Teachers Urged To Integrate Culture In Teaching Methodologies

Director of Culture in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture, Sydney Bartley, has encouraged teachers to integrate culture and the arts in their teaching methodologies.

“Integrating culture and the arts in how we teach, in what we teach and how we interact with our children, will always be very important for them to develop a sense of who they are and therefore a commitment to national development and national reality,” he said.

Mr. Bartley was addressing an awards ceremony for participants in the Primary Teachers’ Integrated Arts Programme at the Knutsford Court Hotel in Kingston on Friday, March 14.

The Director pointed to the importance of an integrated curriculum, stressing that every child should leave Primary school with a sense of self and a desire to advance in society.

“The integrated arts programme allows us to engage our own cultural reality and to use the arts, the song and the dance to allow children to understand. It allows us to find in our own culture .the stones that are hampering us from delivering a serious education to our children and the ability to remove them,” he said.

Some 60 primary school teachers islandwide participated in the programme. They were taught dance, drama and art.

The programme was funded by the Ministry, in collaboration with the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.

The programme was developed and designed with the objective of having primary school teachers equipped to use the art form as part of the newly developed Integrated Primary Curriculum.

Outlining the aims of the programme, Barbara Requa, Dean of the Edna Manley College said that it would provide in-service training for primary school teachers in order to enable them to implement the revised primary school curriculum using the arts as a delivery mode; it would facilitate the use of the arts as an educational tool, while maintaining, communicating and transmitting the intrinsic value and integrity of each artistic discipline; and it would use the arts to change and develop values and attitudes in character building.