Anna is currently a sophomore at the University of Delaware, originally from Elkton, MD. She is an Elementary Education major with a concentration in Middle School English. Additionally, she is a dance minor. Anna has danced since the age of 2 at her mom’s dance studio, Bobbie Ann’s Dance Studio, and currently helps manage the studio & instruct classes. In addition to dance, she loves to participate in theater on campus and locally. On campus she is a member of the service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, Vice President of the Association of Pre-Professional Leaders in Education, and a senior fellow for the Honors Program. Anna is so excited to be an ArtsBridge Scholar!
Rachel Austin is a senior quantitative biology major with a dance minor at the University of Delaware. She has been researching with the ArtsBridge Program for the past two and a half years. She has completed a mathematics and dance integrated lesson plan in a first grade classroom at Gateway Lab School, participated in conducting research on arts access and participation in Wilmington, DE, and is currently creating a science and dance integrated lesson plan at Wilbur Elementary School. She loves having the opportunity to combine her interests in mathematics, biology, and dance, and looks forward to applying her skills acquired through the ArtsBridge Program to a future career working with children in the medicine field.
Jess Riniti and is a junior Elementary Education Major here at the University. Her work at ArtsBridge does and will consist of integrating dance into lessons on transportation. She hopes after she has presented her lessons to classes that they have an improved understanding and awareness of the world around them. Through understanding how transportation–something they most likely use everyday–effects both the social and natural environment around them, she hopes that her students become more involved and conscious citizens in protecting themselves and their environment. She also helps to further her understanding of how much arts integration aids students in their understanding of core academic subjects and is able to speak first hand about the benefits of this curriculum.
As a 2016 Artsbridge Summer Scholar, Marielle designed a 6th Grade Social Studies curriculum called “South African History: A Curriculum to Teach the Art of Understanding Culture” focused around teaching the histories of South Africa and the United States through vehicles of expressive art. Structured around the Same Story, Different Countries project, the curriculum leads students through the four chronological themes of the production: Oppression, Resilience, Resistance, and Unity with 5 different components of arts integration alongside the content instruction. Each of the 5 comprehensive lessons in this Social Studies unit will incorporate a different form of arts instruction,threading elements of music, visual art, dance, photography, and poetry together with content instruction. This curricular project aims to open the conversation with young students about our divided yet continually improving social construct, many of which have first hand exposure to some of the social issues addressed in the lessons. Marielle plans to travel to South Africa this January to teach some of her lessons in various South African schools and community groups to collect, analyze, and compare data from lessons in the South African culture versus the United States in order to gauge the overall effectiveness of the curriculum.