Arts in Education Booking Conference
Columbia, SC
Here's what a few of the sponsors had to say about the AIE Booking Conference:
With nearly 30 years of teaching experience, Gail Paulik, a reading teacher at M.C. Riley Elementary in Bluffton, S.C., is very familiar with booking artists. She contracts one week-long residency per grade level each year - a total of six residencies annually.
She has welcomed many artists into her schools throughout the past 16 years and says that she meets new artists every year at the South Carolina Arts Commission's Arts in Education Booking Conference. “The conference provides a perfect place to meet new artists and allows me to touch base with resident artists whom I've already booked for the upcoming year,” said Paulik. “With a classroom full of kids all day, I have a hard time reaching artists, who are normally on the road themselves.”
A reading teacher, Paulik experiments with her artist residencies by mixing various art disciplines with different grade levels. For example, she once integrated a sweetgrass basket-making residency into a third-grade history class to illustrate South Carolina culture. With certain grade levels, she has a specific goal in mind. For instance, she books poetry residencies for her fourth-graders to prepare them for the PACT test.
Another veteran from M.C. Riley, Barbara Streitenberger, also attends the conference to meet new faces. “The conference allows me to actually see - not just read about - what each artist plans to do in the classroom,” Streitenberger said.
Streitenberger, who has been teaching for nine years, has found that residencies with a hands-on approach are more likely to capture her students' attention. “Residencies using elements like clay and musical instruments have been successful both in my classroom and in others throughout the school,” she said.