To the Editor:

The welfare and education of area children has always been a concern of the founders, patrons, staff and volunteers of the nearly 50-year-old Tryon Fine Arts Center.

In the past five years, largely under the leadership of current executive director, Marianne Carruth, TFAC’s Arts in Education program has grown by leaps and bounds.

An annual student art contest honors youthful artists from four school districts in a 20-mile radius of Tryon while at the same time raising money for grants for teacher arts programs in those same schools.

Local youth and their teachers these days are filling the halls and galleries of TFAC with fiddle and bow music each week, taking their part in a multi-state regional effort to preserve the music of the Appalachian cultural heritage. That’s TFAC’s two-year-old Pacolet Junior Appalachian Music Program (PacJAM).

Every year, performers coming to town for Main Stage shows are asked to arrive a day or two early and perform or teach workshops in the schools.

As if all that weren’t enough for a small performing arts center, this past year TFAC joined with Spartanburg District One Schools in the Partners in Education program of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

As part of that partnership, TFAC is hosting a professional development workshop for Polk County Schools and Spartanburg District One teachers and administrators by Kennedy Center Artist Randy Barron on Friday, Sept. 30, thanks to funding from a Polk County Community Foundation Kessler Grant and Main Street Insurance in Tryon.

The primary purpose of the Kennedy Center partnerships is to provide professional learning in the arts for teachers. In 1992, this program was awarded the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ Dawson Award, which recognizes innovative and successful projects.

The Partners in Education program is based on the belief that teachers’ professional learning is an essential component of any effort designed to increase the artistic literacy of young people. The Kennedy Center’s extensive experience with its local professional learning program, established in 1976, provides the basis for this national program.

Currently, almost 100 Partnership Teams in 42 States and the District of Columbia participate.

TFAC is certainly not alone in recognizing the importance of the arts. Arts in education is an expanding field of educational research and practice informed by investigations into learning through arts experiences. In this context, the arts can include performing arts education (dance, theater, music), literature and poetry, storytelling, visual arts education in film, craft, design, digital arts, media and photography.

Arts “in” Education is distinguished from “art education” by being not so much about teaching art, but rather on how to improve learning through the arts.

For instance, an elementary school teacher might have children sing a spiritual, then read the song and then interpret it in dance — all to reinforce the content of the subject being taught, perhaps learning about a historical figure such as Martin Luther King.

Learning which engages the spirit, the mind and the heart is learning which is enjoyable and memorable and life-enriching.

We at the Tryon Fine Arts Center are reminded this week to toot our own horn on this subject of Arts in Education. Congress in 2010 designated the week beginning with the second Sunday in September as National Arts in Education Week. During this week, the field of arts education and its supporters join together in communities across the country to tell the story of the transformative power of the arts in education.

We at TFAC love to tell that story, and welcome all in the community to join us.

~ Jeff Byrd, President, Tryon Fine Arts Center