The Early Childhood Arts Partnership Grant In Action: Talking Arts Integration with Susanna Olson

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“Drama can help us provide multiple pathways for learning, celebrate creative differences, strengthen empathy and perspective-taking, expand oral language as an essential pre-literacy skill, build community, address an astonishingly high number of Vermont Early Learning Standards, and nurture an appreciation for the performing arts.” – teaching artist Susanna Olson

Susanna Olson is a teaching artist who has brought theater arts integration to young people for more than 20 years, both independently and in previous roles with The Flynn in Burlington. This past year, Olson held residency programs at both Mad River Valley childcare program Neck of the Woods and Pine Forest Children’s Center in Burlington. During these eight-week and four-week long programs, respectively, Olson worked with children preschool age and younger, using drama exercises for developmental learning.

Feedback from the preschool teachers of Neck of the Woods stated, “It was always amazing to see how Susanna could capture the attention of fourteen 3 to 5-year-olds and keep them engaged for an entire hour. She taught us so much about improvisation and the power of imagination. We still use many of her ideas in our classroom every day, whether during transitions or free play.”

Olson’s residency at both Neck of the Woods and Pine Forest were sponsored by the Arts Council’s FY2025 Early Childhood Arts Partnership Grant, which offers nonprofit organizations up to $6,000 to support arts education in pre-school classrooms through partnerships with arts organizations and/or teaching artists. 

Olson is also a teaching artist on the Arts Council’s Teaching Artist Roster.

Arts Council intern Skiles Roberts-Salvador interviewed Olson about her work and residencies to learn more about the impact of the Early Childhood Arts Partnership Grant.

Skiles Roberts-Salvador: Could you tell me about arts integration?  

Susanna Olson: The Kennedy Center wrote this definition in the late 1990s: “Arts Integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. Students engage in a creative process which connects an art form with another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both.” An arts-integrated lesson is one that has two kinds of objectives: arts and another subject area. As the lesson progresses, those objectives lean into one another and lift each other up, making the total impact of the learning experience greater than the sum of its parts.

What first sparked your interest in the concept of arts integration? 

I’m so grateful to my Northwestern University graduate school professor, Rives Collins, whose courses in creative drama, storytelling, and children’s theater opened a door for me in the early 1990s to Winifred Ward’s world of process-centered drama as a teaching tool in the classroom. Upon moving to Vermont shortly thereafter, I was deeply fortunate to find a kindred spirit for this work in master teaching artist Joan Robinson, who was education director of The Flynn in Burlington at the time. Together, in the early 2000s, we participated as artist/educator partners in the Kennedy Center’s earliest professional learning conferences for schools in the work of arts integration. In the years that followed, the Kennedy Center’s influence blended with Joan’s modeling and colleagueship, helping to codify and strengthen my work.  

What draws you to residencies like the ones you had at Neck of the Woods or Pine Forest?  

I’ve been privileged in recent years to have both a consistent home for practicing my teaching artistry at Robin’s Nest Children’s Center in Burlington and opportunities for guest residencies at other wonderful schools like Pine Forest and Neck of the Woods.  Throughout my childhood, I was raised on stories about the importance of spreading good news. I’ve found the power of drama in the classroom to be my good news to share. Anytime I get to do that is a gift to me.  

What are the challenges and advantages of entering a new environment for a limited amount of time?

Over the years, I’ve found it critical to find a balance between sharing what I’m excited to offer with respecting and honoring that my visit is one element of myriad unseen moving parts in the life of any given learning community. I learn so much from visiting new environments and witnessing other educators in action. It makes me a better teaching artist. I wish all educators had similar opportunities! 

What does the curriculum development process look like for these residencies?  

The curriculum development process is most successful if I first have a chance to facilitate an introductory professional development workshop for faculty combined with one-on-one orientation meetings with classroom teachers. I learn many things from teachers during this time, including the reasons they’re interested in the work, how they’re already using drama in their classrooms, their professional development and curricular goals, and specific student accommodations that might be needed. Once questions like these are answered, I search my mental toolbox of drama warm-ups and exercises to build an initial drama unit that might suit the individual needs of each classroom community in the school. Over the weeks, teachers and I regularly reflect together about how it’s going and strategize next steps. In this way, the curriculum planning is an ongoing emergent creative process across the residency. 

What is one of your favorite lessons you’ve created?

I have happy memories of using drama with preschoolers to explore narrative concepts as well as the interactions of light and shadow as a way of scaffolding toward preparations for the 2024 total solar eclipse. One example lesson: Standing in the bright light of a projector, the preschoolers used their bodies, voices, and imaginations to act out solos from Frank Asch’s book “MoonBear’s Shadow.” Interacting with their own real shadows, they pretended to be MoonBear, who saw his shadow and attempted to get rid of it—tried to shout at it, run away from it, bury it, nail it to the ground, etc. The children performed their solos for each other, offered positive reflective feedback to each other, and were proud to have videos of their solos to share with their grown-ups.  

At Neck of the Woods, you were not only introducing arts integration to young students but also teachers. Can you tell me a bit about the experience of educating educators? 

Anytime I visit a school to offer drama to children, even for a single visit, I try to offer fellow educators strategies they can use as well as access to follow-up professional development resources (like dramaticliteracy.org) for those who wish to pursue more. I remind myself that my fellow teachers and I are all lifelong learners and we each have unique expertise to share with one another. As we learn from each other, we all need many of the same things our students need—including chances to access our prior knowledge and connect it to new learning, opportunities to express our own voices and make our own choices, time for reflection, scaffolded learning, chances to process in multiple ways (including kinesthetically, interpersonally, verbally, and visually), and more. 

At both Neck of the Woods and Pine Forest you were working with preschool-aged children. What draws you to introducing your arts integration to a young age group?

I loved the time I spent with the amazing learning communities at Neck of the Woods and Pine Forest! There are so many reasons I find drama valuable in preschool that I recently collaborated with my teaching colleagues at Robin’s Nest Children’s Center to write a piece about it for our parents and wider community. In our piece, we identified seven reasons and wrote stories to go with them. We’ve found that drama can help us provide multiple pathways for learning, celebrate creative differences, strengthen empathy and perspective-taking, expand oral language as an essential pre-literacy skill, build community, address an astonishingly high number of Vermont Early Learning Standards, and nurture an appreciation for the performing arts.

Could you share one of your favorite recent memories working with children? 

Once upon a time, four-year-old Ben was welcomed to school with “Good Morning, Ben! It’s a drama day!” to which his mom replied, “Oh he knows—it’s what got him out of bed this morning!”