The Arkansas Program Where Teachers Spend Summers as Working Artists — and Return With a Completely Creative Perspective

There is something quietly radical about what happens on the UA Little Rock campus each June. Art teachers — people who spend ten months a year guiding other people’s creative work — set down their lesson plans, pick up felting needles or carving tools or printmaking squeegees, and spend an entire week simply making things. Not demonstrating. Not instructing. Just making.

The Windgate Summer Studio for Art Educators, a fully funded professional development program housed in the Windgate Center for Art and Design, is based on this fundamental principle. This program adopts a different stance, arguing that the best thing an art teacher can do for their students is to remember what it truly feels like to be an art student, at a time when professional development for teachers frequently involves sitting in rows and watching a PowerPoint presentation.

The workshops are held in two distinct sessions in June, Monday through Friday, from nine to four. Over the course of five days, participants work intensively on a single studio focus, such as needle felting, screen printing, spoon carving, wax-carved jewelry, or hand-built ceramics. The teachers are not outside curriculum experts. They’re working artists who also teach in UA Little Rock’s School of Art and Design, which gives the whole thing a different texture than your typical teacher training program. There’s real craft knowledge in the room, not just pedagogical theory.

Beyond the caliber of instruction, what makes the program truly unique is what it doesn’t require of participants. No tuition is required. There are supplies available. Travelers from other parts of Arkansas can find housing on campus. A grant from the Windgate Foundation, which has long supported arts education programs throughout the area, underpins the program. That kind of access—to a professional studio, professional-grade materials, and professional artists—is difficult to come by for a K–12 art teacher on a public school salary.

Clark Valentine’s drawing lesson provides a helpful glimpse into the goals of the program. Instead of promoting traditional drawing methods, Valentine challenges participants to consider the very nature of drawing by examining artists such as Richard Long and Kara Walker and investigating the ways in which space, shadows, and unconventional materials can all serve as mark-making. Yes, they have a scaffolded lesson plan when they depart, but more significantly, they have truly struggled with a concept. That type of professional development is distinct.

Dr. Lynne Larsen’s daily art history lecture, which covers movements from the 1870s through the 1920s, including Impressionism, Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus school, and the Arts and Crafts movement, is woven throughout both sessions. At first glance, needle felting in the morning and Pre-Raphaelite painting after lunch seem like an odd combination. But there’s a logic to it. Context tends to deepen practice. A teacher who spent the morning shaping wool into a small soft sculpture might find something newly resonant in a discussion of craft, labor, and handmade form.

It’s important to note that several 2026 sessions quickly filled up, with some of them reaching capacity well in advance of the application deadline. That’s a big deal. Teachers are famously protective of their summers, and for good reason. The fact that so many chose to spend a week in a campus studio rather than anywhere else says something about what this program offers that most professional development simply doesn’t: the chance to be a learner again, fully and without pretense, in a room where the only expectation is that you make something real.