Americans for the Arts

Margie Johnson Reese

 

I am a registered card carrying bureaucrat.  I don’t do passion. The job isn’t what you’re excited about; it’s what you accomplish. My staff might disagree with this self-assessment especially after summer 2014. This past summer, in less time than any organization should be given; Big Thought implemented Dallas City of Learning, an expansion on a connected learning initiative first created in Chicago. To put it simply, the Cities of Learning initiative connects students to learning opportunities based on their burgeoning interests and the peer communities those interests created, with the goal of tying those creative experiences to academic outcomes. Student achievements are codified and recognized through digital badges that contain within their code the granular information about each accomplishment.

Matt D'Arrigo

I write this as an arts leader but, more importantly, I also write this as a dad. My wife and I have two amazing children, ages 5 and 8, who are lucky to have both parents who are artists and work in the arts. They receive daily

artistic and creative encouragement at home. We want our children to be creative in their approach to everything in life, to learn and grow with a sense of wonderment, curiosity, and discovery. We want them to express themselves in authentic ways and to respect and understand the immense role the arts and humanities play in shaping all of our lives to be more meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable.

They attend a fantastic public school, one of the best in San Diego (I know, I’m biased). They receive arts programming once a week, but only through the generosity of parents and families donating to a foundation that pays for it and volunteers who help support in the classroom. We’re lucky they attend a school in a more “well off” area of town whose families have the means to fund the arts programs. If they attended a lower income school, and we didn’t hold the arts as a highest priority in our home, they would receive very little to no arts exposure or engagement. I don’t think that’s fair.

Creativity. The Creative Worker. Creative Problem-Solvers. The Creative Class, (as coined by Richard Florida), Creativity in the Workplace. A Google search on the word “creativity” elicits 216,000,000 listings. Many of the scholarly articles address the role of creativity in the workplace, the relationship between creativity and cognition, or how to cultivate creativity. Mention creativity, and it’s only a matter of time before the conversation turns to the debate of STEM vs. STEAM. What I have increasingly observed in both articles and conversations on creativity is that some include the arts as an integral component in cultivating creativity, while many others do not.

Do you still sing the alphabet when you need to recall the order of letters? Do you chant the poem “Thirty Days Hath September…” when trying to remember how many days there are in a month? Now think about your time in school. My guess is that, like me, you remember school plays, a catchy song when you studied a foreign language, or the content of a science or history lesson when you made a poster or diorama. Yet, how many of us remember the content of the tests or quizzes we took in school?

Most of us have had some experiences that support the idea that using art helps us to remember information better. We would also likely agree that as we progressed through our schooling, learning with and through the arts seemed to diminish, replaced with more traditional types of learning such as lectures and text-based inputs and outputs.

For eight years now, Americans for the Arts has partnered with our nation’s Lieutenant Governors to promote arts education and other arts-related issues. I am often asked, “Jay, why do we work with the Lt. Governors?” The answer is simple. Whether they are elected directly, or on a ticket, Lt. Governors have broad portfolios including many aspects of tourism, creative economy, education, and economic development. Secondly, almost half of them go on to become their state’s next governor.

A number of trends discussed at the 2015 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention resonated with my personal experience as a teaching artist. One trend arose frequently, in a number of different contexts: we all need to consider it since it is clearly top of mind in our field, and prominent in our experimenting with change.  Different presenters used different words to describe this trend, but the gist is: the longtime silos of practice and identity within the greater arts field are coming down. We have stayed within them too long, and now necessity and good strategy are bringing them down.