A Teaching Artist's Companion

Book excerpt: You are an artist, living the artist's life. But you also want to make a difference in the world as a teaching artist. You know how to pursue excellence in your art form; how can you pursue excellence in teaching artistry? A Teaching Artist's Companion: How to Define and Develop Your Practice is a how-to reference for veteran and beginning teaching artists alike. Artist-educator Daniel Levy has been working in classrooms, homeless shelters and correctional facilities for over thirty years. With humor and hard-won insight, Levy and a variety of contributing teaching artists narrate their successes and failures while focusing on the practical mechanics of working within conditions of limited time and resources. Levy organizes teaching artist practice within a framework of View, Design, and Respond. View is everything you value and believe about teaching and learning; Design is what you plan before you go into a classroom; Respond is how you react to and support your students face to face. With the aid of checklists, worksheets, and primary sources, A Teaching Artist's Companion invites you to define your own unique view, and guides your observing, critiquing, and shaping your practice over time.