me arts ed

Art and Music Teachers travel to Boston for fabulous learning opportunity

Romy Polizotto, Laura Devin, Beth Whitney, Karen Wolfe outside Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Laura Devin, K-8 Art, Woolwich Central School and co-art teacher at Fisher Mitchell School, Romy Polizotto, K-5 Art, Phippsburg Elementary School and St. John’s School, Beth Whitney, K-8 Music, Woolwich Central School, and  Karen Wolfe, Pre-K-5 Art, West Bath School and Georgetown School applied and were accepted to an Expeditionary Learning Conference at Wheelock College in Boston put on by the Conservatory Lab Charter School. The conference title was Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Elementary Classroom, Art and Music as Tools for Learning – A Picturing America Conference.

In Laura’s words:

Audience Participation...Beth Whitney style!!

The next morning, as we checked in to the conference, we were handed a great tote bag with a full notebook of resources- you gotta love swag from conferences. (Most of my grocery bags are conference bags.)

Romy Polizotto, Laura Devin, Ekua Holmes, Karen Wolfeparticipating in a hands-on workshop with Artist in Residence, Ekua Holmes

The guiding question of the conference was “How do art and music shape the ways we picture the past?” We came away with many ideas that we are all anxious to implement in our schools. We will be developing an interdisciplinary lesson plan to be submitted for inclusion in a website of resources.

In the afternoon, we had the great pleasure of going to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to hear keynote speakers, Elliot Bostwick Davis and Barbara T. Martin. We toured the new Art of the America’s Wing and now want to bring all of our students back to such an amazing display of wonderful art with many interactive pieces included.

We also got to browse in Dick Blick’s Art Supply store…even Beth, the music teacher, bought something!

A great day and lots of ideas to go forward with.

Thank you to Laura Devin, one of our Maine Arts Assessment Initiative Teacher Leaders, for writing this blog post.