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About the Festival:

Reinventing Strong Practices: Equitable Access to Creative Opportunity is a project of the William Penn Foundation, in partnership with WolfBrown and Creative Generation, that desires to foster a community of learning amongst teaching artists in Philadelphia schools in which we celebrate current practices but inspire future curiosity. 

Over the Summer, join a community of learning to re-examine arts education as a tool for social justice and equity of imaginative opportunities for all learners. Led by Philadelphia and Boston artists and educators, participants will rethink what they bring to schools and classrooms and how they complete that vital work.

Below you can find the session schedule: 

• Session One - Bethlehem the Vocussionist

• Session Two - Maurice Parent & Megan Sandberg-Zakian 

• Session Three - To be announced. 

• Session Four - Kimberly McGlonn, Ph.D.

• Session Five - Drs. Steven J. Holochwost & Dennie Palmer Wolf 

• Session Six - Drs. Steven J. Holochwost & Dennie Palmer Wolf 

The Context behind the Festival: 

The William Penn Foundation’s Creative Communities (CC) program funds programs and initiatives that provide opportunities for all people in Philadelphia and the region to benefit from inclusive, diverse, and high-quality public spaces and arts and culture experiences.  

The multiple and ongoing pandemics of the last three years have...

• Made broad-based inequalities starkly clear: 
  • Access to a well-rounded education, especially arts education; and, 
  • Access to platforms for learning (high-quality schools, out-of-school programs, digital platforms) 
• Emphasized the need for:
  • Designing programs and strategies to combat inequalities and make high-quality, well-rounded education widely available
  • Using every available strategy (design, delivery, partnerships) to reach those goals
• Driven realizations:
  • The William Penn Foundation re-formulated its Creative Communities strategies, as seen in the revised commitments above;  
  • William Penn Foundation grantees invested in promising new directions (in part because of the Foundation’s continued support and flexibility); and, 
  • WolfBrown revised measurements, data collection strategies, and approaches to analyses, including a set of “offline” conversations with grantees to design a new, collaborative approach to research in program improvement.

What's needed in face of these realizations?

In order to harvest and act on these insights, program administrators and teaching artists say they need:

• Support to reflect on and reap what they learned,
• A year to focus solely on re-starting their work in a way that builds on realizations and lessons,
• A chance to re-set teacher partnerships as much more mutual and active,
• Cross-program conversations to learn from one another in order to build new strategies,
• Consultation/support as they develop programs anew, and 
• A pause in research demands and a discussion about how to move forward.

This festival is the first step in supporting the work ahead for the Foundation, WolfBrown, and Philadelphia's community of teaching artists.