You are cordially invited to the NHCTE Virtual Social Hour: NH English Teachers’ Night In on Wednesday, March 23 at 7 pm via Zoom.

This month's session is called How the Arts Can Save Education. The age of accountability in education is losing its momentum. Education is in a time of profound change. We are increasingly aware of how learning outside of school provides life-giving opportunities for our most vulnerable kids. The arts—dance, theater, music, the visual arts, and the digital and design arts—offer us a way to reimagine what good learning and teaching are and how to design learning environments that work for all kids. Gloria Ladson-Billings has called for a “hard reset” on education and for us to fundamentally reconsider the kind of human beings we want to produce (2021). In the book, I describe how the arts can save education by providing new models for learning that embrace the social, cultural, and historical assets that kids bring to the classroom. I also share how an arts-based approach to teaching focuses on risk-taking as the most important aspect of a successful classroom. I offer a framework that leverages how arts practitioners do their work to design learning experiences for all subject areas. Throughout, I use my own arts organization, Whoopensocker, as a model for how to reframe learning as acts of metacognitive representation, identity development, and collaboration—and lots and lots of joy.
This is the 11th in the New Hampshire Council of Teachers of English’s series of monthly social hours. We hope you can join us!