How can the visual arts help learners acquire language?

Free for educators

Join us in the galleries to learn from community members and each other about how the visual arts can bolster and enrich multilingual education.

For this program, we are proudly partnering with Antonia Winters from Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland and Kristin Schardt from Portland Adult Education.

This event was rescheduled from November 2, 2023.

Kristin Schardt teaches ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) adults who are immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers at Portland Adult Education in Portland, Maine. In her career as an educator, Kristin has taught Spanish to elementary and middle schoolers in Portland, Maine; High School English at a boarding school in Pennsylvania; English and ESOL in the NYC public school system; and music, art, and English at an International School in Caracas, Venezuela. She has always looked for ways to incorporate art into instruction, as art is a powerful way to communicate without always using words. Being 60% deaf, Kristin relies heavily on nonverbal cues, such as on lip reading, for comprehension. 

Antonia Winter works at Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland where she teaches academic writing and speaking to fearless and intelligent students across three grade levels.   As a lifelong educator and a member of the ESOL team for PPS,  Antonia is committed to sparking curiosity in her students with powerful content to drive skills instruction in the middle school years.  Critical to this inquiry and methodology is the power of the anchor text!  Antonia believes that a powerful anchor text maximizes instruction and elicits the best academic writing and speaking for students.  Clearly, works of fine art shine in this capacity.  In our forum we will discuss how to integrate works of fine art as the “anchor text” into our teaching in order to develop critical thinking, content knowledge and powerful vocabulary for students.

Educator Workshops and Open Houses provide opportunities to hear speakers, explore the galleries, and learn from each other.