Teaching and Learning With Wolf Trap
Offered through UTC's Arts-Based Collaborative, the program pairs teaching artists with classroom teachers
Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash
Welcome!
You’re reading DanceChatt, a publication dedicated to dance writing centered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A few months ago a teaching artist said, “I want to know who else is going into classrooms to teach performing arts in the area.” It’s important to learn who all is doing the work in order to make connections and multiply resources. So for this issue, DanceChatt interviewed Angela Dittmar of the Wolf Trap affiliate program at UTC. I hope you enjoy learning about this program for teaching artists.
Fall is just around the corner, and with fall come performances. Serious dance deserves serious attention, so if you want to review a show, reach out. Anyone going to see Ballet Esprit’s performance at the Hunter Museum of American Art next Thursday? I can’t review them — that’s my company! But I bet someone reading this wants to write something about it.
Teaching and Learning With Wolf Trap
By Jenn McCormick
Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts is a program dedicated to using theater, dance, puppetry and other performing arts to build academic, social and emotional development for students while inculcating the joy of learning. Named for Wolf Trap Farm, the original Wolf Trap location and home to Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, Wolf Trap now has affiliates across the country. At each affiliate, Wolf Trap teaching artists receive training in childhood curriculum so they can implement arts-integrated lessons and help children deepen their skills in literacy, STEM and whole-person learning. The Wolf Trap program in Chattanooga is only a few years old, but it’s already having an impact in classrooms across the area.
“Performing arts really invite multisensory, multimodality learning experiences, and Wolf Trap’s goals are approached by integrating performing arts into the curriculum,” says Angela Dittmar, MFA, Director of Teaching Artist Residencies and Affiliate Director of the UTC-Wolf Trap at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. “They impact the whole child, while empowering teachers to build their own toolkits.”
Wolf Trap in Chattanooga
Angela explains that the first Wolf Trap affiliate in Tennessee was in Nashville, a program that is still in existence.
“Chattanoogans were involved before Wolf Trap started creating affiliate partnerships,” she says. “We joined as an affiliate in 2019.”
Despite this recent affiliation, arts-based education at UTC and Wolf Trap were evolving along similar lines for years. The Arts-Based Collaborative, which previously existed at UTC as the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts, and Wolf Trap both treat arts as a lens through which other subjects may be productively viewed, especially for young learners.
“The Arts-Based Collaborative has a 30-plus year history at UTC, and Wolf Trap is 35 years strong,” Angela says. “Wolf Trap was created in partnership with Head Start and is very much married to the idea of working in early learning classrooms.”
As part of the Arts-Based Collaborative, the Chattanooga Wolf Trap affiliate first launched a program at Siskin Early Learning Centers with eight performing artists from around the region — musicians, dramatic artists and a dancer.
The collaborative now serves schools in a 17-county radius, Angela says, as well as the Chattanooga Head Start Program, Little Miss Mag, the UTC Children’s Center, and Siskin Early Learning.
How Does Wolf Trap Work?
Angela describes the program as a “job-embedded professional development program.”
“When we partner with a performing artist, we hire them on as temporary staff,” she says. “Through Wolf Trap, [they] are partnered with an educator or early learning center or pre-kindergarten classroom.”
While the Arts-Based Collaborative offers programming for educators in the elementary grades and younger but sometimes holds workshops for all grade levels, Wolf Trap serves learners up to 7 years old. Housed in the Challenger Center, a STEM learning center at UTC, Wolf Trap brings together performing arts with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This marriage is one that has stood the test of time.
When I interviewed Angela in July, the program had about 11 teaching artists in music and performing arts including theater, drama, puppetry, storytelling, and movement arts.
“It’s a twofold experience,” Angela says. “The learners get to experience working with a teaching artist and increase access to movement, imaginative play, storytelling, and tactile engagement through the different arts tools and arts mediums. Meanwhile, the teacher is receiving professional development in the classroom to be able to ideate and brainstorm with teaching artists to create curriculum and to build the skills they are interested in.”
Instead of coming in, teaching a unit, and leaving, the Wolf Trap artists serve as facilitators for the classroom teachers, helping them discern how they can use their personal creative interests to develop their own arts-based lessons.
The Nuts and Bolts
Typically participating a two-month residency, Wolf Trap teaching artists work as a team with their paired teachers, co-teaching short lessons twice a week. They also work with their students through “tailored, curated experiences of arts integration around their developmental or literacy goals,” Angela says. “Then the teaching artist passes the baton of the arts instruction part to the [classroom] teacher over that timeline.”
For example, Angela explains, a kindergarten class may be studying the weather, with goals to demonstrate awareness of the cycles of rain from clouds to groundwater to clouds again. A Wolf Trap teaching artist with a dance background might help students learn that cycle through putting related movements into their bodies — a dance expressive of the rain cycle, or a performance illustrating it. That same lesson would advance goals for gross motor skills and possibly fine motor skills — “whatever developmental domains the teacher and artist identify they want to put together in a unit and work towards.”
Angela, who is an artist as well as her administrative roles, has even used her art in a lesson on sweet potatoes.
“Through Wolf Trap, I developed a movement-based sequence [for WTCI PBS], a puppet show for learning the lifecycle of a sweet potato,” she says. “It relates to a charity project I do outside my work to raise sweet potatoes for the Community Kitchen. I have taken that into early learning centers with my Co-Chair, who performs the puppet show.”
This openness to cross-institutional collaboration is a hallmark of both Wolf Trap and the Early Learning Collaborative.
Why Wolf Trap?
If puppet shows about sweet potatoes and dances about rainwater weren’t enough, Wolf Trap has benefits for students, classroom teachers, and teaching artists alike.
“The arts foster connections and empathy and the ability to reimagine the world,” Angela says. “And all of those are such vital skills needed to thrive as humans.”
The arts enable each child to make a unique connection with the subject matter, and that sense of connection empowers a confidence, an openness to new experiences, and eagerness to learn.
“There are very practical ways that the arts empower learning and the whole child,” Angela says. “Clearly movement-based arts will empower motor skills. Clearly music will empower audio and oral skills. But I truly believe that when children are exposed to the arts, their desire to live and thrive and share increases in multifold ways that we don’t fully understand except through that experience. And it’s joyful. Wolf Trap is dedicated to joyful learning. We know that if you are having a joyful experience, your desire to be there and your willingness to sit with [that learning] and be in that space with the unknown is even greater.”
Applying to Become a Wolf Trap Teaching Artist
While any performing artist can apply to become a Wolf Trap teaching artist, the application process to be added to the roster is not always open. Instead, the program periodically opens a new round of applications so a new class of teaching artists can go through orientation together. Working with a master Wolf Trap teaching artist, they develop a portfolio of lessons.
Eight artists typically train at a time, and, Angela says, “our roster would definitely benefit from more dance experts and dance artists.”
Learn more about Wolf Trap
If you have questions about the local Wolf Trap program or other arts-based education initiatives at UTC, reach out to Angela at angela-dittmar@utc.edu. Follow Arts-Based Collaborative at UTC on Facebook and Instagram to look for the next UTC Wolf Trap application cycle.
To learn more about Wolf Trap, visit wolftrap.org.
About the Author
Jenn McCormick is a writer, editor and dancer working in Chattanooga. She is the publisher and managing editor of DanceChatt.
Join the Chatt
I hope you enjoyed this article. There are many more opportunities for teaching artists to deepen their craft in Chattanooga — if you know of one, reach out. I’d love to share that knowledge with our readers.
Join the conversation! If you’re interested in writing for DanceChatt, send a pitch email to jennelisewebster@gmail.com.
Until then, keep dancing.
— Jenn McCormick