OMA Featured in Edutopia Magazine

OMANETWORK.ORG and Friends of OMA Campaign launched!

Contact information for our public policy officials. (please share your ideas and opinions about education and the arts with them)

Fact sheet about the OMA program. Please use the information on the fact sheet as you talk to your neighbors and friends about the great asset we have in our school arts programs.

"We know the people of this town support student achievement and school improvement," said Kemmeries. "And we need their help now — we need people to go online and sign up for the OMA Network." Folks can sign up at OMANETWORK.ORG and will get weekly news about what is happening with the OMA Program in classrooms across the city.

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Click here to see the OMA video on the Edutopia Web Site with the full article!

George Lucas Educational Foundation filming OMA for Edutopia! Look for OMA to be Featured in the February Issue Pictured Above!

George Lucas, whose achievements are synonymous with excitement, found middle and high school markedly unexciting and irrelevant. His conviction that school should inspire rather than imprison eventually led to the creation of the George Lucas Educational Foundation in 1991. GLEF is devoted to finding and publicizing the best educational practices available, the kind of educational practices that make a difference to students and ultimately to society. GLEF publicizes these practices through their Web site, www.edutopia.org, and magazine, Edutopia.

Last week an Edutopia videography team was in Tucson filming the Opening Minds through the Arts program in action at Corbett Elementary School, 5949 E. 29th Street. Team members interviewed OMA artists, the Corbett arts integration specialist (AIS), Corbett Principal Joyce Dillon, OMA Founder Eugene Jones, and OMA co-creator Joan Ashcraft.

The OMA program was also part of the Harvard Project Zero study, The qualities of Quality: Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve it. On Wednesday, December 17, Steve Seidel, principal investigator for the study conducted a Webinar for Americans for the Arts to share the results, in which OMA was mentioned multiple times. The results of the study, funded by the Wallace foundation, will also be published by Arts Education Partnership.

While at Corbett, the Edutopia team filmed students in kindergarten through fifth grades, working with the OMA AIS, teachers and OMA artists to cover the full scope of the OMA program, which includes listening skills, language acquisition, kinesthetic awareness, composition and organization, abstract reasoning, and research and performance. The resulting video will be 8 - 10 minutes and will be posted on the Edutopia website in February.

Edutopia first heard about OMA when the print magazine staff contacted the Arizona Department of Education wanting information for an article on arts education to appear in the February issue. The Arizona Department of Education recommended OMA. What Eutopia learned about OMA in developing the print story led them to decide to film OMA for the Web site.

For more information, call Dr. Joan Ashcraft, DMA at 520-225-4900.