Can a lunchtime art club teach third graders more than drawing? At Schwab Elementary in Nashville, the people running it think so, and the model is worth a closer look. According to InvestigateTV, the 10-week program, called Gigi's Creative Corner, brings professional artists into the school every Thursday to teach students how to draw and tell stories through art.
The program matters for two audiences at once. For schools, it is a test of whether visiting teaching artists can deliver skills — problem solving, emotional processing, storytelling — that classroom teachers say transfer to other subjects. For artists, it is a paid job. The nonprofit Daybreak Arts built the program to create paid teaching opportunities for artists who have experienced housing instability and economic hardship, according to InvestigateTV. That dual purpose is the part most coverage of school art programs skips. For related coverage, see From Teacher to Nonprofit Program Officer: An Education Career Guide.
What the program actually is
The facts are specific. Gigi's Creative Corner is a 10-week initiative running through the end of the school year. Daybreak Arts developed it in partnership with PENCIL and Schwab Elementary, which sits less than half a mile from the Daybreak Arts studio. Nine third graders, selected by their teacher, meet weekly through May 14, when they will show their work in an exhibition for families and the school community. We covered a connected angle in How Teacher Pension Systems Work: A Guide for New Teachers.
The proximity matters. A studio within walking distance of a school makes a recurring program practical in a way a one-off assembly never is. Trained adult volunteers support the teaching artists throughout the semester, which suggests the nonprofit planned for more than a single instructor carrying the load.
Who teaches, and why that is the story
The lead teaching artist is Helen Stackhouse, a 79-year-old painter who works under the name A.M. Hassan. She has painted for decades, including a period when she was homeless after losing a job. That experience, she told InvestigateTV, shaped how she sees her work: "It made what I was doing special to me. To show people what I was seeing or the ideas that were running around in my head."
Stackhouse's own timeline is her argument for early exposure. She started painting in school but did not seriously recognize her abilities until after she graduated high school. Children, she said, need early exposure to develop their talents. The program pays her to pass that lesson on — and the lessons vary. "It's always something new," she said. "Different techniques, different kinds of paint and different materials that you wouldn't think people would do art with."
For readers tracking careers in education, this is the notable design choice: the program treats working artists as professionals with something to teach and pays them accordingly. It is not volunteer-only enrichment.
What a teacher says she is seeing
Teacher Yenin Echeverria, known as "Miss E," chose the first nine students after noticing they carried sketchbooks everywhere. She reports that the enthusiasm extends past Thursdays. "It's Monday, and they are just opening their sketch books and showing me what they did over the weekend," she told InvestigateTV.
Echeverria also said students are learning problem solving and critical thinking skills they can use in other classes, and that the work has "a huge impact in a child's early developmental stages." That is a teacher's observation, not a study. The honest reading: it is promising testimony from one classroom, nine students, and one program. Whether art instruction reliably builds transferable thinking skills is a question this program was not designed to answer, and no independent measurement of student outcomes is part of the reporting.
What happens next, and what to watch
Two signals suggest the model may grow. Echeverria wants to expand it to other Metro Nashville Schools. Daybreak Arts leaders said they are looking at summer programs for the community. Neither is a commitment yet, but both point the same direction.
The unknowns are the usual ones for school-partnership programs: whether funding holds past the first year, whether expansion preserves the small cohort and paid-artist structure, and whether the skills teachers describe show up in ways other schools can measure. The exhibition on May 14 will be the first public checkpoint. For more reporting on how schools and educators work, see the site's education news section and our Expert Voice coverage.
The takeaway for educators elsewhere is procedural, not inspirational. The ingredients here — a nearby nonprofit studio, a paid teaching-artist role, a teacher who recruits by observed interest, and a fixed calendar ending in a public exhibition — are each visible and copyable. What no school can copy from a news story is proof of effect. That evidence does not exist yet.
