Educating educators through the arts

Educating educators through the arts

DeltaARTS hosts annual Aesthetic Education Workshop

DeltaARTS DeltaARTS hosted 40 area educators at the Glenn P.

Schoettle Arts Education Center in June for the annual DeltaARTS Aesthetic Education Workshop (DAEW), a three-day workshop that actively engages teachers and other school faculty in imaginative teaching and learning processes including art making, questioning, contextual research, and reflection.

Teachers worked in two teams with visual teaching artist Jerry James from the Center for Arts Education in New York and theatre teaching artist Slade Kyle, a founding member of Tennessee Shakespeare Company in Memphis, while Lead Facilitator Anne Davey facilitated workshops based on the aesthetic education philosophy and its accompanying Capacities for Imaginative Learning.

“Including the Capacities for Imaginative Learning in my lessons will help open the minds of my students to comfortably explore areas they feel unsure of,” said participating teacher Kami Cooper of Carol Smith Elementary in Osceola. The participants attended the narrative theatre production of “The Boy Who Fell from the Sky” by Voices of the South and viewed quilt-inspired art by local artist Greely Myatt at his West Memphis studio.

Meanwhile, the teachers also worked on creating their own narrative theatre and art pieces and collaborated on plans for aesthetic education lessons to use in their classrooms next school year.

Marion Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) Magnet School educators attended an extra half-day extension workshop after the conclusion of the DAEW to study indigenous Delta music and dance forms, which will be part of the focus for the upcoming arts integration partnership between DeltaARTS and the VPA school.

In their assessment surveys, several participating teachers shared testimonials on how the workshop has inspired their teaching strategies.

“I have the capacity to teach my students in ways that I couldn’t imagine before this Aesthetic Education workshop,” said Angela Donner from the Marion VPA Magnet School.

“The staff and teaching artists thought of everything!”

said Spring Davis,

another Marion VPA teacher. “It was a wonderful experience, especially the tableaus in theatre and layering of the lessons!”

“The level of thought put into the materials by the teaching artists helped me see there are other ways to approach creativity in the classroom,” said Dan Burdette from East Jr. High.

This program is supported in part by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Registration will open for the 2019 Delta Aesthetic Education Workshop in March 2019. For more information about DeltaARTS arts education programming, please visit deltaarts.org.

By Kelly Pouncey