This morning, students of Baldwin High School welcomed Nikki Toombs, Director of Education for Kenny Leon's True Colors Theater Company, to our main stage to receive some professional tips on how to better their acting and production skills.

Mrs. Toombs joins Baldwin County Fine Arts Director Anna Brock in forming their educator-artist team taking part in the National Education Association's (NEA) Curriculum Framework project, an NEA-funded project by the Educational Theater Association.

The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) has selected 12 two-member teams of high school theatre educators and teaching artists who will create a standards-based curriculum framework and instructional units in targeted areas of theatre. The EdTA Model Curriculum Framework Project, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, is intended to serve as a key step toward the organization’s goal of providing high-quality professional development for its members and the field of theatre education.

More than 100 theatre educators and artists vied for the unique opportunity to play a leading role in shaping the future of the field. The chosen teams hail from across the country, Oregon to Georgia and California to Connecticut.

Participating teachers are expected to put the instructional units and assessments “on their feet” during the first few months of the 2018-19 school year and gather videos and written reflections generated during student engagement with the instructional unit. A select number of adjudicated portfolios judged to be at or above the standards aligned to the individual instructional unit will be posted on the EdTA website in early 2020.

EdTA’s NEA Art Works matching grant, the first it has been awarded, is part of the more than $25 million in grants approved in 2018. The Art Works category is the NEA’s largest funding category and supports projects that focus on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and the strengthening of communities through the arts.