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Summer Arts Institute for Teachers is a Hit!It’s been some years since the County Office of Education has held an Arts Institute for teachers. During the last week of June, however, in collaboration with the Museum of Art & History, DeLaveaga Elementary School and the 418 Dance Project, the COE was thrilled to sponsor more than thirty teachers in a week-long Institute in Art Immersion. The teachers were mostly generalists, although there were also a few arts specialists, and throughout the week each teacher followed two of the four arts disciplines: dance, music, theater and visual art.
Teachers access instrumental music through the approach devised by Carl Orff (1895-1982) known as Orff Schulwerk which is designed to foster creativity. One connection the teachers made was that there are certain elements common to more than one art discipline; for example, ‘shape’ is one of the elements of dance but is also an element of visual art.
In dance ‘shape’ was one of the themes as this ‘shape chain’ exercise shows. 
The visual art groups explored line and shape through the medium of paint. This Institute focused on helping the teachers feel more comfortable with themselves as artists so they can consider integrating arts into their curriculum. For some, ‘doing’ the arts was a brand new experience and all sorts of ‘aha’s’ happened as the teachers not only began to understand the joy of making art but also experienced the art-making process from a student’s point of view.
An improvisational theatre scene
A tableau representing a journey through the ‘liminal’ zone – a journey with which every artist is familiar. On the final day of the Institute each of the groups presented to their peers and a small group of guests to share what they had been doing all week in a special 'informance' ( a performance designed to inform).
The dance group performs improvised choreography on Friday morning. The theater group also worked with improvisation. Working in pairs, they used an identical short script called a ‘content-less’ script. The pairs interpreted the script in vastly different ways ranging from the comic to the tragic. Cathy was illustrating the power of body language and how in theater it is not so much ‘what you say’ but ‘how you say it’ that creates drama.
The ‘content-less’ script works for these two ‘surfers’ in their theater performance. 
The same script also worked in this scene of loss and separation. Marjie Van Gunten, who led the music groups, is steeped in the ORFF approach to music making and teaching. Combining movement, rhythm and singing, ORFF is a holistic and accessible approach to music which can begin in Kindergarten and still be applicable to adults. Although Marjie introduced instruments into the workshop they are not obligatory in the ORFF approach to music – a teacher can just begin with the human body.
Rhythm, movement and singing are embedded in the ORFF approach to music as the music groups demonstrated on Friday morning. The visual art groups had the opportunity to display their work on a ‘gallery walk-through’ where every participant chose to display their personal favorite from the week. The instructor, Susan Trimingham, taught three basic elements of art: the color wheel, line and shape. As each concept built on the other through the week, the participants were able to produce pictures of flowers and parrots by combining the three elements.
The visual art ‘gallery walk’. On Friday there was also a special resource panel consisting of local and national representatives of arts organizations who came to talk about opportunities in arts education. The Cultural Council’s SPECTRA program, Mariposa's Art, The Tannery Arts Center, Lesley University and the Museum of Art & History were all represented. The COE would like to thank the Museum of Art & History for hosting the event, the 418 Dance Project for the use of their dance studio and DeLaveaga Elementary School for loaning their ORFF instruments for the week.
Here is a slide show of more of the art produced by the teachers. We will be having follow up sessions with the participants throughout the year and hope to have another open Arts Immersion Institute next year.  |
Each morning the teachers had an experiential session in one art form and in the afternoon worked in an alternative art form. These sessions were led by master artist-teachers, all of whom have worked at a statewide level. After each session all the participants gathered together for an ‘application’ session where they had the opportunity to process their own experience and begin to translate how to use that experience in their classrooms.
