Top: Kamren Samuels and Maura Galante in a lithography workshop. Bottom: Galante before passing images through the press. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Maura Galante smoothed a dampened sheet of paper over a thick, inky spray of red and blue, methodical as she worked. Beneath it, a photocopy coated in bright color and gum arabic showed a cluster of trees and a cutout of the Venus de Milo. Galante reached out and began to turn the press. Across from her, teacher Kamren Samuels watched every movement. When she lifted his design, reproduced in red ink, he burst into a smile.
“Hey! Thank you thank you!” he exclaimed. “That’s what’s up!”
Galante is a veteran educator at Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy (BRADA, formerly Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School) and the head of printmaking at Creative Arts Workshop. Samuels is a visual arts teacher at Augusta Lewis Troup School, where he teaches close to 400 students a year. Tuesday, their worlds collided at “The Creator’s Classroom: Student Spark,” a conference for New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) arts educators who are on the cusp of a new academic year.
Roughly 200 teachers attended, working across the Audubon Arts District for hours of master classes in music production, songwriting, dance, theater, and visual arts. On Audubon Street, participating organizations included Neighborhood Music School (NMS), Creative Arts Workshop (CAW), the New Haven Ballet and ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). That itself may be a feat: the four organizations share a city block but rarely collaborate with each other.
The conference marks the inaugural collaboration between NHPS and the GRAMMY Museum and Recording Academy, of which beloved New Haven teacher Pat Smith is a chapter member and a seven-time nominee. Smith, who for 37 years led the music program at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, is now the new NHPS coordinator of fine arts. He and the GRAMMY Academy worked closely with Holly Maxson, NHPS supervisor of fine arts, to make the conference a reality.
“I’m feeling verklempt!” Smith said during a lunch hour at NMS, visibly choked up as he spoke. Around him, attendees picked up catered lunches from The Loop by Hachiroku and headed outside to catch up over shared tables. “I’ve been dreaming about this for years. Holly and I really knitted together the four institutions on this street.”
“Last year, we partnered with 32 different community partners, and this year, it’s like, ‘Ok, we’re ready for some changes,” added Maxson, who is starting her second year in the district. After a year of listening to arts teachers talk about their needs in the classroom, “it’s been all about collaboration in every way possible.”
That was fully on display Tuesday, as the recital hall at Neighborhood Music School filled up with hundreds of educators from across the district. Less than 48 hours stood between them and the beginning of the school year; many had already spent several days in their arts classrooms, organizing supplies and running over class rosters to master names before the fist day. On one side of the room, Smith soaked it all in, making time to chat with former student and Latin Grammy Winner Marcos Sánchez.
“In the arts is where innovation happens,” said Keisha Redd-Hannans, assistant superintendent of curriculum, instruction, and assessment for NHPS. “You tap into those unknown geniuses.”
And it was. After a keynote on “culture in the classroom”—spoiler: learn the difference between appreciation and appropriation—teachers fanned out across Audubon Street, from intimate dance lessons in basement studios to classes in music production and songwriting with Grammy-winning musicians and NHPS staff side-by-side. Almost all of the classes included instruction from at least one NHPS teacher or community member, a pillar of the conference that Smith said was vitally important to him.
In a third floor classroom at Creative Arts Workshop, attendees could see why in real time. Donning oxblood-colored aprons, teachers surrounded Galante as she introduced herself, and walked them through directions on paper lithography. Around a long table, bowls of water, clean glass inking slabs and containers of gum arabic waited eagerly for them to jump in. All of them are necessary for lithography, which involves the transfer of an image from one surface onto another.
At each place setting, Galante had placed a printout describing the exercise, so that teachers could both understand the steps (within printmaking, lithography may be the form closest to magic) and reproduce it in their classrooms. On a counter nearby, cutouts of Xeroxed images sat waiting for the group, ready to be inked and reproduced in bright color.
“How do you know how much pressure to use?” a teacher piped up as Galante described the process, through which an artist coats a photocopy with gum arabic, applies it to a dampened glass plate, and inks it before placing paper on top, and passing it through a press. It’s a kind of litho-shortcut, with many of the same chemical interactions that make the art form possible.
