All of Us Are Artists: Bringing Creativity Back to the Classroom

In this episode of The Research to Practice Gap, Dr. Helen Flores sits down with Dr. Hank Samuels to explore the role of creativity, imagination, and arts integration in education. Together, they discuss why so many educators believe they are "not creative," how schools often separate art from learning, and practical ways teachers can incorporate creativity into everyday instruction. Dr. Samuels shares research-based insights and accessible strategies that help educators cultivate joy, deepen student engagement, and create more meaningful learning experiences across all grade levels and content areas.

Resources for Teachers:

8 Ways to Use Music in the Language Arts Classroom

Artist in Residence

Arts Integration and Universal Design for Learning

Arts Integration Versus Arts Enhancement

The Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM

The Kennedy Center

Teaching Students to Critique Art

Why You Think You Aren’t an Artist

Research and Background:

Dr. Mary Weems

Miller, J. A., & Bogatova, T. (2018). Arts in education: The impact of the arts integration program and lessons learned. Journal for Learning through the Arts, 14(1).

Møller-Skau, M., & Lindstøl, F. (2022). Arts-based teaching and learning in teacher education:“Crystallising” student teachers' learning outcomes through a systematic literature review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 109, 103545.

Samuels, J. H. (2025). “To Be a Teacher Is to Be an Artist”: An Ethnodramatic Look into Preservice Teacher Experiences with Arts Integration. In The Educational Forum (Vol. 89, No. 3, pp. 312-324). Routledge.

Samuels, J. H. (2026). Scratching beneath the surface. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 35(2), 275-295.

