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| A Web-based Curriculum Now Going Into Classrooms The National Endowment for the Arts and Jazz at Lincoln Center have announced that their ambitious new educational resource, NEA Jazz in the Schools, is now entering classrooms nationwide. To date, more than 2,000 high-school teachers have received this comprehensive, web-based curriculum. To help introduce NEA Jazz in the Schools, the Arts Endowment and Jazz at Lincoln Center will jointly present the curriculum at a workshop on January 14 at the annual conference of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE), the world's largest gathering of the global jazz community. The presentation will be held at 9:00 a.m. in the Trianon Ballroom of the New York Hilton. Participants in the IAJE conference-some 7,000 educators, musicians, recording executives, exhibitors, journalists, and jazz enthusiasts-may also explore the curriculum at the booths of the Arts Endowment and Jazz at Lincoln Center. The five-unit, multimedia curriculum (www.neajazzintheschools.org ) is available free to high-school social studies, U.S. history, and music teachers, to help their students explore jazz as an indigenous American art form and as a means to understand American history. The curriculum, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, is produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center, a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to enriching the artistic substance and perpetuating the democratic spirit of America's music, and is supported by a $100,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation. According to Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, "We are committed to creating arts education programs of the highest quality that help our nation's teachers enliven their classrooms and that provide meaningful connections to the arts for their students. This curriculum, produced by our partner Jazz at Lincoln Center, offers a unique perspective on American history and the multi-dimensional means to explore that history." "Since our inception, Jazz at Lincoln Center has been committed to creating jazz listeners of all ages through education, concerts, and broadcasts, " states Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. "It's our privilege to be working with the National Endowment for the Arts to further this mission, and we're looking forward to reaching a whole new audience-our American history and social studies teachers and their students. Jazz music gives us a different, more homegrown mythology, with heroes like Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, and jazz provides a voice for some of our nation's most significant historic events." "This Verizon Foundation grant reflects our commitment to help organizations implement innovative youth programs that use teaching tools available in this broadband age, " comments Patrick R. Gaston, president of the Verizon Foundation. "This is an exciting initiative that will bring a revered American art form to thousands of students through the use of web-based technology." NEA Jazz in the Schools provides five flexible units, each of which can be taught in a day or expanded into a more comprehensive series of lessons. Each unit includes a short introductory video; a lesson essay; links to a wealth of multimedia resources (musical excerpts, period photographs, and additional sources of information); a teacher's guide with teacher tips, cross-curricular activities, and assessment methods; and student activities. The units meet lesson objectives and national curriculum standards in five subject areas: U.S. history, social studies, arts education/music, civics and government, and geography. Materials are free and available through www.neajazzintheschools.org and as a multimedia toolkit. The toolkit, designed primarily for high school teachers without adequate web access, will include all of the materials featured on the website including a Teacher Guide, two CDs, a DVD, and a timeline poster. The five units of NEA Jazz in the Schools are The Advent of Jazz: The Dawn of the Twentieth Century; The Jazz Age and the Swing Era; Bebop and Modernism; From the New Frontier to the New Millennium; and Jazz: An American Story. The Advent of Jazz went on-line before the beginning of the autumn 2005 school term. The full curriculum is now in classrooms. NEA Jazz in the Schools is released in partnership with the International Association for Jazz Education, which is utilizing its membership network to encourage use of this curriculum and is reaching out on its behalf to other professional organizations, such as the National Association for the Social Studies. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |