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.