The Science of Arts Integration and Student Success

Artwork and logo by The Interior Gaze

Transcript

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Welcome to the Research to Practice Gap, a podcast that bridges the divide between research and classroom practice. I'm Dr. Helen Flores, and each episode I sit down with an expert whose work informs education and translate their insights into practical, evidence-based strategies you can use in your classroom right away. Today with me I have Dr. Hank Samuels. A former elementary school teacher, Dr. Samuels is interested in the intersections of teacher education, professional development, creativity, and arts integration. He is specifically interested in examining how teacher educators, practicing teachers, and pre-service teachers can cultivate joy and support the imagination, intellectual development of their students. Welcome. Hi, thank you. It's so great to be here. I'm really excited to jump into this. I think cultivating joy is always important, but of like extreme importance right now. To start us off, in one or two sentences, what problem in education does your research aim to address? My problem, my research tries to address like the imagination intellectual development of teachers and students. There's a scholar, artist by the name of Dr. Mary Weams, who came up with the imagination intellectual theory that says the imagination and intellect can't be removed. But what we find in the way we often teach is that they are removed and separated. And she argues that to develop them simultaneously would be more informed engagements with art, teaching students to think creatively and artistically through many art forms and hopefully growing social awareness. I really love that. I I feel like in school, thinking back growing up, it was sort of separated, like the kids who did art and the kids who didn't. And so I always thought of myself as not artistic at all. Um, and it wasn't until I started my PhD when someone told me, you know, writing is art. Well, it took me 30 plus years to figure that one out. But I love that because I have two school-aged kids and there's very strict parameters on art. They're in elementary school. My son came home and told me, Oh, I'm not good at art because I can't color the way the teacher wants me to. And it makes me sad how that imagination is not only limited, but not even talked about or grown. Right, right. And you mentioned your son in elementary school, often there's an art teacher and a music teacher, right? But it's a resource or a special class. So they go to this art and music class and other art forms like drama, but then they come back to the classroom, and everything they're doing in that art and music room is often isolated from what they're actually doing in the classroom, which if we're trying to really have kids be informed creative, there should be some kind of symbiosis there where they're informing each other. But we often don't see that in art. Yeah. Wow. So what first drew you to this line of research? Was there a classroom moment that sparked it? So for me, I have always loved the arts. I'll call myself like an interlope, or I'll just like dabble in different art forms and things. I really had my fourth grade teacher, who's my favorite teacher. She was a community theater artist and always did artistic stuff with us. And she invited our class to audition for a local, the local play they're doing, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. And I auditioned and I got that part. So then I started anything that was like artistic growing up, I would do in projects in school that were open. I like went all the way to 100 and did like the crazy kooky art thing just because like that's how I thought. So going into teaching, I was doing those things, making songs for things, playing things. I learned how to play the basics of the keyboard. And a big part of my instructional practice when I was an elementary school teacher, and even now as a teacher in higher ed, uh, is playing music and singing with my class. Um, and I remember my last year before I transitioned to my doc program, I was playing a song, and one of my second-grade coworkers was looking the window, smiling, and then walked away. And later she found me and she was like, Oh, I wish I could play music with my class. And I was like, But you don't have to bust out a keyboard. You can still like play music with them and make music and sing with them. And it really struck me that this idea of making art or music with your kids was something foreign that you had to have access to when everyone had access to it. And so I think that really drew me to this uh line of work. Wow, I felt the same as your second grade coworker. You know, I would outsource all of my artistic questions to someone that was more artistic than me. You're right. I had access to it. I had a whole cabinet full of art supplies and a computer I could play music on, but I didn't know how, or maybe I didn't even know that I could. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's part of a lot of what I'm figuring out with my research is that there's this idea that we can't do these things, but what we think of when we think of these art forms, we often are thinking of professionals who do this for work. When that is art, but it's not the only art. Because I'd argue by nature of being human and alive, we are all artists. Um and it's just how we think about that art that we are creating helps us engage with them. Now, a big part of my work with pre-service teachers is helping them understand like, all right, y'all are talking about wanting to do these kinds of things, y'all are going into placements where you're not necessarily seeing those kinds of things. So, so what do we do? Like really thinking about what are bite-sized ways that people can have access to these things and hopefully scale up in the kind of level of art generation. Absolutely. So, who should care most about this research? Teachers, administrators, teacher educators, policymakers, and why? I'm extremely biased. So I'm gonna say every level, right? And I think you mentioned, right, in this current educational context that we're in, now more than ever, we need creative, artistic, imaginative, socially minded students. And the only way to really develop those kinds of students is to have creative, artistic, imaginative, socially minded teachers. So how can we affect policy that brings more of this to the forefront? How can we get administrators to really value this and prioritize this? How do we get teachers to see that, hey, this isn't just for experts, I can do this too? And how do we get students to see that art and learning are aren't separate? I don't have to sacrifice one to get the other that both can exist together. That makes sense. So for listeners who