A team of Juneau educators traveled to Washington, D.C. at the end of June for a three-day conference on Arts Integration sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The team included four principals, an art specialist, and an instructional coach from the Juneau School District; School of Education dean and faculty from the University of Alaska Southeast; director of The Canvas, a teaching artist and art education staff from Juneau Arts and Humanities Council.
Participants danced, acted, recited and created through drama, spoken word, collaborative visual arts, dance and music about science, math, history and other standards based curriculum. Teaching artists trained through the Kennedy Center’s approach to arts integration guided participants through a variety of workshops. Singing “Eight Hugs a Day”, reciting collectively created spoken word about our personal history, and dancing out of our seats to collaboratively inspired choreography, our team joined the over 300 participants from as far as Sweden in morning welcome activities.
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- Washington Monument Pool
- Millennial Installation at The Kennedy Center
The trip was funded by the Any Given Child Juneau’s resources and the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation.
The trip commences a new partnership between the four agencies called Artful Teaching, a collaborative project focused on providing new and pre-service teachers training in arts integration techniques and strategies for the classroom. Through shared vision and goal setting, the partners will create strategies to prepare teachers to infuse arts into every classroom. This can provide Juneau’s students with artful experiences that reflect learning that is active and experiential, reflective, social, evolving, and focused on problem-solving, all characteristics of constructivist learning theories.
The Kennedy Center believes a shared definition of arts integration provides a common starting place for educators and teaching artist.
“Arts Integration is an APPROACH to TEACHING in which students construct and demonstrate UNDERSTANDING through an ART FORM. Students engage in a CREATIVE PROCESS which CONNECTS an art form and another subject area and meets EVOLVING OBJECTIVES in both.”
The Artful Teaching project is made possible by a grant from the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation.
The new landscape of arts education continues to evolve, growing richer and more supported through programs like Artful Teaching, Any Given Child Juneau, Partners In Education, Artists In Schools, Voices on The Land and more. Please continue to support and follow the new landscape of education in Juneau.