P.S. ARTS is pleased to share that we have received a two-year $200,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to support the expansion of our Educator Development initiatives. The partnership comes at a pivotal moment with the passage of Proposition 28 and increased demand for arts education programs. With the foundation’s support, P.S. ARTS will grow our staffing capacity and reach more students through a three-tier approach that includes 1) expanding our Teaching Artist Training Intensive to grow P.S. ARTS’ faculty roster, 2) developing a new Coaching Intensive to train a cohort of existing faculty to provide support to new Teaching Artists and classroom teachers, and 3) launching an Arts-Integration Training Intensive for conventionally credentialed classroom teachers to bring the arts into their teaching practice.
This work builds upon our successful Teaching Artist Summer Intensive (TASI) pilot that launched in summer 2022. Like TASI, the trainings supported by the Keck foundation are multi-day and feature a praxis model that encourages cohorts of educators to engage in dialogue, discussion, and modeling as they put theory into practice among their peers. The grant will strengthen P.S. ARTS’ ability to support public schools through providing robust, high-quality arts programming for students and arts-focused professional development for teachers.
This summer, P.S. ARTS hosted our second Teaching Artist Summer Intensive, engaging 21 Teaching Artist Trainees, 11 of whom were invited to join our faculty for the 2023-2024 school year. We also engaged five existing faculty through our first Arts Integration Coaching Intensive, which allowed experienced Teaching Artists to prepare to work side by side with classroom teachers to develop arts integrated lessons. We are grateful for the W.M. Keck Foundation’s generous partnership, and we look forward to continuing to engage Teaching Artists and educators over the next two years and beyond.