aren't familiar with this line of research, what are two to three key findings or important facts? For this line of research in general, one important fact is that, like I mentioned earlier, we are all artists. There is a myth of expertise that we attach to the art and that we tell ourselves that because I am not an expert in this art form, I cannot do it, which is a bunch of everyone can do it, no matter level expertise. There's also notions of beauty that we put on art as well, so that if we say in our brain, whatever we think beauty is, and if our artwork doesn't align with that idea of beauty, we're automatically saying it's not art. But that notion of beauty is a construct. It doesn't, it's there's no set standard for beauty. The other important findings is that people have a lot of baggage and trauma when it comes to their own artistic development. Um and the research shows that that's often a barrier for classroom teachers to then try to use the arts. And then also when teachers often think of arts integration, they're thinking of, oh, like I need to turn my class into a symphony and have all these gallery walks and all these other things. When there are very realistic, bite-sized, easy, accessible things that we can do to work towards arts intuition. That's great. Yeah, when you were just talking about own teacher experience with arts. So my little sister was the arty one of our family. She did the logo for this podcast, she taught herself guitar. And I remember wanting to be an art club, but I didn't get in in elementary school because whatever the criteria was, I didn't make it and she did. And I remember being upset about that. And then I think too about teachers that don't think of themselves as artsy and how this probably makes the problem worse. I've have for sure been the teacher and observed teachers who are like, sorry, I can't even draw a stick figure, you know, when we're drawing something on the board, and how that maybe sets the tone for other for kids in the classroom that feel like they are also not artists. Exactly. And we do it all the time in beings. Well, mine's not as good as no one asks for it to be as good as that. No one even asks you to say anything like that. We just want to hear what you said. And so that's a big thing to think through and work through. And also on that same line, an elementaries teacher, right, is a generalist and often has to teach all of the subjects, right? So people will also have like math identity issues, right? Not a mathematician, not good at math, but they still have to teach it, right? So they have to come up with ways to to figure out how to do that, right? But the same thing with the arts, right? Oh, I'm not, I'm I'm not an artist, and then it just ends, right? There's no push or growth outside of comfort zone to even try to include that. So really thinking about how do we how do we push past that and be like, hey, okay, I can I could do this. It may not look like this, but that's okay. But these are experiences I know students should have. How do I help them have that? Absolutely. Well, then let's jump into this. Someone's listening to this right now. What are two or three practices or strategies they can try in their classroom tomorrow? Beautiful. The first strategy I'm gonna say is not really a strategy, but a definition to tell yourself. The Kennedy Center is like uh one of the premier institutions of arts integration in our country, and they have a really cool uh definition of what considered an art form, and an art form they define as any uh work with a creative product at the end. So then that that's a normal music, drama, visual arts, dance, but then also including like uh hairstyling, right? Landscaping, doing nails, right? All of those have creative products at the end. So that could also be an art form. So then I think the first thing is opening up to what you think art is more than what we think it is, and often you are already doing a whole bunch of arts stuff. I think one strategy I like to use a lot is poetry. I think poetry is often page 12. There's some kind of standard that relates students to thinking about poetry. Poetry is a text. Texts aren't often all long-form books. Songs are a great way to dive into poetry or figurative language or theme. All of these things are accessible through songs. So, for example, you're teaching theme, one of the teaching theme, like the song Let It Go from Frozen. There's a very meaty, rich theme in that that kids can talk about that is not necessarily a comprehension passage or a chapter book. It's something small, digestible, they can break down and do. Another strategy to use is asking your students what their favorite song is, provided that it's school appropriate and playing that song in class. So there's a kind of a social emotional relationship, community building aspect there where, like, oh, whose song is this? Oh, I like this song too. And then you can make connections that way. But then you can even ask them to think about listening critically. What are you hearing in this? This sounds like a sad song. What in it is making you think it's a sad song? Well, the drums kind of are doing this, and she's kind of sounding like she's crying. All of these things, when we think about critical talk between students and dialogue, music as a launching pad can give us all of those kinds of really cool and really rich kind of things. Okay, but those are those are two that are accessible. They're not asking anyone to create a van Gogh like painting or anything. Uh, but again, really thinking about like what are we defining as art, uh, and then what we're already doing. Where does the arts already live in the work that we're doing? And how can we boost it just maybe a little bit more? Yeah. I love that you brought in social emotional learning because we um in episode four, we there's we talk a lot about social emotional learning, and it's nice how these best practices, it's all interconnected. It's not like you have to do this for SEL, this for arts, and this for restorative practices, and this. They're really all interconnected. I think maybe this could be easier to integrate into elementary school. Have you seen ways that this has been done really well in middle school or high school? One person I was uh talking with remembered this project they did in their literature class in high school where they had to make a mixtape related to a book they read in the class. So really having them synthesize the core concept of the book and then assess them on those concepts by the songs that they chose and the argument for choosing those songs. So I say that to say as we transition into middle and high school and even college, it's about showing students that if I'm asking you to show your knowledge, it's not just essay, multiple choice tests. I can ask you to make a