Arts and Schools as Partners (ASAP)

Overview  |  Grants  |  Artist to Artist   |  Peer Coaches  |  Artful Online  

Overview Research in arts education shows that instruction in and through the arts, while enhancing the lives of all students, has powerful implications for disenfranchised learners, who are able to show sides of themselves that otherwise may remain hidden. Summarized in: Ingram and Seashore 2003; Freeman, Seashore & Werner 2002 Improving Student Achievement in and through the arts Arts and Schools as Partners (ASAP) is a growing network of individuals, schools, artists, and community arts organizations committed to improving student achievement. Job-Embedded Professional Development ASAP provides artists and educators with ongoing, job-embedded professional development through grants, individualized coaching, workshops, and other resources. The program provides learning opportunities designed to enhance arts-based teaching and learning in the classroom. Grants for teaching teams Professional development grants support interdisciplinary K-12 teams of teachers, arts specialists, and teaching artists.

The Artful Teaching and Learning Handbook, a joint project of the Perpich Center for Arts Education and the Minneapolis Public Schools, began in 2002 as a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the McKnight Foundation. Full of tools, processes and examples from its field sites, the handbook provides research-based support for ASAP teams.

Online tools and resources
Artful Online blends the power of online learning with face-to-face interaction. Tools, resources, and exemplars help teachers and teaching artists hone skills, share quality- teaching practices, and improve educational outcomes for their students.

Explore the “art” of teaching
Artist to Artist makes the invisible parts of teaching and learning explicit for teaching artists of all types, backgrounds, and levels of experience.

Arts Education Coaching
Peer coaches – teachers, artists, and arts administrators who have worked in schools and arts organizations and as independent teaching artists – provide support for teams and individuals as they learn and apply artful methods, tools, and strategies in a wide variety of settings.

Customized learning
Arts and Schools as Partners responds to the needs of teachers, artists, schools, organizations and teaching teams by offering customized workshops, retreats, and learning experiences based on their unique needs, perspectives, and experiences.

Through common language, tools, and philosophies the program promotes authentic learning in:

• arts integration strategies
• arts education planning
• continuous improvement strategies
• multicultural arts education

For more information contact: Barbara Cox, 763-591-4762, or 800-657-3515.

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Professional Development Grants

Arts and Schools As Partners provides opportunities for teachers and teaching artists to see their students with fresh eyes. Typically, teams of at least two teachers and at least one community arts organization or artist apply for a professional development grant to fund an arts-based learning project during the regular school year.

Teachers and artists discover innovative ways to recognize and kindle the potential in each student by:

• Collaboratively planning, implementing, reflecting on, and assessing standards-based, student-centered learning experiences over the course of their project supported by a peer coach and Perpich Center staff.
• Engaging in an ongoing process of professional discussion and collaborative inquiry in a “lesson study” or “critical friends” network that includes arts education roster programs, agencies, and other state and national resources and programs.
• Rejuvenating their own teaching and learning practice.

For more information please contact:

Barbara Hackett Cox
Perpich Center for Arts Education
Phone: 736-591-4762, 800-657-3515, TTY/TDD 711
Email: barbara.cox@pcae.k12.mn.us

 

To learn more about ASAP teams and their work, please visit Artful Online. For more information contact: Barbara Cox, 763-591-4762, or 800-657-3515.

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Artist to Artist Professional Development Program

Innovative arts education begins with understanding two things: how people make art, and how people learn.

Founded in 2002, Artist to Artist is a cadre of experienced teaching artists, “translators,” facilitators and emerging teaching artists acting as critical friends. It is an informal collective of individuals from across the states of Minnesota and North Dakota that is actively supported by the Perpich Center for Arts Education, the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Bringing artists and educators together
Artist to Artist is grounded on the principle that authentic learning in the arts is the foundation for creating meaningful arts integration in the classroom. Artist to Artist expands the definition of what a “teaching artist” is and brings a wider variety of teaching artists into the classroom. This includes naming what kind of support and mutual understanding it takes for artists and educators to collaborate in innovative and nontraditional ways.

