PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES

This year's conference will be on Saturday, March 13, 2010, from 10 AM to 4 PM at Gallaudet University. The theme is "Now More Than Ever: Vital Arts in Trying Times."

Click here for more information, including registration and costs.

Learning from Cezanne provides four ways you and your students can learn from the paintings of Paul Cezanne in the special exhibition Cezanne and American Modernism, on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, February 14-May 23, 2010.

Click here to download the Learning From Cezanne Flyer and Registration Form.

The ClancyWorks Dance Educators Training Institute believes that outstanding teaching takes place when educators are passionate and engaged in their own artistic growth! ClancyWorks Dance Company co-presents a week-long intensive professional development for artists teaching dance each summer with Baltimore County Public Schools. The week is designed to enable participants to delve deeper into their artistic pursuits and to enhance their pedagogical techniques in a challenging and supportive environment.

Click here to download the ClancyWorks Dance Educators Training Institute Flyer.

Contact Information:
Adrienne Clancy
PO Box 3111
Silver Spring, MD 20918
Email: adrienne@clancyworks.org
Website: www.clancyworks.org
Phone: 301-717-9271

The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, San Francisco Arts Commission and Santa Clara County Office of Education have launched Designing the Arts Learning Community: a Handbook for K-12 Professional Development Planners. The handbook represents a move away from the one-day workshop or summer course to a systemic, ongoing collaborative approach that yields powerful results for students’ learning in the arts. It demonstrates how to establish, grow and sustain a learning community that comes together to improve arts instruction. The online, interactive tool can be found at http://handbook.laartsed.org.

The handbook has a national perspective, drawing on the experiences of arts education professional development programs from across the United States. It is designed to be used online but offers options to print out sections or the entire handbook.

Designing the Arts Learning Community was researched and written by Dawn M. Ellis, President of Dawn M. Ellis & Associates, LLC. Among her many credits, Ms. Ellis served as primary researcher for Gaining the Arts Advantage: Lessons from Districts That Value Arts Education (President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Arts Education Partnership 1999). Dawn Ellis and her team scoured the country for exemplary professional development programs in arts education to inform the content of the handbook and create a searchable database of 50 model programs. The handbook is both a guide and a reference resource for arts coordinators, principals, superintendents of instruction and anyone who designs professional development for K-12 arts education. It synthesizes documents, interviews, responses from outstanding practices in the field as well as literature regarding professional development and arts education. The programs profiled, which cover a wide range of partnership types, were selected because they:

• Address the scale, scope, or perspectives of school districts
  
• Provide evidence of evaluation, research, and/or reflective practice
  
• Provide insights into approaches relevant to a variety of communities, students, and arts disciplines, or
  
• Involve education reform that includes a strong arts component

Professional Development Programs in Maryland:

American Alliance for Theatre and Education
Service organization for theatre, education, and theatre-in-education professionals.

Arts Happenings – Arts Education News

Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance (AEMS) and Maryland Arts Education Coalition
An alliance of those who teach, advocate for, and make policy regarding arts education from the cultural and education communities, including K-12 and higher education.

Professional development programs that provide continuing professional development credits to participants or opportunities to earn graduate credit hours include the following:

• Crossing Borders/Breaking Boundaries is an eight-day, multidisciplinary institute that offers an integrated program supporting performance, scholarship and education in the Fine Arts for Maryland middle and high school educators in dance, music, theatre, the visual arts and related disciplines. Each summer’s institute focuses on different artistic/cultural periods (e.g., “Africa & its Influences, “Jazz, & America, and Considering the Postmodern” and “Arts of the Renaissance”). Participants explore exemplary artistic products as well as the artistic processes, theories and philosophical currents that provide a context for understanding the arts of the period. In addition to attending lectures from area experts, hands-on performance classes, collaborative lesson-planning workshops, museum and gallery field trips, and film screenings, teachers receive support from a teacher-mentor as they work to create multidisciplinary lesson plans. Crossing Borders/Breaking boundaries is supported by the Maryland State Department of Education and the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland.
• The Maryland Artist/Teacher Institute (MATI) is an intensive program of professional development for elementary and middle school teachers and administrators, conducted by master teachers, artists, and artist-educators. Through hands-on workshops, lectures, seminars, and performance, educators are provided opportunities to enhance their knowledge of the relationships among content areas and of ways that the arts can be used to integrate curriculum, content, processes, and skills. MATI was established to explore the arts as a force in a child’s development and enable teachers to become more knowledgeable, creative, and skillful in using the arts to engage children. MATI is a program of the Maryland State Department of Education in partnership with the Maryland State Arts Council and AEMS.
• Towson University’s Arts Integration Institute is designed to help Maryland’s K-12 educators to facilitate student growth and development through the arts, providing new ways to integrate dance, music, theatre, and visual arts into the curriculum. The Institute’s interdisciplinary courses interweave a variety of teaching methodologies and arts experiences, and courses are customized for individual schools and school systems to meet their needs. The Institute currently offers six 3-credit graduate courses; four others are in various processes of development as of 2006.
• The University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC) and Johns Hopkins University’s Graduate Division of Education are in the process of developing or have recently developed course offerings in arts integration and are partners in convening symposia and the Deans Roundtable.

National Dance Education Organization
The National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) “is an autonomous non-profit organization dedicated to promoting standards of excellence in dance education by providing the dance artist and the dance educator a network of resources and support, a base for advocacy, and access to programs and projects that focus on the importance of dance in the human experience.”

Current National Initiatives in Dance

About Dance Education in the U.S.

For more information, email Christine Stewart, Program Director, or call her at 410-767-6476.