Registration Opens Fall 2023!

SC Arts in Education Forum

On January 19, 2024, ABC Institute will host the SC Arts in Education Forum. This free event will feature informational sessions about the Arts Grow SC plan from key program and research partners.

More details to follow.

Register Soon

2023 Session Information

Presentations from our 2023 Forum

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Think Like a Region: Supporting Arts Learning in Rural/Remote Regions

Drawing from research conducted on “Leveraging Change: Increasing Access to Arts Education in Rural Areas” (Donovan & Brown, 2017), Dr. Lisa Donovan will share the challenges and opportunities for arts education in rural areas. Insights will be shared from Donovan’s current collective impact work in western Massachusetts where cross sector collaborations are activating promising practices including community engagement ambassador programs, partnerships with schools and county education initiatives, and collaborations with higher education.
In this session participants will:

• Learn how rural areas can create regional collaboration through network development
• Learn how networks can be activated and/or created to foster regional change
• See how research in rural arts education can be translated to specific contexts
• Consider how cross-sector work can leverage change and align efforts
• Examine exemplars of regional change in a case study of Berkshire County

PRESENTER

Lisa Donovan, Professor
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

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Spark! Inspiring Tomorrow’s Readers Through Drama

Spark is a regional outreach program that seeks to support Read to Succeed and reading improvement efforts at Palmetto Literacy Project schools statewide through the effective use of elementary level drama strategies.

Spark builds reading engagement, reading motivation, and creative/divergent thinking by helping students connect the actor’s basic skill set (body, voice, imagination, cooperation & ensemble) to reading and storytelling.

After positive findings from a five year summer pilot, Spark is expanding to a year-round model that brings story based drama experiences to students in up to thirty elementary schools statewide. As part of the Governor’s School’s commitment to being a resource and research center, the Office of Outreach will partner with researchers from the University of South Carolina to investigate Spark’s impact, using nationally recognized methodology.

PRESENTERS

Carol Baker, Director of Outreach and Community Engagement
SC Governors School for the Arts & Humanities

Melanie Trimble, Grant Director
Spark!

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Think Like a Region: Workshop

In this workshop, participants will:

• Apply ideas from the presentation, Think Like a Region to their own context
• Create planning maps based on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of specific regions
• Consider how promising practices across rural regions can be translated in one’s unique context
• Identify models and strategies to support one’s community,
• Identify action steps to increase access to arts education
• Learn about the CARE Project, a USDE Assistance in Arts Education grant-funded initiative of ABC Institute. Based on the alignment between promising practices outlined in “Leveraging Change” (Donovan & Brown, 2017) and traditional components of ABC Schools, the CARE Project is a five-year collaboration with Allendale County School District to determine effective practices that increase access to arts education in rural communities.

PRESENTERS

Ferdinand Cooper, Project Manager
CARE Project

Lisa Donovan, Professor
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

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The Arts Education Classroom: Promoting Supportive Environments for Multilingual Learners’ English Language Growth and Development

This session will address student-centered instruction that promotes English language development for multilingual learners in the arts education classroom. Participants will learn about appropriate practices to assist with scaffolding standards-based instruction for a range of MLs’ learning and language proficiency levels. It will showcase how the arts education classroom can be leveraged to promote academic language that impacts the schooling success of all students in the general education classroom.

Participants will examine evidence-based practices:

• To provide instruction that promotes asset-based learning and meaningful collaboration among students;
• To explore instructional scaffolds addressing a range of language proficiency and learning levels;
• To examine how the arts education classroom promotes language and learning for all students that advance schooling success in the mainstream content-area classroom.

PRESENTERS

Dr. Bobbi Siefert, Associate Professor &
Coordinator, Teaching English as a Second Language Program
Furman University

Betsy Kerns Lanford, Art Educator,
Spearman Elementary, Piedmont

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MTSS: Supporting Students In and Through the Arts

The Arts can reach every student, but what happens when they don’t? Come engage with us as we consider why it is beneficial for Arts educators to be part of the MTSS process when evaluating both student deficits in non-arts content as well as weaknesses within arts education content. Hear about how the Arts and Arts Integration have been used successfully as supports to enhance the accessibility of content and deepen student understanding and engagement.

PRESENTERS

Roger E. Simpson, Jr., Education Associate for Visual and Performing Arts,
SC Department of Education

Brandon Roeder, K-12 Music and Theatre Arts Consultant,
NC Department of Public Instruction

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Harry Culpepper & The Woodmont High School Wildcat Players

The Woodmont Players will perform “Sweet Nothings In My Ear” followed by an open dialogue with the cast of Woodmont High School’s fall play production class. Learn how the class worked as an ensemble to create a powerful production, fully communicating in American Sign Language and Spoken Words. Students learned through the arts and community connections. Experience the production in person and participate in a Q&A Panel discussion with the students and director on the process of the production.

PRESENTER

Harry Culpepper, Theatre Educator
Woodmont High School