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Examples of success in the community based setting
Being asked to blog about operationalizing access and equity in arts education is daunting. As a museum director, we strive to make everything accessible following ADA guidelines and being open to the public on a regular basis. Here at the Delta Blues Museum we are trying to tell the stories of artists who have not always been given equity–in their lives, their professions, or even in their deaths.
In pondering what knowledge I could share about this topic, I realized that in part, our programming is not planed for a particular age, demographic or targeted audience. We plan programs about the blues for fans of the blues and persons interested in learning more about the blues. This audience is global. So, when you look at the world as your audience, you are freer to be more creative in your offerings instead of trying to create something for the audience you aren’t reaching. Nurture and feed the one you have.
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Excellence Isn’t Enough: The Benefits of Arts Education–for Arts Organizations
To make the case for the value that pursuing equity and access to arts education provides to arts organizations themselves, I want to look at two ongoing and current topics in arts production.
The first topic is diversity in all forms. In the past three years, as part of a larger national conversation on diversity that has revolved as much around micro-aggressions and the slow grind of institutionalized discrimination as around shocking, devastating, and violent events, America’s arts communities have been challenged to examine the unwitting ways in which they maintain this status quo. With the best intentions, we produce excellent artistic work meant to have a universal appeal, and are surprised when audiences are not diverse. The discussion revolves around this question: If artistic excellence and a desire for diversity aren’t enough to eradicate the barriers that prevent our arts institutions from serving a representative audience, what more do we need to do?
The second topic is the audience of the future. Arts production seems to be hovering around perpetual invalid status, always wondering what it will take to get an infusion of new blood. As the average age of season ticket holders rises, we wonder where the next generation of arts supporters will come from. The discussion revolves around this question: If excellence isn’t enough, and marketing to young adults fails to promote long-term engagement, what can we do to reach new audiences?
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The Arts and Social Justice: Bridging Artistic Excellence and Social Justice Transformation
With the rise in racial tension and violence in our communities, the question of how we engage our communities in meaningful civic discourse is being asked across the country—particularly how do we engage our young people and help them understand how to include their “voice” in the discussion? The arts have a long standing place in building a bridge between artistic expression and social justice. “Music and the arts are often the glue that helps hold a movement together, providing a sounding board and an emotional support structure,” says Anthony Trecek-King, Artistic Director for the Boston Children’s Chorus, BCC, during our recent discussion about BCC’s unique mission.
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Funding Models that provide Access and Equity at Colburn
Equity can only be achieved if students of need can perform at the same level as their peers who have the benefit of financial access. If the end goal is artistic excellence, regardless of socio-economic status or ethnicity, we must develop a funding model that provides deep access to training for students at the onset of their arts education journey.
Colburn’s mission is to provide performing arts education at the highest level. The organization is uniquely situated to provide access and equity because Colburn offers a complete sequential learning program in the arts for children aged 7 months through college. There are no limits to the heights at which a Colburn student can achieve.
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Arts education is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
It was a proud day the morning of November 17, 2016, as I stood around my colleague’s computer screen with a group of Armory friends watching our First Lady Michelle Obama honor one of our own teens with the most prestigious award the nation gives for an outstanding after school program. My eyes and heart filled with tears of joy as aspiring seventeen-year old photographer Dalon Poole received the award on behalf of the Armory Center for the Arts for the 2015 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. In that moment, I found myself reflecting upon my own journey, the last twenty seven years of service in arts education, and what brought me to the Armory in the first place, and most importantly what has kept me inspired for all these years.
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Title I and the Arts — Yes, you can!
For the last four years, The California Alliance for Arts Education has been pursuing its Title I Initiative, an effort to clarify confusion around the appropriate use of Title I funds for arts education programs, and to provide tools to school leaders on the ground for planning and implementation. For us, the initiative is not just about finding ways to provide more access to arts education—it’s about providing a high quality education, full stop, for every student. That high quality education must and should include the arts.
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They say only death and taxes are certain. In Portland, Oregon, make room for the arts, too.
How many times have we heard people groan about taxes? Lots.
What if it’s to support arts education in public schools? That was a different story in Portland, Oregon in 2012 when residents said, “YES! We’ll vote for that.” They overwhelmingly endorsed a measure that has restored art and music teachers in all the city’s elementary schools.
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The Crucible: Through Bigotry and Close-Mindedness Comes Equity
An access to a theatre education is as simple as teaching acting classes in a school. It’s allowing anyone to participate in shows and extracurriculars involving the arts. It’s giving kids a space in which to creatively express themselves without judgment, and giving them a group of people who will welcome them with open arms. And most importantly, it’s telling everyone’s stories, not just one kind of person’s stories.
It’s easy to see the end goal, but it’s harder to reach it. There’s too much left to do to summarize in a blog post, but I think these three ideas are a good starting point to make the arts more accessible:
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Access, Equity and Empathy
The data from the 2015 National Center for Educational Statistics report The Condition of Education had this to say about the changing demographics of students: From 2002 to 2012, the number of white students in public elementary and secondary schools decreased from 28.6 million to 25.4 million, and their share of enrollment decreased from 59 to 51 percent; Hispanic student enrollment increased from 8.6 million to 12.1 million students, and their share of enrollment increased from 18 to 24 percent; and the number of African-American students enrolled decreased from 8.3 million to 7.8 million, and their share of enrollment decreased from 17 to 16 percent.
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Open Source Arts Education Is the Only Path to Equitable Arts Education
Visionary school districts aren’t satisfied with offering music and arts education only at schools with affluent students. Leaders in these districts know the imperative of equitable access to learning in the arts.
However, the desire to provide arts education on the part of school leaders does not always translate into the capacity or even the know-how to make it happen. In California, the curriculum contraction that began in the early 2000s along with cycles of budget cuts, reduced arts education infrastructure, and diminished teacher training pipelines have left our state’s education field unprepared for a rapid restoration of the arts in schools.
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All You Need to Know About Diversity in Arts Education You Learned in Kindergarten
I’m going rogue. I’m an arts administration educator posting in the Arts Education blog salon. I’m here for purely selfish reasons: arts administrators LOVE engaged arts audiences. We need students to have great arts education experiences in the K-12 system, since studies show that this is an indicator of future arts participation. Arguably, fewer barriers to equity and access in arts education can help lessen the barriers that arts administrator have to help audiences overcome.
There are quite a few barriers to equity and access in quality K-12 education. These are often structural issues that will take time to fix. I’m more interested in addressing what can be done now, while the larger and slower fixes are underway.
