Arts Integration Academies provide strategies, energize teachers
Kentucky School Advocate
May 2017
By Matt McCarty
Staff writer
The Kentucky Department of Education will hold five newly designed Arts Integration Academies this summer. The academies, presented in conjunction with the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, help promote innovative arts strategies in the classroom.
This summer’s academies will be:
• Arts and School Leadership, Louisville, June 12-16
• Music & Literacy (high school level), Danville, June 19-22
• Arts & Assessing Creative Work, Hopkinsville, July 17-21
• Arts, Spanish, and Culture, Ashland, July 24-25
• Arts, Spanish, and Culture, Hazard, July 27-28
The Leadership Academy is new this year and is designed for administrators, including principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, superintendents and assistant superintendents.
Jeffrey Jamner, senior director of education and community arts for the Kentucky Center, said the Leadership Academy “looks at leadership at all levels in schools and districts, and what we can learn from arts processes about leadership capacities.”
Jane Dewey, the director of arts education for Danville Independent Schools, said art academy “rejuvenates and provides new ideas” for arts teachers.
“It provides arts strategies that show them there are new or different ways to explore their subject matter through the arts,” Dewey said. “I’ve never had a teacher come away (from the arts academies) saying ‘Boy, that was a waste of time.’ They always come away with things that they actually can use.”
Judy Sizemore, a writer and arts consultant who works with public schools through the Kentucky Arts Council, works with teachers who attend the academies to track how they integrate what they learn into the classroom.
“They come for the opportunity to be with other teachers who are kind of taking that same path, being with other teachers who are engaged in the creative process and they seem to really, they get so much … by being with colleagues who are excited about teaching the same way that they are,” she said. “It seems to really energize them.”