“Practice!” answered Galante, who has taught thousands of artists in her decades at Betsy Ross and at CAW. “It’s pretty magical. I’m not sure why it works, but it works.”
Teacher Rebecca Mickelson.
Around her, teachers buzzed with back-to-school excitement. Rebecca Mickelson, who teaches at the Dr. Reginald Mayo Early Learning Center, said she’s always looking for new exercises to bring into her classroom, where she introduces three- to five-year-old students to different forms of art each time they walk through the door. While lithography may not be appropriate for her age group, it helps her remember the breadth of art forms that are at her fingertips.
“I haven’t done any sort of lithography since college,” Mickelson said, excited to jump in. She pulled out a black-and-white photocopy of a woodsy scene from the nearby counter, and got started. “We’re all staring down the first day of kids coming,” and moments like Tuesday’s make that transition feel more bearable.
Samuels, who is in his ninth year of teaching in the district, added that he’s always grateful for a chance to think about new techniques to bring to his students. Teaching K-8 classes at Troup, he’s constantly aware that each class has very different educational needs. While lithography might not be in the cards for his classes this year—Troup doesn’t have a printing press—the exercise made him think about new alternatives to linocut printing, which required sharp tools and a level of coordination that younger students might not yet have.
“I think my goal going into the year is that the majority of students finish their projects,” he said.
Mellody Gallagher in a tetra pak etching workshop from CAW instructor Mark Grindell. She said that it was the first professional development in a long time that she could remember being in a community-oriented institution.
At the printing press, that magic Galante had mentioned was taking shape. One by one, teachers brought their designs over to her: giant dragonflies with big, papery wings; trees that glowed red and green; the Brooklyn Bridge, stretching across the Hudson River in an inky, dark blue. Many stayed to watch as she placed a dampened, creamy sheet of paper on top and began to crank, the press bending to her touch. Nearby, Truman School teacher Kasalina Nabakooza took it all in with a sense of wonder.
“I really enjoyed this project,” said Nabakooza, who is starting her second year in the district and has served as a fellow at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. “This process of using the copies [photocopies] was a really innovative idea.
As teachers-turned-students filed out of the classroom, Galante said that she saw Tuesday’s conference as not just a chance to share knowledge, but to remind fellow arts educators why they do what they do—and that they got into it because they are artists themselves.
Superintendent Dr. Madeline Negrón (in suit), who began the day with high praise for the arts.
In the past few years, NHPS has left many arts teachers—often relegated to part-time roles or billed as “specials” instructors, despite the fact that they keep students coming to school—feeling taken for granted. That was especially true in April, as Superintendent Dr. Madeline Negrón announced a proposal to cut costs by eliminating arts instructors and library and media specialists. The NHPS budget later passed with those positions intact.
“Today is for us to just enhance our art practice,” she said, with high praise for the level of deep listening and responsiveness Maxson has brought to the district since her arrival. “If we can take some of it back to the classroom, that’s great. But we have to enhance our own art practice too.”
“I think it just helps me remember that I’m an artist,” she added. “That I have to keep working on my art practice and bring the joy I get out of it to the kids.”
An Educational Dream
Ingrid Schaeffer.
Just down the street, theater teachers gathered in a first-floor studio as ACES ECA instructor Ingrid Schaeffer walked them calmly through an exercise she does with students early in the semester. Around her, they had transformed from buttoned-up, classroom-ready educators in business casual clothes into a knot of bodies, a few of them giggling as they leaned all the way in, arms extended.
Between them, there were at least a dozen stories: of scrappy high school drama programs that punch way above their weight; of district alumni who still look to the teachers that raised them; of teachers who shook a fear of Sondheim for their kids, and soared; of the first educational team to bring a musical to Hill Central Music Academy in years. Now, all of them hung onto Schaeffer’s every word.
“You’re gonna melt into the floor to the count of ten,” she said, explaining that she wanted them to move as though they were candles, sizzling on their way down. She counted slowly, and the room filled with a momentary hissing, teachers sinking to the floor for a mid-morning meditation. As they spread out, Schaeffer talked them through the next steps.
“Listen to the sound coming from outside the room,” she said. Outside, a car rumbled down Audubon Street. The elevator dinged and its heavy doors slid open with a hum. A burst of violin came up through the floor, from a dance class taking place in the basement. Somewhere outside the studio, a toilet flushed. Water gurgled in the bowl.
