The district is working with The Art of Education University, an accredited Iowa-based graduate school for art teachers that also sells software platforms to help them with curriculum-building and professional development. The university’s sales director Ben Jensen said he believes schools have given little emphasis to digital support for visual arts teachers, who have fewer options than science teachers in the ever-growing ed tech market.
“When it comes to arts, there often isn’t any real quality curriculum support. They’re the one content area in K-12 that really gets overlooked," he said. "A lot of companies don’t know how to support visual arts because they’re kind of a specialized content area.”
With this in mind, The Art of Education University offers PRO Learning, a software platform with video training, hands-on tutorials and other professional development resources for K-12 visual art teachers, as well as FLEX curriculum, which includes state standard-aligned teaching materials. These can be implemented within digital learning management systems such as Google Classroom that have become commonplace in schools.
Jensen said The Art of Education University serves teachers in over 400 other districts, including Tacoma, Wash.; Clark County, Nev.; Kansas City, Mo.; Cincinnati and Baltimore schools, among others. The goal, he said, is to fill a critical need for support of visual arts instructors, who must often formulate their course structures with little guidance from others.
“An art teacher can go onto our platform and go into the FLEX curriculum, where we provide hundreds of lesson plans, instructional resources, assessments, artist bios, classroom and student-facing videos. We prepare all the content, and teachers get to pick and choose which lesson plans, worksheets or activities they want to use in their classroom,” he said. “It’s like a plug-and-play [tool], where you can embed our resources into classes and into units teachers then can customize.”
Milwaukee Public Schools' fine arts director Deb Bowling said the district received about $220,000 in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education to expand its use of the platforms. Using both tools, Bowling said, the district aims to supplement its professional development efforts geared toward the arts.
“We purchased PRO primarily to provide our visual arts teachers a resource for professional development to improve their practice, which was particularly important during COVID. The content is also based on state art standards and provides our teachers a basis for solid lesson planning and self-paced learning,” she said in an email to Government Technology.
“We first implemented PRO and then brought FLEX to our teachers," she continued. "We were not looking for curriculum, but rather a resource for our teachers to build upon."
As other K-12 districts look to maintain and expand virtual courses in the years ahead to meet growing demand, Bowling noted that Milwaukee schools is not planning to establish new virtual or hybrid art courses. Rather, she said, the system will use both platforms to expand in-person arts classes as students make the gradual return to brick-and-mortar schools.
“We have a visual arts support staff, and they offer monthly professional development, which often demonstrates an idea or concept and then uses one or both platforms to deepen the learning and provide options for implementation,” she said, adding that the programs will be helpful for training new teachers.
While 60 percent of the district remains virtual, she said, art courses will remain in-person for the foreseeable future, where the new platforms will be used to enhance instruction and content.
“All of our courses are in person, and that is the hope in fall as well,” she noted.
Jensen thinks bolstering the arts in public schools could play a key role in supporting student emotional well-being, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says has suffered over the course of the public health crisis, as well as mitigating learning loss that occurred since the drastic shift to virtual learning during COVID-19.
“We believe students' attention spans are better when they’re using their hands and they have something to do, and you can incorporate some of the other core content areas with that too,” he said. “Art plays a really important part in that we believe some people get, but there’s still quite a few people out there that haven’t really made that connection to the role art education can play.”
