Bank Street College teacher candidates are introduced to Lincoln Center Institute teaching artists who work with faculty to engage students and prepare them to attend repertory selections that include dance performances, music performances, dramatic performances and visits to museums.
In each LCI-designated course, the teaching artist and faculty plan hands-on activities, which are implemented in class, to explore and experience a work of art, enter its world, articulate one's responses, and reflect on one's experience with the work.
Bank Street College teacher candidates work with faculty in class to find connections between the aesthetic approach to the study of works of art and the course curriculum and pedagogy. They have direct experiences with works of art, thus making possible the aesthetic connections within their own lives.
Harriet Lenk, Coordinator: 212-875-4580
The Bank Street College/Lincoln Center Institute Collaborative is a partnership designed to enhance the learning of all children through an exploration of ways to use the arts in the preparation of new teachers. The Partnership connects the Lincoln Center Institute with the graduate faculty of Bank Street College through a series of experiential workshops and performances of music, dance, opera and the visual arts. These experiences are extended to graduate students through a wide range of courses in the College. The goal is to help future teachers understand how experiential investigations of the arts can engage children in learning about the arts and support their development of a wide range of critical, analytic, and expressive skills.
This collaboration has enabled us to pair "teaching artists-in-residence" with various faculty members and groups of Bank Street students. Integration of the arts into the teacher's repertoire supports learning across the disciplines. Together we explore selected performances of theatre, dance, and music; visit museums; and consider how to use the insights and sustain the enthusiasm and depth of understanding for both students and teachers.
This project is based on the belief that the infusion of the arts into teacher education programs yields professionals capable of important shifts in perception and creativity. In effect, drawing on the arts affords greater variety in curricula and learning. This integrative perspective on teaching and learning follows Bank Street's "core curriculum" approach, in which a topic of study is selected and explored in depth from different perspectives; projects are used to engage children in authentic tasks that involve skill-building as scientists, historians, artists, and writers.
"Aesthetic education... is an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what there is to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful. When this happens, new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened. Persons see differently, resonate differently..."
-- Maxine Greene, from Variations on a Blue Guitar, The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education (2001)