Enriching Lives Through Art

Fostering an understanding of the arts is not just an ivory tower endeavor. As a pilot project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum has shown, learning takes on a new dimension when students are given the opportunity to experience the arts outside of a traditional classroom setting.

Developed by two sixth-grade teachers from the UCLA Community School and supported in part by UC’s Institute for Research in the Arts, the Hammer’s innovative “Classroom-in-Residence” immersion program brings 60 sixth-graders to the museum for an entire school week.

Participating students come from some of Los Angeles’ most impoverished neighborhoods. Many of them have never stepped inside an art museum before or spent much time thinking about the power of art to express complicated feelings and ideas.

Throughout the week, students receive arts-integrated instruction from their teachers, sketch and write in the galleries, and get behind-the-scenes tours from Hammer staff.

It’s a deeply immersive experience, one that allows students to make cross-curricular connections between the study of art and the rigorous inquiry into other academic subjects. Now in its second year, the program has been so successful that its funders view it as a model to be replicated in other communities.

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