Focus:

Student Success

Target Audience:

Middle School Migrant Students, Migrant Education Program (MEP) Staff

Synopsis:

Voices from the Field Performing Arts Academy is a week-long academy sponsored by the Washington State Migrant Education Program. At the heart of the design of the Academy was our intention to address the fact that Migrant students are often scheduled into remedial classes in Math and English Language Arts and do not have the opportunity to take arts, music, movement or enrichment classes. Particularly for Middle School aged students, we felt this was an area we needed to address and together with Arts educators and a nationally recognized Performing Arts Camp, Centrum (http://centrum.org), we developed the Voices from the Field Performing Arts Academy.

A total of 60 Middle School (7th and 8th grade) Priority for Service and Needs students are selected to participate. The academy curriculum includes a variety of art-related activities including drama, dance (Folklorico), found art gizmos, spoken word, creative rhythms/drumming and wearable art. All art curriculum is aligned with the Common Core and Washington State Learning Standards.

Student impacts:

Over the course of this three-year project, Washington State MEP will partner with five identified high-need school districts. The school districts are requested to recruit two certificated teachers who attend a parallel professional learning strand during the Academy, focused on integrating the arts into their core curriculum. Included in the professional learning model, an artist mentor is assigned to the attending teachers. The artist mentor provides job-embedded professional learning by visiting the teacher’s classroom over the course of the academic year.