By making the teaching and learning through arts integration visible, we illuminated how the Arts Learning Anchor Schools are leveraging the arts to create outstanding classrooms for every child, in every school, every day.

We discovered and explored how the arts transform our schools… at an inquiry based, classroom centered convening of teachers, teaching artists, principals, and community members focused on quality arts integration.…

Why are we teaching and learning through the arts in our classrooms? How can we begin an authentic exchange of arts learning classroom practice with each other?

How is arts integration an instructional, assessment and community building strategy? What is quality arts integration and where do we see it happening?

Where do we fit into a global movement for building equitable classrooms through arts learning? How can we stay connected to the bigger picture?

Conference Highlights

Over twenty workshops by teacher and artist leaders in the Arts Learning Anchor Schools Initiative!

Keynote by Julia Marshall, arts integration expert and San Francisco State University faculty…

Conference Schedule

Friday, March 7, 2008
3 pm – 5 pm
Berkeley Arts Learning Anchor Students Gallery
Berkeley Art Center
1275 Walnut Street (across from Live Oak Park)
Berkeley, CA

6 pm – 9 pm
Dreams Create Hope Opening Reception
featuring hands on art making, tiki bar and interactive performances
Emery Secondary School Atrium
1100 47th Street, Emeryville, CA

Saturday, March 8, 2008

8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Dreams Create Hope:
Arts Learning Anchor Schools Conference
featuring over twenty workshops
Malcolm X Elementary School, 1731 Prince Street, Berkeley, CA

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

2pm-4pm
Do Dream Create Hope? Arts Integration and Social Justice Pedagogy: Community Conversation, A 2nd Sundays Salon
Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, CA

ASCEND School, Oakland Unified School District

In this hands-on music integration workshop, we will explore basic classroom instruments in order to fashion a palette of timbres and sound qualities. We will create a character through movement and writing, then accompany it by composing short, rhythmic motifs. Conversely, we will also use written and verbal images to enrich the creation of music and movement.

ASCEND teachers now routinely incorporate visual art and music into their literacy studies, leading the art lessons as well as the writing. What have been their and their students’ successes and challenges with this work? You will see project examples.

We will also provide photocopies of the lesson plan and resources.

Sarah Willner, Brett Wilson, and Lisa DeCastro

How can parents and community members influence policy to make a better future for all our children? We can vote for candidates we think share our values, and once they’re elected we can keep them informed about our concerns. In this workshop you will hear from a panel of staff members of your current elected officials. You’ll learn about the best ways to make contact, how to follow up, when to visit, and when to invite. You’ll receive information that will make a practical difference in your future relationship with people who make policy in your neighborhood and world.

Kathy Kahn with Local Elected Officials Field Representatives

How can parents and community members influence policy to make a better future for all our children? We can vote for candidates we think share our values, and once they’re elected we can keep them informed about our concerns. In this workshop you will hear from a panel of staff members of your current elected officials. You’ll learn about the best ways to make contact, how to follow up, when to visit, and when to invite. You’ll receive information that will make a practical difference in your future relationship with people who make policy in your neighborhood and world.

Kathy Kahn with Local Elected Officials Field Representatives

Urban Promise Academy, Oakland Unified School District

This workshop will provide strategies and techniques for classroom teachers to co-create high quality arts integrated curriculum with art teachers, artists or arts integration coaches that addresses important learning targets/understanding goals in BOTH Core and Art disciplines. Examples of art integrated curriculum will be shown and participants will be given the space to begin planning their own interdisciplinary/art-integrated projects.

Todd Elkin is a visual artist, art educator and art integration-coach.

Kristi Leunig teaches 6th grade Humanities at Urban Promise Academy in Oakland CA.

Lisa Hildebrand teaches 6th grade Humanities at Urban Promise Academy in Oakland Ca.

EnCompass Academy, Oakland Unified School District

This workshop will engage participants in playing rhythmic singing games from around the world, and from here in Oakland. We model the naturally integrated Orff-Schulwerk approach, which brings together rhythm, language, movement, drama,and song.

The elements in music learning parallel main elements of language acquisition, in phrasing, tempo, melody,
pitch, and specific sounds. And we know that facilities for making and listening to music are integrated throughout many places in the brain; there is not just a ‘music center’. Music can be a bridge to many other places in the brain, as well as function to satisfy a human capacity.

Making music is one of the central tenets of the EnCompass Academy Spiral philosophy.

How can we work (and play) with songs and games to motivate students in language acquisition?

Sarah Willner and Yari Mander, with EnCompass teachers

Oxford Elementary, Berkeley Unified School District

The workshop will start with an overview of how theater is being used to support writing at Oxford Elementary in Berkeley. An in-depth look at how one teacher built on and documented the process will follow. Participants will have an opportunity to experience exercises as well. Oxford Elementary’s Arts Anchor focus is on using theater to support writing across grade levels.

Eric Engdahl and Caryn Chan

Eric Engdahl, Ph.D. CSUEB, Dept of Teacher Education (Arts Education) and Director of Art & Public Education, East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, Richmond Caryn Chan, Second Grade Teacher, Oxford Elementary, Berkeley

Caryn Chan is a second grade teacher and the Arts Liaison at Oxford School in Berkeley. She has been focusing on using process documentation and reflection as vehicles to convey, capture the work and thinking, and assess student learning that is developed in the performing arts and writing. She hopes to create equitable classrooms that honor cultural diversity and extend student learning and reflection through the arts.

