Laura Reeder

Academic Advocacy

Posted by Laura Reeder, Sep 15, 2010 2 comments


Laura Reeder

Laura Reeder

I have recently stepped from arts education advocacy into arts education academia after twenty years as a teaching artist and arts administrator. The advocacy work continues, but, I have been able to view it with a new perspective. The thing that has remained unchanged in this short step is my understanding about the role of the teaching artist in contemporary education.

In arts education advocacy, the compelling stories that we bring to policy makers almost always include an artist-educator (as one human being) or an artist-educator partnership. The teaching artist appears in our tales as a full-time educator in a school, as a visitor who sparks a new energy in the classroom, or as a community mentor who engages learners outside of the school setting. The teaching artist also appears in the halls of the legislature each year when we are lobbying for policy change.

In arts education academia, with the focus on individual students who will go out and become the great teachers and artists of the future, we recruit newcomers and increase endowments with glossy images and passionate speakers who each embody the seriousness of education with the rebel promise of creativity. The teaching artist also joins the campaigns for new programs and new funding when it is time to make institutional changes.

If, as many of our colleague bloggers appear to be saying, we are making little progress in arts education reform, is there any way that we can combine the constructive qualities of education and the inventive qualities of the arts and advocate for a new hybrid model of citizen by being better planners? The institutional systems of the arts and education are teeming with teaching artists who have accidentally stepped from the “arts side” side to the other to become administrators, certified educators, policymakers, deans, and union members.

There seems to be no plan on the table to intentionally integrate our artist-preparation programs with graceful skills for advocacy and navigation in our combined institutions. We are still funding the arts as something to be integrated into education, and we are still researching the impact of the arts on education, but we are not intentionally handing any mirrors to our artists and asking them to look for the educational, administrative, and advocacy characteristics that they may inherently be using.

My next entry will focus on the characteristics of new-generation teaching artists who continue to side-step into advocacy and leadership at all levels. I offer a challenge to readers to populate this blog with examples of the hybrid-creative-educator-artist-learners who we may offer as the models for a new approach to advocacy.

2 responses for Academic Advocacy

Comments

September 17, 2010 at 8:37 am

VSA Massachusetts is working with the Boston Public Schools to promote a new role for teaching artists in improving instruction and learning across all subject areas and addressing student engagement and inclusion of students with disabilities. With Lesley University, UMass Boston and the VSA home office we've championed arts integrated instruction as a tool for accomplishing Universal Design for Learning. Teachers and teaching artists have access to graduate level instruction and support from teaching artists in the classroom as well as coaching through a reflective community of practice.

UDL focuses on anticipating barriers to learning and designing instruction that offers multiple means of representing information, expressing understand and engaging students. Our work emphasizes accomplishing standards based goals in arts learning as well as learning in other curricular areas, inclusion of students with disabilities and demonstrating the learning accomplished to parents and the broader community.

Case Studies at: http://www.vsarts.org/Documents/resources/education/VSA_Inclusive-Case-S...

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September 15, 2010 at 11:27 am

"we are not intentionally handing any mirrors to our artists and asking them to look for the educational, administrative, and advocacy characteristics that they may inherently be using."

I see this. But what is it, in your opinion, that makes this so common within the arts world? Why is there such a hesitance to do so?

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