Upstream Arts is proud to be part of the small but steadily emerging field at the intersection of the arts, disability, and learning. Her practice centers on connecting educators, youth and families with place through interdisciplinary education using memory, story, play and art making through community art /ecology projects, livelihoods training, teacher professional development and educational research and practice.
In this framework then, learning is not a process of transmission of information from teacher to student, a model which positions the student as a passive receptacle, but an active process of construction on the part of the learner that involves making meaning out of a multiplicity stimuli.
Instead of working in obscurity and struggling to deliver meaningful arts experiences to every child as the only artists in the building, specialists now become collaborators, experts, and role models for students who are discovering the arts in their classrooms as well as in the art rooms.
Old world schooling prizes the standardization of predictable learning goals and an assessment system designed for easy measurement of performance on nationalized, norm-referenced tests rather than a real desire to understand what students really think, know, care about, or are able to do. In such a system, the more unusual the classroom teacher’s technology innovation, the less likely it is to be supported in schools” (p. 14).
The AEQ: Access, Equity, and Quality in Arts Learning conference took place during Americans for the Arts’ 2009 annual convention and featured experts on arts learning, along with representatives and grantees from The Wallace Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Grable Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.