Master of Education in Arts and Academic Interdisciplinary Education

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As a teacher, you have experienced firsthand the challenge of finding ways to connect with a classroom full of students. Their attention spans are short, and each one has a different learning style. What works one day fails to inspire your class the next day. You need new resources to add to your toolbox to present lessons in creative ways and reach students more easily.

In Southeastern’s Master of Education in Arts and Academic Interdisciplinary Education, you will take 36 credit hours of study. In this program—which can be completed within 16 months—you will study art, theatre, music, and dance and learn practical ways to integrate these disciplines into your teaching. Instead of just having students read a story and take a test, you can—for example—lead them in creating a play that expands the story’s plot. In short, the program gives teachers a solid foundation in education from a Christian perspective while preparing them to give students new and exciting ways of learning.

The Program

You might not feel qualified to teach students art skills because you haven’t developed them yourself. But Southeastern will teach you those skills, as well as how to use them in the classroom. You will learn acting and improvisational techniques that you can use to lead your students in creating skits or plays related to your curriculum. Skills you develop in the visual arts will allow you to present lessons as drawings, either freehand or with a computer program. Our music instructors will teach you how to recognize music by different composers and how to read music so that, for instance, you can understand ways to relate counting measures and notes to mathematics.

Southeastern’s Arts and Academic Interdisciplinary Education is offered as a 36-credit hybrid program, meaning you will take classes on campus and online. Your four on-campus courses are only available during the summer and last one week each. You will work directly with our fine arts faculty to develop your skills in music, visual arts, dance, and theatre. The other eight courses are available online. Each online course is eight weeks long and requires, on average, eight to ten hours of work per week. Each semester (including the summer), Southeastern offers multiple courses every eight weeks. Students can take one, two, or three courses per semester. After each semester, you can choose either to take the next course(s) or to stop for a while. If you put yourself on a fast track—three courses every semester—your fourth semester (16 months from when you began) will end in graduation. If a more leisurely pace suits your circumstances, you can take as long as you like. The choice is completely up to you.

THE RESULTS

Integrating art into classrooms improves student performance. It can increase students’ ability to think critically while stimulating their imagination. Artsand Academic Interdisciplinary Education grads say that after they infused the arts into lessons, students begin coming to class excited and ready to learn rather than dreading being in school.

A fifth-grade teacher who graduated from the program now uses music to teach his students science. Rather than standing at the board and lecturing about the steps of the scientific method, he has them write songs incorporating the steps into the lyrics. Other graduates now teach geography and social studies by asking students to create squares for a quilt about different countries. When all the squares are combined the class can see the different characteristics of countries in a region of the world.

Interested in looking more closely at our Master of Education in Arts and Academic Interdisciplinary Education? Click here to request more information or contact our admission counselor. You can also contact the program coordinator, Terri Paton, at tkpaton@seu.edu.