Creative Classroom
Our professional teaching artists represent a wide variety of art forms and cultural backgrounds and make the arts live and breathe in classrooms. Everyone in the classroom creates no matter what their abilities, giving every student the opportunity to benefit from our artists’ attention and expertise.
COMPAS board, staff, and teaching artists are deeply committed to using our assets to mitigate racial, ethnic and income disparities in our region. We take a leadership role in delivering priority access to creative learning experiences for BIPOC communities.
Ready to see what a COMPAS Teaching Artist could accomplish in your classroom? Let’s talk!
From creative writing to zoology, teaching through the arts enriches curriculum and engages learners. Here are just a few areas where COMPAS can boost student learning:
Arts
We love working with art and music teachers to expand the scope of art forms available to students. Our programs meet Minnesota arts standards in dance, media arts, music, theater and visual arts, and go way beyond the ordinary. Students learn professional techniques, work side-by-side with a practicing artist and create original art.
Literacy and Language Arts
We work with each school to understand its artistic, social and language arts goals and help them select a COMPAS poet, non-fiction writer, storyteller, memoirist, playwright or other writer who will inspire and motivate students as they meet those goals. Selected student pieces from our literary and communications programs are published each year in the COMPAS Anthology of Student Writing. Click here to explore a sample of literary programs that will engage your entire classroom - even those reluctant writers.
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Global Cultures
Immerse students in the vibrancy of cultures from around the world. COMPAS artists bring their cultures to life through African drumming; Music from Ecuador; Dances of Northern India; Aztec dancing; SAORI weaving; music from Algeria, Egypt, Hawaii, Morocco and Tunisia; Swedish mythology; Bharatanatyam dance; Henna painting from India; and Gamelan music of Java, among many other things. Many of our artists are bilingual and can teach in Spanish, French, Hmong, Japanese. Click on Global Cultures in our Artists gallery to see a full list of artists.
STEM
COMPAS delivers alternative methods of learning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in ways that motivate students who may struggle in more traditional settings. COMPAS encourages the doing, creating and hands-on parts of art and science. We’ve got some great thought-starters on what we’ve done in the past. Click here to explore how we can create a program to help teach STEM through art.
Communication
Students (especially middle and high school students) discover the power of their ideas and voice as they analyze language, stereotypes, social programming, etc. They'll stretch to use new vocabulary and manipulate language to tell their story concisely and rhythmically in our popular spoken word and hip hop programs. Not sure what spoken word looks like? Here's a 2-minute video of one student performing her piece.
Note: In response to the challenges presented by COVID-19, COMPAS continues to find innovative ways to connect children with arts experiences wherever – and however - their schooling is taking place.
Whether your school, community center, or other program is open for in-person programming or is operating virtually we have artists who are ready to deliver their quality arts programs to meet your current operational needs. Read more about our policies.
