Melanie Coffee.
Most teachers spend their summers honing their skills, preparing themselves for a new school year. Foster High School teacher Melanie Coffee is no different, except she will do some of her teacher development in Florence, Italy.
The Fund for Teachers named Coffee a 2016 Fellow and awarded her almost $5,000 to learn Renaissance masters’ painting and preservation skills through an egg tempera painting workshop at the Centro Italiano Firenze in Florence. The workshop helps teachers increase student awareness of the connection between chemistry, math and the arts. Coffee was chosen out of thousands of applicants.
“This medium is well-suited for all ages, is economical and creates beautiful, longlasting paintings that stand the test of time,” Coffee said. “We will be visiting museums in Rome, Florence, Venice and Paris to view and study the works of Renaissance masters.”
Coffee said the bulk of the time will be spent in Florence attending art classes at the Centro Italiano Firenze campus, where she will learn how to make egg tempera paint using historical pigments, how to prepare panels and canvases, the process of gilding and the painting techniques used by the masters.
Coffee will be blogging about her trip and then blogging as she applies what she has learned in her Foster classroom. “Fund for Teachers is a wonderful program,” Coffee said, “and we are honored to have been selected out of thousands of applicants from across the nation. The funds awarded enable us to have this opportunity that otherwise would not be possible on a teacher’s budget!”