The purpose of this article is to describe the development, mission, and events of the Festival of the Arts at Southwest Virginia Community College (1995-2018) with special emphasis on community involvement and community enrichment. The festival serves as a tool in fulfilling the cultural enrichment mission and community service function of the…

This past spring, the education industry experienced a massive paradigm shift as a result of the pandemic. In a matter of weeks, curriculum plans that had been carefully prepared and executed over two-thirds of the school year were upended, and educators were asked to revise, reorganize, and realign to address the needs and capabilities of an…

Art educators can "critique" senseless violence--mistreatment, exclusion, intimidation, bullying, violation, abuse, corruption, murder, and war--by unleashing the power of students' creativity. In this article, the author, sharing her philosophical context, discusses how art is preventative medicine with the power to transform the cycle…

Examining lessons learned through 4 years of experience of hosting Camp Launch, a university-based residential science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) enrichment program for low-income, high-ability, middle school students, this article explores components of the program and offers suggestions for implementing programs that serve…

The practice of mixing grade levels in school settings is increasing (Nishida, 2009) and one third of classrooms worldwide already combine two or more grade levels (Cornish, 2006a). However, many teachers are assigned such mixed-grade groupings without training, and there is some evidence that this may be particularly true for art teachers…

Each year, the first-year high-school art students at Surry County High School in Dendron, Virginia, complete a three-dimensional project that attempts to re-create an artifact from the Old Kingdom. In this article, the author describes how the students made canopic jars from recycled 2-liter soda bottles and newspapers for this year's art…

The present research represents a test of the effect of adding seriation instruction to oddity instruction to produce an advantage in both forms of abstraction. Pasnak et al. (2007) and Kidd, Pasnak, Gadzichowski, Ferral-Like, & Gallington (2008) have shown that at risk kindergartners profit academically from instruction in both oddity and…

This article recounts the experience of the Regent University Library in planning and implementing a festival of Tolstoy and Russian culture as part of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Big Read initiative. The NEA launched the Big Read in 2006 to counter the alarming decline of literary reading documented in its 2002 report Reading at…

In this article, the author describes how she introduced a lesson called Albert's Alphabet to her kindergarten students. This lesson introduces the design thinking process to kindergartners in a developmentally appropriate way. She began the lesson by reading Leslie Tyron's book "Albert's Alphabet," which tells the story of Albert Goose,…

In a graduate literacy course, the author as the teacher educator conceptualized "Visual Literacy" into the course. In-service and pre-service teachers from inner-city schools in Georgia and Virginia invited struggling writers to create graphic novels by envisioning life activities, using drawings, and invented spellings as well as…

The Afterschool Alliance and MetLife Foundation are proud to celebrate a fifth round of the MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Awards. For the past five years, we have collaborated to highlight the work of quality afterschool programs that support children, families and communities across the nation. This compendium is a compilation of four…

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities--improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This report covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. It details what mayors, program providers, system…