Our Shared Future: Imagining a New Landscape for Teaching Artists

On April 5-7, 2022, we hosted a virtual event in support of teaching artists across the country. Our Shared Future: Imagining a New Landscape for Teaching Artists featured sessions that dug into the current realities and hopeful futures of teaching artistry.

This event was made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Department of Education, Hewlett Foundation and by planning support from the Teaching Artists Guild and Arts Education Partnership.

About the Resource Archive

We invite you to engage with the Our Shared Future resource archive page and experience the conference through the narratives of teaching artists who attended. This resource includes visual, audio and written reports created by 19 artists who attended the virtual convening. We know that teaching artists have the potential to change the world, and these reports help continue the conversation as we collaborate to build more inclusive environments for learners of all ages.

Title: 2280 Pasos Bajo un Cielo Nublado | Artist: Hernán Jourdan | Medium: Film

When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.

Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music

My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.

Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film

Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.

Title: Tercera Llamada | Artist: Karilú Forshee | Medium: Audio

La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.

Title: Literaseas | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite and ink on paper with digital edits

Title: A Riddle | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits

Title: False Binaries | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits