Common Ground 2006

The 2006 Common Ground Arts in Education Conference takes place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Rochester, NY, from Wednesday, April 5 through Friday, April 7. The conference is a focused grouping of various members of New York State’s arts-in-education community. Participants in the three-day conference will have the opportunity to hear three keynote speakers and will engage in workshops and in networking sessions.

Common Ground 2006 offers over 30 different workshop sessions over the course of the conference. Workshops will be led by statewide arts-in-education experts and include diverse areas of focus such as advocating for strong arts programs in schools, therapeutic uses of art in an educational setting, assessing student learning, and socially conscious choreography, among many other topics.

This year’s conference also includes three keynote speakers, including contemporary theater artist Nilaja Sun. Nick Rabkin, the Executive Director of the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, Chicago, will speak on reframing education in the arts, and Frances Lucerna, the Executive Director and Founding Principal of El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, will talk about her experiences founding and developing the school.

For full information on Common Ground 2006, visit www.arts4ed.org.

Summer Seminar 2006

Empire State Partnerships’ (ESP) 2006 Summer Seminar conference will take place from July 16 through July 20 at Long Island University’s CW Post campus in Brookville, NY. Summer Seminar is a conference in which teachers, artists, and arts and school administrators convene to investigate their core beliefs, participate in discussion groups, attend workshops, and work collaboratively.

Members of the Rotunda Gallery/IS 49 ESP partnership from Brooklyn in a Summer Seminar peer discussion group (2005) (Photo: Lorenzo Ciniglio)

This will be the 10th annual incarnation of the conference and those who plan to attend may begin registering online on May 16.

The theme of this year’s Summer Seminar is “Looking Back, Looking Forward,” and over the course of the conference approximately 300 attendees will investigate the theme through a series of workshops, discussion groups, keynote addresses, and plenary meetings. There will also be consultants present on location for attendees to discuss plans for the upcoming year with.

The fee for arts in education professionals to attend Summer Seminar is $700. New York State Council on the Arts grantees in all of ESP’s “School-Wide” granting categories for 2006-7 are required to have teams of three attend the conference. There is a team tuition fee of $2,100 and additional team members may be added at the cost of $700 per person, although principals of schools who have ESP partnerships may attend for one day free of charge.

For complete information on the 2006 Summer Seminar conference, visit www.espartsed.org.