TAPA develops well-rounded, educated, artistic and professional community leaders who practice service and teamwork in initiating and implementing goals, with a focus on the global society.
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At TAPA, students will be taught utilizing a fully-integrated arts curriculum, where the arts are deeply embedded into the core of interdisciplinary learning. Arts integration affirms the indispensability of the arts as a core curriculum subject, and views the arts as a catalyst to learn other subjects. At TAPA, the performing arts (theater, dance, music, and film) will play a major role in helping students address broad curricular themes and achieve robust habits of mind, including imagination, discipline, collaboration, inquiry, divergent problem solving, empathy, and making connections.
One way to think about Arts Integration is in the words of James A Beane (1991): "Given a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and told to put them together, no doubt we would ask to see the picture they make. Its is the picture, after all, that gives meaning to the puzzle and assures us that the pieces fit together, that none are missing and that there are no extras. Without the picture, we probably wouldn’t bother with the puzzle… To students, the typical curriculum presents an endless array of facts and skills that are unconnected, fragmented, and disjointed. That they might be connected or lead to some whole picture is a matter that must be taken on faith by young people." At TAPA, we use Arts Integration to provide the whole picture to our students.
The pyramid below shows the levels of Arts Integration that TAPA uses in all of our classes. Traditional art education exists in the bottom of each pyramid, with the arts and academics being entirely independent from one another. At TAPA, only 10-20% of our class time is spent in the "Independent" section of the pyramid. Our goal is to create classrooms where the arts are, at very least, a catalyst for the other academic subjects, if not fundamentally interconnected or indispensable.
You can download the full-size Arts Integration Pyramid here.
