Learning in Arts and Culture Program Fellowships

Thanks to support from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2009 VSC will offer at least two residency fellowship awards to Lamoille County single subject art and English teachers through VSC’s Learning in Arts and Culture Program (LACP). Vermont Studio Center residencies will allow teachers the opportunity to immerse themselves in their own art and creative writing projects, reinvigorating their teaching approaches and familiarizing them with the cultural, literary and artistic resources VSC has to offer to their students.  Modest funds will be made available to participating teachers to assist them in creating curriculum that builds on their VSC experience and exposes their students to the international creative community in their own backyard.

call for applications (download pdf)

The newly created teaching fellowships are VSC’s way of reaching out to local middle and high schools based on the success our 15-year-old partnership with Johnson Elementary School, where VSC’s staff and resident international artists provide weekly art instruction to all students.  Expansion of the LACP was also inspired by the Zoe Barnum Fellowship Fund which has provided VSC fellowships to English teachers in northern California’s Elk Grove School District since 2004. Dorienne Cedeno and Moira Donovan, both English teachers at People’s Academy, received the LACP fellowships in 2008, the pilot year of the program.  They found it revitalized their own approach to writing and have seen tremendous student impact including the founding of a new student literary journal.  VSC hopes to expand the program to include single subject art and English teachers throughout Vermont.

"The Studio Center offered me an opportunity to call myself a writer for the first time. I encourage my students to identify themselves as writers, but rarely am able to do so myself. Simply using the title was liberating and inspiring, allowing me a freedom in creativity and expression I had not felt in quite a while."
-- Dorienne Cedeno

"I brought to the Studio Center writing that I started last summer... The visiting writer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who graciously read my first chapter, gave me several very useful, technical suggestions, along with plenty of encouragement. Taking her suggestion I created a visual of my story on the studio wall, with a color scheme to denote present or past scenes and transitions. Once I did this I felt the whole of the work lift and I could write freely, as if the process of creating the structure enabled my imagination to play once more. I have no doubt that I will now be able to complete this novel once I return."
--Moira Donovan