I’m not sure if you’ve all read the Obama Arts Platform – but it’s linked here for easy access. There’s one strong piece in it, right near the top ‘Expand Public/Private Partnerships Between Schools and Arts Organizations:” – that means to me, that higher education needs to consider more about how it shares its expertise in, support of, and commitment to the ARTS – not only for those within the Ivory Tower, but in our surrounding communities.
I work for a great institution of higher learning, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. The arts faculty are world class educators as well as top producers in their respective fields. The Zoellner Arts Center is a jewel of a facility that presents incredible guest artists. Other departments and programs have dedicated faculty and staff who recognize the intrinsic value of cultural engagement through experiencing the arts.
There are many institutions in our great country that have similar testimony. But what are we doing to share our expertise with our community? How do we effectively align our goals, learning objectives and RESOURCES so that we can see an even greater impact of our collective effort?
That’s why I’m hosting a House Meeting. That, and we have Michael Chabon (one of members of Obama’s Arts Policy Committee) coming to campus on March 22, 2009. He is a great artist, and a great thinker on the importance of the arts in our lives, our culture, and in our future. I hope that he’ll be a catalyst for renewed energy on all our efforts to keep working TOGETHER.
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For those of us who can’t make it to your house meeting, please make sure to blog about what occurs!
Yes, please keep us updated!
You bet. But what will help me frame our discussion will be some of your comments ahead of time…. as in, what would you be expecting if could come? Some students and die-hard local arts community supporters will come to this meeting. What would it look like in your world?
Oooh … sounds exciting! This is a topic of huge interest to my organization, the Illinois Arts Alliance. As part of our Illinois Creates initiative, we recently published Illinois’ first arts education guidebook for education stakeholders. (You can download at http://www.IllinoisCreates.org.)
One of the topics that came up is how higher education can support arts education in public elementary and secondary schools. We identified a few ideas:
* Create professional development programming in
arts education for credentialed arts educators as well as general education faculty and administration.
* Collaborate with schools and districts to create innovative models for arts education
partnerships.
* Include arts education in general teacher education
programs and administrative certificate programs.
* Recruit arts education majors from general teacher programs or arts majors.
Obviously, there’s a lot of room for growth here, and we’ve been working to develop our ideas.
It might be interesting for your conversation to start as a brainstorming session of partnerships you could offer which would benefit both your institution and the schools. Actually, I think it would be best for the conversation to be just with higher education folks and students and then later conversations to involve community partners to help vet and develop the best ideas.
Please let us know how things turn out. This is a very interesting way to use the Obama momentum to help further the arts.
Very inspiring, very exciting. I can’t wait to hear the results.
I would like Higher education can do is communicate and connect – things such as Scarlett suggests like professional development, make the efforts communal instead of we’ll do this over here, you do that over there.
It’s only when everyone works toward the same goal and with the same intent that schools will see change. I just typed that and almost erased it – will that ever happen? Could it ever happen that everyone works toward the same goal with the same intent?
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