Professional Development at CAPE
Professional Development at CAPE in the New Space!
An integral part of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education is the professional development of its artists and teachers. Regular Professional Development launched on Monday, October 17, for the 2022-2023 school year in the new CAPE space, live and in-person and will continue throughout the year.
Every teaching artist and teacher with CAPE is offered free, monthly, compensated professional development instruction at the CAPE space. The goals for professional development are to assist teaching artists in becoming skilled at engaging children and youth in school-based arts learning. Professional Development at CAPE means teaching artists can actively develop their approaches to curriculum design and collaborative teaching and will gain exposure and insight into artistic practices outside of their own by meeting regularly at sessions with artists of multiple disciplines. Teaching Artists will develop their ability to collaborate, an essential skill in the art field, having to co-design, co-plan, and co-teach arts an original, arts integrated curriculum.
On Monday, October 17, 2022 CAPE held the first in-person PD in the new space for the Artist/Researcher Partners Program! At Monday’s PD, 28 teachers and teaching artists attended from the Artist/Researcher Partners Program. They worked on planning their projects for the school year and spent two hours thinking about how they and their students could use the new CAPE space.
CAPE sustains the development of its long-term teacher and teaching artists collaborations through the Artist/Researcher Partners Program. Up to forty collaborating teams are selected each year to deepen further their work in arts-integrated practice, inquiry-based learning, and action research. These teams not only expand artistic investigations in the classroom but also infuse exhibition practice in the classroom to work with students on displaying their learning in a public forum. Artist/Researchers work collaboratively at the end of the year in exhibiting their work in CAPE’s annual Convergence exhibition, advancing the development of collective curation.
On Monday, October 24, 2022 CAPE held the second in-person PD in the new space which featured Collaboration Laboratory.
Participants at a CAPE PD on Monday, October 24, 2022. Teaching artists work on refining their Inquiry Questions from last school year in a breakout session.
Collaboration Laboratory is CAPE’s two-year program that introduces new partners into the CAPE network of arts integration practitioners. Co-Lab applies CAPE’s model of inquiry-based, arts-integrated teaching and learning partnerships to schools and arts organizations new to this methodology. The project supports a cohort of teacher and teaching artist teams at ten schools through an intensive program of professional development as they form a professional community organized to develop high-quality arts integration.
