The author has been an art educator at the largest urban high school in Toronto, Canada, for the past six years, and every year he attends his students' convocation. Traditionally convocation is held at the beginning of November, and those Grade 12 students who graduated the previous spring return to high school for a celebration and to receive…

Mentorship is essential to teaching artists seriously committed to "learning to love this work more." For new(er) teaching artists, with little or no experience as teachers, the New Teaching Artist Mentorship Initiative is designed to inspire a life-long love affair with teaching and learning. This article describes the New Teaching Mentorship…

This article offers eight recommendations for teaching artist training programs. These recommendations based on the findings of the Ohio State Based Collaborative Initiative report may be useful to arts and education organizations as they design training experiences for teaching artists developing arts-integrated workshops for teachers; they may…

This article presents a study conducted by the author about teaching artists. Ninety-three working teaching artists were surveyed about their working conditions as well as their overall experience of being a teaching artist. In addition to the survey, ten teaching artists were drawn from the surveyed sample and were interviewed at length. Both…

The current focus on professional development for teaching artists is not a new development in the United States. Since the Lincoln Center Institute first coined the term "teaching artist" in the early 1970s, there has been increasing focus on the unique characteristics necessary for artists who choose to work in educational settings. This article…

This article reflects the voices of the authors who are three early childhood tertiary educators and who have presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Arts Educators Conference held in Wellington in July 2007. The authors revealed many common threads that interwove throughout their individual presentations and made visible an emerging…

The Multimedia Arts Education Program (MAEP) was an innovative initiative for middle school students that used teaching artists as leaders in an apprenticeship-like teaching context. This article is about a second apprenticeship program supported by a University/Community Partnership grant from the Kellogg Foundation that engaged university…

As teaching artists, teachers, and arts administrators, the authors are constantly looking for signs of spring: evidence that there is a growing understanding of the role artists have to play in the education of children; proof that teachers, if trained well, will see that role and wish to incorporate it into their classrooms. "Arts in the…

In this issue of the Research Review, the author focuses on the importance of developing learning environments emphasizing the Arts. First, the author reviews a study concerning professional development and "artist-teachers", which is of particular interest since most readers of this journal are involved in various educational partnerships. Then,…

In this article, the reviewer focuses on a study of a professional development workshop and visual art studio workshops for adolescents. It is her hope that teaching artists will draw new ideas about curriculum and content from the discussion of this work and that the issues discussed here may provide inspiration for their own shift in thinking…

Project AIM, a Schools Partnerships program of the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago, partners Teaching Artists with classroom teachers in eight Chicago public schools. Funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund to Improve Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), the project has an ambitious…

After many years of hearing teachers express surprise at their students' performance in arts classes, ArtsConnection set out to create a process that would help define and focus attention on artistic abilities and characteristics and bring further value and legitimacy to artists' views of children. The result is the Talent Assessment Process in…

The mission of this article is to introduce just a few of the organizations that are expanding the teaching artist field by addressing the artistic, educational, and business needs of today's TA head on. For some organizations, supporting TAs is a facet of what they do; for others, it is all they do. Staying true to their creative nature, each…

The author had an opportunity to teach two professional development classes at the Children's Museum in Pittsburgh. One class was titled "American History through Folk Music" and the other "Celebrating Diversity in the Classroom through the Arts." The subject matter brought together a wonderful collection of teaching professionals--from preschool…

As schools and cultural organizations face pressure to provide arts programs that meet academic standards, artist residency models have been evolving to become more in-depth and long-term. This trend, supported by schools and funding sources from both the public and private sectors, has affected Teaching Artists' (TAs) practice significantly.…