Katie Dawson
Bridget Lee
Stephanie Cawthon
KEYNOTES
SCEA’s 2009 Arts & Education Forum will engage participants in inquiry regarding adult learning and teacher change. Two keynote presentations will look at these ideas both from a pedagogical standpoint and from the viewpoint of programmatic structure.
Keynote Presenters:
– Katie Dawson, Lecturer and Drama for Schools Director
Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of Texas at Austin
– Bridget Lee, Adjunct Lecturer and Drama for Schools Program Coordinator
Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of Texas at Austin
– Dr. Stephanie Cawthon, Assistant Professor
Department of Educational Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin
Day One Keynote
An Introduction to Adult Learner Literature
The first keynote will make the case that if one goal of arts integration is to empower students to actively engage in the classroom, then shouldn’t teachers be trained through a process that empowers them to actively engage in the training.
Questions explored during the conversation will include:
• What is active, participant-constructed learning?
• Why do adults learn better when the experience challenges them to draw upon their current knowledge base and extend it to approach new problems?
• Why do adults need to know the importance of what they are learning and how they are going to acquire that knowledge?
• Why do adult students need to have more control and be more self-directed in their learning than their younger counterparts?
• What types of learning opportunities address specific questions and problems that adults face in their work?
Day Two Keynote
How the Pedagogy of Adult Learning is Activated into Teacher Change
As the weekend is organized around articulated dilemmas, this keynote conversation will focus on the challenges and creative tension between an adult learner focused professional development model in arts integration and the ways teachers actually implement the strategies in their respective classrooms.
Three issues of program fidelity will be explored:
• How does the arts integration program retain its essential content and structural components?
• How does a collaborative model encourage or challenge issues of quality control?
• How does program evaluation adapt to a collaborative program model?
