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Through winter and spring I was working with the Kennedy Center Education on a video for their Teaching Artists Present series.
Working with them was a blast, so I was delighted when they asked if I’d be interested in presenting at their Art’s Integration Conference.
“The Kennedy Center’s Arts Integration Conference: Exploring an Approach to Teaching explores the how of arts integration, rooted in the Kennedy Center’s 40 years of experience in professional learning for teachers. It provides many strategies that can make arts integration a part of every teacher’s approach to teaching. The conference is appropriate for teachers, principals, school district administrators, and partnering arts organization staff and teaching artists.”
My presentation “Wordplay: Combining Sensory Play with Poetry” took this concept of an “approach” to heart and distilled my rationale and strategies for integrating sensory work with poetry into a 90-minute, interactive workshop.
The interactive piece for the presentation admittedly took me a bit to get right. My past virtual presentations have been predominantly lecture and anecdote driven webinars and I kind of defaulted to that as I was putting “Wordplay” together. The Kennedy Center organizers carved out time to meet with me for a dress rehearsal and let me run and rework my presentation again and again. Their thoughtful critiques and feedback helped me shape it away from a lecture and into a true workshop. I’m sure they had a lot going on from the organization side of the things, but they still made time for me as a presenter and I can’t thank or praise them enough!
I presented twice, which was really nice because time flew the first time through and I was able to be a bit more minute conscious the second time around. I had a model workshop as one of the central components of “Wordplay” and typically when I do model workshops in conference spaces it takes a bit to warm the room (especially the Zoom room) and get people invested in sharing their work. These presentations felt more like running workshops in a community setting, as if everyone came ready to write some poetry. Even in my larger group people weren’t shy, more people than I could get to wanted to share their artwork and poetry!
In both presentations I had to skip over an example of an asynchronous multi-sensory lesson. I left it in the resources for attendees to access and decided to embed it here as well because I’m really quite proud of how it turned out. If you watch it, remember to ask yourself: what senses are being activated?
One thing I really loved about this conference is that each presenter had a Kennedy Center staff member as a co-facilitator to manage the technical end of the presentation: breakout rooms, polls, caption access, technical difficulties, and the like. This is always such a relief! I prefer, and usually ask for, a co-facilitator anytime I work in Zoom, Teams, or a similar video platform because trying to teach and tech at the same time can be a lot.
My session ended with breakout rooms where educators worked in small groups to create multi-sensory lessons for poems. I was able to freely float between the rooms while the technical side was handled and focus on guiding the small group discussions and plans. The lessons all the educators came up with were marvelous! A few of them I might just have to keep in my bag of tricks too.
Things were a bit hectic for me personally and professionally in June so I didn’t make it to any other presentations. I did, however, carve out some time to watch the Virtual Field trip Leonardo and Sam
The work Manual Cinema does is astounding. Highly recommend this if you have an opportunity to view. Their work with props definitely inspired me to try some new puppet and backdrop ideas in Let’s Write About.
All in all, the Kennedy Center’s Arts Integration Conference was a wonderful event to be a part of! The work of the Kennedy Center staff made the conference the most seamless virtual experience I’ve had in a conference space and the energy of it was like a live workshop, a trick that’s hard to pull off this deep into virtual learning when so many educators (myself included) are feeling a bit Zoomed out. If you have an opportunity to go (virtual or live) in the future I definitely say do it!