With the support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, we have built a FOUR-PILLAR arts education model for artists working in today’s classrooms.
These four pillars are STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), SOCIAL JUSTICE, CULTURE, TRADITIONS + HERITAGE and WELLBEING.
Our students are learning that the arts are a powerful tool to engage communities in various levels of change through dialogue and creative learning that leads to community mobilization and activism. Engagement in the arts can be a remarkable catalyst in building our personal growth and, yes, our happiness.
Our partners share the belief that we, as artists, social entrepreneurs and educators, can inculcate skills, awareness, strengths and attitudes in our students to enable them to respond quickly and effectively to growing social challenges, thereby empowering individual freedom and confidence to not only address any social problem but to also drive the change.
Educators advise that their students are increasingly challenged to make sense of an exceedingly complex world of greater insecurities and unpredictability. Self-care and wellbeing is a primary focus for educators. Children are challenged to build resiliency, to cope with chronic change, to better understand diversity, to open their minds to an enlightened world-view and to be brave in facing injustice. In essence, we are all challenged to become culturally competent.
At the same time we are witnessing remarkable fast paced developments in science, technology, and engineering. Not a day goes by where there is not a breakthrough in STEM knowledge.
We appreciate the inherent value of the arts, with countless opportunities for critical and creative thinking, promoting alliances among artists and educators towards active collaboration on interdisciplinary arts models. Teams encourage discovery and inquiry in all areas of learning, understanding how best to drive innovation and invention.
We invite you to explore what these FOUR pillars and the school programs created by our artists thus far. We invite educators to suggest even more ideas within these pillars. After all, listening and acting upon the needs and ideas of classroom teachers has served us well for close to 50 years!