the Arts & Creativity Studio

Apply for ACTS 2026

Our students are profoundly eager to engage in the arts. 75% of them identify as artists and many engage in informal arts practices.

(The Arts at Michigan: A Benchmarking Report, 2025)

Students report learning outcomes like goal-setting, leadership skills, project planning, expanded world view, sense of personal well-being, and social connection. And they are right: academic, social, and emotional learning and growth outcomes of arts-integrated learning have been demonstrated in many studies (Rosenfeld-Halverson, 2021). Matching this, 95% of faculty think that arts experience should be part of students’ educational career at the University of Michigan. 

If you are one of those instructors and wish to develop pedagogical strategies in arts-integrated teaching, we invite you to apply to join our inaugural Arts & Creativity Teaching Studio (ACTS). Our program will provide you with training in and support for arts-integrated teaching, learning, course design, and assessment. 

What is the Arts & Creativity Studio?

U-M faculty (lecturers & tenure track) will participate in a multi-session faculty learning community dedicated to the integration of arts and creativity based learning in the classroom. The ACTS program will support faculty in integrating new content and approaches in their course.

Each faculty participant will bring a particular course they plan to teach in AY 2026-2027 on which to work. The course content itself need not have any inherent relationship to art forms or practices: it can be in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences.

  • Arts-integrated learning (AIL) works by linking arts practices and processes with another discipline, through multiple modes of engagement.  Best practices in AIL incorporate high impact and hands-on learning by students, encompassing a range of modalities, including project-based learning, creative problem-solving, community-building creative projects, design-process iteration and prototyping,  and engaging with traditional and experimental arts forms and practices. Students build skills and methods in the specific arts practice and stand to gain deeper, more accessible, more active, and more creative learning outcomes in the discipline at hand, more even than via conventional, non-arts learning approaches. 

  • The Arts Initiative will offer four days of programming on Ann Arbor’s Central Campus with expert instructors Monday, May 4; Wednesday, May 6; Friday, May 8; and Friday, October 23, 2026, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.) These sessions will support participants to: 

    1. Revise their course with an arts-integrated approach, including workshopping course design, materials, assignments, and assignment assessment plan; 

    2. Participate in hands-on exercises designed to exemplify arts- and creativity-integrated learning with clear learning outcomes that can be applied to courses; 

    3. Workshop theirr course and syllabus and get feedback with seasoned practitioners of and experts in arts-integrated learning, as well as fellow ACTS participants.

    4. Become part of a community of instructors who aspire to incorporate arts and creativity into their teaching.  

  • Tenure track or lecturer faculty across any U-M school or campus, are invited to apply. Participants coming from Dearborn or Flint campuses will be reimbursed for mileage. 

    Applicants need not identify as artists to apply. Perhaps you already include elements of arts-based exercises in your teaching (zines, flash fiction, map-making, movement, etc.). Perhaps you are a person who has your own creative, artistic, material, or somatic practice. Maybe you just want to find robust new ways to engage students in learning and in working to cultivate creative and critical thinking (especially in the age of AI). 

  • Participants will receive $500 initially upon completing the first 3 sessions ( as research funding or as additional pay) and an additional $500 upon completion of the course redesign, implementation, and assessment.

    Participants will also have the supported opportunity to apply for grants for continued or expanded implementation (up to $750). 

  • Applications open on February 1, 2026 and will begin to be reviewed on March 6.

    Applications will continue to be accepted on a rolling basis until the program has reached capacity.

    Applicants will be notified by March 23, 2026.

    12 faculty members will be accepted into the 2026 program.

  • Contact artsinitiative@umich.edu