Miami University Art Education Alumni

Miami Art Ed is excited to share about a new program we're launching in partnership with the Lane Community Technology Center in Hamilton!

This is a free after-school program for middle-school-aged students. Feel free to share in your circles!

Interested families can register their students here: https://tinyurl.com/STEAMEX-signup

Sessions are led by Honors College students enrolled in Miami Art Education's 'Digital Materials and Making in Arts Learning' course. Youth in grades 6-8 can sign up for these sessions. Previous experience in digital art is not required!

Each attendee will experience a range of creative projects in a variety of digital mediums during this 4-session program, focusing on free software tools they can continue to explore beyond our sessions! The lessons are developed anew each year by the Miami students, and common activities include digital image manipulation, digital illustration, coding, game design, and interaction design.

This program is offered free of charge, with no registration fees. However, available seats are limited.

Miami University's Saturday Art program is accepting registrations for participants for this fall!

Please visit the program website for more information and to register:

https://miamisaturdayart.weebly.com/

We hope you will check out Miami University Art Education Alumni Mentor features, which were put together by the spring 2025 Professional Partnerships capstone class!

ART 493 Spring 2025 - Alumni Profiles Explore the links below to learn more about our interviews with Miami University alumni during spring 2025.

Update: Thanks to additional context provided by alumna Julie Lindsey below, and some subsequent digging through the Michael Autobio Lecture archives, we've learned that Saturday Art predates the estimate we had - it was founded in spring 1953!

Since the 75th anniversary will be here in just three years, we think it's still valuable to begin collecting stories to celebrate THAT significant anniversary!

Share your stories here:
https://tinyurl.com/satartmemories

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Original Post:

While Dr. Meeken still trying to find the precise origin date of the program, our best estimates say that 2025 is Saturday Art's 65th anniversary!

To commemorate this milestone, we've set up a Google Form where people can share their Saturday Art stories and experiences, which we may post to the program website or include in other materials celebrating the longevity of the program! If you're interested, please follow the link below:

https://tinyurl.com/satartmemories

Highview Sixth Grade Center in Middletown City School District is hiring immediately for a Long-Term Substitute Art Teacher through the end of the school year!

Bring creativity and inspiration to our students—apply today! 👉 https://www.middletowncityschools.com/departments/human-resources/career-opportunities/

For more information, call Nicole Fisher at 513-420-4566 Ext. 2817

The Miami University Preservice Art Education Conference is happening this spring, on Sunday, April 6th!

https://tinyurl.com/preserviceconference

We encourage our awesome alumni to consider proposing 30-minute presentations to share their knowledge with up-and-coming art educators from Miami and beyond!

See the Conference website for the link to propose a presentation or register for the conference, as well as other information.

Proposals can either be talks covering relevant topics, or hands-on workshops exploring materials and processes.

(If your proposal is accepted and you will be presenting at the conference, you can waive the conference fee!)

If it helps you to have suggestions, our students have brought these up as topics they would find useful or interesting (but feel free to share whatever expertise you have to share!):

-maintaining your art practice/artist identity alongside teaching

-teaching digital art

-supporting LGBTQ+ students (and/or self-care/supports/resources as an LGBTQ+ teacher)

-effective, socio-emotionally responsible classroom management strategies

-tips for "sub-optimal" teaching setups: (Teaching "art on a cart", Traveling between multiple schools)

-disability and inclusion in the art room (Or supports for teachers with disabilities, including neurodiversity, invisible disability)

-budgeting materials - making the most out of a school budget
(I think a way to keep this from being dry could be to make it a workshop - like, have teams in different scenarios with different needs and budgets have to actually fill out a materials order?)

-preventing burnout

-art teaching with non-English speakers and English learners

-teaching performance art in K-12

-phones in secondary classrooms - managing behaviors, 'banning' phones, integrating phones into lessons/activities

-grad school experiences - taking classes while teaching, taking grad school classes for art ed or for other subjects, other topics related to continuing education and learning as a teacher

-hands-on workshops for useful/new/interesting materials for the K-12 art room

This conference is a great opportunity to share your experiences and expertise with emerging art educators, who are in a place you were in not too long ago! It’s also a great bullet point to add to a resume or a professional development portfolio!

Registration is open for the Spring '25 session of our Saturday Art program!

https://miamisaturdayart.weebly.com/

Happy 2025! Check out this awesome picture that Laura (Leichter) Pearl (class of 2020) posted! Laura is teaching Ceramics at Davis High school in Kaysville, Utah!

If any of you would like to share a picture of you in your classroom and a brief update about where you are teaching, please send a DM! We would love to feature you and reconnect you with other alumni.

Saturday Art at Miami University is gearing up to start again soon! Hopefully seeing this post brings back some fond memories for our alumni! There are still a few spots left! Contact Dr. Luke Meeken with questions.

Huge thanks to Isabella Obradovich for all of her work as director of sponsorships for the Preservice Art Education Conference and for putting together this great video! https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4tIsKspBq7/?igsh=YnBtbmQwd21hdTh0

On February 11, 2024, over 85 preservice and in-service art educators came together in the Art Building to celebrate teaching art and discuss contemporary issues in the field at the third Preservice Art Education Conference at Miami University. Students, faculty, and alumni from 21 different institutions were among the attendees, as were two incoming Miami University first-year art education majors from local high schools. The conference opened with a keynote address by Dr. B. Stephen Carpenter II, whose keynote was entitled, “If Teachers Teach What Do Learners Learn?:  A Sampling of Educational Experiences”. There were a total of twenty-three presentations given, including two from the Miami University Center for Career Exploration and Success: Sarah Keefe and Charlie Chen presented twice, detailing the importance of CV/resume and portfolio development & providing other important resources available to preservice art educators through the Center. Presentation topics included DEI, lesson planning, classroom management, disability/accessibility, assessment, creative technologies, museum resources, career planning, and leadership. @laceyclarkart screen-printed custom “swag bags” that were later filled with goodies from this year’s conference sponsors. @weareticonderoga , @prangartsupplies , @xppen , @arrtxart , Sketch for Schools, @cincyartmuseum , @royallangnickelclassroom , @modabrush , and Sax were all contributors to the bags. Sophomore Isa Obradovich, who served as this year’s Director of Sponsorships, used her collective social media platform of over 2 million followers (@isabella.drawsss) to reach out to these sponsors. These art supplies were both included in the swag bags and raffled off as door prizes. The grand prize was the XP Pen Artist Pro 16 Drawing Display (Gen 2), which was generously donated by @XPPen for the conference. Azure Kim (@blackbeltarting ) won the tablet, and the speedpaint in this video is his! The 2024 PSAE Conference was supported by a CTE major teaching grant and through a CCA Reeder Fund grant. - @miamiohcca @miamioharted @naea_miamioh @sndanker #arteducation #miamiuniversity #thrivingartists

Tonight is Dr. Steve Carpenter's John & Betty Michael Autobiographical Lecture in Art Education! Join us--lecture is at 7:00 p.m.! You can read about Steve's work and register to get the Zoom link here: https://miamioh.edu/cca/departments/art/academics/lecture-series.html