ACAMIS Conference for the Arts
April 11, 2025, Tianjin Juilliard School
April 12-13 2025, International School of Tianjin

Join us for a transformative conference where arts educators converge to explore the power of creativity. Discover innovative teaching strategies, engage in hands-on workshops, and connect with a community passionate about the arts. Let's ignite imagination and inspire the next generation of creators together.

Create agency: Nurture student autonomy and voice throughout the creative process.
Create space: Inspire learning environments and make space for creativity and expression.
Create performance and artistic work: Collaborate with fellow educators to develop projects that integrate various art forms.

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ACAMIS Pre-Conference for the Arts

Kick-off the weekend with a visit to the Tianjin Juilliard School. Marvel in the building’s unique architecture, attend first-rate performances by students and faculty, participate in workshops and lectures, and learn about the school’s inspirational mission to serve as a music education catalyst in China. A fantastic way to meet other arts teachers and get fired up for the weekend conference at IST!

The pre-conference showcases the many facets of the Tianjin Juilliard School while giving participants the opportunity to meet and connect with peers. Mark your calendars and join us for a memorable, inspiring day that will not only leave you feeling energized for the conference and the year ahead, but also strengthen the bonds within our professional community. Click here to visit the full webpage of the pre-conference

Conference Pictures

Keynote Speaker

Name

Gabrielle Metcalf

Education

PhD in Leadership from The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA)

Career

Arts Educator, Acting Lecturer and Intimacy Coordinator

 

Gabrielle Metcalf is an arts educator, acting lecturer and intimacy coordinator. She holds a PhD in Leadership from The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) where she lectures in Acting. She coordinates WAAPA’s educational programs that offer arts tuition to high school students in Music Theatre, Acting, Dance and Screen performance. She has devised and directed work at The Blue Room Theatre, PICA, Adelaide Fringe, Fringeworld Perth, Black Swan Theatre Company, The Performance Space, Notre Dame University, Curtin University and WAAPA. She is a co-founder of the China-Australia Cultural Link (CACL) a company that assisted with the training of Chinese teachers to be able to teach drama. This resulted in a series of books, Teaching Drama commissioned by Beijing Normal University and widely distributed to their schools to offer teachers lesson plans and methodologies to be able to teach drama. CACL also brought Chinese students to participate in Dance and Drama courses at WAAPA. Gabrielle has recently been the Intimacy Coordinator on the Binge series, The Twelve starring Sam Neil. She has a special interest in leadership pedagogies that support collaboration and the role that consent-based processes can play when we engage in the act of creating.

Empowering Students Through Arts Education: Creating spaces where Creativity can flourish.

How we choose to teach has a profound effect on the way in which students learn and think. Establishing the container or space for learning to occur will determine the level of creative input from students, their ability to collaborate with others and how confidently they are able to navigate the unknown and ambiguous. This keynote aims to share leading pedagogical practices associated with establishing such a space.

Synetics : a tool for developing creative thinking

Synetics is a tool designed to foster creative thinking. It employs various techniques such as analogies, metaphors, and brainstorming to stimulate innovative ideas and solutions. It is a creative connection-making process and can be used in any subject across the curriculum. During this workshop, we will explore how these processes can be leveraged by educators to enhance the creative problem-solving capacity of their students. Participants will create a short, devised work using a Synetics approach.

Engaging with Written Texts Through Improvisation

This practical workshop will explore the way in which improvisation can be used to enhance student engagement with written texts. Whether you are teaching Romeo and Juliet, Charlotte’s Web or Where the Wild Things are, improvisation can be an exciting tool to scaffold student learning and create greater understanding of the plot, character, context and theme of any text.

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Name

Augustina Droze

Life in China

9 years in Beijing

Exhibitions

11 International Exhibitions in Galleries, Museums, and Shows

American artist Augustina Droze (1981) uses animals as symbols to describe her personal lived experiences. Her current body of work explores her life as a foreigner, her gaze of the world as exotic, beautiful and bewildering. As an expat living in Beijing for the past nine years, Droze’s work incorporates elements of East and West. Her paintings are colorful and confrontational, brimming with Rococo inspired abundance. Droze creates her own modern mythology, a storybook land where she is other in a very other worldly landscape. She has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally in numerous shows, notably the Castellani Art Museum, Niagara Falls, New York (2014), Banaras Hindu University as Fulbright Senior Scholar, Varanasi, India (2017), the Beijing US Embassy as Distinguished Art Envoy (2022), London Biennale (2023), and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2024).

Finding a Balance as Artist and Educator

I will highlight my experience as a professional painter and public artist and the work I have done across the world using art to connect communities. I will have an honest discussion about my challenges of finding balance with family, painting, work, and also completing my doctorate.

Creating a Community Art Project with your Students

This workshop will provide a step-by-step guide to work with your students to design and create a community mural in your school. We will focus on techniques to ensure agency and voice of all student participants as well as aesthetic integrity and professionalism. During the workshop, you will be the students as I guide the group through a mock mural design session. Leave energized and ready to lead your students in a mural or other community art project.

Primary Art Tools and Tricks

This workshop will showcase some of my favorite tools that I have used in the primary art classroom. We will discuss skill building as I guide you through some techniques I created for shading and blending. I will explain how I incorporate a deep understanding of art history into my lessons (so that they are not likely to forget), and some handy tricks for classroom management.

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Host School

 

A premier international school, International School of Tianjin (IST) was founded in 1994 as a non-profit and parent-governed international day school for the children of expatriate families living in Tianjin. IST is proud to be the only three program IB World School in Tianjin. The International Baccalaureate (IB) offers three high quality programs to a worldwide community of more than 5600 schools in 159 countries. IST is consistently ranked in the top 10 in China and top 100 IB schools in the world on the basis of its IB Diploma results.

 

Steve Moody

Director

International School of Tianjin

22 Weishan Nan Lu, Shuanggang, Jinnan District, Tianjin, 300350

+86 22 2859 2001

Planning Committee Team