Kathy Jaffee has been teaching for more than twenty years at Eastwood School in Oberlin, Ohio. For the last eleven years she has taught in a multiage first- and second-grade classroom with Sharon Blecher. In 1990, their classroom was named a Center of Excellence for Teaching Children at Risk by the NCTE. In 1994, they were awarded a NCTE Teacher-Researcher Grant to study the ways students are empowered in their literacy learning when the fine arts are woven into the curriculum.