Co-authored by Kristina Fox, Luke Meeken, and Stephanie Danker
In March, I had the opportunity to attend the National Art Education Association’s National Convention in Louisville, KY. Bright and early on the second day of the convention, I joined Drs. Stephanie Danker and Luke Meeken in presenting about the Myaamia Arts and Culture Education Partnership (MACEP).
What is the Myaamia Arts and Culture Education Partnership?
In a nutshell, the MACEP prepares preservice art educators attending Miami University to learn and teach about cultures that are not their own. To accomplish this, the preservice educators work with Myaamia Center staff to develop lessons about the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, Myaamia culture, and an art activity inspired by Myaamia art.
Values
The Myaamia Arts and Culture Education Partnership centers a number of core values:
- Community – Preservice art educators understand their work as teaching with Myaamia teachers/scholars, rather than teaching about or speaking for them. This is a collaborative effort.
- Reciprocity – The Myaamia Arts and Culture Education Partnership aims to provide a valuable experience to the preservice educators in working with Myaamia Center staff, but also to do the work of sharing this knowledge with local elementary students. We aim for both the Tribe and the preservice educators to benefit from this work.
- Cultural Appreciation – Preservice art educators learn to distinguish between cultural appropriation (claiming another people’s cultural practices as your own) and cultural appreciation (valuing and learning about another people’s cultural practices), and how their lesson design can foster the latter over the former.
Partnership Growth
In 2017, Stephanie’s junior-level Art Across the Curriculum course taught all of the fourth graders at one Oxford, OH, elementary school. The following year, they taught fourth graders in all three Oxford elementary schools. In fall 2021, Stephanie’s students stretched themselves to teach students in Oxford and at one elementary school in Cincinnati, OH. We have written more in-depth about these partnerships previously.
When Luke joined Miami University’s Art Department in 2023, the partnership expanded to include his sophomore-level Elementary Art Methods course. Now, Luke’s students teach the fourth graders in Oxford while Stephanie’s students teach fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in Cincinnati. These preservice art educators are also now spending two semesters working with Myaamia Center staff and teaching about the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
In the fall of 2024, the fourth graders learned about Myaamia history and contemporary cultural revitalization, and made a craft inspired by Myaamia ribbonwork. Fifth graders learned about Myaamia ecological knowledge and made a craft inspired by Myaamia weaving (particularly the weaving and research of Jared Nally). Sixth graders learned about Myaamia contemporary art and Myaamia color understandings, and created digital artworks inspired in part by Megan Sekulich.
Impact
As of fall 2024, over 2,500 youth have participated in learning experiences focused on Myaamia art and culture. These include the classroom lessons developed by over 100 preservice art educators as well as adaptations of those lessons for community organizations, such as local Girl Scout troops in collaboration with the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum in Oxford.
The preservice art educators represent their work with the Myaamia Center consistently on their ePortfolio teaching websites. Their ePortfolios are developed throughout all art education courses to promote their work to potential employers. An outcome from a 2024 Howe Writing Center Fellows workshop, attended by Stephanie and Luke, was a statement co-authored with Kristina for consistent representation of the collaborative Myaamia lessons in ePortfolios. The statement was designed to share the intention of the collaboration without outwardly sharing all cultural content of the lessons.
The impact of this work continues to resonate beyond graduation, as preservice art educators regularly reach out to share how it has shaped their teaching. At the 2025 Preservice Art Education Conference, Stephanie moderated a panel with three MACEP alumnae and one current student. The alumnae, Molly Ensor, Ally McLean, and Kalee Grayson, acted as mentors to the class following their cohort, and the current student, Hal Loomis, was in the first cohort to participate in two semesters of the program. Molly shared how her MACEP experience has informed how she engages with Indigenous art and artists in her classroom. Hal shared how engaging in this work across two years (and two consecutive trips to Winter Gathering) has allowed him to meaningfully incorporate Myaamia culture in curriculum.
I am proud of the work the preservice art educators are doing with local youth and love hearing them share their experiences. I’m grateful for Stephanie’s and Luke’s partnership in this work and enjoyed sharing it with others at the National Art Education Association’s National Convention. Most of all, I look forward to seeing how this work evolves during our next iteration of the collaboration next fall!
Aacimotaatiiyankwi 
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