BRINGING ARTISTS INTO THE SCHOOLS ISN'T EXACTLY A NEW IDEA. Young Audiences, a national art-in-education organization, has been doing this successfully for more than 40 years, enlivening classrooms with performances and residencies by professional artists. But what about bringing artists and teachers into a sort of creative hothouse, where together they might imagine new ways of helping students learn? And how about using cutting-edge technology to share these ideas-along with links to local community arts resources-with any teacher who has access to the Internet and a CD-ROM drive? These are exciting new developments, indeed, as Northwest Education learned in a recent roundtable discussion with the staff of Young Audiences of Oregon and Southwest Washington. The chapter's Executive Director, Sarah Avery Johnson, and Education Director, Christine Caton, offered a preview of a brand-new, multimedia project called, appropriately, Arts for Learning.

NW EDUCATION: How did this ambitious project get started?

JOHNSON: We've always recruited artists who love kids and truly are good teachers. But over the last couple years, we've become increasingly aware of the importance of having artists on the Young Audiences roster who can talk teacher talk. As the education reform environment heated up in Oregon and Washington, many of our artists were left to work in a vacuum. They needed to know about the changes that were going on in the classroom. We developed some workshops called Arts Spark for artists to bring them up to speed on education reform. Our artists began to understand the relationship they could have with teachers in working to educate the child. We realized that this was a really magical thing, and that was the kernel.

CATON: Rather than a departure from our mission, Arts for Learning is a way to light a fire under what we've already been doing. It broadens and deepens our program, so that it really warms all the parties involved in arts in education.

NW EDUCATION: Where do teachers enter the picture?

JOHNSON: Last spring, we invited some teachers to an Arts Spark-type workshop. With artists and teachers together in a creative situation, they began to feed off each other, learn from each other. They really began to get it, as far as how they can work together to achieve successful teaching and really integrate the arts into the curriculum. So the first strand of the program was to generate creative teaching strategies, collaboratively developed by teachers and artists. It's not artists coming up with teaching strategies, or teachers coming up with arts strategies, but both of them working together and learning to talk each other's language.

NW EDUCATION: These must have been high-energy workshops.

JOHNSON: The dialogues! For three and a half days in December, we had 22 artists and 31 teachers from all over the state gathered for a workshop. And it wasn't all talk. Teachers could observe art residencies-see how a clay artist could enhance what students know about science, for instance. And artists gained new awareness of how what they do helps students reach state learning goals.

CATON: One of our artists, a dancer from Oregon Ballet Theatre, realized during the workshop that she's teaching about the math content standards in her dance workshops. Now that she knows that, and knows the vocabulary, it makes all the difference. And kids have the capacity to see these connections, too.

NW EDUCATION: What happens next?

JOHNSON: The next strand is using technology to disseminate what we've learned. We're developing a Web site to share this information with anyone who's online. A teacher in someplace like Fossil, Oregon, will be able to read about integrating art into the social studies curriculum, for instance, then see a video demonstration of an artist doing just that, then click on a resources box that will lead directly to arts resources right in that community. This wonderful technology allows us to reach out to every classroom teacher in the region. We expect to have a prototype ready to roll out by late April, when the national Young Audiences conference comes to Portland.

NW EDUCATION: What's the long-term goal?

JOHNSON: We want to raise teachers' awareness of this resource and get people to be aware of the importance of arts in their own communities. Arts advocacy is the final phase of the program.

NW EDUCATION: We understand that, in partnership with Portland State University, you'll also be conducting a longitudinal study to see how this program affects student learning. Is Young Audiences shifting away from the fun of kids doing art with real artists?

JOHNSON: Young Audiences grew up as an organization that knew intuitively that the arts are good for kids. Therefore, programming went into schools, and kids got their "arts vitamin" for the day. Now, our real target is teachers. If we don't reach them, we won't reach the kids. We can provide a lot of quality arts programming, but the real impact happens if a skillful teacher uses that to enhance learning in the classroom. This is revolutionary for us.

NW EDUCATION: How are you paying for this innovative project?

JOHNSON: We've had a generous gift from U.S. Bank, support from the Oregon Commission for the Arts and other sources, and wonderful encouragement from the state Department of Education.