Renegade Education Project

Thank you for visiting the website of the Renegade Education Project.  Eleven years after our formation, we are proud to look back with our partner organizations on a number of milestones and accomplishments and the state of arts education both within the Willamette Valley and across the country.

It is time for an Arts Revolution.  Because they are transformative in the lives of those who experience and participate in them, the arts have an essential role in education.  Much research has been done in the past two decades that supports the role that the arts play in developing successful learning environments and support the notion of the arts as transformative.  Schools and communities need the arts to thrive.  Within the arts, REP has built a coalition of partnerships that represents a diverse group of individuals with differing approaches to community and education art integration.  We all share a commitment to the arts as an integral part of every child’s education and an integral part of a healthy community.

Today is a wonderful time to be working in the arts.   While arts-supportive research and receptivity to advocacy work are at an all-time high, we must work to maintain connectivity, professional development in the field, and ensure that we continue to pursue meaningful advocacy and policy work into the 21st century.  We as artists, practitioners, educators, and researchers must be engaged partners in the conversation about education reform, especially since recent research points to the arts’ central role in helping develop skills to solve many of the problems facing education and society today.  To this end, REP’s work is focused on arts research, arts education, arts creation, and arts advocacy.

Each day, we are supporting and conducting arts research, developing and providing current and useful information about arts and arts education, producing and fostering high-quality arts performance experiences within local communities, pursuing advocacy work, actively pursuing and working with local educational programs to integrate arts into the education curricula of our primary and secondary schools, as well as providing high quality, rigorous and accessible arts education within local communities.

If you are interested in finding out more about REP and the work we do, please explore the About Us pages. Check out the Publications page to see recent arts-focused research studies. Head for the Performances page to see a listing of upcoming arts programs and performances, locations, and times. Check our Links pages for links to partnership and coalition organizations and other arts and arts education pages.  Be sure to sign up for our mailing list to keep abreast of upcoming seminars, events, public forums, and performances.  Be sure to find us on FaceBook.  If you would like to make a donation to the work that REP does and make a difference in your community and in the lives and educations of youth, please visit our Support REP page.  And of course, we’re delighted to hear from you anytime through our Contact page.

Enjoy your visit, and come back soon!

Cheers:

Eric-Michael MacCionnaith, Ph.D.

Executive Director