mixtape, I can ask you to perform something, I can ask you to write a poem. All of those things can live in every single subject. So it's really about being creative and being open to the fact that hey, I can have students do this in a different way. Um, and then also the arts can include more students. If we're thinking about traditional ways of showing knowledge, they often are not equitable for certain groups of students. So, how can we change how we think about assessment to include the arts to make sure that we're not thinking of them as silly little add-ons, but as rigorous, critical subjects alongside all the other subjects? And how can we really lean into that and give students other ways of showing what they yeah, I teach uh pre-service educators as well. And as part of our lesson plan template, we have the 21st century competencies and creativity is one of them. And again, since it's not my strength, I don't, I don't harp on it very much to them. And it does become this add-on or sort of like gloss over, oh, they had to generate their own word problems, so that's creativity. And I never really talk about that section because I'm not comfortable with it, but now I'm going to. Yeah, and I think also with pre-service teachers specifically, like our programs that we're teaching in and the methods coursework and all if if that through line of creativity and imagination isn't throughout the whole program, we're doing them a disservice. How are they supposed to figure out or problem solve with? Hey, how do I do an arts lesson and science class? If we're not helping make those explicit connections, it's difficult for them to do it when they go out into the deal on the and the research shows that one of the barriers to pre-service teachers using the arts is lack of training in their teacher preparation program. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking about this, Hank. I'm figuring out how I'm gonna integrate this. Um, do you have any more concrete examples that that you've seen have worked really well that you could share about arts integration? One-time engagement in the arts is wonderful, but it's not enough to sustain. So, how do we think about continued engagements with the arts, with teachers? One way to really build in that confidence is working with people that are of that art form. So I was working with pre-service teachers, and we brought in the poet laureate of the county that we were in. And he came in and led us through simple poetry uh exercises that helped build us up on poetry, but then also showed us, hey, actually, we can do this with students too. We might be like, oh, I'm not strong in X, Y, or Z. The arts lend themselves wonderfully to clever reason. Reaching out to the people, the specialists at your school, local artists, what I found in my experience that local artists are willing to collaborate and teach and help. If I'm teaching this art form, I gotta know a little bit about the art form, right? I can't go up and wing it. So if I need to know a little bit about the art form, what does that look like for me? Am I watching YouTube videos? Am I talking to someone? Am I having someone come in the classroom and help me teach? So that's what I've seen in my own practice working with artists to help build people's confidence up in that art form. And once they've built up a little confidence in that art form, they're they feel better about teaching it. And also the better able to recognize oh, hey, I already do some of this stuff. I am an artist, I can do this. I'm already doing this. That's great. We're trying to designate schools as STEAM schools, you know, instead of STEM schools. But what does that look like? I think oftentimes it is just sort of an add-on unless there's an expert in the building that can help. Right. And I think it's again, it's often an add-on too, because again, people have unclear expectations and definitions on what art even is, right? So when when you already are starting off on a leg of uncertainty, then the A in Steam often becomes just the add-on, or okay, now draw what you did when that isn't necessarily centering the arts. It's just using the art form to support the science, technology, engineering, and math, which is not authentic STEAM, you know. Right, right. Are there specific grade levels, content areas, or student populations where this research is especially impactful? I think I truly, truly think it's everyone. When we think about arts integration, it's a level of creativity and imagination and artistry in lesson planning, which again, I think is so very needed. And lesson planning is can be tough to teach in general, right? Can get very procedural. You have to do this, you're gonna have to do this, you're gonna have to do this, you're gonna have to do this without genuinely thinking about like what kind of experience am I trying to design for these young learners in my class, right? And what I find is that thinking about how to use the arts can help students think more broadly and more globally. Yes, there's a rubric and a template that you have to follow, but your lesson plan is a living, breathing thing. It's a hopefully engaging thing. So, how can we be more imaginative and creative? And granted, not every lesson is going to be the wham bam, looking at all the art stuff I'm doing. So I think, yeah, everyone, it helps every subject, every teacher, every grade level can really, really benefit from this kind of thing. Yeah, I think too about the lesson plan template we use, and we have the tiny little box for creativity, and we also have the enrichment or the higher order thinking skills area. And I imagine those two can go hand in hand very easily. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things also that the research shows is that we often in A12 education use the art as an enrichment piece only. So if you get through all of this, then you can do the art. Everyone should have access to it, right? So it can be an enrichment thing, but thinking more globally, like how do we get access for everyone? But also I'm thinking of higher order. There are so many like higher order questions specific to each kind of art subject to. And just finished a paper with a colleague, we have pre-service teachers who make collages about social justice topics that are important to them. And there's like a level of art critique where you go through description, then you interpret what you see, and then you analyze what you see. There's all of these rich kind of high order things that are in each art form, that can also help uh achieve educational goals and standards and academic rigor, right? Uh so again, all that to say, and I know I'm on a soapbox here, but like really thinking about how the art can help us do these things as opposed to being something extra or something just to hang up in the hallway