Welcome to Creative Spark, an exhibition about the education-focused organization called Learning about Learning!

What was the creative spark that launched Learning About Learning, a San Antonio-based educational foundation dedicated to teaching children how they could use their innate creativity to enrich their lives and learning? Believe it or not, it was a theater course that Trinity University’s theater director Paul Baker taught back in the 1960s! This course, the Integration of Abilities, reflected his philosophy about how to develop the creative potential of children through integrated arts. 

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, this philosophy inspired a number of educational programs in San Antonio, including Unlimited Potential, which worked with 15 schools in the San Antonio Independent School District over the summer of 1967 and hosted workshops through Project Y, a program in the Children's Garden at Hemisfair, in 1968.

In 1971, Jearnine Wagner, along with former Trinity University students Cynthia Herbert, Sally Howell, Mary Jean McCullough, Charles Jarrell, Julia Jarrell, Johnny Gutierrez and later Susan Marcus and Susie Monday took what they had learned through Unlimited Potential and created the Learning About Learning Educational Foundation. Learning about Learning initiatives included the Lab School for educational research, developing teacher training materials, creating educational activity kits distributed through Kid Concern, Inc., and the operation of the Idea Workshop family center.

This digital exhibit explores the social and intellectual history of Learning about Learning, including dramatic stories of the organization’s development.