Paul Robeson College Prep High School for Visual and Performing Arts, Oakland Unified School District

This participatory workshop focuses on the rocky and rewarding initial phase of developing a socially engaged arts integration program at Paul Robeson Visual and Performing Arts Academy, and how teachers galvanized around exploring the cross-disciplinary inquiry question: How does Input affect Output? – Cultivating conscious and critical consumption of food, media, and consumer products in our society.

Laurie Polster, Arts Integration Coach at Paul Robeson Visual and Performing Arts Academy, is a cross-disciplinary artist and vocalist working in sculpture, installation, and musical performance. She has received numerous grants, awards, fellowships, artist residencies and commissions, and her work is exhibited nationally and held in numerous public and private collections.

As an arts educator, she has extensive experience teaching painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, fundamentals of art and art education in both public and private, primary and secondary schools and colleges throughout the Bay Area and in Boston. In addition to coaching, she is an Artist-in-Residence at Oxford Elementary School in Berkeley, CA and a consultant for SFMOMA on their web-based multi-media curriculum project, ArtThink. She has taught Art Education at Mills College and California College of the Arts, where she was also an Art Education Faculty Fellow from 2005-07 through the Center for Art and Public Life. As an artist and educator, she focuses on increasing lateral thinking and optimizing linkages – connecting the dots in disparate experience – thereby enabling leaps in creative understanding.

Seqouia Elementary, Oakland Unified School District

Using bookmaking as a frame for opening the possibility for greater school-wide arts integration, One Step at a Time Arts Integration showcases Sequoia Elementary’s beginning and ongoing steps at creating meaningful art-literacy connections. Repeating skills, inventing songs, creating books, our Arts Integration Professional Development is complementing an ongoing Artist Residency program.

Debra Koppman, Artist-in-Residence and Arts Learning Coach, Sequoia Elementary: Debra Koppman is an exhibiting visual artist, with extensive experience teaching a wide range of media including drawing, painting, watercolor, printmaking, bookmaking, maskmaking, and puppetmaking to children and adults. She is particularly adept at creating curriculum connections to literature, writing, performance, and social studies projects in collaboration with classroom teachers. She has lived and taught in Latin America, and is bi-lingual in Spanish and English. She has a Masters Degree in Studio Art from UC Berkeley, and a Doctor of Arts Degree with an emphasis in aesthetics and art criticism from New York University.

Manzanita SEED, Oakland Unified School District

Examine how all the stakeholders at Manzanita SEED are working together in a successful collaboration between the classroom teachers, the school’s Art specialist and the MOCHA teaching artist. We will look at the 2nd grades’ expedition on Sausal Creek, and the unique contributions that each provided as our example. Participants move from table to table for an in-depth conversation with multiple arts integration leaders about their roles and experiences working together. Workshop participants will also share with each other their own roles in supporting the arts at their individual sites.

Alexandra Kulka-Wells, MOCHA Teaching artist, is an Oakland native, and after 6 years as an OUSD classroom teacher came to MOCHA to focus more on supporting art education. She currently lives in Oakland with her family and is a graduate student at SF State University.

Kelly Doyle, School Programs Coordinator. Ms. Doyle provides program design, oversight and support for a staff of 30 teaching artists working at 50 different school sites. Among her many responsibilities, she provides ongoing support to the artists, participates in the recruiting and hiring of new artists, works closely with MOCHA program managers and school staff to coordinate residency and professional development programming, and contributes to funding proposals and reports. Ms. Doyle joined MOCHA in 2001 and has served as MOCHA’s School Programs Coordinator since 2004, taking on increasingly greater responsibility during that time. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts and English from Southampton College.

Carrie Johnston grew up in California and has been a teacher for almost ten years, including one year in the UK and nine in Oakland. Carrie currently teaches at Manzanita SEED, a small Expeditionary Learning school in Oakland. She is a second grade teacher in a dual immersion Spanish-English classroom. This year, Carrie has been trying out a music curriculum she came up with for her class. In addition to that aspect of arts integration, she has enjoyed collaborating with the studio art teacher, Daphne Elin, and the guest artist from MOChA, Alexandra Kulka-Wells, in creating projects to highlight expedition content. While teaching is stimulating and fulfilling in many ways, Carrie finds great delight outside of school reading, sharing music, and hiking with her husband and her young daughter.

Daphne Elin is currently the Artist in Residence at Manzanita SEED where she provides visual arts education for K-4 students. She also offers an after-school visual arts program for students and their families. Prior to beginning at Manzanita SEED in its first year of operation, she taught visual arts at the high school level and has had several years experience as a classroom teacher in the primary grades.

Wesley J. Watkins, IV, Ph.D. is a California native who was raised in Oakland. Despite his initial dreams of becoming a marine biologist, Dr. Watkins graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor’s Degree in African & African American Studies, and obtained Honors in the School of Education. During his undergraduate years he developed a passion for both education and music. His undergraduate honors thesis research in music education began while attending Stanford’s overseas study program at Oxford University. Throughout his term at Oxford, he observed music education at both local elementary schools and world renowned secondary institutions like the Yehudi Menuhin School. His contacts in England eventually persuaded Dr. Watkins to earn his Ph.D. from the International Centre for Research in Music Education at the University of Reading. He is now an independent consultant in the Bay Area assisting schools in their efforts to integrate the arts into the core academic areas.