CONGRESSIONAL ARTS COMPETITION

The Congressional Art Competition was co-founded in 1981 by then-Representative James Jeffords. Over the years, Senator Jeffords celebrated the creativity and artistic vision of Vermont's young adults with this annual event. Representative Peter Welch has become the sponsor of the Vermont competition, in partnership with the Vermont Arts Council.

2007 AWARD WINNERS

In a ceremony held on Monday, May 14 at the T.W. Wood Gallery in Montpelier, Xavier Donnelly of Burlington High School was named the winner of the 26th Annual Congressional Arts Competition.

Xavier’s untitled, expertly detailed cityscape (pictured at left) will hang on the walls of the U.S. Congress in Washington along with winning artwork by high school students from around the nation. Congressman Peter Welch sponsors the competition in Vermont, which was founded by former Senator and then-Congressman James M. Jeffords.

The competition was judged by sculptor and printmaker Patricia deGogorza, painter Paul Gruhler, and Joyce Mandeville, Director of the T.W. Wood Gallery & Art Center.

2nd Place: Dan Aiken, Lyndon Institute “Fall Brook”

3rd Place: Nelson Skinner Northfield HS “Canopy of Life”

People’s Choice Award: Armando Veve, South Burlington HS

Honorable Mention: Stephen Bishop, Green Mountain Technology & Career Center “Waiting for Winter”
Honorable Mention: Melissa Cohen, Green Mountain Technology & Career Center “Thought Clouds”
Honorable Mention: Laura Putnam, Lamoille UHS “My Backyard”

Judges Choice: Dan Herrmann, Poultney HS “Self Portrait”
Judges Choice: Eric Joyce, St. Johnsbury Academy “Meghan”
Judges Choice: Josh Newton, Green Mountain Technology & Career Center “Untitled”

Congressman Welch’s Choice: Karyn Brower, Rutland HS “Self Portrait”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Elizabeth Castle, North Country UHS “The Art Room”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Nicole Erthein, Long Trail School “Brighton Beach”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Leslie Fairchild, St. Johnsbury Academy “Untitled”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Jacob Gevalt, Champlain Valley UHS “Combined Perspective”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Abbey Goodrich, Northfield HS “Tree Frog”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Neomi Hennessy, Springfield HS “Frolic”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Alyssa Langevin, Spaulding HS “Sunflower”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Riley Lumsden, Bellows Free Academy “Untitled”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Soo-Mi Park, Leland & Gray UHS “Organic and Inorganic”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Jaina Rich, Randolph UHS “Video Vault”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Lynn Sipsey, Mt. Abraham UHS “Dirty Laundry”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Amber Thomas, Mt. Mansfield UHS “The Golden Center”
Congressman Welch’s Choice: Elisha Washburn, Thetford Academy “Beauty Sleep”

Governor's Institute for Excellence in the Arts

The Governor's Institutes of Vermont, an independent 501(c)(3) non profit educational organization, offers highly successful summer learning experiences in seven program areas. It began nearly 25 years ago when the Vermont commissioner of Education and the Director of the Vermont Arts Council met to examine the extraordinary deficiency that existed in arts education in the state's public schools. With these founding partners the Governor’s Institute on the Arts was establshed to address the problem. GIV seeks students from all walks of life, from the economically disadvantaged and rurally isolated to those who have had many opportunities but are under served by their schools.

No other program in Vermont addresses the need to provide similar intensive residential educational opportunities for these talented students. The arts institute creates a lively artistic community of artists and motivated students exploring creativity.

The Institute enrolls about 130 students annually, coming from virtually every high school in the state, and offers them the opportunity to study with professional artists in their chosen field. The Institute is designed to explore the creative experience in all areas of the arts, including dance, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, graphics and theater arts. Students choose courses in the area of most interest in the arts, but are also encouraged to take courses in areas in which they are unfamiliar.

Local school systems are urged to select students who show evidence of strong potential but may have been poorly served by the system. Priority is given to students who have completed 10th and 11th grades. Space is also made available for students who are home-schooled or in other schooling situations.The Arts Institute is held on the campus of Castleton State College in its Fine Arts Center for classes and performances as a gift-in-kind.

If you are a high school student with a strong interest in the arts you are encouraged to apply to the Institute.

Click here to learn how to apply.

Arts Education Partnerships: Head Start

Since 1993, when a National Endowment for the Arts grant established the Partnership, regional collaborations between local arts service organizations and Head Start agencies have been providing services to children and families throughout Vermont. The program was conceived as a way to enhance the lives of Head Start children through the integration of the artists into their preschool experience - and to enrich creative thinking, self-expression, and positive self-concept.

Local arts councils identify and recommend artists who are interested in working with young children in residencies. Each regional partnership works collaboratively to select the artists, design the program to suit the partners and teachers, and set up their own communications and evaluation systems.

