Our Work

"Studio Pathways is an essential partner for educators and artists to reach their full potential. They are the wings which provide flight to any org willing to do the work to heal and soar. Mariah and Jessa deepen any practice with real learning. Chapter 510 has been transformed by their approach to racial justice through an arts education lens." Janet Heller, ED, Chapter 510

Studio Pathways provides an inquiry-based approach to culturally responsive teaching and learning. Our work addresses the root of social inequities operating within education, work, and organizing systems while attending to the critical need for reflection and healing. Through a variety of arts-integrated learning experiences, our clients deepen their understanding systems, relationships, and norms that perpetuate patterns of inequity so that they may be dismantled.

Training & Professional Development

We maintain a menu of powerful professional development workshops that can be adapted to meet the unique needs of your learning environment. Our most popular signature training workshops address culturally responsive pedagogy in the arts and have been successfully presented to groups of educators throughout the country, including teams at Stanford University, Solano County Office of Ed, Santa Clara County Office of Ed, Los Angeles Unified School District, Turn Around Arts Ca, Turn Around Arts National and The Kennedy Center.

Other professional development workshops and learning themes include schoolwide implementation of integrated learning pedagogy and strategies for administrators to increase regional and county impact through the arts.

Coaching, Consulting & Organizational Development

Studio Pathways serves as pedagogical advisors for professional arts organizations, educational & research partners, non-profits, universities, LLCs and individual educators at large. This work incorporates our efforts towards collectivism - an understanding of the collective nature of how learners learn and how teachers teach and the belief that ideas that shape the world are best crafted by the hands of many.

Some of our work in this area includes Teaching Artists’ Guild, Solano and Santa Clara County Offices of Ed, Art Corps’ Arts Integration Summer Institute; Turnaround Arts California in partnership with The Kennedy Center; workshop and lesson design consulting for Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain; and Mia Birdsong, TED Speaker and family narrative change advocate.

Curriculum Development

We create curricular frameworks and learning experiences rooted in a creative inquiry that draw upon neuroscience and cultural and contemporary art practice. Our work navigates pathways from patterns of harm toward reconciliation, inviting the artist within us all to lead for love and liberation. We utilize an in-depth understanding of how the brain and body work, applying the ways thatarts support the brain to encode information for long-term memory, for example, as well as how the brain processes information in short bursts, through consistent protocols and cultural portals (the arts) for optimal retention.

A few samples of our curriculum development work include U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society; Othering & Belonging Curriculum; World Trust’s W. K. Kellogg Foundation Racial Healing Curriculum; The Center for Cultural Power, Pedagogical and Curricular Frameworks; and Super Awesome: Giant Robot Interdisciplinary Unit for Oakland Museum of California.

We are currently only providing training on how to design curriculum with our partners. Please contact us for more info.

Speaking Engagements

Interested in having Mariah and Jessa speak at your event? This dynamic team inspires the field to think vibrantly about how and why we teach, the critical role of cultural and contemporary arts, and the components of building lessons that love your students.

RISE UP: An American Curriculum

Rise Up! An American Curriculum uses creative inquiry to explore Hamilton: An American Musical. Lessons help students to understand and critically examine Hamilton themes and artistry, and to express their own personal narrative through writing and performance. The Rise Up! curriculum includes standards-aligned modules for high school students in Theatre Arts and English Language Arts. Lessons embrace concepts and core values that include: Creative Inquiry, Accessibility, Intersectionality & Racial Justice, Liberatory Arts Research Practices, Professional/Contemporary/Theatre Artist Dispositions, Critical Thinking & Reflection.

Through this curriculum, educators learn to:

Explore concepts of democracy and citizenship and how they can be used to rise up within today's political and cultural movements
Guide students to use creative inquiry to find meaning in the past
Affirm student narratives that combat ideologies of hate and exclusion within American history and today’s political environment
Support students to use of artistic forms such as mimicry, metaphor, and projection to develop their capacity and skills for social innovation