A letter-to-the-editor from Bob Lynch was recently published on the New York Times website.
The letter calls for a reunification in the debate among arts education professionals about which benefits of arts education should be researched by scientists, designed for by providers, and touted by advocates.
The letter is online.
Guest blogger Nick Rabkin has also offered his thoughts.
Tagged with: AdvocacyArts-EducationPresident-and-CEOResearch
August 13th, 2007 at 05:02pm
John Abodeely
By Nick Rabkin
Center for Arts Policy
Columbia College Chicago
August 8, 2007
It is so rare that arts ed or arts ed research gets coverage in the daily press. The recent article in the New York Times about the “Studio Thinking” research project (1) is significant first because of its rarity. It is already generating a buzz about arts education that we rarely feel.
It is important for another reason as well, though. For the last decade or more a debate has raged about the “intrinsic” vs. the “instrumental” value of arts education. Ellen Winner, one of the “Studio Thinking” researchers, played a very big role in that debate several years ago, when she and colleagues published a “meta-analysis” of arts education research in which she found no evidence that arts learning contributes to student academic achievement. (2) Hence, she argued, it was scientifically irresponsible to make a case for the arts’ place in schools because they improve student performance in other subjects. Furthermore, she suspects that education policymakers will reason that if they want to improve math achievement, they will teach more math, not more arts. In the end, the arts are important in their own right and should be justified in terms of the important and unique kinds of learning that arise from the study of the arts.
Some researchers who believed that there was good evidence the arts did contribute to higher achievement across the curriculum criticized Winner’s meta-study, arguing that it excluded good research from its scan. As one of many places in the country where teaching artists were inventing new ways to improve schools by connecting the arts to other subjects, many folks here in Chicago felt Winner’s study simply ignored their work and contributions. Others, more committed to arts education traditions, thought Winner bolstered their argument against “arts integration” and for “sequential and discipline-based instruction” in the art forms.
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Tagged with: AdvocacyArts-EducationResearch
August 9th, 2007 at 10:46am
John Abodeely
Uploaded to this blog post, you will find an audio podcast of Rha Goddess’s speech from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention. Rha was the 2007 Leadership Innovator.
Rha Goddess is a performing artist and social-political activist. Her work, combining vibrant images, linguistic brilliance, hip-hop rhythms, and unflappable honesty, has been internationally featured in several compilations, forums, and festivals. Time magazine called her debut project, Soulah Vibe–one of the year’s coolest records. As founder and CEO of Divine Dime Entertainment, Ltd., she was one of the first women in Hip Hop to co-create, independently market, and commercially distribute her own music worldwide. Her activist work includes co-founding the Sista II Sista Freedom School for Young Women of Color. Goddess’s current projects include Meditations With The Goddess and The Next Wave of Women & Power/We Got Issues! We Got Issues! recognizes that young women have the power to preserve, repair, and protect families, communities and the globe, yet this power is often hidden behind unspoken personal and political issues. Goddess is giving voice to young women through visions, songs, and movement,with the goal to transform women’s ideas of leadership and power.
Audio and video files from previous events, as well as Americans for the Arts’ monthly podcast, can be accessed from our website. To listen to this podcast, please click on the play button below.
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Tagged with: EventsLeadershipPodcast
August 8th, 2007 at 12:10pm
Chad Bauman
An item about Iraq in the last Sunday’s Washington Post caught my attention regarding our ongoing discussion about the arts in a global context. Megan Greenwell says, “Baghdad’s once flourishing community of artists has all but evaporated. Streets formerly lined with galleries are now deserted and the artists who remain say they have not sold a piece since the U.S.-led invasion. Samarrai (a ceramicist) estimates that 90 percent of artists who were working in the capital in early 2003 have been killed or have fled the country.” There is not enough electricity to fire the ceramicists kiln so he will probably leave too.
We talk about and see evidence so often of the community development value of the arts. You have to start by addressing the joy, pain, beauty, ugliness, and questioning that music or painting or theater or dance bring, whether to kids in a school or people living in a neighborhood. We have all seen the arts’ presence become community energy that makes a better neighborhood, a more productive school, a kid with more options in life. And yes, we often get an economic benefit and a social problem-solving benefit as well. We don’t actually need research to see it all around us. But sometimes we don’t think about the opposite situation where the arts are dramatically stripped away, and the unraveling of those very same benefits that occurs, like what the remaining artists in Baghdad see and fear. Shayma Ahmed, a professor at Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts said in the same Post article “The threat to the culture is at least as devastating for Iraq’s future as the political problems. If the artists and the writers leave, who will be here to show what is happening and change the situation?”
When leaders and elected officials recognize the importance of the arts, the very value that the artists in Iraq see eroding, these leaders need to be recognized. The August 3 issue of the Indianapolis Star has a story about such a leader, Mayor Jim Brainard of Carmel, Indiana whom I have had the pleasure of meeting at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. The mayor is fighting City Hall so to speak, insisting on a $700,000 arts appropriation in the 2008 budget. He says “it is very important to economic development that we have art and cultural life in the city.” The article indicates that some city council members disagree and actually voted against the entire city budget in opposition to any arts funding. Mayor Brainard is not backing down even as the dispute shapes up to be a possible fall election issue. Hats off to Mayor Brainard.
-Bob Lynch, President and CEO, Americans for the Arts
Tagged with: AdvocacyLeadershipPresident-and-CEO
August 8th, 2007 at 11:57am
Chad Bauman
by Judith Tannenbaum
Preserving the important qualities of the Teaching Artist profession, while still moving ahead with its professionalization.
Passing on the vision and practice of art-making is as old as culture itself: creation stories told during long winter evenings, women and young girls weaving baskets, men welcoming boys to their dances. One generation has always taught the next.
This history moves forward into the 21st century. Artists; arts program administrators; school, hospital, senior center, and prison administrators and staff; and professors in a variety of college departments are increasingly asking that the valuable work done for decades by teaching artists be recognized as a professional field.
One repeated conversation is a fundamental one that questions the ways in which professionalization of the field strengthens or harms this work that we love. In the midst of these conversations, I often think of architect Chris Alexander. When brought to the site of a new project, Alexander is said to have asked community members not only what they wanted that they didn’t have, but also what they presently had that they valued and did not want to lose.
That’s the question I’d like now to ponder: What do we-teaching artists, students, program administrators, site partners, community activists”cherish about the work of art in other places, as Bill Cleveland calls it, as it has been practiced over the decades? What do we want not to lose as teaching artistry becomes a more formal field?
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Tagged with: Arts-EducationPartnershipsPolicy
August 7th, 2007 at 01:58pm
John Abodeely
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