'How we would've liked to learn': KCYA helps LINC integrate the arts

Before the teachers’ teacher ever put the lesson’s scientific words on the screen, the class of adults had become expressive dancers.

To the beat of a tambourine, LINC’s Caring Communities staffers were stepping, freezing and reaching for artistic poses.

“We’re not thinking about the curricular area yet,” Master Teaching Artist Harlan Brownlee told the LINC team. “We’re just thinking about the art form.”

Today, the classroom site was dancing space inside Kansas City Young Audiences at 3732 Main Street. But in the days ahead, the LINC staff aim to create scenes like this with the children in LINC’s Caring Communities after-school programs across the Kansas City area.

Once his adult class had channeled their child-like enthusiasm for daring dance, Brownlee turned on the pictures of clouds and their names: Cirrus. Stratus. Cumulus.

This is how after-school learning can tap children’s innate energy, Brownlee said.

Over the next several minutes, the LINC team were using their bodies to imitate the varying shapes of the clouds. Soon they were in small groups, choreographing a dance story, recreating the onset of a meteorological warm front.

“We were creative,” said LINC Caring Communities Coordinator Marlisa Collins. “We were active.” She could see that the lesson on weather had become “interesting” and “entertaining.”

Beyond memorization and understanding, the highest way to demonstrate learning is in creating, Brownlee said. The arts help children reach this highest level.

“I absolutely love the work because I’ve seen what a difference it makes with children,” he said. “It can energize them. It can engage them and it is another way for them to really learn an idea and to use their imaginations to be creative.”

LINC has been partnering with Kansas City Young Audiences for many years to enrich the Caring Communities experience. KCYA artists regularly lead programs in LINC’s classrooms, but LINC also works with KCYA’s teachers to help LINC’s staff incorporate the arts and all their benefits into their own lesson planning.

“Bringing arts into the program,” Collins said, “helps those (children) who like to draw, who like to move, who like to dance, who like to sing, who like to act, who like to play.”

Collins was out there on the dance floor, ballet-like, shaping herself into moving clouds, enjoying it the same as her colleagues all around her.

She felt the energy, she said.

“It brought us into our childhood,” she said, “like how we would have liked to learn.”

For LINC and KCYA to bring the energy of the arts into the after-school time is a great benefit to children, schools and families, Brownlee said.

“The LINC partnership with KCYA is really important because it provides that after-school space for students through the course of their day,” he said. “To be able to have an opportunity to experience arts at the end of the day I think is a powerful way for them to learn.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer