Education
Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability
General Information |
2008 Conference and Training |
Conference Schedule |
LEAD Awards Information |
Resources
Conference Schedule
go to Text-Only VersionSubject to change.
Thursday, August 21
Sessions will be held at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
Times and sessions are subject to change
7:30 am to 5:00 pm - Registration
8:00 am to 12:00 pm – Morning Pre-Conference Workshops
Basic Policy Development: Part One of a Two-Part Series to Help You Craft, Implement, Enforce, and Troubleshoot Access Policies for Your Venue
An encore presentation of LEAD 2007’s Policy Writing is Not for Sissies!, this workshop provides you with the nuts and bolts you need to develop, implement and enforce defensible accessibility policies. Each participant receives a policy development guidebook. Recommended for those new to policy writing, approval, and maintenance.
- Identify evidence-based reasons for policies.
- Develop a template policy format and process for in-house use.
- Identify necessary components for a comprehensive organizational assessment of policy needs.
- Identify core resources for verification of policy content and compliance.
- Identify factors needed for successful policy development and implementation, including the policy-practice connection and in-house awareness.
- Identify principles to defend the contents of, and need for, the policies you produce.
Don’t Be Caught by Surprise: Sound Ticketing Policies are your Friends
When do you release wheelchair accessible locations? Do you offer discounted tickets to patrons with disabilities? Where do you seat patrons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or have low vision? How do you accommodate unusual requests? The answers to these questions should be in your box office policies. Come to this session to learn how to write effective policies and implement procedures that will ensure that patrons with disabilities have equal access to tickets and performances.
Presenter: Betty Siegel, Director of Accessibility, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (DC)
Audio Description from A to Z: 10 Steps to Creating and Maintaining a Successful Service
Whether creating an in-house audio description service for a single performing arts presenter/producer or museum/exhibit facility or creating a community-wide service for the various venues of multiple program providers, the essential steps to creating and maintaining a successful service remain the same. In a lecture/discussion format, the workshop leaders and participants will explore creating an advisory board; hiring an audio description trainer; securing buy-in from decision makers; determining equipment needs; budgeting, fund raising, and marketing; training describers and involved staff; and ongoing evaluation of the program and describers.
Presenters: Founding Members of the Audio Description Coalition: Janet Zoubek Dickson, Access Coordinator, McCarter Theatre (NJ); Ruth M. Feldman, Director of Education and Accessibility Services, Yale Repertory Theatre (CT); Celia Hughes, Executive Director, VSA arts of Texas, (TX) Deborah Lewis, Executive Director, ELA Foundation (CA) Michael T. Mooney, Manager of Outreach and Access Programs, Paper Mill Playhouse (NJ) Bill Patterson, President, Audio Description Solutions (PA)
This dynamic, interactive session will train staff and volunteers from theaters, museums, community centers, after school arts programs, and others how to universally design their educational arts programming to make it accessible to children of all abilities. Participants will learn unique strategies and best practices for engaging a wide range of children in several arts disciplines. Everyone will leave the training with specific, universally-designed arts activities they can replicate with the children in their program.
Presenters: Martin English, M.F.A., Executive Director of Accessible Arts, Inc. (KS); Kit Bardwell, M.M., Program Director of Accessible Arts, Inc. (KS)
12:30 pm to 5:30 pm – Pre-Conference Workshop
Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Effective Volunteer and Staff Training
Effective training is 90% of the battle … make that 100%! Your staff and volunteers are the public face of your institution. With proper training they can be enthusiastic and informed allies in your efforts to create a completely disability and senior-friendly patron/visitor experience. This session will address strategies for maximizing your training efforts, offer practical suggestions, supply sample training manuals and materials, and look at key components of thorough and effective training sessions.
Presenters: Celia Hughes, Executive Director VSA arts of Texas (TX); Cindy Brown, ADA and Accessibility Specialist (AZ)
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm – Afternoon Pre-Conference Workshops
Advanced Policy Development: Part Two of a Two-Part Series to Help You Craft, Implement, Enforce, and Troubleshoot Access Policies for Your Venue
If you need help making your policies work in real life, this workshop is for you. Workgroups will gain practical experience by applying the principles learned in Basic to produce venue-tailored policies that comply with accessibility standards. Strategies for identifying and overcoming problems with policy implementation and maintenance will be discussed. Each participant receives a policy development workbook. Recommended for those involved in policy development, implementation and enforcement—administrators, legal counsel, managers, marketing directors, staff educators, policy committee members, program coordinators.
