2018

The Paseo Youth Program provides educational programming built around The PASEO festival and its visiting artists.  We bring local, national and international artists into the schools and we bring students to the festival for engaging STEAM experiences such as classroom workshops, online curriculum tools, artist talks or internship opportunities. This curriculum tool is one of many free activities and events being offered to middle and high school students and teachers.

For 2018 we have designed a pre-festival activity for local participating classrooms from Taos County.  Middle and high school students will be transported to the Youth Day in the Space Cloud for a private tour of the award-winning inflatable pavilion we call Space Cloud, designed by the architectural team, Espacio La Nube from Madrid Spain.  The students will visit each artist installation in the pavilion and the artists will talk and demo their work. Each of the artists is represented in this curriculum tool where students can learn about the science and technology behind their work in advance of their meeting.  At the end of the Space Cloud tour, the Taos Youth Ballet will perform a special sci-art choreography called Totality of Being created in collaboration with LANL astrophysicist Nicole Lloyd-Ronning.

The STEMarts Curriculum Tool is an online platform with resources that take teachers behind the scenes of the 2018 festival. Teachers and students get a glimpse into the creative process of Paseo artists. It provides examples of the artists’ work, highlights the science and technology behind their art and links to STEAM activities and resources.

Teachers can integrate this curriculum tool into their lesson plan in any way they like. For example, students can select an artist to investigate and experiment with the suggested STEAM activities, or one STEAM activity can be explored as a class. High school students might want to research all the new media technologies used by the artists and write a paper on the social impact of the technologies. For local classrooms participating in the festival’s youth day, students can come prepared with questions to ask the visiting artists.

We have selected eight artists from the Paseo line up whose work has strong STEAM components. Each artist has their own Artist Page for teachers and students to explore. From this page teachers can access Teacher Tips for lesson plan suggestions, Standards to align the Paseo activity to the Next Generation Science Standards and the P21/21st Century Standards, and a STEAM Wiki for each artist with resources and activities based on the artist’s work. We also include Surveys to help evaluate the impact of the project.