“The arts are a blessing to our student body and make school a much more joyous place to attend.”
– Teacher, Zamboni Middle School, Paramount
This summer we gathered with teachers from our schools across California to prepare for the coming school year and explore all the ways the arts can help us meet the uniquely challenging moment our schools, and their teachers, students, and families are experiencing.
We partnered with The Music Center’s annual arts integration conference and planned special Turnaround Arts programming for our school network. The theme of this year’s conference was “joy and healing through the arts.” While the arts cannot solve all the challenges the communities we support are facing, the arts can offer meaningful opportunities for self-expression, community-building, and healing.
Attendees at our recent summer conference
At the conference teachers explored all the ways that joy shows up in our work at Turnaround Arts: California, and how it relates to our vision of ensuring that all students – no matter their zipcode – have access to a high quality education including arts and creativity to support their success in school and life.
In our 2025 survey of teachers, 86% reported that the arts positively impacted their students in the areas of bringing joy and fun into the classroom. Joy isn’t frivolous. We know that when we reimagine classroom learning to incorporate the arts, that we are addressing the whole child. The arts help us provide multiple modes of learning and create learning opportunities that are relevant to students’ backgrounds. This ensures that kids feel seen and heard, which are actually prerequisites for being ready to engage in learning.
And joy isn’t just important for kids. Two thirds of teachers in our 2025 survey said that the arts helped make teaching more enjoyable and engaging. Our schools and teachers are under a tremendous amount of stress and burnout. Finding joy and engagement as an educator, helps to protect against the vicarious trauma they may experience as they serve students and families. We help teachers tap into their creativity and use the arts to better reach and support their students— an antidote to the heavily standardized curriculum many teachers are required to use. As one teacher shared,
It [the arts] has made me more motivated as an educator as I really enjoy artistic expression and it has greatly improved the motivation of my students which in turn makes my job a more pleasant experience.
Another reflected,
Working with Turnaround Arts not only enhanced the quality of my instruction but also strengthened the sense of community and shared purpose within the classroom. The impact was felt most profoundly in the joy and enthusiasm it sparked among my students.
The joy the arts bring to our schools extends to families as well. We support schools to put on community arts events that welcome parents and other family members into the school community in a safe and supportive environment. One teacher reflected,
It is heartwarming to see our parents and students who don’t normally get involved, enjoying each other and the arts at Family Art Night.
Another shared,
Parents are more interested in attending school functions to see their children perform. They are more likely to see us as caring and supportive because they see how much joy their children experience at school.
As we prepare for the coming school year, our commitment is to ensure that teachers and students have access to the arts to cultivate resilience and learning, and bring color and joy to the school day amidst challenging times for so many communities.
We’ve been partnering with Finney Elementary for two years, supporting the school in identifying and developing arts strategies that build student learning and family engagement and create a welcoming and joyful school environment. Over the past year, teachers at Finney Elementary worked to expand their use of the arts to include theater in classroom teaching. Principal Rachel Scott shares, “Dr. Niki Elliott says that art is a vehicle to the brain, a gateway to learning. We want to make language come alive through theatre.” In partnership with their Turnaround Arts Coach, Deirdre Moore of 
All teachers at Finney participated in an interactive training workshop, learning the art of tableau, where actors stage a scene that is silent and motionless, in order to depict an event or convey an idea. Teachers learned practical techniques to help them use theater in everyday classroom teaching to make learning fun, meaningful, and memorable. Following the training, teachers received individual support as they began to implement the new theatre arts technique into their teaching, and reflect together on the impact it’s having on student engagement and learning.
