Gevirtz School members visit the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and listen to artist-in-residence Alejandro Cartagena. Credit: George YatchisinA contingent of faculty, staff, and students from UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, along with teachers from its Harding University Partnership School, recently met with Santa Barbara Museum of Art Director of Education Patsy Hicks to discuss forging new educational partnerships. The group sat in the museum’s Family Resource Center interactive educational space currently designed around the theme “Where Art Meets Science” to discuss just that – how the museum could be a lab for the furthering of STEM education, teacher preparation, and educational research.
“The museum sees this meeting as just the first step in a process of discovery,” Hicks says. “While we already have a host of educator events and workshops and student programs, we are always looking for ways to expand our impact in the community. Connecting with the Gevirtz School seems an avenue for even greater reach.”
This meeting featured artist-in-residence Alejandro Cartagena from Monterrey, Mexico. Cartagena showed some photographs from his serial series Car Poolers, and discussed educational assignments he developed for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hicks suggested Gevirtz School students and researchers could work with artists such as Cartagena as just one advantage of a SBMA-GGSE partnership.
Beyond that, Hicks was receptive to numerous types of collaboration, even mentioning that graduate students could come in and design a “program” in the Family Resource Center interactive educational space, a hands-on way to turn theories of education into action.
“We couldn’t be more pleased to have this opportunity to work with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art,” says Lilly Garcia, Director of STEM Outreach at the Gevirtz School. “Their existing education programs are so robust – from lesson plans to outreach programs, from English Language Learner Focus Tours to creating ways to use art to address the new Common Core standards – that we know this partnership will benefit our students in immeasurable ways.”
Editor’s Note: This article is republished with permission from the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. Article and photo by George Yatchisin, Communications Coordinator, Gevirtz School.