results in taking objects from one discipline and presenting them in the form of another.

The next strategy listed is Mimicry. Mentioned in a straightforward manner, Mimicry is the act of copying. In example given in the article is performing experiments.  This allows students to learn from the discipline by experience. Again, this strategy could also be linked to the earlier strategy of Depiction.

The last strategy listed is metaphor. Metaphor is explained as “the depiction of one thing in terms of another.” This practice is very often done in literature, poetry specifically. Metaphor creates a comparison between two objects, and is thus vaguely similar to the strategy of Reformatting. The benefits listed of being able to effectively use metaphor is that it hones their skills of analysis and perception, and aids them in learning how to think symbolically.