FINDING FACILITATORS

“Classroom Art teachers are often unicorns – outsiders or loners – in their buildings. These training sessions would lift up and validate their work by acknowledging the very special connections they make with students, often spanning multi-year relationships.” (Sanaz

Hojreh)

As a champion of quality arts education, Margaret El, the Director of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Board of Education was a powerful partner in promoting this work to art teachers and also secured a site for the first in-person workshops. With many classroom art teachers as participants, the curriculum had to validate and support their work, acknowledge the often-unique relationships that art teachers have with students across grade levels, and demonstrate that this was not a new and additional layer of work. At the same time, the core planning team understood that this was an opportunity to profoundly change how art teachers work with students; to help build intentionality for reducing trauma.

In terms of facilitators, the core planning team chose Master Teaching Artists to partner with trauma-informed healthcare specialists. The selected teaching artists were high-quality arts educators who value artistic excellence and rigor and had previously exhibited intrinsic knowledge of and experience with what works for students. In the planning sessions, their work was validated by the presentations of healthcare specialists, and they learned the scientific and clinical rationales that underpin their work with students, and they were able to incorporate new vocabulary and language to name and make their practices more intentional.