The importance of the arts and the life of the imagination as a means of keeping the understandings and experience of childhood alive for all children.

In this workshop, we will discuss the imperative role the arts play in sustaining the very core of childhood and a child's capacity to experience the world from many different facets of imaginative understanding and exploration.

Thursday 11:00-12:30

Conference Strand: Education/Policy Reform

Educators, Artists, Organizational Administrators, Educational Administrators, Community/Parents: Why the relationship between the arts and childhood is both natural and necessary,  and how this relationship can, and must be, implemented at every stage of learning.

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Richard Lewis is the founder and director of The Touchstone Center for Children in New York City. Since its inception in 1969, the Center has worked extensively in creating artist-residency programs in public schools that emphasize our poetic and imaginative relationship to the natural world. In addition he has edited and authored books related to the imaginative life of childhood, among them When Thought is Young, Living by Wonder, The Bird of Imagining, Each Sky Has Its Words, and A Tree Lives.