Crossing Borders/Breaking Boundaries 2000:

A Multidisciplinary Institute for Arts Educators

 
 

Identity and the Arts (And All That Jazz*)

Teacher: Ruth Gray, Margaret Brent Middle School (contact Ruth)
Arts Discipline: Music
Grade Level: Middle School
Team: F
Topic: Jazz & America

Click here to view the lesson plans of other Team F members.

Rationale

Why is this unit worth teaching?

The connections between the arts and identity are important notions for students to explore if they are to understand the human impulse to create art and the personal values of the artistic process. The arts are not separate from the artist. They offer an opportunity to discover and transform who we are. Jazz, America's contribution to music, is a particularly rich vehicle for teaching students about the relationship between artists and identity. A player's art even under the guidance of a composer, this music of spontaneous melodic embellishment is an art form which has developed in the recent past out of African American culture and reflects a sense of group identity. Its distinctive rhythms, scales and modes, harmonic progressions and riffs, and its improvisational elements celebrate the communal need for self-expression and allow the individual performer an opportunity to unmask and explore in order to develop his unique voice.

* Thanks to mentor Dr. Paul Traver for naming our unit
 
 

Unit Plan--Overview

(6-8 lessons)

Big Idea: Identity and the Arts
 

Essential Understandings:

  • The arts allow individuals to express their uniqueness and/or their relationship to others.
  • The arts reflect the artist's identity in his society.
  • Parameters and structure in art can empower an individual, giving him creative freedom.
  • Improvisation challenges traditional notions of the self and offers a tool for collaborative risk-taking.
  • Human beings (and artists) are constantly transforming their identities

Topic: Jazz

Essential Understandings:

  • Jazz grew out of the African-American experience.
  • Despite its different styles and reputation for being free, jazz is highly structured in its melody, chords, rhythm, and form.
  • Improvisation in jazz challenges traditional notions of music and offers a tool for creative development.
     

Big Idea:  Artists and Identity

Essential Questions:
1.    How can art help us to discover and express our identity in relation to others?
2.    What is the role of structure in helping us to find our own voice?

Lesson Objective:
Students will explore artistic ideas through simple improvisation, a key element of jazz, in a variety of art forms.

Lesson Activities:
Students will become familiar with a musical theme and related topic; e.g.. "Yankee Doodle."  The class will divide into small teams selecting an art form in which they would like to work.  The music team will improvise the theme by embellishing on the melody and altering its rhythm to make it in a swing style.  The art team will create a visual work that will include all the visual elements (line, shape, color, rhythm, form, texture and value) using a medium selected by the teacher and centered around the selected topic.  The theater team will create an improvised scene with a beginning, middle, and end, presenting a problem or conflict centered around the selected topic.  The dance team will create an improvised dance centered around the selected topic.  Each team, with the exception of art will perform or present their accompanied improvisation to the entire class.  Art will create their work while listening to the jazz accompaniment.
 

Assessment:
What should students understand and be able to do as a result of this lesson?

Criteria:
Students will be able to work within the parameters of the instructions to improvise in an art form.  They will work with other students to achieve this.

Evidence:
Students will note that all the arts allow expression through improvisation and that there is a very close relationship between the arts.  Collaborative work will help to bring out individual expression.
 
 

~    A later lesson will use a different music theme/topic and the students will perform in a different art form.

   

Sponsored by The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, The Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, and the Maryland State Department of Education.

We welcome your comments and suggestions.
Last updated 25 April 2001