photo courtesy of the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes

The Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes has announced its inaugural cohort of ARTEFFECT Ambassadors, a prestigious online fellowship for educators working directly with K-12 students to foster the visual arts. The 28 individuals in the first ARTEFFECT Ambassadors cohort hail from diverse educational, professional and geographic backgrounds and specialize in areas including visual arts, social studies, general education, special education and nonprofits.

This year’s ARTEFFECT Ambassadors will participate in themed virtual professional development sessions, collaborating with and learning from other high-level practitioners. Their work will inspire others through art-centered project-based education in an engaging and collegial environment and will create new pathways in visual art education by harnessing the ARTEFFECT Unsung Heroes curriculum. These online sessions – several of which are also open to all interested educators and free to join – encompass varied themes and subject areas, including STEAM, character education, Holocaust studies and narrative art-making.

In each session, participants will: examine their relationships to the diverse stories of Unsung Heroes from history; collaborate with other educators to deepen their instructional practice; explore lesson plans that provide step-by-step modeling to creatively and visually interpret the stories of the LMC Unsung Heroes: individuals, largely unrecognized by society, who took extraordinary actions to improve the lives of others and made a profound and positive impact on the course of history.

LMC founder Lowell Milken said the “voices and collective impact are proof positive that celebrating the qualities and character embodied in the Unsung Heroes can generate these qualities in younger generations.”

In addition to participating in professional development modules – as well as opportunities to advocate for visual arts education and inspire leadership among educators and learners in the classroom and community – ARTEFFECT Ambassadors receive an unrestricted stipend of $1,250, $250 credit towards materials and a certificate of participation upon completion. The professional development program will culminate with Ambassadors developing and delivering a capstone project, such as creating a new lesson plan, student art exhibition or workshop. Ambassadors will then implement these projects within their classrooms and communities, allowing each participant to make an impact that extends the stories of the Unsung Heroes into various educational contexts.

“LMC received an overwhelming response among a very competitive pool of applications and accepted more participants for this inaugural cohort than originally anticipated,” said director of ARTEFFECT, Toni Guglielmo, Ph.D. “The creativity and enthusiasm expressed by the Ambassadors in their initial capstone project ideas underscore the value of teaching and learning through the stories of LMC Unsung Heroes as role models.”

Since 2016, ARTEFFECT has run an annual visual art competition for middle and high school students. Last year’s competition awarded $20,000 to teachers and students, and the next cycle will accept submissions from through May 1, 2024. The new Ambassadors initiative further supports visual arts education by directly engaging educators to bring these remarkable stories into their classrooms and communities – and inspire students to recognize their own ability to make a positive impact on the world through art.

For information, visit lowellmilkencenter.org/programs/arteffect-online-professional-development/lmc-arteffect-ambassadors.