Erica Rosenfeld Halverson

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Maureen Janson Heintz Photography

Erica Halverson is chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at UW-Madison.

media release: This book provides a blueprint for using the arts—performing, visual, and multimedia—to rethink what good learning, teaching, and curriculum can be. The author presents a bold plan for saving education with an arts-based approach to teaching that focuses on risk-taking as the most important aspect of a successful classroom. Halverson offers new models for learning that embrace the social, cultural, and historical assets that kids bring to the classroom, with guidance for designing engaging learning experiences for all grades and subject areas. Featuring many evocative examples from Whoopensocker, the author’s in-school artist-in-residence program, this resource illustrates how classroom practices and school structures can be reorganized for more inclusive success. Readers will learn how to reframe learning as acts of metacognitive representation, identity, and collaboration. And lots and lots of joy.

Book Features:

• A guide for using theater, music, visual arts, dance, and digital media to transform the process of teaching and learning.
• Guidance for building learning environments with art at the core, as opposed to adding art to curricula built around standardized tests.
• Specific examples designed to inspire students’ creativity through writing, improvisation, and performance.
• Exemplars culled from the author’s 25-year history of making art with young people.
• Accessible language appropriate for nonacademics and nonexperts.

Dr. Erica Rosenfeld Halverson is a trained theater artist and award-winning professor and chair in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In that role, she teaches a range of courses to undergraduates and graduate students, including future teachers. Erica has been a field leader in the learning sciences, creating a sub-field that focuses on how people learn in and through the arts. Erica is a seasoned performer and co-founder of two community youth arts programs: Whoopensocker (Madison) and Playmakers Lab Theatre (Chicago). She also performs regularly, working with the Children’s Theater of Madison, Four Seasons Theatre, and Music Theatre of Madison. She lives in Madison with her husband, Rich, her daughter, Gracie.

The Wisconsin Book Festival is presented by Madison Public Library in partnership with Madison Public Library Foundation. For program details and the full schedule, go to wisconsinbookfestival.org.

The festival is funded with generous support from Signature Sponsor Marvin J. Levy; Presenting Sponsor Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation; Festival Patron Cheryl Rosen Weston Estate; Festival Sponsors National Endowment forthe Arts and American Girl’s Fund for Children; Contributing Sponsors The Bass Family, Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, Great Dane Pub & Brewing Co., MG&E Foundation and University Research

Park; Media Sponsors The Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal, Isthmus, Madison365 and Wisconsin Public Radio; In-Kind Sponsors KennedyC and the Park Hotel; and Event Supporter A Room of One’s Own. Learn more about funding and support for the festival at wisconsinbookfestival.org/give.