It all started when…

The Art Ed ColLab began with Dr. Taylor’s dissertation research, which explored possibilities for supporting beginning visual art teachers as they transitioned from the university setting to the professional field. Through conversation with her colleagues at CSULB, Dr. Taylor discovered that Dr. Laurie Gatlin and Dr. Brian Trimble were both interested in the same idea! Together, they formed a pilot group of beginning visual art teachers (BVATs) from CSUN and CSULB in their first year teaching art with four veteran art teacher mentors for the 2021-22 academic year. Meeting monthly online as a whole group and individually in mentor/mentee teams, this mentoring community of practice helped eight novice art educators navigate their first year in the field, sometimes as the lone art teacher at their school sites.

Expanding to eleven BVATs and six mentors in 2022-23, Year 2 allowed for a few in-person sessions to take place in addition to the monthly virtual meetings, including: an initial meet-and-greet artmaking workshop, the California Art Education Association conference at CSULB,  a museum field trip to the Cheech Marin Art Museum in Riverside, CA, and an optional weeklong summer institute at CSUN in June.

Data collection each year includes: a Photovoice project, Visual Journaling, a BVAT questionnaire, and a mentor focus group. Findings from the first year were presented at the UNM Mentoring Conference in October 2022, along with a published paper about this work, with additional presentations at the CAEA Southern Area Regional Conference in November 2022 and the NAEA Conference (virtually) in April 2023. The content-specific support and resources shared among members in this community of practice have been noted as one of the primary highlights, in addition to the confidence-building and feelings of community and belonging experienced by participants. As a High-Impact Practice (HIP), the Art Ed ColLab strives to ensure that newly-credentialed art teachers are supported in their initial years teaching with others who may share similar lived experiences as art teachers, alleviating feelings of professional isolation and finding solutions to the challenges they encounter. We look forward to inviting our first group of BVATs to return in 2024-25 to become mentors in this cyclical community of practice.

The goals of the Art Ed ColLab are threefold:

• to retain new art teachers in the profession and help promote job satisfaction

• to expand this work to other Art Education programs across the 23-campus CSU system

• to serve as a model of new teacher mentoring/professional development that is content-specific and directly addresses the needs and concerns of beginning teachers