Visual Understanding in Education (VUE) in partnership with PS 159 and its primary arts provider, DreamYard, will build school-wide capacity to implement the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) program. This will be the first step in a new collaboration--based on student-centered instruction, rich arts-learning, action research, teacher capacity building, and learning--between three partners, each bringing unique expertise to the table.

VTS is a student-centered, research-based curriculum that asks classroom teachers to facilitate open-ended discussions of developmentally sequenced works of visual art. The facilitation method has been proven to build students to capacity to articulate their ideas about what they see, find evidence in the artwork to support their ideas, listen to the viewpoints of their peers, and respectfully debate multiple interpretations.

While there is a lot already known about the impact of VTS on student learning in general school settings, there have not been many opportunities to work collaboratively with a high-quality arts provider and experiment with lessons that integrate VTS practice with a model such as DreamYard's project-based approach to arts integration.

In a school where half the students are English Language Learners and a majority come from at-risk populations, there is a considerable challenge bringing all students up to ELA proficiency.

Central inquiry questions for all three partners are:

• How does the VTS curriculum affect teacher and teaching artist collaboration?
• How does VTS, a research-based curriculum proven to advance aesthetic development in beginning viewers, affect the growth of students as creators of art?
  
• What are the implications for students discussing their own art works during sharing?
• How does VTS, in combination with the artist-residency, support the bilingual educational goals of the school?