Programs & Services

Eliza Duenow presenting at the Play on Education International Conference in Athens (2022)

For Parents and Teachers

Teacher Trainings

Founding Director Eliza Duenow has been leading professional development for Early Childhood and Elementary educators for over two decades. Each year, she trains dozens of teachers, caregivers, and teaching artists in child-centered, trauma-informed, and play-based methodologies, integrating foundational insights into child development, brain science, regulation techniques, and creative teaching. She specializes in guiding educators with little arts experience and artists new to working with children, offering deep coaching in creativity, mindfulness, and relational teaching.

In Chicago, she launched and led three years of Talkshops at Hyde Park Art Center —hands-on conversations for teachers and parents exploring youth development, creative curriculum design, and executive functioning and regulation practices through the arts. She continues to offer a range of workshops, including Scavenging for Synchronicity, Wander Wonder, Practicing Presence, and Creative Consciousing foundational trainings. Sessions range from single-day intensives to multi-session series, available locally in Chicago and seasonally in Tel Aviv. Please inquire for details via the contact form

Creative Consciousing for Adults - Circles/Coaching

Eliza also offers immersive programs for adults—intimate circles that blend curated literature discussions, contemplative practices, therapeutic writing, and hands-on creative exploration. These gatherings, somewhere between a book club, writing salon, meditation sangha and expressive arts session, foster deep conversation and creative engagement. Eliza leads groups into reflective making spaces, frequently hosting field visits to local nature sites and artists’ studios, and welcoming co-creative dialogues shaped by participants’ interests. Groups are small, often evolving into ongoing communities, and are offered seasonally in Chicago and Tel Aviv.

In addition, Eliza provides private coaching and customized resource packages for individuals and parents seeking to deepen their engagement with creative practices, writing, and interpersonal relating skills. Rooted in her Creative Consciousing pedagogy, forwarded the last decade via The ARC programs, Eliza's work supports both personal expression and social-emotional development for children and adults alike. For upcoming schedules and coaching inquiries, please reach out.

Creative Weekends

A newer initiative open for parents and children together! This series was inspired by special requests over the last years from dozens of parents who wished that they could join our Creative Discovery field trip programs! These weekend excursions invite parents and children to participate in curated afternoons, exploring fun cultural sites, funky artsy corners, and lovely nature spots in and around their cities. We play in Chicagoland during the school year and in Tel Aviv over the summers. We provide maps, resource lists, orientation sessions, guided explorations, and closing sharing circles. We share creative materials for hands-on projects along the way and guide families through some ARC ways of creative play, both scavenging to collect special finds and mark making to create ephemeral urban intervention installations. Please inquire for next season's schedule!

Eliza Duenow's full lecture and workshop on Creative Consciousing presented (unedited) at the National Arts Education Association Conference (NAEA) available online here.

~Sourcing~
Creative Play in the Corporate Arena

Conjuring a culture of community generativity, Eliza Duenow birthed Sourcing into her local landscape in 2024. Hers are offerings of play across arenas, with a next-level alchemy of professional development, corporate wellness, creative ideation, team building, and staff retreat. She overlays these with a kind of gaming—through playful invitations, alongside emergent making, and some kind of intangible spirit rousing. Altogether, it is a magic that is everything.

Eliza brings an artistic blending of her tools to the table—Expressive Arts, leadership/facilitator training, community building, and a passion for deep but playful hands-on engagement. A second-generation prolific maker and lifelong poet, her pedigree is in Visual Culture, and her career spans Education, Facilitation, and Contemplative Arts. But her years as a writer, photographer, and contact improv dancer (in the movement arts arena) bring the real juice—where her spirit speaks from. She plays with sourcing creativity and believes down to her bones that others can source the flow of this to transform work, focus and character. Maybe it’s less of a teaching or convincing, and more of a contaging through play, but it’s an art to behold. Reach out directly to inquire about workshop days and series.

For and With Children

Creative Expressions Afternoon Programs-- Tzaharon Days

We invite children to come explore, create, and grow their imaginations in an English immersion experience. Our inspiring teachers lead a wide range of hands-on activities, explorations of urban and nature environments, social entrepreneurship and performative projects, alongside interactions with local shops and the public as both "subject" and "audience". Our program time centers around hands-on text-integrated creative projects, where children engage in producing works through which they express their thoughts and feelings in response to the bigger concepts and cultural phenomena we are tackling, while also exploring these themes through new materials and the natural world around them.

