Areas of Expertise

  • National PTA is the nation’s oldest and largest child advocacy association, comprising of millions of families, students, teachers, administrators, and business and community leaders devoted to the educational success of children and the promotion of family engagement in schools.
  • National PTA’s Reflections program engages over 300,000 students every year, providing opportunities for recognition in the arts which boosts student confidence and success in the arts and in life. Through the program, students explore their own thoughts, feelings and ideas, develop artistic literacy and find a love for learning.
  • National PTA has a long history of advocating for arts education and believes all students deserve the opportunity to take part in the arts, and that the arts are central to learning and key to the development of students. National PTA supports programs that promote public awareness of the arts and arts education and the integration of the arts in school curriculum.

Current Top Priorities for Guidance or Collaboration

Contact us to learn more about these current priority areas or to explore collaboration opportunities.
  • Incorporating family engagement strategies into arts education programming. National PTA’s programming, including our Reflections art program, forwards transformative family engagement - the shared effort of families, schools and community leaders to advance whole child development as integral to impactful programming and policy.
  • Working with PTAs to ensure access to and opportunities for high quality arts learning experiences for all children. The Reflections program is wide-reaching and is often used as a catalyst to further develop arts education and arts learning opportunities for school communities.
  • Expanding access to and knowledge around arts and arts education advocacy. PTAs serve a unique community role as advocates and can use their voices to identify concerns and amplify quality arts education in their schools and communities.
  • National PTAs School of Excellence program allows PTAs to focus on supporting and improving arts education in their school communities through intentional action-planning steeped in best practice for continuous and transformative family engagement.

Geographical Areas Served:

Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, National, New England, North Central, Northwest, Rural/Remote, South Central, Southeast, Southwest, Suburban/Exurban, Urban, West Coast,

Primary Audience Served:

Children/Youth, Parents, Pre-K Schools and Learning Centers, School Administrators, School-based Teachers,

Artistic Discipline:

Arts and crafts, Dance, Literature and Storytelling, Media Arts, Music, Visual Arts,

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