Partnerships meet together at least twice a year with the Council's Arts Education Program Manager to share goals, successes, problems and best practices, as well as to advance their own information and the field of early childhood arts learning.

Artists and teachers work together so that the arts programs reflect and enhance the Head Start curriculum; they give teachers project ideas and model teaching in the open-ended, process-oriented method best for young children. Prior to their residencies, artists receive orientation and are trained to work effectively within the Head Start environment.

The program provides professional development in the arts for early childhood educators. Our workshops have included expressive movement, working with clay, creative movement and music. We also conduct workshops at regional early childhood conferences. Since Head Start is a parent empowerment program, opportunities for parents to learn more about the arts and to tap their own creative resources in workshops with their children, family outings that include performances and hands-on experience and participation in the Head Start classroom. Several of the partnerships have end-of-year exhibits in which the young artists can show off their work (self selected) to their parents, friends, and other community members.

We have developed resource materials about young children and the arts that you can download and our site features an extensive list of Web links.

New Perspectives in Arts Education

New Perspectives in Arts Integration is a three-year research project the Council has undertaken to investigate how and why three exceptional arts education programs are successful at improving students performance and knowledge and also at keeping them excited about learning. The programs are:

• The Vermont MIDI Project, which teaches music composition
• "Words Come Alive!" a program of FlynnArts which uses theater and dance
• Visual Thinking Strategies, which focuses on visual art

The Council, in collaboration with its partners, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, the Vermont MIDI Project, and Vermont Institutes Evaluation Center seeks to investigate and describe the process by which each of these community-based approaches to arts education affects schools, teachers, and students.

The project, which focuses on children in fourth through sixth grades in four Vermont schools, is examining the empirical links between each program’s strategies and its success in increasing student learning and engagement in and through the arts. Professional training is provided in each school for classroom teachers in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, their respective arts educators, and other key school professionals. The goal of the project is to document these successes and determine how they can be replicated, particularly in Vermont’s many small rural schools struggling with limited resources.

Vermont Institutes Evaluation Center is providing guidance and technical expertise for the research aspects of this project: developing logic models, identifying or developing qualitative and quantitative methods for collecting evidence, and data analysis and interpretation. This project will measure any links between skills developed in the arts and success in such academic areas as reading and mathematics. The US Department of Education and others have called for more studies demonstrating these links. In addition to the focus on student outcomes, this study will also look at effects on teachers, other professionals, and schools as systems where professional development and support are provided for integrated arts education.

The “New Perspectives in Arts Integration” project represents a significant collaboration among those working in the arts, new technologies, and education (both curriculum and assessment) in Vermont. This project has the potential to increase knowledge and understanding of effective strategies for strengthening the use of high-quality arts in the course of other academic instruction.

Projects

Words Come Alive! is a professional development program for classroom teachers that focuses on elements of the theater and dance performances that the teachers and their students see on the Flynn Center stage. It explores the creative processes behind those elements, and then applies that same exploration to what students are reading. This program empowers teachers to create ways to build their students’ expressive skills while deepening reading comprehension.

In WCA! the Flynn Center’s teaching artists instruct classroom teachers in creative drama and movement, on elements of the art forms and demonstrate the connection between the creative artistic process, strategies used in reading comprehension, and the appropriate Vermont Grade Expectations in theater, dance and reading. Each class involved in WCA! attends two Flynn Center student matinee performances per year to demonstrate the powerful relationships among theater, dance and narrative art forms, and to provide teachers and students with examples of artistic excellence.

Visit the Flynn's Words Come Alive website

The Vermont MIDI Project promotes music composition for students and provides on-line mentoring experiences that tap into critical thinking, problem solving and skill development. This program connects Vermont students and their teachers with professional composers around the country. The computer technology for music composition is similar to a using a word processor for writing, allowing students to hear and edit their musical ideas as they create. Compositions often begin as classroom assignments designed for students to explore musical elements by manipulating melody, rhythm, form, expressive elements, and harmony. As a next step, students often integrate their next original compositions into activities such as music for movies and multimedia presentations, puppet shows and plays.

An important element of the process requires students to describe the intent of their work and ask for feedback to improve it. Professional artists trained to serve as mentors provide comments and encourage teachers and students to participate in the critique process. The compositions are then revised and re-posted, often through several iterations. Project members adhere to a set of mentoring protocols to ensure respectful and substantive critique in a process that supports all levels of student ability. Collaboration is promoted through a group composition process at the elementary and middle school levels.

Visit the Vermont MIDI Project website

Visual Thinking Strategies consists of a series of lessons taught by classroom teachers over the school year. It is an open-ended inquiry method for engaging children in thought and discussion about visual images. Each lesson involves a discussion of carefully sequenced images chosen from many different cultures and times, and in various mediums. The process is not information-based; its goal is for the students to look, think, verbalize, and discuss what they are seeing as they participate as a community of learners.

