Emily Porter earns scholarship to attend ARTful Teaching Conference
MAGNOLIA – Emily Porter, of Smackover, recently earned a scholarship to participate in the ARTful Teaching Conference along with a group from Southern Arkansas University’s College of Education.
Porter is a senior Middle School Education: STEM major, and the scholarship was granted by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. “The conference taught me a lot about what it really meant to get students involved in their own education… it has made me think of the endless possibilities for my future math and science classroom and the ways that I can integrate the Arts into what I teach,” said Porter.
The annual ARTful Teaching Conference is held at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute at Petit Jean State Park in Morrilton, Arkansas. The conference Introduces pre-service teachers to the arts and provides a variety of means to integrate them into their various teaching areas. Each year’s conference is focused on a theme and has special guests invited for specific arts training.
This year’s conference, which was April 2-3, was themed “Art & The Socially Engaged Classroom” and highlighted a guest group was LATINX. This group creates and performs plays based on social issues at hand. They provided breakout sessions in acting, drama, rap, and improvisation. Other breakout sessions explored means to highlight what socially engaged art is and how it can be incorporated into school content.
Courtney Cochran, keynote speaker and 2017-2018 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, presented sessions on being culturally responsive in teaching and how to be culturally responsive with students.
Other presenters highlighted student creativity, visual art representations, and other various forms of art.
Thirteen universities were represented at this year’s conference.