In this 30-minute episode, Art Education Radio’s Tim Bolgatz talks to Lois Holzman about play, creativity, and fostering development “Using Improvisation and Performativity as Teaching Tools.” The show sponsored by The Art of Education, which also holds a yearly online conference for art teachers. Lois will be a featured speaker at this year’s event coming up on Feb. 3 (see the full line-up here: Winter 2018 Art Ed Now: National Online Conference for Art Teachers).
Take a listen to their wide-ranging conversation, which begins:
Tim Bolgatz: Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. This show is produced by The Art of Education, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz. As you probably know from me talking about it all the time, I am in charge of putting together the line of the Art Ed Now online conference that we do twice a year here at AOE. It is absolutely one of my favorite things that I do because I’m constantly able to explore new ideas, find new voices, and work with some of the most talented people in art education. Every once in awhile though, I’m able to step out of the world of art ed to find some valuable ideas in academia, or in the world of education at large. And a couple months ago, I was lucky enough to find today’s guest, Dr. Lois Holzman.
What specifically in all of those interests are your biggest passions? Like what ideas do you care about the most?
Dr. Holzman: What I care about the most is the way … Is trying to intervene on the way that our culture, and that’s US culture, but also around the world, it looks different, but how our cultures stifle development of not just children, but adults as well. What I mean by development is the ability that we have and that we can see in children all of the time of transforming qualitatively who they are into someone else, into from a baby to a toddler, from a toddler to a child, from a child to a teenager, and so on, that we transform the circumstances that we’re in and become bigger and greater and more knowledgeable and more passionate about things and more imaginative. And many of our institutions stifle that, so my passion is to re-initiate development in all those people that it has stopped, and to provide the best for the very young so that they can continue to thrive and develop.