Arts Focus
Founded in Stevenson's second year, Arts Focus continues the school's
focus on developing social relationships in a project-based learning
environment. During Arts Focus sessions, students build relationships
across age and social groups and learn the skills and habits of creative work.
Teachers and parents partner to present 15 classes that run for six, three-hour sessions on Thursday mornings twice a year. The classes incorporate
hands-on study with a formal curriculum designed and presented by
parents. Regular classes are dispersed and re-assembled, so that each
course has an even number of students from each grade level. Volunteer
parents partner with teachers to run each class. Each Arts Focus session
concludes with a public exhibition at City Hall of student work from
each class.
The enhanced arts curriculum is designed to...
- substantially increase the number of hours the children participate in creative exploration,
- expose them to a much greater variety of art media than what the schools are able to provide, and
- contribute enormously to the children's cognitive, academic, and
social development. The goal of this program is for the children to
experience all phases of the creative process, with emphasis on the free
expression of ideas (rather than on simply creating facsimiles of
pre-established end products).
Courses are: ceramics, 3D, drawing and painting, kinetic
art, paper, music on stage, physical theatre, photography, printmaking,
animation, textiles - weaving and dyeing, textiles - sewing, materials
exploration, global beat, and video.