How do we make art? How do we teach and learn?
Artist to Artist uses the power of collaborative inquiry to examine artists’ work. Participants develop deeper understandings of artists’ planning, instruction, and reflection strategies.

Experienced facilitators guide participants in ways that allow them to share teaching and learning practices with each other, to discover mentoring and partnering opportunities with other teaching artists, and to build bridges to arts organizations and schools.

In practice, members meet to experience first hand an artist’s lesson and then describe back what they experienced using a facilitated reflection protocol. This demystifies and makes visible the often intuitive and extremely complex aspects of teaching by helping participants clearly identify and name what they experience. This process greatly informs the practice of both the presenting and responding artists.

What works? What doesn’t? Why?
Artist to Artist uses protocols to facilitate conversations that follow agreed upon guidelines. A protocol is a planning or reflection strategy that helps practitioners to perceive deeply, think critically, and make meaning.

Artist to Artist uses various reflective protocols because they allow practitioners to:

• Build the skills and culture necessary for collaborative work;
• Create a safe atmosphere for respectful, nonjudgmental dialogue;
• Ensure everyone present has a chance to contribute;
• Make the most of their time;
• Hold in-depth, insightful conversations about teaching and learning.

For more information contact: Barbara Cox, 763-591-4762, or 800-657-3515.

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Peer Coaches

Barbara Cox is Arts Education Partnership Coordinator at the Perpich Center for Arts Education. Since 1998, she has worked statewide to develop collaborative partnerships and professional development opportunities with educators, administrators, artists, arts organizations, and students. Barbara has worked as a K-6 classroom teacher, arts coordinator, education specialist, arts education consultant and jazz radio broadcaster in Minnesota, New York, and California. 

Becca Barniskis works as a poet, teaching artist and free-lance writer and consultant in arts education. She edits the Resource Roundup section of the Teaching Artist Journal and is an active member of Artist to Artist.

Lori Brink is a visual artist affiliated with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. She is a recent BFA graduate and teaches book arts in the schools with K-12 students.

Steve Busa, co-founder and Artistic Director of Red Eye Collaboration, has been professionally writing and directing locally and nationally for more than 25 years. As a consultant and instructor he has collaborated with a wide range of organizations including the Institute for Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts, Arizona State University, Metropolitan State University, Minneapolis Public Schools’ Arts for Academic Achievement and the Perpich Center’s Art Courses for Educators (ACE) programs.

Bettine Hermanson is an arts education consultant. She has almost ten years experience in coordinating, documenting, and facilitating professional development opportunities for artists and teachers throughout Minnesota.

Debra Hunt is a creative being who works as an arts education consultant. Based in Minnesota she finds herself deeply engaged at the intersection of arts and education.

Jane Oxton served for 16 years as a music teacher and fine arts coordinator at Jefferson Elementary School in St. Cloud, MN.  She conducts an auditioned community choir for middle school girls, Cantabile, sponsored by the Music Department at St. Cloud State University.  She is working with the Paramount Arts Resource Trust in St. Cloud, which works to provide quality arts programming in visual and performing arts for Central Minnesota.

Nadja Reubenova’s work with artists and arts organizations spans 30 years.  Highlights include having served as executive director of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, manager of Illusion Theater’s Breathing Room for Spirit capital campaign, interim director of the Perpich Center’s Partners: Arts & Schools for Students and board chair of Galumph Interactive Theater. Since 1999, she has guided nonprofits, neighborhood groups, and especially teacher/artist collaborations through the messy process of transforming great visions into clear, unified and attainable plans of action. She has worked for the Perpich Center as a peer coach since the inception of the ASAP program.

Liddy Rich is a licensed elementary school teacher who has worked in Minneapolis Public Schools. She now coordinates curriculum at Talmud Torah of St. Paul.

For more information contact: Barbara Cox, 763-591-4762, or 800-657-3515.