A longtime partnership between the Segerstrom Center for the Arts and Cal State Fullerton’s College of Education has been providing future teachers with the strategies to incorporate art into all their subjects in the classroom.
“The Arts: Avenues to Learning” program is a one-day workshop connecting preservice, multiple-subject and special education teachers – those students working toward receiving teaching credentials – with professional teaching artists from Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
Through the guidance of Segerstrom’s teaching artists, the future teachers engage in interactive, hands-on art sessions in which they get to embrace their creativity through puppetry, dance and theater arts.
About 60 preservice teachers, most on the path to becoming teachers for grades K-8 students, participated in a workshop held March 7 at the Fullerton Marriott.
Preservice teachers working toward a special education credential also participated for the first time.
Teaching artists from Segerstrom demonstrated to the future teachers the ways art transcends all subjects as groups of students rotated from workshop to workshop throughout the day, practicing in each of the four genres.
The goal is not merely for the preservice teachers to practice art, but to learn strategies for implementing art instruction into every subject, said Kristine Quinn, lecturer from CSUF Department of Elementary and Bilingual Education, within the College of Education.
“One of our largest objectives is to not only teach best practices but to really help to build those positive dispositions towards the arts,” Quinn said. “To help them to build agency, meaning we want our teacher candidates to get out there and fight for the arts.”
The program started 12 years ago when Talena Mara, vice president of education at Segerstrom, was looking for ways to strengthen Segerstrom’s Art Teachers program by having teaching artists work with college students, who were in the process of…
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