because my principal said we need stuff in the hallway. And you've given us a lot of ideas, but I guess I'm having a hard time conceptualizing maybe how often you would do it or how you could embed it into quick lessons. In terms of how often, again, I bias it, I would say as much as possible. But I think the other thing we have to think about with arts integration and then also with teacher education in general, teacher education is very silo. We have reading methods, and then we have math methods, science methods, and we often are not explicitly talking about the connections between all of them. I think it's the same with the arts. We're not explicitly talking about how the arts can be explicitly connected through all of those things. I the quick things to do, I think, are dependent on the lesson itself. But a good thing to think about is are you using the art to enhance what you're doing or are you trying to integrate what you're doing? Enhance, meaning like, okay, I taught this social studies lesson. Now color this matte. Anytime you can use the art in school period is a wonderful thing. Anytime, right? But if we're only sticking to those enhanced kind of experiences where they're done in support of other subjects, we're explicitly implicitly and explicitly telling students that they're the arts aren't an important. If you're choosing to use the art form, eventually getting into a place where you are teaching about the art form itself. So if they're coloring something, you're being like, all right, why did you choose this color? Artists are very intentional about the colors they use. So talk to me about why you use this color. We can use color to show emotion, we can choose color to tell stories, we can use colors to do all of these things or quick things, right? Well, sometimes teachers don't have the luxury or the pacing guide or the curriculum, that might be a scripted curriculum where they're told what to do, but how can they kind of embed it a little bit? So if they're if the lesson is telling them to color something, then how can we produce, hey, when artists are coloring, right? They're really thinking about the colors they're using because they're trying to tell something, they're trying to tell a story, they're trying to give a message, they're trying to do something. How are you doing that in your artwork? And then they can talk about that. That makes a lot of sense. This this is this is a really neat conversation for me, Hank, because I'm like reflecting. As you're talking about my own experiences with these things, I took art history in high school and I loved it. I remember being so drawn to it. And then my parents would take me to some museums and stuff after that when we were in various places because I was so interested in it. But I always disconnected those two things: making the art and learning about the art, because I had already decided that I myself was not an artist. And so learning about it was cool, but that was as far as I would get. And so I'm also reflecting, I just asked you this question, like quick ways. And I'm now I'm thinking, no, Helen, but that's not that's not the point. How can we integrate it meaningful meaningfully throughout an entire year, an entire semester, really being intentional about that string throughout, and maybe refraining from words like, this is such a beautiful picture you made, and instead asking those questions of why did you choose that color? Yeah. And helping people see the beauty in their own work. Because naturally, as humans, we're going to look at someone else and be like, oh, look what they're doing. And I mean, that that doesn't leave us until adult. Even in adulthood, we're still doing that, right? But if we can get them to really have a sense of pride in, oh, this is what I created. This is art because I made it. And the teacher also believing, oh, I can show this, I can be vulnerable, I can like work through this because it's the same thing that we want students to do in our own classrooms. So that's another thing to think of with the arts too. Like there's an inherent vulnerability that the arts somewhat demand when you're sharing your art with someone. It's very personal and can be very vulnerable. But I think classroom communities have to have a level of vulnerability and personal sharing from students and from the teacher in order to build those kind of solid relationships and to build a sense of community. And again, I think the arts are a really beautiful way because they often give us language that we can't express in words. Yeah. I wrote down vulnerability because it does feel like that. I remember being uh like early on in my teaching, my first couple years feeling like I of course I had to have control of the classroom, but I don't know. I had this thing where I felt uncomfortable with letting students take risks and me allowing them to take risks because I I wanted to make sure like I felt like I had that control at all times. I I think that's a hard skill to learn, to become vulnerable. And especially to little kids, like when you're supposed to be the one. Exactly. I think and you also bring up a good point in the the arts are in, I think this is also one of the barriers teachers have. The arts are inherently messy. Because you pose the thing, the question, the problem. There are an infinite amount of ways that students can do it. So then that becomes, well, how do I grade that? How do I help support them through it? What is right and what is wrong? The arts challenge, the arts challenge what we are taught as teachers. And that's a very uncomfortable thing to work through. But we see how much benefit in education it is by open-ended problem solving type of things. If it's open-ended like this, and they can choose an art form and they're using an art form to think, like, what are the things that I'm looking for? What is the actual demonstration of learning that I'm looking for? What do they actually have to be able to articulate? Which, again, is something that we want pre-service teachers, in-service teachers to be able to articulate. This is what learning is. This is how I know they've got that learning. And they could do that through an art form for sure. Thanks, Hank. How has your own thinking as a researcher or educator changed because of this work? So, you know what's funny, Helen, is that I almost quit my doc program because there weren't any solid avenues into doing this. I told my advisor early on, this is what I want to do. And she was like, Well, I'm not an expert in this, but try talking to someone in the College of Fine Arts. So I emailed them, but I had to be a student in the fine arts to even take classes. Uh, if I could take classes, I had to pay an extra fee because I wasn't a student in that class that was outside of my assistantship. People didn't really know