KID smART presents Artful Teaching Workshops with Kurt Wootton, ArtsLiteracy Project
Open to all educators

Three different workshops: March 14, 15, and 16 | 5pm-7:30pm

  • Workshop
  • Professional Development
  • Teacher Training
This event has passed.

Tickets available for all three dates: attend any or all! A light dinner will be served at 4:30pm and the sessions will begin promptly at 5pm.

March 14, 4:30-7:30pm
Linking Literacy and the Arts: Building the Global Classroom

Our students come from a diverse range of backgrounds, speak many languages, and have vast funds of cultural knowledge. How, as teachers, do we capitalize on all the resources students bring into the classroom while helping them to gain the kinds of literacies necessary for academic and work success? This workshop will provide concrete practices for integrating the arts, literacies, and languages in a way that welcomes, and challenges, all students.

March 15, 4:30-7:30pm
Roaring, Rolling, and Gnawing: Designing Educational Experiences with the Performance Cycle 

For nearly twenty years, The Performance Cycle, developed by the ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University, has provided a clear structure for integrating performance and various art forms into numerous educational settings in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. Kurt Wootton, co-founder of the ArtsLiteracy Project and director of Habla, a lab school in Mexico, will introduce the Performance Cycle in a vigorous hands-on workshop.  Wootton will focus on ways we can recover our sense of theatrical play with adults and students in schools and workplaces. 

March 16, 4:30-7:30pm
To Understand is to Invent: Designing Creative Reading Experiences

For preK-2nd grade educators

Students who are not able to read by the third grade are four times as likely to drop out of high school. Much of the nation's response to this has been to implement more testing and more remedial programs. But is there a way to teach reading for all students that involves a great sense of play and imagination? How can we teach vocabulary, fluency, phonemic awareness, and comprehension in ways that honor the whole child as a complex human being? In this workshop, learn about an approach to reading that integrates the arts in ways that hold students at the creative center of the reading process.


Kurt Wootton is the Co-Founder of the ArtsLiteracy Project in the Education Department at Brown University as well as the Co-Founder of Habla, an international education center and school in Mérida, Mexico. He has piloted several ArtsLiteracy lab schools in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil and worked with many cities including St. Paul, MN; Providence, RI; Hartford, CT; Andover, MA; Vero Beach, FL and Central Falls, RI on multiyear, districtwide initiatives. Wootton also writes about education for The Huffington Post and for various professional journals. He is the coauthor of A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts published by Harvard Education Press.

The New York Times writes: “Mr. Wootton remains every bit as convinced of education’s power to transform lives. He has changed his tool of choice, however, from a mirror in which students see only reflections of themselves to a window that opens onto the rest of the world.”


Arts Estuary 1024

1024 Elysian Fields Ave.
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