Supporting Women Artists Project (SWAP)
In addition to providing studio space and mentoring, SWAP also offers curriculum development and teacher placement for public schools in New York City.
Curriculum Development: The SWAP Program Director will work with your leadership team to create a curriculum tailor-made to your specific scope and sequence. Because we believe that the arts can be used to teach almost any discipline, we work to incorporate your whole school curriculum into our unit and lesson plans. If, for instance, your students have a two-week science unit on metamorphosis, we would plan an art project that appropriately echoes and supports the topic. If you have a math unit that explores triangles, we can work on shapes and perspective depending on the age group. If you are working with poetry, we can design a complimentary unit that highlights and integrates poetry into the students art making. We have a number of trained curriculum writers who assist the program director in developing curriculum when needed.
Teacher Placement: Depending on your needs, we can also provide an educator, trained by SWAP, who can teach this tailor-made curriculum and who would be integral in developing it. Either full-time or part-time, this teacher can make a significant impact on your school because she will understand the scope and sequence of your school year, and will be teaching units that have been planned to compliment the traditional subjects.
About our program director: Francesca Kaplan is an artist and art specialist here in New York City. Having worked as a curriculum developer and teacher for Girls Prep, a Charter School for Girls on the lower East Side, she has reaffirmed her devotion to supporting women artists old and young. Francesca has a Master’s Degree in Art Education and Curriculum Development from Stanford University and has taught in and run art programs for children at The Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park, CA and the JCC in Manhattan. Her most recent work was shown in das MoMA Berlin in 2004-2005.