Our education program reaches hundreds of students each year through public-facing programs and local partnerships. These include summer camps, workshops, activities for kids at our events, online art lessons, hosting art clubs with and in seven local public schools, and designing curricula. We seek to empower the artist in every student, giving them lifelong tools to explore and express themselves.
All of our programs are rooted in social-emotional learning: an educational approach through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.
Soft skills
Soft skills are nonacademic skills students acquire to help them interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. Our programs are focused on developing social-emotional, critical thinking, and creative problem solving skills.
Project-based learning
Project-based learning is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects. Our approach centers on challenging students with long-term projects that require investigating and responding to authentic, engaging, and complex questions and problems.
Cross-age peer mentoring
Engaging with students over a long period of time allows us to frame their learning as essentially community-based and participatory. By offering older students the chance to serve as mentors, we give younger students effective role models and prompt mentors to think critically about how they can best pass on what they’ve learned.
Student-centered learning
We give learners the freedom to choose what to study. We also prompt them to reflect on how and why their chosen topic is of interest to them — and what other areas of inquiry it might lead to.
Exposure to diversity
We actively seek ways to introduce students to diverse perspectives, and strive to make all our programs accessible and enjoyable for any student that wants to learn from us. We believe that exposure to diversity promotes creativity and problem-solving skills.
Note: We're still migrating a few of our online lessons over to our new website. They'll all be back within a couple weeks!
Field trips
We're able to accommodate school groups of all sizes at Maxon Mills. We have three bathrooms — one ADA-compliant — space for parking, plenty of outdoor space, and two classrooms. Email jill@wassaicproject.org to set up a visit.