Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, October 10, 2007

October 11, 2007 at 7:48 am | In Minutes |

Summary:

We had a discussion of items that might be work for smaller groups. We did some brainstorming around “what does a graduating student look like?”. We had a short discussion of process and what we want our meetings to be like.

Next meeting: Wednesday, October 17 at 1:10 in Room 140.

Agenda for next week:

1. set ground rules for meetings (15 minutes)
2. brainstorming around homework: “what does an graduating student look like?” (40 minutes)
3. setting agenda for next meeting (5 minutes)

Meeting adjourned at 2:15; smaller group adjourned at 2:25.

Full Notes:

Present:

• Phil Divinsky
• Dave Nichols
• Vicky Stubbs
• Jane Krasnow
• Diane Manzi
• Valerie Green
• Lisa Hicks
• Dave Beane

Discussion of whether or not we have to have a PowerGrade as a cluster or not. Consensus: some of us need individual practice on PowerTeacher, but not everybody in the cluster does.Next 3 Wednesdays are available for visioning work or work in smaller groups.

Val & Dave had meeting with Bob Bettencourt from Channel 6 about the PhotoShop course. He will teach 3 levels of PhotoShop. The next meeting should also involve Diane and Dave N. We started talking with Bob about making the project a useful real-world experience. Reworking PATHS logo, doing a “makeover”. Kind of the nonprofit makeover idea, starting with us first and seeing what we need to do to work together. Using design terms from posters, seeing how our classes work together, students learn how different media work together.

Chunks to hit with this project: PR/marketing: lots of artists have trouble with the marketing aspect. Knowledge around that would be useful to a lot of students. How do our students learn to market themselves? Portfolios fits in to this.

Maine Audubon was in yesterday to discuss the fashion show. Asking him: “what is his message?” What is our message at PATHS? It’s a question we need to know in order to successfully market it. It’s very useful for our students to go through this process, and getting student input would yield amazing results. It would be nice to get the student viewpoint.

Other interests: Vicky wants to work with Dave to plan how to get music and video students working together. One session would probably be enough for that.

In Augusta, Web Programming and Video departments are combined into one. Val and Dave want to go up to Augusta to see how this is working and how they’re doing things up there. It’s possible that we could do something like that here.

Phil: love to be part of a subgroup around a design of what the arts academy might look like: “a day in the life of a student”. We talked briefly last year about a college-like atmosphere where students pick courses and might have a free period to do an “elective” in another class. This could be done in a smaller group that would then bring it to the bigger group for expansion and approval.

Jane saw some things on the Web this summer about how to market an arts academy or arts cluster/program. She would be interested in working on something in that area. She can research and collate some techniques of people who have done this.

Lisa: We need to get the Plea Letter out this November to continue to ask for $ from the community for artists-in-residence and trying to talk about where the Academy is going. Write a letter that brings people up to date with the new projects, etc. Make sure the language includes both “artists in residence” and “guest artists” . Subgroup for this plea letter. Casco Bay HS has a good letter that they put out. Lisa will start writing this year’s letter.

Visioning: “a day in the life of a student” sounds a lot like visioning, but it’s more of a bottom-up process. Maybe we should keep going with the top-down template. The group was split between whether the visioning should go on in a smaller group vs. stay in the whole group for the visioning, but we decided that we need to stay together as a big group for the top-down visioning. But this is our 3rd meeting on it and we keep getting distracted. Are we stuck on the piece of creating a vision? Do we have enough structure to do that work? Do we need a structure around creating the vision? Or if we just let the process go, will it produce the result we want?

A shared vocabulary around describing the kind of students we want to produce would be helpful. Val has been thinking about how to talk about the student she envisions.

Lisa: we need more things down on paper about Academies and hard examples of what our students would have in an AA. We need to set goals.

Maybe looking at some of the small picture items would help to decide the big picture.

We ran into some trouble last year with the HOME project because we didn’t have a “big goal” to drive the project. The same thing is happening now: we don’t, as a group, have a big goal in mind.

We continued brainstorming about “what does a graduating student look like?” (our homework for last meeting)

What does a student look like?

• sees connection of the arts to the world around them.
• s/he has a broad understanding of how knowledge of varied academic disciplines can influence and affect their creativity
• understands the value of working collaboratively as well as individually in all aspects of their lives.
• values the process of connecting to their inner creative voice
• intuitive
• observant and notices things
• fluent in vocabulary of major subject matter
• draws connections between different interests
• map their own course of study

Some members of the group felt that we’re getting distracted in meetings from our group goal, and different members have different ways in which they want to work. We need to revisit the group ground rules and [re]decide how will will run our meetings.

We need to set an agenda for the next meeting at the end of each meeting. Val will post the agenda for the next week in the summary of the meeting notes.

Agenda for next week:

1. set ground rules for meetings (15 minutes)
2. brainstorming around homework: “what does an graduating student look like?” (40 minutes)
3. setting agenda for next meeting (5 minutes)

Meeting adjourned at 2:15; smaller group adjourned at 2:25.