These past two weeks in February have been a blizzard (pun intended, of course) of activity for me here in Charm City, USA. In addition to starting those indie craft show applications, shoveling the car out of a four foot snow drift, shoveling it out again and trying to balance Mr. illegible ink and our three amazing animals, I also squeezed in time to teach a printmaking residency in Lena Costa's kindergarten classroom at Southwest Baltimore Charter School for three days. (Fortunately, the first day of Snowtorious B.I.G. hit about 30 minutes after I cleaned the classroom up on our last day together.)
How did I get hooked up with Ms. Lena's classroom? I am participating this year in a really interesting program called the "
Teaching Artist Institute" (TAI).
TAI is a joint project between Young Audiences of MD/Arts for Learning, the Arts Education in Maryland Schools (AEMS) Alliance, and the Maryland State Arts Council. The Institute is a professional development program for trained artists who perform and conduct workshops in schools, and entails one-on-one coaching from master teaching artists and a curriculum specialist; opportunities to field-test their work in a classroom with institute staff, peer artists and teachers observing and providing feedback.
Ms. Lena and I were lucky enough to be recently interview by Aaron Henkin for wypr's The Signal. You can hear the interview (about 14 minutes) discussing the TAI program and how the artist and teacher collaborated over the last couple months at wypr: : The Signal, airdate 02.19.10 (2010-02-18).
Spoiler alert: I am really excited about getting invited back to Ms. Lena's classroom next year. A blizzard couldn't stop me from returning!
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