Three Jackson County teachers — Jennifer Dall at Smoky Mountain Elementary, Kansas Heiskell at the HUB, and Gayle Woody at Smoky Mountain High School — were awarded a Learning Links grants to support an art workshop at their respective schools.

With the grants, area metalworker William Rogers was able to teach Jackson County students to handwork metal.

Learning Links projects must involve students in “hands-on” projects to support innovative, imaginative and creative approaches to teaching. During the series of three workshops, students as young as ten years old, hammered metal into shapes and then suspended those shapes along a wire framework to create a kinetic sculpture. Each student had a chance to work with steel wire, copper sheet and aluminum.

To better integrate art into the curriculum, Rogers incorporated a physics lesson on leverage along with art lessons on balance and proportion. Rogers has completed several artist-in-education projects in WNC.