Americans for the Arts

John Donne coined the phrase "no man is an island," emphasizing no one is self-sufficient—each of us relies on one another. As arts agencies, arts educators, and arts advocates gathered in the nation’s Capital a few weeks ago for the Arts in Education Symposium: States of Change 2016, the strength and realization of our inter connectivity couldn't have been more evident. Confronting the new landscape of the Every Student Succeeds Act, will require impactful collaborations at the state level, and deep conversations among advocates for the Arts.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in the newsletter for the National Art Education Association, and has been reprinted with permission.

Dennis Inhulsen

Nearly one thousand art educators from all parts have reviewed and provided feedback to our Next Generation Visual Arts Standards. I am pleased to report that reviewers have supported our work as “agree” or “highly agree” with 85% to 92% approval in all categories.  As chair of the team of art educators writing the standards, I am proud and amazed by their perseverance and professionalism demonstrated throughout the process. While still a work in progress, we are on a positive path to support art education for all students and the teachers that serve them.

What are Standards?

The Common Core State Standards Initiative define standards as:

Educational standards help teachers ensure their students have the skills and knowledge they need to be successful by providing clear goals for student learning.

Source: http://www.corestandards.org

Further, educational standards, are developmentally appropriate, assess with reliable measures, and pay close attention to the gaps of demonstrated learning for all students. Standards in education can be traced to the early 1980’s when a “Nation at Risk” was published prompting legislation by congress through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

Standards for Arts Education were first published in 1994 after the standards movement in education was well underway. Since the birth of the standards arts teachers have been increasingly held accountable to them. Our new standards reflect new practices in art education aligned to new challenges teachers face such as demonstrating growth in art for teacher effectiveness ratings and to help teachers with qualities that matter most transferring learning into adulthood. NAEA in partnership with the National Coalition of Core Arts Standards in the local autonomy of teachers and is striving to write standards that can be adapted to a wide variety of teaching and learning conditions. The standards further make the case for more learning in and through the arts.

Through feedback review it was noted that there is a fine line between standards and instruction & curriculum. Indeed, standards in the new Common Core for English Language Arts & Math oftentimes have a tone suggesting “how” to teach not “what” to teach. Like our standards, they are a hybrid of sorts providing enough detail for teachers to assimilate for unit planning.

Alex Sarian

Arts Education, by the very nature of our work, is a hybrid profession.  As such, I’m sure many an arts education administrator or fundraiser can share tales of woe about having to explain to board members or funders how our work is both artistic and educational – a task which only a few people, in my opinion, have managed to accomplish in our field.  But where some people see confusion as a result of not being able to label, others see collaboration… the overlap of a Venn diagram.  What fascinates me about our work is that we are the combination of two ecosystems and a place where community takes on a whole new meaning.

While all that sounds lovely, there are (too) few concrete places where one can achieve a professional sense of community – a space where folks can come together from different cities, organizations and professions to share, discuss and dream about what arts education can achieve.  For me, one of these places is American for the Arts – specifically, the Arts Education Network.

In 2011, a year in which many of us and our organizations were dealing with the ripple effects of a massive economic meltdown, I very quickly became overwhelmed by the sense of isolation and surprised by how most in our community quickly reverted into a survival mode that prevented us from seeing beyond the walls of our institutions.  We became so focused on making sure our organizations could make it through the crisis, we inadvertently turned our back on the solution: us.  I, along with everyone else, was starving for perspective. 

Katherine Irey

The next time you hear yourself justifying inclusion of the arts in an educational setting stop and ask if this could be true:

ART IS THE MOTHER OF ALL LITERACY.

EACH ARTS DISCIPLINE IS A DISTINCT LITERACY IN ITS OWN RIGHT

Then back up and ask yourself:

•          Is my art form a vehicle for communication?

•          Does my art form support personal engagement and community participation?

•          Does it distill my insights and synthesize my meanings?

•          Do I use a symbol system that emerged to support my art form?

•          Does my discipline support idiomatic expression for me and my community?

•          Does my art form invite engagement and gain meaning from critical interpretation?

•          Is it guided by particular structures, rules or agreed-upon [cultural] customs?

•          Does my discipline adapt with relocation or change over time?

Let us assume, for now, that the answers to the above are all yes!

Christopher Lee Kennedy

In 2003, one woman’s 58-year collection of thrift was rediscovered by her grandson and transformed into a living museum and artist residency program called Elsewhere. Today, we invite artists from all over the world to create site-specific projects that respond to this collection, while working inside a three-story former thrift store in downtown Greensboro, NC. As the building and its contents are continually transformed into an evolving artwork, publics are invited daily to play, collaborate, and curate alongside this changing creative community.

As a teaching artist at Elsewhere, the museum and its vast collections provide a platform for learning projects, workshops, and tours that engage schools and publics across North Carolina. In 2012, we launched CoLab, a collaborative laboratory for youth-led media experiments and digital storytelling. Each CoLab session brings together a teaching artist and a group of youth to explore a theme or question, creating interactive media works that range from short films and live performances, to digital publications, websites, and sound recordings in response.

Deb Vaughn

Funders are increasingly skeptical of the impact that a short-term interaction with an artist has on students, especially those who may count those four hours as their only arts experience for the year.

But despair not! There are ways to make the most of those limited contact hours. A recent best practices sharing session of The Right Brain Initiative illuminated several ways to make the artist-student time really count.