LAUSD Arts Education Branch

Dance Education gives our students the opportunity to dance, create dance, observe and appreciate dance, and make connections to, with and through dance to the world around them, and ultimately to themselves. Dance provides support for cognitive development.  Through the dance creation process, students encounter problems and investigate solutions.  This compels students to communicate solutions through the language of movement, which demand cognitive processes and skills. The developing brain needs sufficient activation of the motor-cerebral-vestibular system for successful movement and growth. 

Music Education teaches our children a language spoken all around the world, and helps them to collaborate with others and feel at home in a community of lifelong learners. Music has a direct impact on sensory and perceptual motor systems that aid in the development of spatial and logic reasoning, memory, language, listening skills, and fine motor skills. Music plays a critical role in activating and synchronizing neural firing patterns that coordinate and connect multiple places in the brain. Music training induces functional and structural changes in the auditory system, motor, and visual-spatial regions of the brain. 

Theatre Education allows students to create imaginary characters, stories and worlds while learning about the history of civilization. Theatre provides students the opportunity to imagine and physically express themselves in character and story.  Embodying the traits of a character and putting themselves in place of another, students are able to reflect, observe and examine themselves and others around them within the context of an imagined world.  Abstract thinking and active engagement lends to and develops predictive, reflective, critical thinking and metacognitive processes.  Theatre develops comprehension skills of recognition and recall of details, sequencing of events, and generalizing the main idea.

Visual & Media Arts Education is the study of history and its people. Students have the opportunity to contribute their experiences and opinions through the creation, analysis, and processing of ideas. Visual thinking allows students to look close, to see clearly and to perceive differently.  It allows students to see beyond what is expected, to observe and to perceive accurately.  Visual and media arts involve strategic use of visual deconstruction, comparison, synthesis, analogical transfer and repetitive cycles of construction, evaluation and revision. It engages students in comparing and contrasting, making connections between form and content of works of art, allowing the student’s brain to detect patterns, contrast and movement.  It enhances the students’ generalized knowledge about the world.

Arts Integration is instruction combining two or more content areas, wherein the arts constitute one or more of the integrated areas.  The integration is based on shared or related concepts, and the instruction in each content area has depth and integrity.

Numerous studies and research show students who participate in arts instruction become meaningful, well-rounded contributors to society.  Creativity and innovation are fostered through creative practices inherent in arts education, such as flexible thinking, creative problem-solving, inquisitiveness, perseverance, problem identification, research, interpretation, communication and accuracy.  Artistically literate students find joy, inspiration, peace, intellectual stimulation, meaning and other life-enhancing qualities through participation in the arts.  Students exposed to the arts will be better prepared to navigate through the 21st century workforce, creating and developing well-rounded citizens, while enhancing student, parent and community engagement.

The stories that are told through the ARTS will be left to future generations.