how to help. Help the fine arts didn't really know how to help me. The College of Ed kind of didn't really know how to help me. And I was like, ended up taking all these classes that I was like, this is not what I want until I kind of like my brother and be like, I'm not happy, this is miserable. Then we found from early childhood there was an art class. So I got to take that and then kind of spiraled into this thing. But for me, it's helped me think about if I'm talking about researching arts integration, if I'm talking to talk, I have to walk the wall. So as a researcher, I primarily use arts-based research methods to share, to write. So my dissertation was an ethnodrama, which combines ethnography and drama. I made three short plays as findings. I wrote a piece that was poetic inquiry. I used the excerpts and I made poems out of the excerpts. I've done some work with photo voice, right? Where they take pictures and create galleries. For me as a researcher and as a person, the arts makes sense to me. Reading arts-based research makes sense to me. Traditional research often does not make sense to me. So it's a way for me to really live in the world that I'm talking about, number one, and be genuine about the thinking about arts integration. But two, it's my way of fighting against the academy and how rigid it so often is. I think we have a long way to go in academia with recognizing arts-based research as legitimate, but I am so excited about my work when I can use the art to kind of tell the story. Because research is storytelling. Research is storytelling. And the arts give us so many powerful ways to tell stories and to center people's experiences and to share people's experiences. And so that's the biggest impact it's had on me. Another impact too is I still get into the rut of, well, well, I'm not good at this. Like you don't need to be an expert to make art. I am an artist, right? I'm an artist no matter what I try to do. And because I create it, it is art. So really trying to live in that and walk that walk between the actual sharing of my research, but also in my own individual artistic practice so that I can better model it. Your passion is so clear and it is contagious. You were introduced to me through Deanette, who was one of my other guests. Her dissertation was part graphic novel. And then another one of my guests, Alejandra, she used testimonial in her dissertation. And it's been so awesome hearing about all these things. And I think it's especially important in education research because we harp on and on about accessibility and student voice and all of these things, especially in special education. The majority of my students might not have the typical voice that is going to get written down into a dissertation or a research article, but they may be able to access the arts or other ways of communicating that would not be a research paper that you would see in most journals. Exactly. And in this ivory tower of academia, we're not chemistry or biology. We are researching education. And arguably, the people who need to read and understand this are classroom teachers. But often the work that we're doing is so rich of content, jargon-specific things that are even academics don't even really sit and read through. So my focus in arts integration and using arts-based reach, it's challenged me to think about like who is this for? Granted, part of my job is to write and submit to academic journals. I understand that that is fine. But it is not for the journal. So I'm going to continue to make these art-space moves and explain why I make them. And that might not fit in somebody's academic journal. That's fine. Because that's showing me I shouldn't have submitted there in the first place. So really being intentional with where I am trying to submit and making sure that they celebrate this kind of work. Because it isn't, this is me. This is how I exist in this educational academic world. Absolutely. I myself, when I read a research paper, usually skip the results completely, especially if it's heavy quantitative. If it's qualitative, I'll I love those interview quotes. But if it's quantitative, I am honestly skipping the results. So I I love that. What questions remain unanswered for you? What are you studying next? The biggest question is how do we get this everywhere? The issue is, and you know this very well, schools of education are under pressure from states and accreditation bodies that tell them you need X amount of credit hours, they need X amount of placement hours, and if they don't have that, you're in trouble. And often first to get chopped when programs are being redesigned and fixed and changed are these kinds of questions. So what I'm trying to do is think about if colleges of education in their missions statement are talking about developing creative, artistic, or imagination, all any of those things. How are we living that from a class on classroom management to a classroom assessment to the literacy box to the special ed, all of it? How do we develop creativity and agency and imagination in all of those courses? Um, because again, it's great if it lives in a course, but if we're not making those explicit connections everywhere, we don't have the luxury of standalone arts courses or multiple standalone core arts courses. So how do we embed this across the whole program to get a more cohesive vision? And I don't know the answer. There might not even be an answer, but I look forward to trying to figure that out. That's awesome. And where can educators go to learn more about your work? I will link in the show notes all the information that you talked about. Yeah, the Kennedy Center's website, they have a whole database of arts integration lessons with the materials already linked in. One of the ones that I use in class a lot, it's the butterfly life cycle, but they have to use dance to illustrate the butterfly life. That's another thing about arts integration. We often try to reinvent the wheel in education for some reason. Somebody's done it, and the a good old internet search can find some really great lessons that you can then match to your own content. Well, thank you for joining me. Thank you. This was so wonderful. It was so much fun. Thank you for listening to the research to practice gap. If this episode challenged your thinking or gave you something practical to try, share it with a fellow educator. You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook at the Research to Practice Gap and subscribe anywhere you listen to your podcasts so you never miss an episode. If you have any questions, feedback, or would like to be featured on the podcast, you can reach out to us at research to practicepod at gmail.com. Research doesn't change classrooms, educators do. Until next time, keep reflecting, keep questioning, and keep bridging the gap.