Some of our groups spend time at The ARC Garden House, which allows hands-on cooking and gardening explorations and deeper material investigations at the big project table. All groups work outside and enjoy time learning about our city and the local natural habitats. Projects include games, street art, signage, urban interventions, book art, photographic experiments, and public art projects. We play with spoken word poetry, joke writing, group storytelling, comics, and text-led “exquisite corpse” illustrations. And the children practice expressing their voices through more public sharing of their ideas and opinions. Of course all our Creative Play is only in English(!) Registration for each next school year is first offered on a priority basis to current ARC program students and siblings, then to families from our partner Wonder School. By late June we open registration to the public to fill remaining spots. Spaces can also open up during the year, so feel free to check in(!)

Creative Explorers Friday Program

A play-based, nature-centered early-learning program, focused on outdoor activities and creative explorations in the garden environment.   The program invites children to “free range” and engage with a variety of materials in child-centered projects that will spark curiosities, imaginations, and the joy of discovery. The Garden House offers a Nature Atelier filled with scrumptious loose parts, an open garden area for digging, a vegetable patch to tend our edibles, baskets of stone collections from across Israel, a shaded hammock area, a pagoda covered deck with big project work table, a Makers Space with wood and tools, Montessori inspired wooden toys, an incredible book collection, a 4 meter long art wall, water hose play, and endless art supplies to explore alongside all our nature bits, recycled materials and real-world resources. The Environment is indeed a third teacher~

Our values derive from a play-based nature pedagogy, through which we prioritize conscious-bearing practices and social emotional learning. Our practices are informed and inspired by Reggio Emilia approaches, Shefer philosophies, and Visible Child care perspectives. We support children to know themselves and thrive in the world around them as they explore all their senses, their community of peers, and the natural environment.

Afterschool Chugim Classes

The ARC offers a wide range of chugim at a few sites across Tel Aviv. From Eco Arts to Funky Dance to Creative cooking, there are groups for all ages, including parent and child classes. Contact us for more details.

Creativity Camps (Summer, Sukkot, Hannukah, Passover)

The ARC has hosted it's celebrated Creativity Camps for 12 seasons in partnership with Wonder School in Central Tel Aviv. They are the largest English Language camps in the city. The programs invite children age 2-9 to come explore, create and grow their imaginations with an inspiring group of teachers and wide range of multi-media activities. Campers dive into engaging hands-on art-making experiences in our Art Atelier, Architecture Studio, across our classroom stages, and in our large play yard through a wide range of visual, theater, music and dance arts every week. We also host series of visits from guest ARC Teaching Artists (yoga, eco-construction, dance), as well as outdoor fun and some cool larger-scale creative projects. So we have in store a lot of fun Materials, cool Ideas, and some inspiring Meaning Making. And in between the hands-on explorations, of course there is lots of outdoor runaround time at Wonder's fabulous on-site playground with swings, slide, sand box, fort, jungle-gym, and mud-kitchen for all sorts of wild fun!

Please submit a request for the current info/registration form for the camps HERE~

Creative Discovery Summer and Holiday Programs

The ARC's special summer programming for older children age 7-11 invites curious kids to explore, create and grow their imaginations with an inspiring group of teachers and a wide range of hands-on activities that we do "out in the field". We visit various public and private botanical gardens, animal sanctuaries, sports climbing/boating sites, and even a special water day for some outdoor splashing-fun and some very cool hands-on creative projects. Children dive into mapping, scavenger hunts, urban interventions, street art and eco-constructions at park and nature sites through visual and theater arts and imaginative creative play every day. In the last years some favorite sites we visited included: the Nature Museum, Eretz Israel Museum, a mini golf course, Ramle Underground pools, boating in the HaYarkon lake by the balloon, the Botanical Gardens, TLV municipal dog pound, Bowling Ramat Gan, The Artist Stables and Ananda in Pardes Hannah, Country Dekel pools, and Meymaidon Water Park. Next year the fast train to Jerusalem zoo!