Judith M. Burton
faculty
nyc
Judith M. Burton?is Professor of Art and Art Education, Department of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Burton came to the United States from Great Britain in 1974; she taught in the Newton Public Schools and at the Massachusetts College of Art. She completed her doctoral work at Harvard University while chairing the Art Education Program at Boston University. In 1990 she was invited to direct the Program in Art and Art Education at Columbia University Teachers College and more recently served as Chairperson of the newly created Department of the Arts and Humanities. Dr. Burton?s research focuses on the contribution of the arts to human growth and development; her publications include a series of articles entitled ?Developing Minds? which has become standard reading in art education. In 2001, Dr. Burton was honored by The National Art Education Association with the prestigious Viktor Lowenfeld Award for her contribution to the profession of art education. She has also been invited by the publishers Prentice Hall, to revise Lowenfeld?s famous text Creative and Mental Growth which is widely read in art and psychology programs around the world. In 1994 Dr Burton co-founded the Center for Research in Arts Education at Teachers College. The Center has carried out a number of assessment studies looking at the impact on learning of school/arts organization collaborations. In 1997 she was awarded a grant from the GE/McArthur Foundations to study the impact of learning in and through the arts on student learning across the curriculum. This work was originally published in the Report Champions of Change, and a fuller version was recently published in Studies in Art Education. For this paper ?Learning in and Through the Arts: the Question of Transfer? Dr. Burton and her colleagues were honored in 2001 by the National Art Education Association with the Manuel Barkan Award. In 1997, Dr. Burton was the inspiration behind the founding of the Heritage School, a comprehensive high school located in East Harlem. The School, a partnership between Teachers College and the New York City Board of Education includes the arts as part of the core curriculum. The School also features work in museums and other types of cultural institutions as central to interdisciplinary learning. Now in its forth year, and still in the making, the Heritage School, is rapidly offering a leadership model to other schools in the City. Dr. Burton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in Great Britain, and trustee of the Haystack Mountain School for Craft in Maine.