An Arts Integration Field Trip to Ben Shahn Galleries at WPU!

As part of the Dodge Art Integration grant program, students from the Don Bosco Technology Academy and New Roberto Clemente School attended separate field trips to William Paterson University’s University Galleries at the Ben Shahn Center for Visual Arts and Power Art Building in December., for their on-going* art integration/ social studies project.  

 

Kristen Evangelista, Galleries Director, took the students on a gallery tour of "For Home and Country:  World War 1 Posters from the Newark Library".  "Curated by WP Professor George Robb,  this exhibition showcases 26 Propaganda Posters to coincide with the United States World War 1 Centennial."

 


The students will be learning about World War I soon in their class at Don Bosco.*  At the WPU gallery, they learned about how enemies were depicted in propaganda posters at that time.  

Afterwards, WPU Art Professor Juan Robles conducted a workshop pertaining to creating a propaganda poster in the form of a collage.

 

After this workshop, students visited the Power Arts Building and toured the facility with WPU MFA students seeing the state of the art robot , three-d printer room, computer room, virtual reality room, painting, printmaking, and ceramics studios, and more.

Art integration clearly supports both social studies and the arts - enriching students’ understanding about War World I in many different ways, in addition to creating a collage and poster.  

"Arts Integration is an interdisciplinary teaching practice through which non-arts and arts content is taught and assessed equitably in order to deepen students' understanding of both"(NJPSA/FEA & Dodge, 2017).

*Recently, students just completed their large-scale Thomas Jefferson grid-art project with the help of their art teacher at Don Bosco Ms. Kamisnki, and their WPU Professor in Residence, Professor Samras.  The social studies teacher Ms. Simmen will follow-up with smaller Founding Father portraits in her class.