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The Art of Teaching 40th Anniversary Celebration brought together alumni, students, faculty, and friends to reflect on four decades of progressive, child-centered teacher preparation at Sarah Lawrence College. Speakers traced the origins of the program in 1985, honoring its founders and early influences while highlighting the program’s continuous commitment to teaching as relational, intellectual, and ethical work. Through stories and reflections drawn from classrooms across generations, the event illuminated how the program has consistently pushed against the grain of dominant educational structures, holding fast to practices that honor the complexity, dignity, and individuality of children.
The evening also celebrated the powerful community that has grown through the program’s cohort-based model. Alumni described lifelong professional connections, the sustaining influence of the program’s philosophy in their daily work, and the importance of returning to a space where shared values are reaffirmed. Conversations during the session and Q&A emphasized resilience in the face of systemic challenges, the centrality of observation and descriptive practice, and the ongoing need for educators who advocate fiercely for children. The event reaffirmed that the Art of Teaching community remains as vibrant, interconnected, and mission-driven today as it was forty years ago.
Graduate of the program and now Director, The Art of Teaching
We must continue to defend the rights of children to be treated as human individuals despite a push back towards whole-class instruction and one-size-fits-all approaches — which teachers know are wrong but are being forced to teach.
Co-founder of the Art of Teaching program and past director
From the beginning — and now more than ever — it has been a fight for a way of educating that enables all children to be who they are, to frame teaching as art founded on getting to know each child with love and care.
2003 graduate and a teacher at Sarah Lawrence's Early Childhood Center
The name of the program — The Art of Teaching — says so much. It places value not just on the children learning, but on the teachers as well as on our learning. Delving into this process of learning known as “making meaning” also had the effect of helping me become a better student.
2000 graduate and Executive Director of Knowledge Management in the Office of the Chancellor of New York City Department of Education
The Art of Teaching Program has given me more than a degree; it has given me a vision of education as artful, intellectual, and transformative. It has enabled me to construct a relevant framework for comprehensive school development. It has taught me to see each child as a thinker/doer, each classroom as a site of inquiry, and each lesson as a chance to imagine something better/different. Something Great!
2016 graduate and a K-1 teacher at Central Park East II, a public school in NYC
Looking back now, it seems miraculous to me that this graduate program so directly reflected that passion, striving and resistance I had already lived as a teacher. It felt like a gift to enter an intellectual and professional community that mirrored my already strongly held beliefs about being with children and pushed me to expand those beliefs into areas I hadn’t yet encountered or imagined
2022 graduate from the Art of Teaching program and a 4th grade teacher at the Ella Baker School in NYC
My time at Sarah Lawrence helped to build the philosophical backbone which frames my values as a teacher. Sarah Lawrence’s dedication to progressive education—inquiry-based learning, antiracist practices, inclusivity, and play—shape the pillars of that philosophical foundation. My education at Sarah Lawrence not only instilled these values within me, but also gave me the room to turn theory into practice.
What do we want for children? What do we strive for on their path? Do we do what we say we do and what we say we value? So then what were and still are the central values, beliefs, the underlying philosophy on which the program is founded? Is it naive, undoable to believe now, as Sara [Wilford] and I did then, that every child must be known, must be visible if we can hope to educate each one fully? That is precisely the belief we held then, and the one that continues to the present time in the program: the belief that without knowing each child fully, we cannot hope to teach each one; to respect each one's uniqueness and possibility.
Mary Hebron
The Art of Teaching program is grateful for all who played a part in founding the program and contributing to its success.
Sarah Lawrence College Remembers Faculty Emerita Jan Drucker