Alaska's arts council wants to bring arts and culture into classrooms statewide, building on a Kodiak model

Alaska's state arts council is launching an effort to weave arts and culture into classrooms across the state, building teacher partnerships grounded in Alaska's own arts and cultures over the next three school years.

The model grew in Kodiak. For a decade, the Munartet Project brought together the Kodiak school district, the Alutiiq Museum, the Kodiak Arts Council and Kodiak College to build arts into local classrooms, a partnership that settled into a steady routine of teacher workshops promoting arts-enhanced and arts-integrated lessons. The new statewide push, called Creativity in Teaching, would carry that approach to the rest of Alaska, with a first year of planning followed by two years of putting it into practice.

At the heart of the model is the collaboration between classroom teachers and teaching artists — the working artists who partner with teachers to fold creative practice into everyday lessons, and who depend on projects like this for work. Teachers who take part get training that reshapes how they plan and deliver lessons.

To run it, the council is hiring a project manager to coordinate the initiative and its team, and expects to bring that person on by October. The role would be paid up to $151,000 over the nearly three years of the project.

The effort comes as the arts council is itself in transition, having recently begun a search for a new executive director.