ARTSEDGE is the Kennedy Center’s free digital media platform for teaching and learning in the arts. Our resources are designed to support active engagement with the arts—in the classroom, at home, and beyond, focused on making the arts and creativity a part of everyday life. We’ve just finished a major, ground up redo of the entire site—and are focused on ramping up our content, especially for tweens and teens.

We’re interested in seeing what happens when we break outside our usual methods of creating arts-centered content, in this case by leveraging a large community of knowledgable, opinionated people. We'll be posting questions, ideas, and links to works-in-progress, hoping to generate robust discussion and get a variety of perspectives on ways we can make our content more useful (and, hopefully, more interesting) to kids and the people who teach them. So, we'll reach out to /r/education for "wish lists" from the field. We might ask the AskScience or ScienceTeachers subreddits about what they would do with slo-mo footage of a violin or a ballet dancer, or ask /r/cogsci for help uncovering why some music make us cry (or what ear worms are, anyway?)

We hope this plays out by opening our topics up to a wider audience for feedback and contribution. We’re still figuring out some of the details—like how we will credit the community, especially when there are some places we can’t link to from our K-12 education focused site—but those will evolve as our experiment unfolds.

*(If you don't know about Reddit, it is a social news site with a large community of people interested in an incredibly diverse array of topics--some of which connect to our mission here at ARTSEDGE. Go over there and take a look.)