How ArtsNOW Prepares Educators for the School Year Ahead
Inside the 2026 ArtsNOW Foundational Seminar — and what teachers are taking back to their classrooms.
Every June, something happens that shapes thousands of students' school years: educators gather, roll up their sleeves, and spend three days rethinking how they teach. That's the ArtsNOW Foundational Seminar.
The Foundational Seminar is ArtsNOW's flagship professional learning experience, designed for school teams that include administrators, arts educators, and classroom teachers. It's not a sit-and-listen workshop. It's hands-on, standards-aligned, and built around one core belief: that the arts aren't a supplement to great teaching — they're central to it. This year, ArtsNOW celebrated its milestone 20th Foundational Seminar. The Georgia edition was held at Lake Lanier Islands from June 3-5, while the South Carolina edition was held at the Columbia Museum of Art the following week from June 10-12. In total, at both seminars, 324 educators attended, 51 schools were represented, and 4 states were represented.
This year’s Georgia Foundational Seminar also welcomed WSB-TV Channel 2 Atlanta News to capture educators in action. The feature offered a meaningful glimpse into the energy of Foundational and the impact of bringing creativity, connection, and academic learning together in one space. Watch the full clip to see ArtsNOW’s work in action.
What happens at Foundational
Over three immersive days, participants move through sessions spanning various art forms— music, theatre, dance, visual arts— and leave with practical strategies they can bring directly into their content areas. Sessions are grounded in research and aligned to both content and fine arts standards, which means the learning isn't siloed: a third-grade teacher walks away knowing new strategies for teaching English Language Arts through choreography, or how a visual arts lens can deepen a history lesson.
The format matters as much as the content. Teachers learn the way they're asked to teach: actively, collaboratively, and creatively. The research-based strategies are modeled in real time, so participants experience it in real time.
Key learnings from 2026
This year's seminar reinforced several themes that teachers said shifted how they think about their practice. Among the most commonly cited takeaways:
- Arts integration works best when it's authentic.
Teachers bring back more than just strategies from Foundational. Rather, teachers leave having discovered a new way of thinking about how the arts and academic content genuinely connect. Authentic arts integration means students aren't using movement or music as a memory trick; they're engaging with both the art form and the content on its own terms, in ways that deepen understanding of each. That distinction changes everything. When teachers learn to build those real connections — between a dance concept and a math principle, between visual composition and a literacy skill — students begin to think differently.
2. The arts address what classrooms are struggling with most.
Engagement, literacy, social-emotional learning. These are some of the challenges teachers name year after year. Arts-integrated strategies speak directly to all three, giving educators new tools for reaching students who don't thrive in traditional instructional settings.
3. Teachers leave with a community, not just a toolkit.
Because Foundational brings school teams together, not just individual teachers, educators return to their buildings with shared language and shared strategies. That peer network becomes a support system for implementation that lasts well beyond the seminar itself.
What comes next
The Foundational Seminar is just the beginning of these educators’ journeys. Throughout the school year, ArtsNOW continues to support partner schools through in-classroom demonstrations, coaching, collaborative planning sessions, and more.
For the educators who attended this summer, the school year ahead looks a little differently. They're walking into their classrooms with new tools, a stronger sense of what's possible, and the knowledge that they're not doing this work alone.
That's what ArtsNOW is here for.
Connect with us to learn more about the Foundational Seminar and how to make this opportunity possible for your school.