Center for Artistry and Scholarship Information

The Center for Artistry and Scholarship (CAS) is a nonprofit that fosters and mobilizes creative, arts-immersed schools, where students are making and doing, teachers are asking how and why, and schools are engaged in their community. What is an arts-immersed school? These schools do not view art as a separate class, but as an opportunity to bring math, science and the language arts to life through hands-on projects. Band and orchestra are not seen as separate after-school programs, but opportunities to learn essential life lessons, such as collaboration, responsibility, perseverance, and empathy. Initial work of CAS: Identify, Develop & Support Identify best practices CAS will profile arts-immersed schools that transcend sectors and grade spans, while showing how educators can implement similar practices in their school or classroom. We will begin with schools regionally and nationally, and we hope to become international in scope in the next few years. Develop future leaders CAS will support future leaders in arts-immersed schools through the Perrone-Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership. The Perrone-Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership develops leaders who integrate educational, artistic and communitybased strategies to transform the lives of youth and families from diverse backgrounds. The first cohort begins in the fall of 2016 in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Boston. Support arts-immersed schools Since the summer of 2016, CAS has provided support and guidance to the leaders of the Conservatory Lab Charter School as they develop a national model of teaching and learning based on the orchestral practices of El Sistema and the project-based and service-learning approach of expeditionary learning (EL). CAS hopes to expand this direct guidance to other schools in the future.