We think of education in the arts as a fun and engaging way to teach students the key pieces necessary for creative thinking and problem solving, research and innovation, which will continue to be some of the most essential skills for career success in the 21st century, in jobs that will never be automated:

• Generating original ideas 

• Testing different approaches

• Collaborating with peers 

• Receiving and incorporating feedback

• Building resilience while being vulnerable and honest 

• The value of sustained effort over time

That being said, we also contextualize art education within a holistic learning environment and program design that naturally lends itself to organic learning about STEM, design thinking, English as a Second Language, Art History, English and Spanish Language Arts, and Social-Emotional Learning, Citizen Science, and Outdoor Education at every turn. And of course, artistic expression and appreciation are also just part of our human birthright that make life rich and meaningful, and help foster community resilience.

• We create a great environment, and kids lead the way. Environment is an essential element, dramatically shaping student learning. We expose children to ideas and activities and support them in choosing what to explore, honoring and channeling their natural curiosity.

• Beyond fostering the psychological safety universally necessary for creativity to thrive, our first job is to teach students to ask “why,” and how to go explore safely and effectively. In the words of Elizabeth Sedgwick, “If you succeed in training properly [young people’s] powers of mind, in forming in them habits of patient and careful study, of a concentration of their powers, bearing upon a single point, as the sun’s rays are collected in a focus, and inspiring in them a love of knowledge for its own sake, you have done inexpressibly more for them than if you had made them passive repositories of the be got out of all of the school-books that were ever printed.” We strive to model and encourage a learning mindset at every turn.

• We co-create in solidarity with our families and Highland community. We are obsessed with listening and improving based on feedback, and strive to create culturally responsive learning opportunities, where students can explore being bi-cultural, bi-literate, and bilingual in a non-binary way. “Not About Us Without Us.”

• Access and exposure to difference fosters tolerance in citizens of our community, state, nation, and world.

For more detailed information about the design and evaluation of our program curricula, our Logic Model, and our continuous improvement practices, please email our program director Kate Hotler at crearte@tietonarts.org.