“Now listen to the sounds coming from inside the room,” she continued. The spare, calculated ticking of a clock suddenly seemed thunderous. After just a minute or two, the room came back to attention. Teachers sat up, a little dazed as they took in the world around them for a second time.
“This is where I ask our students to share,” Schaeffer said. “It’s one of the staple things that I do.”
Rebecca Corbin, who teaches music at Hill Central, pointed to the sound of a car coming down Audubon Street. A few murmurs of agreement rippled through the room.
“People adjusting their bodies and breathing,” suggested Scott Meikle, a theater teacher at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. Schaeffer nodded. She explained that she took the exercise in part from the late Sanford Meisner, who spoke passionately about the level of attention and engagement that theater required from its students.
“Listening isn’t about waiting to speak,” she said. During his life, Meisner would challenge his disciples to actively listen for maybe 90 seconds at a time—a stretch that was far shorter than the time most would spend waiting for a cue or doing a scene onstage. “Listening is active. Listening is about doing.”
“This is my dream,” she later added of Tuesday’s conference. While there are dozens of arts educators in the New Haven Public Schools—ECA works most closely with Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse High Schools—they rarely get the chance to share space and pedagogical approaches with each other. “We’re on our own as theater people sometimes.”
She pulled out another sheet, and began to read from an excerpt of Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street. The book, which has become a staple in high school classrooms in the years since it was published in 1984, follows a central character named Esperanza as she grows into adolescence in Chicago.
Teachers often select the book because it speaks so clearly, and so urgently, to young people. As a young person, Esperanza has feelings about her name, her hair, her neighborhood. She tells stories that unfold in Chicago, but could just as easily be in Fair Haven or the Hill. It has stood the test of time, too: Cisneros’ words, and her anecdotes, are just as prescient now as they were 41 years ago.
Schaeffer explained that she teaches it every year, as a way for her students to get to know each other — and themselves — better. From the beginning of the year onward, she asks them to keep journals: this is one of the first writing exercises they respond to. “I like to have students hear this,” she said before beginning.
“In English my name means hope,” she read from a page where Cisneros’ words were printed. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.”
She went on, chronicling the story of how the character got her name, and what she wished it might be instead. When she had finished, she looked up.
“What is the story behind your name?” she asked. “What other things come up for you? And it’s okay to go on a tangent, but it starts with your name.”
The sound of scribbling filled the room, as teachers craned their necks and leaned, shoulders suddenly rounded, in toward their own journals. In just a few minutes, they wrote furiously, chronicling stories of great-grandparents, uncertain fathers, last-minute changes in the delivery room.
“My name was my grandfather’s and his grandfather’s,” began Sal DeLucia, who has completely rebuilt Wilbur Cross’ drama club from the ground up. Or, at least, that’s the story he was told growing up. Now, he’s not so sure there isn’t more to it. By the time he read that “I don’t remember much about him, but I know he loved me” of his grandfather, a few people in the room looked as though they were on the verge of tears.
Sumiah Gay, Christi Sargent and Valerie Vollono. Gay had both Sargent and Vollono as teachers during her time at Co-Op, for theater and English respectively. Now she's back teaching at the school, and Sargent is starting her first year at BRADA.
The stories multiplied. Corbin recalled that she was “supposed to be Andrea,” but someone had had a change of heart at the last minute. For fellow Hill Central teacher Jaclyn Chiarelli, it was evidently a portmanteau of beloved family names, with a sound she didn’t learn to like until much later (“I wanted to be Christine,” she said). Others, like theater instructor Justin Pesce, took a more poetic approach, with lines like “My name rings bells / My name blooms in the spring.”
But it was Tyheed Scurry, a Wilbur Cross grad who has gone on to teach at New Haven Academy and High School in the Community, whose words stayed with many in the room long after he had spoken. Scurry, whose said his first name means “anointed one,” remembered how many teachers would stumble, balk at, or bypass his name simply because they deemed it too difficult. Something about it intimidated them until he abbreviated it.
