Educating

After graduating from the road at 30, I moved to Boston, got married, had a baby and started teaching at Berklee College of Music with my uncle Liv, the school’s premier performance professor. I taught songwriting and performance and a workshop here and there during Berklee’s summer program series but I’ve always felt strange about “teaching” music. As my mom once said to me “If you’re meant to write music, you’ll figure out how.”

After I founded Consenses in 2012, I thought my teaching days were behind me but at my first exhibition, I was confronted by more than a dozen teachers asking how I could bring Consenses into their classrooms. They identified, perhaps more than others, just how effective Consenses could be at helping people see from each other’s perspectives. They understood immediately, before I myself did, the possibilities for Consenses in their classrooms.

And so, from 2014-2016, with the help of Harvard School of Education professionals, I built and piloted a curriculum that would transform classrooms using art as a language. Since then, I’ve been bringing the curriculum into classrooms from east to west coast and training 100s of teachers on how to bring the course to their students. Teachers have told me it’s a joy and a relief to teach, that it’s brought a new joy and fulfillment and blown the hinges off their stale traditional teaching. They report that their classrooms feel unified, and creative and that students have a new found confidence and agency to express their voices and listen to each others’ differences with tolerance and respect.

“The Consenses curriculum is itself as beautifully constructed as a work of art…”

–Jessica Hoffmann Davis 
Founding director of the Arts in Education Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and author of numerous books on arts learning including Why Our Schools need the Arts. 2008