SUAVE (Socios Unidos para Artes Via Educación
- United Community for Arts in Education) a Cultural Partnership Program for Teachers is
helping California Center for the Arts, Escondido (CCAE) achieve its educational goal to
bring the arts back into the classroom. SUAVE is collaboratively sponsored by CCAE,
California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), and three school districts: Escondido
Union School District, San Marcos Unifed, and Valley Center Union School District.
The program provides professional development for one hundred forty-four elementary school
teachers through supported in-service training and weekly in-class coaching on ways to
infuse the arts into the core curriculum as a teaching methodology.
Learning through the arts is the focus of SUAVE. Using the arts as a
methodology for learning mathematics, science, social studies, literacy, and other subject
areas is the program content. By learning to use the arts, teachers and students
discover that the arts express and communicate ideas in an aesthetic context and thus a
greater understanding and appreciation is developed for the subject matter.
SUAVE is an arts integrated approach to teaching and learning in
multi-cultural and multi-lingual settings. Using the arts as a medium for
instruction offers students a forum for translating ideas and creating representations and
metaphors for specific understandings. Translation is essential to intellectual and
emotional development.
The CCAE hired eight arts coaches. These coaches serve as an
artistic support person for ten teachers at each school. They spend one hour a week
with each teacher with the mission of adding the arts into the existing curriculum.
Then the coaches meet weekly with Merryl Goldber, Ed.D, professor at CSUSM who is the
Program Director and Coordinator to share ideas, activities, success, and issues.
This year (with funding and support from Escondido Union School District)
the SUAVE program expanded from seven schools to thirteen schools. The mentor sites
increased from four sites to seven sites. To assist our former SUAVE teachers and
school sites an artist spends four hours a week at the sites, and special monthly
"SUAVE Mentor Meetings" are held. Additionally, we are working with year
round schools and need to provide for serving teachers who are off track by offering after
school and alternate day programs.
To support the hands-on arts education learning experience, seven free
afterschool project orientated workshops, "SUAVE Mondays," are offered to all
teachers at every school site. These free classes in drama, grammar, mime, poetry,
and visual arts are one more way for us to provide access to the arts for all teachers.
The concept of hiring an arts coach to assist educators in learning
through the arts can be replicated. The curricular ideas in math, Science, History,
and Literature can be applied to any K-5 curriculum. They are available for teachers
on our website: http:ww2.csusm.edu/SUAVE
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