Finding the Thread of an Interrupted Conversation: the Arts, Education, and Community

As we look at the role of the arts in our communities, it is important to examine the evolving role of the arts in public education. There has been a fair amount of excited talk and writing over recent years about the need to reclaim the arts as a basic part of meaningful education, as central to young people's development and as an important element in school improvement. There's also been a fair amount of equally fractious talk and writing about art and education that grows out of a series of perceived oppositions.

In education, traditional teaching methods are pitted against progressive teaching methods, top-down school reform efforts against bottom-up school reform efforts, "standards-based" approaches against "inquiry-based" approaches, and quantitative educational research against qualitative educational research. In arts education, oppositions are drawn between discipline-specific arts education and arts education that integrates the arts across the curriculum, and between aesthetic education and training in artmaking skills. In the arts themselves, a conflict is often drawn between community-based art and "high" art. These oppositions can echo back and forth through a seemingly endless corridor of disagreement. And while it could easily be argued that each of these "conflicts" are built up around false dichotomies, the rancor evoked is often all too real.

What has not been well represented in the writing of recent years, or in the general public awareness, is the growing phenomenon of new networks of educators, artists, parents and young people who have worked through enough of these disagreements to actually develop coherent programs that expand the role and deepen the value of the arts in schools and communities. The big shift that has occurred in these situations is not just a shift in opinion about the value of the arts as content areas to be covered or skills to be acquired, but, more important, a fundamental shift in relationships between the education communities and the arts communities within networks of shared work.

Within these networks, practitioners have not only committed to healing the fracture separating the arts from the essential functions of education, but they have also becoming self-reflective enough to articulate their successes, their challenges and their processes in negotiating across this false but deep divide. Some attribute this development to the larger shift in the culture from a manufacturing economy, built on the assembly line and the segregation of functions, to an information economy, built on distributed leadership and problem solving across disciplines. In any case, this new vitality of the arts in education requires new lines of communication and shared work between people who have been traditionally been separated from each other: Arts teachers must learn to collaborate with professional visiting artists, classroom teachers to collaborate with arts organizations and each other, and parents to collaborate with principals, students, and other community members. These networks are emerging throughout the United States and internationally. Some of these networks are profiled on the Web site of the national organization The Arts Education Partnership.

Certain trends are emerging across this work in different communities:

1) Long-term relationships: If the world of the arts is going to become a real part of whole-school improvement, long-term relationships between art organizations and schools are essential. Partnerships need to be large enough to develop sufficient momentum and critical mass to have some staying power, yet small enough to maintain a human scale of discourse. The field is still exploring how big is too big and how small is too small, and what structures support good inter-relationships among work at the classroom, school, network, district, state, regional, national and international levels.

2) Capacity building: The arts organizations must move from a "delivery" mode (in which they provide programs for schools and do things to kids) to a partnership mode (in which they create programs with schools for kids). This requires moving from a marketing model to a capacity-building model. The focus moves from service delivery to kids to the ongoing professional development of teachers and artists.

3) Multiple voices: The most productive innovations in educational improvement are generated by a "mixed table" — a collaboration among teachers, principals, artists, arts specialists, administrators, parents and community members stimulating each other by their varied frames of reference. All the art forms (dance, theater, music, visual arts, literary arts) are beginning to be explored. This is a development beyond the traditional focus solely on music and visual arts. There is an emphasis on both arts learning in the arts disciplines themselves as well as on arts learning integrated with the other academic areas (language arts, science, math, social studies). Media and electronic arts are just beginning to be explored. Unlike the field of youth development, the field of arts in education has not, to date, been very successful in foregrounding leadership of color.

4) Challenging instruction: The arts are one of the most effective avenues for engaging students in authentic, challenging learning. The arts, when well integrated into instruction, require learners to take responsibility for their choices and to reflect seriously upon their work, provide a connecting thread across learning experiences, and create a sense of meaning and coherency across multiple opportunities to generate and represent knowledge. Communities are beginning to collaborate with arts-in-education networks to provide opportunities for young people to present their work in respectful community contexts: professional galleries, concert halls, theaters, etc.

5) Democratic access: The arts are for all kids, not just the "artistic" or the talented. Learners that benefit from the arts the most (students who have special needs and students who are alienated from school) often have the least access.

6) Connecting learners to the assets of the community: Arts-education partnerships connect the existing cultural resources of the community to the lives of children in schools.

7) New roles for colleges and universities: Colleges and universities are just beginning to realize their potential for assisting and supporting meaningful connections between artists and schools in their communities. This requires universities to move past deeply ingrained institutional habits:

a) Cross-department and cross-college collaboration: Colleges of education, colleges of the arts, studio and conservatory departments, arts-education and service-learning programs are beginning to plan curricular work together for the first time.

b) Cross-city discourse: Consortia are being formed in which scholars, program directors and college students have the opportunity to compare practice across sites.

c) New roles for preservice students: College and university students need the opportunity to help develop and document actual practice through new collaborations between higher education and "on the ground" programs. School systems and arts organizations need to train the next generation of arts-in-education practitioners.

All in all, a wide range of interesting new experiments and models are being developed for the arts in education that move beyond the "drive-by culture" model of short-term artist-in-residence programs, or the model of the isolated and under-funded music or art teacher tucked away in a corner of the school. How will all this emerging, promising practice survive? This is not just a funding and advocacy issue. Arts-education networks need to include reflection on how the pieces "fit together" over time — how schools move from random projects to informed decision-making in order to create coherent, curricular programming, and how students, teachers, artists and other stakeholders reflect together on the quality of their collective work. Only then will communities become able to effectively lobby for the ongoing importance of the arts in education.

Arnold Aprill is the executive director of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), a network of public schools, arts organizations and community organizations committed to arts-education partnerships in Chicago. He is one of the co-authors, with Craig Dreeszen and Richard Deasy, of "Learning Partnerships: Improving Learning in Schools with Arts Partners in the Community," and is one of the co-editors, with Gail Burnaford and Cynthia Weiss, of "Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning," published by Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2002