Arts Education

SmART Schools is a comprehensive, standards-based, arts centered, whole-school redesign program that provides ongoing opportunities for all students to appreciate, develop, and demonstrate skills, knowledge, and understanding in and through arts. SmART Schools’ overall goal is to help every student meet high national, state and/or local standards of performance in the arts and other core academic subjects. The program allows every student to fully embrace and participate in their cultural legacy, and achieve artistic, academic, and social success.

EDC is working with ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Careers, with support from The James Irvine Foundation, to develop a curriculum for career sector academies in California public high schools. This project focuses on the arts, media and entertainment (AME) sector.

The Youth Media Learning Network (YMLN) is a new capacity building and professional development initiative intended to strengthen the practice and expand the reach of youth media.

EDC is developing an interdisciplinary career technical education (CTE) curriculum, Making Connections, that prepares students to pursue their interests in the arts, media, and entertainment when they go off to college or join the workplace. The curriculum addresses national and California state standards for grades 9 and 10, and also includes integrated units for English language arts, math, science, and social studies to help teachers link these subjects with applications in arts, media, and entertainment.

EDC will investigate whether learning in the visual arts, a discipline in which students continually practice visualization, leads to improvements in geometric reasoning. This study will compare high school students with and without extensive exposure to the visual arts. Geometric reasoning will be assessed at baseline and after one and two years of study, as will visualization skills in art, general spatial visualization, and control tasks not related to visualization.

EDC will evaluate Adobe Systems Incorporated’s new signature initiative, Adobe Youth Voices (AYV), an international youth media making effort. Adobe and their program partners are training educators in five cities to lead youth media projects. The evaluation team will coordinate on-going evaluation to document the successes and challenges in implementing the initiative; and measure AYF effectiveness in meeting intended outcomes for teachers and students.

dot-EDU was an information and communication technology (ICT) intervention mechanism for USAID Missions seeking to improve education systems in their respective countries. dot-EDU sought to assist developing countries in strengthening learning systems that improve quality, expand access, and enhance equity through carefully planned applications of digital and broadcast technologies. The dot-EDU mission had two foci. First, dot-EDU provided training and technical assistance to support USAID Missions in developing and implementing technology-assisted applications.