Kicking off Fall Custom Trainings with Young Audiences New York.
Teaching Artist Project’s custom training initiative has started off the year strong with an early October training for Young Audiences New York (YANY), a visual and performing arts based non-profit that employs 60 teaching artists, works in 200 public schools, and serves 50,000 students per year. Based on the unique needs of YANY, TAP custom training facilitators Libby Mislan and Adriana Guzmán designed a training that addressed best practices for lesson planning and collaborating with school partners.
As a creative warm up, YANY teaching artists were asked to choose an artwork– Amy Sherald’s “Trans Forming Liberty,” Frida Kahlo’s, “The Two Fridas,” and Ricardo Levins Morales’ “Solidarity in Stars,” and discuss what the piece brought up for them personally, and how it might be used in a workshop setting.
YANY teaching artists then reviewed key curriculum-building tools like scaffolding, project-based learning, and backwards mapping, and worked in teams divided by art form to “backwards map” a short creative project. Each team was assigned a mock project– for example, dance teaching artists were given a project where students would choreograph and perform an original piece about freedom– and the teaching artists practiced how to scaffold the learning week by week to build up to an original choreographed piece. YANY teaching artists were introduced to key scaffolding tools like modeling and building examples together as a group, providing worksheets and written versions of instructions, and building in time for reviewing the previous week’s activities.
In the second half of the workshop, the group discussed how to create positive, constructive collaborations with paraprofessionals, classroom teachers, and other school staff when working in in-school residencies. Drawing upon the extensive experience within the group, teaching artists shared with each other their personal best practices for creating respectful and engaging partnerships.
The training ended with a movement-based reflection – one posture that represented the energy TAs wanted to bring into the new school year, and one posture that represented what they’d like to release or let go of.
Given that many teaching artists have extensive artistic backgrounds, but often lack traditional educational training, Teaching Artist Project is proud to fill in critical learning gaps and strengthen the teaching artist field at large through custom training.
