Arts Integration: Teaching Through the Senses Just Makes Sense!

Arts Integration is a high-impact teaching practice for both higher education and K-12 settings. Because students bring diverse backgrounds, learning preferences, and ways of making meaning, the arts offer flexible, multi-sensory pathways to content comprehension that traditional lecture-based and text-based instruction often cannot. Drawing on classroom evidence from an Honors First-Year Seminar at UNLV in which students identified an arts-based workshop as their favorite lesson, we argue that creative, hands-on activities deepen knowledge retention and foster genuine intellectual engagement. Arts Integration is inherently an asset-based and inclusive practice, as it encourages students to connect through various sensory learning experiences, whether that be tactile, visual, auditory, spatial, or multimodal. As one of the most diverse universities in the nation, integrating arts-based learning at UNLV honors the full range of cultural perspectives and learning styles students bring to the classroom. Our research recommends that UNLV instructors incorporate even a single in-class creative activity to disrupt lecture monotony and promote higher-order thinking. Resources such as the National Education Association and the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM are identified as accessible entry points for faculty interested in adopting this approach.