USING VIDEOCONFERENCING, TEACHERS IN NEW JERSEY HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO STIMULATE LEARNING IN STUDENTS AROUND THE COUNTRY AND THE WORLD.
The Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts in Camden, New Jersey, uses broadband technology to teach a variety of cross-curricular courses to K-12 students through its distance-learning program called “D’Arts.” The program, funded by the Subaru of America Foundation, employs visual arts and theater to explore mathematics, language arts, and verbal artistic expression. For example, the center’s teachers might discuss how paintings demonstrate mathematical concepts such as geometry, grids, patterns, symmetry, scale, and proportion.
Schools select courses from D’Arts curriculum on a first-come, first-served basis. In the class sessions, teachers at the center interact with classrooms of 15 to 25 students through videoconferencing, one classroom at a time. In 2005, approximately 6,000 students participated in D’Arts classes.
According to Virginia Oberlin Steel, the center’s director, “The kids get so much more engaged when they see a whole different side of what they’re learning in the classroom. It brings reality to their studies. Through this program, we show that artists actually use the math that the students are learning.”
Steel added, “Videoconferencing is a great opportunity to bring all kinds of new things right into the schools. It’s also very immediate and interactive. The arts are often a way of opening up kids, because the arts are neutral territory. It stimulates the students with something they then can relate to what they’re learning and to their own feelings. It’s just incredible.”
For more information about D’Arts Program, visit www.ruarts.org.
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