creativeacrossthecurriculum.com

What It Is

Creative Across the Curriculum (CATC) is a professional development and instructional design service based in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, founded by Heather Dean. It is not a standardized recorded-course platform, but rather a learning experience design service centered on “making lightbulbs turn on.” It helps teachers, organizational leaders, nonprofits, and community groups improve communication, understanding, and engagement through creative thinking, arts integration, and high-quality instructional design.

Core Courses and Services

CATC’s core offerings include Arts Integrated Curriculum Design, Lightbulb Leadership Workshops, Arts Integration for Complex Topics, High-Quality Instructional Design, and Creativity and Wellness Workshops. Its educator-focused services are especially comprehensive, covering 90-minute introductory sessions, half-day professional development, five-part workshop series, and one-on-one curriculum coaching that supports everything from unit design, material development, and assessment tools to classroom implementation. Its arts integration approach emphasizes helping students construct and demonstrate understanding of academic content through art forms, making it well suited for complex topics, differentiated learning, and language-barrier contexts.

Pricing and Delivery

The website clearly mentions in-person and virtual professional development, workshops, and one-on-one consulting, but it does not publicly list pricing, payment methods, fixed schedules, or a registration system. It can be inferred that users need to contact Heather for a customized plan. Whether completion certificates, continuing education credits, or formal certifications are offered is also not stated in the main site content.

Pros and Cons

The main advantage is the founder’s strong background: Heather Dean holds an M.Ed. and NBPT certification, and has over 25 years of experience in learning experience design. The services extend beyond school classrooms to businesses, nonprofits, government, caregivers, and community issues, giving them a broad range of applications. Its approach emphasizes practice, presentation, feedback, inclusion, and multi-perspective expression, making it distinctive for improving engagement and addressing complex topics such as DEI, burnout, and racism.

The downside is limited transparency: pricing, program length, available regions, delivery scale, and contract models are not disclosed. The courses also rely heavily on the capabilities of an individual consultant, so large organizations seeking standardized training at scale would need to further confirm delivery capacity.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is better suited to schools, nonprofit organizations, community programs, and training leaders in English-speaking environments, especially those looking to make curricula, presentations, or advocacy activities more engaging. Access status for users in China cannot be determined from the text alone. The service also appears to be primarily focused on English-language and U.S.-based professional development contexts, so cross-border collaboration would require separate consultation.