The Southeast Center for Education in the Arts (SCEA) at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga hosted “Arts & Education Forum: The Role of Professional Development in Facilitating the Practice of Arts Integration” in the UTC University Center. Master teachers taught model lessons with students from Brown Academy and Chattanooga School for Arts and Sciences. Hamilton County teachers participated in professional development demonstrations led by nationally prominent educators.
More than 100 teachers, artists, administrators, researchers, and professional development providers from 24 states attended the forum. They explored and analyzed current practice in arts integration instruction and examined defining characteristics of research-based professional development models.
Third grade students from Brown Academy reviewed sentence structure, learned to read dance symbols, choreographed a dance sentence and informally performed their choreography for each other under the direction of Jody Cassell, Teaching Artist from Durham, North Carolina. This dance-integrated lesson demonstrated the program READ! DANCE! WRITE! After the lesson, Marissa Nesbit, SCEA Director of Dance Education, engaged forum participants in a discussion of the instruction and its use in the professional development of educators in arts integration.
In a visual art integrated lesson, Andrea Gelfuso of Oscar J. Pope Elementary School in Lake Wales, Florida, engaged fourth grade students from Brown Academy by reading from a picture book. The session involved reading comprehension, creative writing and art appreciation.
Dr. Janet Barrett, author and music education professor at Northwestern University, presented the keynote address “The Curricular Imagination: Arts and the Interdisciplinary Mind.”
For more information about the forum and the Southeast Center, visit the center’s website.
