Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Mar. 26, 2007

March 26, 2007 at 1:40 pm | In Minutes |

Summary:

Meeting adjourned at 2:40 p.m.

Next meeting: Wednesday, 3/28 at 1:10 (during staff dev)

Please get a copy of Lisa’s handout if you don’t have one; we will be doing Plan 2.

This Wednesday will be a kickoff meeting. All of our programs will meet together in the 3rd floor hallway at 8:15 and 11:15 and Lisa will describe what we’ll be doing to the students, and introduce Bo. All programs will then return to classrooms and Lisa will work with Fashion from 8:30-9:15 and Web Programming from 9:15-10:00 (see schedule below).

Things we need to do before Wednesday:

• emphasize to our students that we’re using writing to help release creativity
• tell our students why creativity is important in each of our disciplines, so that they know why we’re doing this
  • different process than researching first and then writing after
  • chance to stretch out of their program
  • chance to collaborate with students from other programs
• talk to our students about the work we’re doing with the Arts Academy and why we think it’s important

Please see the bottom of this page for the schedule up to April break.

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Lisa DiFranza
• Diane Manzi
• Valerie Green
• Phil Divinsky
• Dave Nichols
• Bo Hewey
• Jane Krasnow
• Dave Beane

Full Notes (paraphrased):

This Wednesday, 3/28, will be the kickoff meeting for the "HOME" project, with all of our students meeting together in the 3rd floor hallway.

Lisa began the meeting by reporting on her thoughts regarding the parameters of the project and project scheduling. She came up with 2 plans, which she distributed to us in a handout. We need to pick one, because our time is limited and she wants it to be a quality experience.

Plan 1: do a project for PATHSFest and work collaboratively on it, but with a smaller number of groups (2 classes only in the AM and PM)

Plan 2: do a workshop for all of our students with Lisa rotating through smaller groups in a 3-week rotation. This would result in work that could be shown at PATHSFest, but it would not be our main goal.

Comments:

- at maximum 2 or 3 programs might produce a "performance" rather than a product. Lisa said she didn’t necessarily mean a performance at PATHSFest, but a collaborative piece where all performances or products related to each other.

- logistically, Plan 2 means that the last groups won’t start on the project until 2 weeks into it, meaning their project would only last 4 weeks.

Lisa wants to work with one program at a time for 45-minute intervals because she wants students to be able to share their writing with a small group and have everyone in the group be able to hear and respond to other students’ writings. Bigger sessions would mean we’d have to do the responding on another day in smaller groups without Lisa.

Plan 1 would not meet our funding criteria, since it only involves 2 programs.

Can we build in class time for students to meet in interdisciplinary groups for Plan 2, outside of Wednesdays? This time could be unsupervised (later we also discovered that Bo could facilitate these collaborative groups)

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are the best days for Bo to help.

Lisa is envisioning that the first session with a group will be a "springboard" session with writing exercises. The second session with a group would be taking that writing and supporting it with discipline-specific work.

Vicky offered that Music & Dance could be on the third week in the rotation because they have more experience with this kind of work and could get their kids started before meeting with Lisa.

We tried to figure out how to get it down to a 2-week rotation instead of a 3-week rotation, and came up with the idea of Bo acting as another Lisa, observing Lisa on Wednesdays and then working with classes on another day so that all of our programs could get started more quickly. (see calendar at bottom of notes).

This Wednesday will be a kickoff meeting. All of our programs will meet together in the 3rd floor hallway at 8:15 and 11:15 and Lisa will describe what we’ll be doing to the students, and introduce Bo. All programs will then return to classrooms and Lisa will work with Fashion from 8:30-9:15 and Web Programming from 9:15-10:00 (see schedule below).

Things we need to do before Wednesday:

• emphasize to our students that we’re using writing to help release creativity
• tell our students why creativity is important in each of our disciplines, so that they know why we’re doing this
  • different process than researching first and then writing after
  • chance to stretch out of their program
  • chance to collaborate with students from other programs
• talk to our students about the work we’re doing with the Arts Academy and why we think it’s important

Phil will make sure that it’s OK to meet in the 3rd floor hallway

Schedule for first wave (before April break):

(Note: Music & Dance are together in the afternoon because they are already used to working together)

Lisa in yellow

Bo in blue

 

Date	8:30 - 9:15	9:15 - 10:00	11:30 - 12:15	12:15 - 1:00
3/28	(8:15 meet/greet) Fashion	Web	(11:15 meet/greet) Fashion	Web
4/2	Comm. Art	Music	Comm. Art	Music/Dance
4/4	Video	Graphic	Video	Graphic
4/9	(8:15 meeting) Fashion	Graphic	(11:15 meeting) Fashion	Graphic
4/11	Comm. Art	Music	Comm. Art	Music/Dance
4/12	Video/Web	Video/Web	Video/Web	Video/Web

Note changes to 4/9 and 4/12.