Innovative Educators Institute | Application now open!

2026-2027 Innovative Educators Institute
Dates: Summer Lab (June 22-26) and Summer Reconvening (July 15), plus additional components throughout the school year

Theme: Regeneration

Location: Lynden Sculpture Garden

Application: Lynden Sculpture Garden IEI 2026-2027

The Lynden Innovative Educators Institute welcomes K-12 teachers, teaching artists, and museum and community educators with an interest in developing an interdisciplinary and arts-integrated curriculum that explores the relationship between art, nature, and culture. Join us for a week of community with fellow educators.

What we do:

• Network with fellow educators.
• Make art alongside master artists.
• Participate in interpretive activities in the gallery and garden.
• Design and implement an art-integrated curriculum.

2026–2027 Program Components

• 36 hours of laboratory time across a June intensive and three follow-up reconvenings
• Up to 12 hours of one-on-one classroom coaching with Lynden’s implementor
• Priority registration for field trips to Lynden to implement the curriculum developed by teachers with a classroom and/or a participating classroom teacher
• Priority access to transportation funds for field trips
• Complimentary one-year family membership to the Lynden Sculpture Garden

2026-2027 Program Schedule

• Week-long summer intensive (June 22–26, 2026; 1:00–5:00 pm daily; 20 hours)
• July reconvening (July 15, 1-5 pm; 4 hours)
• Two reconvening days during the school year (6 hours each, late fall and early spring; breakfast and lunch provided)
• Access to hands-on art and nature workshops (Lynden members receive discounts)
• Access to an online archive of professional development resources
  

Fee: $750. Scholarships Available.

For nearly a decade, the IEI was grant-supported. As we transition to a new funding model, we are offering a deeply discounted rate and actively raising scholarship funds to ensure equitable access for all. We understand that districts may face funding constraints, and we are eager to partner on solutions.

To apply for a scholarship, if necessary, click here.

We ask you to fill out the online application as soon as possible.

Lynden Sculpture Garden IEI 2026-2027 Application

(Direct link: https://form.jotform.com/261236023147044)

The application deadline is June 12, 2026.

For more than a decade, the Lynden Sculpture Garden has been home to the Innovative Educators Institute (IEI), a high-quality, in-person, place-based professional development/learning laboratory for K-12 educators. This dynamic, year-long program focuses on arts integration, outdoor learning, and collaborative, place-based curriculum design, with the goal of designing and implementing arts-integrated curriculum in the classroom and at Lynden.

The IEI is a durational, relational community of practice that centers active rather than passive professional learning. Teachers, artists, higher education faculty, and Lynden staff learn together, modeling collaborative inquiry not only during laboratory sessions. Educators carry this shared practice into their classrooms, strengthening instructional coherence and creative confidence, and reinforcing it through field trips at Lynden, classroom lessons, and coaching sessions. As a community of practice, the Institute also cultivates teacher leadership—from informal peer mentoring to teacher-led sessions —supporting long-term professional growth and retention.

Each year, the Institute is built around a different theme.

2026-2027: Regeneration
The Innovative Educators Institute at Lynden Sculpture Garden begins a new year-long chapter for a cohort of educators engaged in arts integration and place-based learning, grounded in a relational and collaborative community of practice. The institute centers migration, cultural memory, and ecological awareness as generative forces for creative work and curriculum design. Through a series of hands-on sessions with guest artists, participants will explore how making can become a process of reclamation, regeneration, and collective meaning-making. With Warren King, educators will investigate material and spatial practices that reflect cultural continuity and change. In a reimagining of Reclamation with choreographer Reggie Wilson, participants will engage movement as a form of embodied knowledge—where histories of migration, resilience, and joyful expression are carried and transformed through the body. With Daniel Minter, participants will create vernacular brooms—objects that hold histories of labor, care, and ritual—offering a tactile and symbolic act of sweeping, repair, and renewal. Throughout the week, educators will work across indoor and outdoor spaces, attuning to the migratory patterns and regenerative systems of the natural world. Rooted in collective storytelling and future thinking, this institute invites educators to create together as a practice of resilience, to center joy as an active and sustaining force, and to nurture ways of teaching that are responsive and connected.

For more information, please visit our For Teachers webpage: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/education/teachers

Please reach out if you have questions about the application form process. We are happy to answer your questions about the IEI. Please feel free to contact Anna at  agrosch@lyndensculpturegarden.org.

We look forward to seeing you at Lynden this summer!