A Vision and Mission for a Fine Arts Academy

For our spring cohort sessions, we focused on forming a vision and mission for our fine arts programs.

Jerry Foster, the leader of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, presented to our cohort in March on the development and expansion of their fine arts academy.  Their academy started from very little and has now recently added its own music recording studio.  They also offer multiple levels of choral and instrumental music, dance, visual arts, theatre, and other innovative courses.  Foster’s expertise was very helpful in providing guidance on ways to expand fine arts programs in relation to using online academic courses as an avenue for allowing students to take more fine arts electives, using adjunct instructors, and finding financial resources.

For our programs, we decided to form a vision and mission as we continue to expand our programs and course offerings and begin to see and market the fine arts programs as an academy.  We also wanted our vision and mission to reveal the long-term unlimited possibilities in relation to establishing a fine arts academy.

For our April session, we used all of our professional development experiences throughout the year to brainstorm and form our vision and mission for a fine arts academy.

We developed these program-defining statements:

The Sylacauga Fine Arts Academy Vision:  Cultivating excellence through artistic expressions.

The Sylacauga Fine Arts Academy Mission Statement:  The mission of the SHS Fine Arts Academy is to engage students in the arts community, promote independent thinking and self- discipline, and foster lifelong artistic appreciation and development.

These will help provide focus and purpose as we continue development of fine arts at SHS and throughout Sylacauga City Schools.

Fine Arts: Engaging Students in Content

The fine arts provide the original template for differentiated instruction and addressing the different learning styles for students.  A focus of our state arts grant is turning around professional development related to using the arts as an instructional tool in all content areas.  For our January cohort meeting, the fine arts cohort presented and modeled engaging fine arts instructional strategies to the secondary literacy cohort.  These strategies involved engaging students in content and informational texts.

             
Shelly Bailey modeled a “Tiny Toy Tale” lesson.  Using artistically modified dollar store toys and other manipulatives, she told a three-dimensional and very animated story that presented and explained the colors of the color wheel and their relationships with each other.  While this was an example of a fine arts strategy with the content of visual arts, as Bailey explained, this strategy could be used to engage students in content and informational texts in any subject.  While the teacher could model a “Tiny Toy Tale” with any content-related information, students could then create and present their own three-dimensional animated tales to engage in and retain important content information.

            
Chad Littleton modeled a lesson utilizing tableau drama (a motionless dramatic representation of a scene) that addressed the context of the Gettysburg Address in 10^th grade literature.  After reading online texts and viewing online videos through blendspace.com, participating teachers used the information from the online materials to plan tableau scenes representing the beginning, middle, and end of the action at Gettysburg.  Again, this strategy could be used to engage students in content and informational texts in all subject areas.

              
The goal of this session and the modeled lessons was to show that the fine arts should not be an extra responsibility for the classroom teacher, but they should provide necessary tools for allowing the students to access the content in a fun and engaging way.