Outreach: USF shares valuable lessons
with the community
USF center director promotes the arts while focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion ALREADY BUSY DENISE DAVIS-COTTON, director of USF’s Center for Partnerships in Arts Integrated Teaching (PAInT), is about to get even busier thanks to an $8.5 million arts learning grant. A popular presence on the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus, Davis-Cotton was named principal investigator of the grant, which was awarded this fall by the U.S. Department of Education to strengthen arts-educational programming in the nation’s educational system. Titled “Race, Equity, Arts and Cultural History (REACH),” the five-year program seeks to establish a national, replicable model to strengthen arts learning in U.S. schools and harness the effectiveness of arts integration as a catalyst to increase student engagement and achievement across multiple subject areas. The Arts Schools Network (ASN), a collective group of national arts leaders, thought partners and valuable contributors to the arts, is working directly with Davis-Cotton to implement the program.
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This project builds upon my desire to promote programs and secure resources in the arts for socio-economically depressed communities.
– Denise Davis-Cotton
Specifically, it seeks to use demonstration schools – including the William Monroe Rowlett Academy for Arts and Communication (elementary) and the William Monroe Rowlett Academy for Arts and Communication (middle), both in Bradenton – as national models to design instructional practices on racial and cultural equity, while implementing arts education, arts integration and cultural initiatives in classrooms. “This project builds upon my desire to promote programs and secure resources in the arts for socio-economically depressed communities,” Davis-Cotton says. “I am excited to share my leadership experience and motivation to help educators and teaching artists build upon
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their prior, current and future work in diversity, equity and inclusion.” Helping local students has long been a hallmark of Davis-Cotton, founder and first principal of Detroit School of Arts. As director of the Center for PAInT, which is housed on the Sarasota-Manatee campus, she has helped develop innovative art-based programming across Florida. Among her recent efforts, she produced a series of educational videos for children to view at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, she helped launch an educational-based summer camp for rising seventh-graders at Booker Middle School in Sarasota. The camp, designed to ease the transition from sixth to seventh grade, helped focus the students on core subjects, including mathematics, science and language arts, as they prepared for the fall term. More recently, she has turned her attention to a new and unique effort called the Beeler Scholars’ IDEIL Program, named for philanthropists Tom and Carol Beeler of Sarasota. Started in 2020, IDEIL serves as an online “trainthe-trainers” program for arts leaders, teachers, college instructors and others who, after completing the program, are encouraged to share its content with their host organizations. The program’s aim is to connect ideas related to diversity, equity and inclusion with arts-integrated teaching, an instructional method that combines the arts with academics. IDEIL stands for Incorporate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Life skills. “The Beeler program empowers teaching artists and educators to engage in equity work that strengthens social cohesion, promotes shared values and celebrates the heritage, histories and cultural identities of an inclusive community,” Davis-Cotton says. - RICH SHOPES | USF Sarasota-Manatee campus
