The J. Paul Getty Museum's innovative English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum, Language through Art: An ESL Enrichment Curriculum, provides important resources to formal educators, while engaging adult learners and reaching out to nontraditional audiences. A research project was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of both the beginning and intermediate/advanced levels of the Language through Art curriculum, by speaking with 160 teachers who had implemented these materials in their classroom.

Download the evaluation report:
Language through Art: An ESL Enrichment Curriculum Evaluation (45pp., 852KB)

Findings:

• Many teachers felt that they did not have the background or confidence to implement arts-based units on their own. The workshops and curriculum format had a positive effect on teachers' skill-acquisition and implementation of arts-based content.
• A high percentage of teachers attending workshops implemented the curriculum in their classroom (88.5%).
• A large majority of teachers who attended a curriculum workshop later participated in a self-guided museum visit (73.7%).
• Overall, the beginning level of the curriculum was too advanced for lower level ESL students. It was recommended that this level be broken into two units: (1) Beginning Low, and (2) Beginning High.