“Often, I rarely feel like I’m anointed or appointed to anything,” he said, and the weight of his sentence was palpable in the room. Schaeffer thanked him for sharing, nodding to how vulnerable some entries can be.
“You have to be prepared for that as a teacher,” she said. “You never know where your kids are gonna take you.”
“This is another staple in my toolbox,” she added before the session wrapped. “I was just in another PD [professional development] and they reminded us that failure is good. And I get that. But we also need things that work in the classroom.”
Arts In Action
Top: Smith. Bottom: Marcos Sánchez.
As he stepped out into the hallway later in the day, Smith echoed that message. As a longtime educator and a member of the GRAMMY Academy, he’s thought for years about building a database of Grammy-nominated arts educators to whom teachers can reach out with questions, from how to teach American music history to what writing exercises to bring to the first day of class.
“People need to understand that the arts inform the abstract side of our thinking that makes it possible to contribute to society,” he said. “It’s not plus one. It’s one plus one, minus 17, plus purple.”
During a morning keynote, panelists had also zeroed in on that message, stressing the importance of deep, active listening, mutual trust and respect, and culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom. Seated at the front of the recital hall, speakers Arin Canbolat, Dr. Emmett Price and Ashley Shabankareh (as well as filmmaker Martin Shore, who joined via Zoom) set a sort of tone for the school year, reminding educators of the power and lived experience that their students bring when they walk through a door and sit down at a desk.
All of them are cultural producers and storytellers in their own right: Canbolat is the vice president of education and community engagement at the GRAMMY Museum; Price is the founding dean of Africana Studies at the Berklee College of Music and the founding pastor at Community of Love Christian Fellowship in Boston; Shabankareh is a brass musician and former teacher (she still serves as a professor at Loyola) who now leads operations and programs at the Trombone Shorty Foundation. Short is the director behind Take Me To The River, a 2022 documentary about music in New Orleans.
Teacher Nikki Claxton leads a dance workshop in the lower level studio of New Haven Ballet (70 Audubon St.).
As they spoke, each noted the need to understand culture as a way people make meaning, informed by their own lived experiences and the stories, traditions and rituals that are passed down from generation to generation. Shabankareh, who hails originally from Texas and has lived in New Orleans since college, joked that people can see this everywhere—down to the way they open and boil their spaghetti noodles.
The room, which had before been buzzing with conversation, was suddenly full of low laughter, warm and bubbling over the group. Teachers thought back to their own cooking practices, a few tentatively raising their hands.
In the front row, BRADA teacher Cody Norris said he learned from his grandmother, a thought that garnered several knowing Mhmmms. A few rows behind him, fellow BRADA teacher Nikki Claxton said that she started breaking the noodles when her son was just a kid.
“I have a question first,” piped up photographer and Wábi Gallery Founder Kim Weston from the back. “Are the noodles gluten-free?” Price, who had been listening intently, burst into a smile and scrunched up his face just a little at Weston, as if to say I see you and I appreciate you.
“So I break the noodles,” said salsera Alisa Bowens-Mercado, who later gave a class on how to teach Latin dance to students across elementary, middle and high school. “I learned from my mom because when you throw it on the wall to see if it’s done, it’s shorter.” More laughter ensued. Shabankareh brought it back to attention.
“You learned it from someone, right?” she said. She traced the spaces in which students learn, from their homes and their elders to their schools, their extracurriculars, and increasingly, the social media apps on their phones. “These are all things that we’re picking up.”
In the audience, there were dozens of teachers already doing that: William Fluker, who has carried students through classical, jazz, funk, and hip hop at multiple schools; Henry Lugo, who in 2021 designed the first string curriculum that looked and sounded more like New Haven; Josh Smith, who grew up in the Hillhouse drumline, and is now working to make it better; Nikki Claxton, who weaves her students’ own histories into dances at BRADA.
In a district like New Haven, that need feels especially pressing. In the 2024 school year, 69 percent of city educators were white, according to the state database EdSight. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the student body is non-white, with a growing number of students who are not native English speakers. It’s not just being accepting of those cultures, Price and Shabankareh said—it’s taking the time to learn from them and actively listen to what they have to say.
“Sometimes our students are the tradition-bearers,” Price said. “We need to elevate our students to allow them to have the proximity, the positionality and the power to share.”