How VTS works: Students are first asked to look at an image without talking. Then the teacher asks specific non-directive questions which encourage students to examine what they see. As students develop their observational skills, more probing and directed questions are added. The teacher ensures that each response is heard and acknowledged by paraphrasing what is said. As the discussion evolves, teachers link various related answers, helping make students aware of their converging and diverging views, and of their developing skills at constructing shared, yet varied meanings.

As students develop their connection to art, they exercise a wide variety of cognitive skills that are useful in many contexts, including: active class discussion and group problem solving; development of thinking and communication skills; development of descriptive writing skills; and enhanced ability to transfer these skills to other subject areas. VTS has helped students critique their own and their peers’ art work. Core art teachers and artists-in-residence reinforce students’ VTS learning with book-making and story-writing projects as well as projects in photography, neighborhood documentation, mural-making and a wide range of other studio arts.

Visit the Visual Thinking Strategies website.

POETRY OUT LOUD 2009 

Click here to visit the 2009 Poetry Out Loud Page.

POETRY OUT LOUD 2008

The 2008 Vermont Poetry Out Loud State Finals took place on March 11th in Montpelier. 

Congratulations to the winner, Caleb Smith-Hastings, of Middlebury Union High School, who will proceed to the national competition in Washington, DC on April 26, 2008. Watch excerpts of winning performances below.
 

2008 VIDEOS

2008 FINALISTS AND PARTICIPATING SCHOOLS

BACKGROUND

Created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud is administered in partnership with the State Arts Agencies of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.  

The program, which began in 2005, encourages youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and performance, and helps students master public speaking skills while learning about their literary heritage. 

Poetry Out Loud builds on the recent resurgence of poetry as an oral art form, as demonstrated by the slam poetry movement and the immense popularity of rap music among our youth. Participation begins at the classroom level around the country; winners will advance to school-wide, county, and state-wide competitions, and ultimately to the National Finals in Washington, DC.

PRIZES

School-level recitation champions advance to the state and then national levels. In 2007, Poetry Out Loud awarded more than $100,000 in prizes to students and schools at the state and national levels.

STATE PRIZES: Each winner at the state level will receive $200 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington (with an adult chaperone) to compete for the national championship. The state winner’s school will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books. One runner-up in each state will receive $100; his or her school will receive $200 for the purchase of poetry books.

NATIONAL PRIZES: A total of $50,000 in scholarship awards and school stipends will be awarded to the winners at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals, with a $20,000 college scholarship award for the National Champion.

RESOURCES

Participating teachers receive free multimedia curriculum materials – a poetry anthology, audio guide, teachers’ guide, posters, and the comprehensive Poetry Out Loud website , all aligned to national standards – augmenting their regular poetry curriculum with poetry recitation and a classroom-level competition.

This year’s Teacher’s Guide incorporates a simplified rubric and optional creative writing lesson plan. As the sponsoring Vermont Arts Agency, the Council will also be available to offer workshops for teachers to provide tips on bringing the program into their classrooms and to sponsor classroom visits by teaching artists.

Teachers, students, and poetry lovers everywhere can use Poetry Out Loud website and its accompanying educational materials to organize their own recitation contests, but the official contest is limited to the programs run by each state's Arts Agency. The Poetry Out Loud website has the following areas you may find helpful:

PAST WINNERS of vermont poetry out loud

2008: Caleb Smith-Hastings, Middlebury Union HS
2007: Henry Kiely, People's Academy of Morrisville
2006: Anna Svagzdys, Montpelier HS

CONTACT

Questions, concerns, and material requests should be emailed to Stacy Raphael, Education Programs Manager, (802) 828-3778.
 

Vermont Alliance For Arts Education (VAAE)

The Vermont Arts Council serves on the Board of Directors of the Vermont Alliance for Arts Education and is committed to VAAE's mission of:

• ADVOCATING for arts education programs for all students
• SHARING information, ideas, and resources among people dedicated to arts education
• PROMOTING innovative collaborations among artists, individuals, cultural and educational organizations and institutions
• RECOGNIZING notable achievments by individuals and organizations in arts education

The Vermont Alliance for Arts Education is a member of and funded in part by the Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network. It offers a year round agenda of professional learning opportunities for arts educators, artists, classroom teachers, and administrators. Additional funding comes from professional development programs, private and business donations and/or grants, membership and partnership grants.

The Council's Arts Education Manager serves as a non-voting member of the Board, contributes articles to the Newsletter, presents a grants workshop at the conference and often contributes ideas and opportunities for other workshops, and attends the conference.

VAAE along with the Vermont Department of Education, particularly the Arts Education Consultant who is also a non-voting board member, are the three primary partners for assisting and delivering arts education in the State.