A cohort of educators from Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) attended the inaugural Genius, Joy, and Love institute and this group has continued deepening their commitment to arts-based and justice-centered education ever since. To support this work, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh created a full-day professional development option for PPS’s visual arts and music teachers as part of the district’s annual “The City is Your Campus” professional learning event. Our concept for this was “PD Unplugged. . .” Centered on the belief that a world centered on love, justice, and equity is a place where freedom and self-care reign, this session gave participants the space and time to “unplug” and reconnect with their personal “freedom dreams” through poetry, journaling, drawing, sculpture, music, and/or multimedia exploration. 

In January 2024, the Museum continued its support of PPS’s professional development program by creating another workshop for PPS visual arts teachers which highlighted research about the neurological benefits of art. Based on the publication, Your Brain on Art: How Art Transforms Us by Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen, the session focused on ancestry, identity, and artistry. PPS teachers joined artists at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh for hands-on activities that explored reconnected with our individual journeys as artists, sharing and discovering points of intersection and divergence, and reflecting on how our experiences might mirror those of the artists who have come before – as well as those whom we are inspiring through our work as educators.