Learning Center

The Learning Center builds on all of the aspects of Appalshop’s work--radio, theater, community arts, multimedia production, documentary film and video, youth media training, and community organizing. 

The goal of the center is to provide a place where folks with diverse interests come to learn, research and create. The Learning Center allows Appalshop staff to gather and share lessons learned from their experience creating community based art, with each other and with the communities and disciplines in which they work.

Learning Center activities take form as arts residencies, cultural exchanges, media production workshops, film screenings and media literacy discussions, storytelling and traditional music workshops, professional arts development training for teachers, and curriculum development.

From 2006 through 2008, Appalshop is partnering with the organization Boemboe, located in Jakarta, to conduct an international exchange project. It involves Appalshop media artists and Appalachian Media Institute youth as well as Indonesian adult leaders and youth from counterpart media and arts organizations in Java and outlying areas. Project activities will be centered around trainings, production, and sharing of work. The goal of the exchange is to promote mutual understanding and build relationships between key professionals in the arts and their organizations, in the US and Indonesia. This new project builds upon Appalshop’s history of cultural exchange activities and is made possible, in part, by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US State Department.

Appalshop has been devoted to creating meaningful learning experiences for folks of all ages since its early days as a youth training project. With deliberate attention to how learning can take place in local communities through the stories and histories of people rooted in their place, Appalshop is a recognized architect of powerful place-based education programs.

The Appalshop Education Initiative develops educational materials around our place-centered documentary resources. The online curricula, which can be used in a variety of educational settings, are designed around state and national educational testing standards.

The Education Initiative also conducts professional documentary training workshops for teachers with the goal of helping them incorporate place-based media arts activities in their classrooms. Supported by a U.S. Department of Education grant designed to improve the teaching of history in elementary, middle school and high school classrooms, project staff member, Maureen Mullinax provides training in digital storytelling through the Documenting American Democracy Project. A partnership between Appalshop, the University of Kentucky, the Kentucky Historical Society and the Letcher County School System, the project leads 37 eastern Kentucky teachers through a three year exploration of national and regional historical themes, critical approaches to teaching history and how to produce and incorporate historical documentaries into their classrooms.