Year One: LTTA Professional Learning Artist Mentorship

Your Brain on Art. 

Learning Through the Arts (LTTA) is continually innovating in the field of arts based education and developing creative approaches for learning. LTTA's latest endeavour is to take the experience from its highly successful 20 years of arts of infused learning and expand that to include an enhanced digital delivery component.  

We are proposing a prototype of the program to the Calgary Board of Education.

Contained on this blog are the descriptions of the project as it would unfold with over a three year period. We look forward to hearing your comments and perspectives.

Through a year-long connection with an Artist-Educator, on-going collaboration and co-learning with colleagues invested in the same arts disposition, teachers will inspire each other and their students to explore their aesthetic awareness, discover connections between art making and self, life, and curriculum to build a greater understanding of others and the world. 

LTTA Digital Learning Objective

Our objective is to assist the Calgary Board of Education to inspire, test and establish excellence within the new Arts Education curriculum. We propose the prototyping of the first year of a three year, continuous arts discovery and application process that connects artists, FNMI Elders from our Elder in Residence program and teachers. The artists and teachers will use an aesthetic awareness in a specific arts disposition- we will be starting with the many facets of digital media- to develop meaningful arts exploration activities and engage with students in the classroom. Co learning among teachers that occur within professional learning circles will focus on reflection on the arts disposition, weaving in an FNMI world view when requested by the teachers, learning from each other and manifesting an arts disposition awareness in daily life.

Goals

YEAR ONE: Through a year-long connection with an artist-educator, on-going collaboration and co-learning with colleagues invested in the same arts disposition, teachers will inspire each other and their students to explore their aesthetic awareness, discover connections between art making and self, life, and curriculum to build a greater shared understanding of others and the world. They will explore the foundations of the art form personally, in co learning situations and with their students.

Keys of a Successful Year One

• Building awareness and stretching our ways of thinking and seeing
• A shared understanding of the FNMI World view and how to bring that perspective in a culturally appropriate way
• Noticing together.
• Share Small things often. 
• Tell Stories: success, failure- all stories of experiments within this environment are good.
• Starting with what is known and moving to what is not known. Teach what you know now.

Year Two: LTTA Professional Learning Artist Mentorship

Inspiration for a project that falls within the scope of the Teacher's arts disposition

YEAR TWO: Through a year-long connection with an artist-educator, on-going collaboration and co-learning with colleagues invested in the same arts disposition, teachers will inspire each other and their students to explore, create and celebrate the arts. Their work will be dynamic hands on learning that is planning and learning with a purpose. Final projects in year two will reach a standard of excellence in terms of showcasing teacher art skills, student engagement, classroom transformation, and community connection.

A year long media arts experience with master artists deconstructed:
Year Two ensures that an arts aesthetic is explored with other teachers and students in a meaningful way, therefore also ensuring that the arts becomes embedded in teacher culture. Below are the phases of the year two prototype.

Curation as a means of engaging teachers: looking in, considering

When we considered the BIG idea of Curation and apply it to developing teacher skills and comfort with arts, we discovered a few things, we explored a few things...

We were tasked to consider these three steps:

1. Use curation to help teachers explore their existing aesthetic judgement. Trigger finding analogies to other things using artists as coaches. Also include inquiry questions. 
2. Bridge to cultivating, expanding and enlarging creative experiences. This stage facilitates a practice of creating art without formal instruction. Could be a time to explore apps and digitial on-line 
3. Hands-On Dynamic instruction. 

Building a structure that uses existing technology. Applicable at all grade levels and applicable with all art forms. 

Who are you? Nice to meet you! 

Innovation was hung by the chimney with care...

Extension of Our Group Think…

Naturally, as we follow the questions and the process we’ve laid out, we diverge into areas that we’ll be exploring later on in our symposium-intensive retreat. But, we keep talking...and here's the result: (Not in order of importance.)

We explored the ideas that we’ll be developing work that align with values of diversity- within art forms, particularly.

A BIG idea that could be explored within the prototyping models is Curation. Becoming a curator? Finding a voice through the curation of ideas and themes?

LTTA Moving Forward

As LTTA continues to innovate and develop new programs, we must continually question and challenge ourselves in the process so that we remain relevant. We want to stay current with the ever changing needs of the educational communities that we partner with.

What new resources may be needed to be brought forward?

• Experts in structuring a digital learning environment
• Outside partners to act as experts in creative fields
• Friendly teachers who are experts in the field of assessment and prototype creation
• Relationships/partnerships to people at post secondary and in arts ed level to support a high level delivery model
• Engaged with community leaders who love art: be at the fore front of community building
• Be wiser about how we work with our own Artist-Educators: what skills do they have to bring to the table?
• Support for media literacy
• Need to know digital resources in schools
• Create a list/repository of essential digital tools that will help you be successful in what we are doing with your students

Key Strengths of LTTA. What LTTA Artist-Educators bring to the classroom.

Consider the key strengths of LTTA programming.
What do our artist educators bring to the classroom?

LTTA brings:

•        Structure and strength of program: authority to accept this connection that has to be made between curriculum and art form
•        Consistency of product
•        An expectation of a high standard of Artist-Educators
•        Framework for artists in the classroom (how to develop lesson plans etc)
•        Nurture collaboration among artists

LTTA Digital Team starts off well

Eveline, Marce, James and John open the LTTA Digital Team meeting with an introductory activity to share their perspectives on what they bring to the process as Artist-Educators and what they hope to take away.