Bring to class: Examples of policy-related problems from your venue that you want to discuss. At the end of Advanced Policy Development, participants will be able to:
- Discuss various strategies for achieving administrative support and end-user compliance.
- Discuss strategies for in-house teambuilding for accessibility issues.
- Compare centralized and decentralized accessibility responsibility and oversight.
- Discuss related education and performance requirements for employees and contractors.
Listen to a Bench, Chew on a Painting: Multi-Sensory Approaches to Museum Visits
How can temperature and texture affect your experience of a sculpture? How can a description shape the way you see a painting? How can taste and smell evoke the mood of a photograph, and fix it in your memory forever?
As visitor demographics shift and the population ages, museums are increasingly striving to address the needs of diverse visitor populations. This workshop will give you the tools to begin new programming or expand current access in increasingly inclusive ways.
Explore how art and history museums can use multi-sensory interpretation strategies to create a richer appreciation and understanding of their collections. We will see how employing multiple, redundant and simultaneous versions of information as a means of improving comprehension, engagement and access to visitors with a range of abilities and preferences, will benefit everyone. Through interactive hands-on exercises, participants will discover the benefits of investigating a work of art through touch, sound, smell, taste and movement, as well as through looking, discussion and description.
Presenters: Hannah Goodwin, Accessibility Manager, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); Rebecca McGinnis, Access Coordinator, Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Hope McMath, Director of Education, Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens (FL)
ADA Basics: Titles I, II, III
The perfect session for beginners! Start your LEAD 2008 experience with a solid introduction to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Speakers from two regional Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers will define Titles I, II, and III of the ADA and discuss how they apply to cultural organizations, whether public or private, non-profit or government.
Presenters: Robin Jones, Project Director and Principal Investigator, DBTAC: Great Lakes ADA Center (IL); Shelley Kaplan, Project Director, DBTAC-Southeast (GA)
Conflict is Inevitable; Combat is Optional: Mediation Skills for Everyone
Mediation skills have highly practical applications in managing the interpersonal and institutional conflicts which arts organizations, in general, and ADA professionals, in particular, may encounter. Role-play is the most common technique for teaching mediators and this session will involve extensive role-plays (relax, it's fun and will be gently coached) and will teach conflict management and mediation skills that can be put to work immediately to defuse, transform and resolve conflicts, handle complaints, satisfy constituencies that they have been heard, avoid litigation, and enhance the chance for peace.
Presenter: Madge S. Thorsen, Attorney (MN)
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm - Opening Reception – Free!
Broward Center for the Performing Arts
Celebrate the start of the 2008 LEAD Conference. Reconnect with colleagues and make new contacts!
8:00 pm Art Metrano's Show
Thursday, August 21 at 8:00 pm
Tickets are $31.50
Enjoy the funny, poignant, and powerful story of actor/comedian Art Metrano’s rise to fame, the accident that almost ended his career, but instead gave him new perspective on life.
This performance will be sign interpreted, captioned, and audio described.
Friday, August 22
Conference sessions will be held at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
8:00 am to 5:00 pm - Registration
8:00 am to 8:30 am - Continental Breakfast
8:30 am to 10:00 am - Plenary Sessions
10:00 am to 10:15 am – Break
10:15 am to Noon – Concurrent Sessions
Noon to 1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00 pm to 5:30 pm – Concurrent Sessions
Saturday, August 23
Conference sessions will be held at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
Times and sessions are subject to change
8:00 am to 5:00 pm - Registration
8:00 am to 9:00 am - Continental Breakfast
9:00 am to Noon – Concurrent Session
Noon to 1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm – Concurrent Sessions
7:00 pm – LEAD Awards Dinner
Tickets are $35
Always one of the best conference events, the Awards Dinner is not to be missed! Join us for an elegant evening to present the 2008 Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability Awards for Excellence in Accessibility Leadership in recognition of the achievements and contributions of an individual and an organization to the field of cultural arts access.
Click here to learn more about the LEAD Awards.Sunday, August 24
10:00 am to 1:00 pm – Conference Sessions
Contact Us
- (202) 416-8727 (voice)
- (202) 416-8728 (TTY)
- (202) 416-8802 (fax)
- access@kennedy-center.org
