Mr. James Palmarini

Pondering the Arts Education Lunchbox III: It's time to party!

Posted by Mr. James Palmarini, Sep 17, 2010 0 comments


Mr. James Palmarini

Enough pondering. On with our Arts Education Week party. To wit, let’s celebrate:

  • Students first, last, and always as learners, advocates, and our guides to the future.
  • Student learning in the arts that gives ownership and choice and therefore empowerment.
  • Training programs for arts educators that embrace changing modes of learning, new technology, and other tools that teachers and students need to succeed in the twenty-first century.
  • Seminars, workshops, and breakout sessions that always remember to add students to the butcher block paper checklist of stakeholders.
  • Arts space architects and builders that understand the need for facilities to be safe, and simultaneously messy and orderly enough for creativity to thrive.
  • Initiatives like the P21 Arts Framework that suggest the learning of skills beyond the arts discipline while supporting the core content of the domain itself.
  • Thoughtful advocates who recognize there is no single strategy to “make the case” for an arts program before school boards, legislators, administrators, or parents.
  • Collaborating arts educators who work to integrate the arts with other core subject areas in order to deepen their own and students’ understanding of the world we live in.

  • The visionary arts education champions we are so fortunate to have: James Catterall, Elliot Eisner, Eric Booth, Doug McLennan, Sir Ken Robinson, Diane Ravitch, and Sandra Ruppert, to name a few.
  • The national organizations like Americans for the Arts and the Arts Education Partnership who disseminate news, organize forums and blogs like this one, and other opportunities for discussion of policies, initiatives, and research—all to give the rest of us the opportunity to be heard.  
  • Research, both qualitative and quantitative, that not only offers statistical validation, but illuminative examples that prove the innate value of an art form.
  • Afterschool programs that offer children access to arts programs when schools do not.
  • Teaching artists and classroom educators who embrace and respect the skills and knowledge of one another equally.
  • Assessment models that assume that arts learning is measurable and that all students can reach the highest bar of achievement.
  • Arts institutions, both public and private, that are truly committed to more than a drive-by arts experience for students and their teachers.
  • Teacher practice that puts student learning first, artistry second, and entertainment third.
  • Tireless parents who go to school board meetings, build sets, donate paint, haul instruments, costumes, children (theirs and others), and make their kids realize that arts education is important.
  • Courageous arts educators who dare to assert that there is aesthetic by which good and bad work can be measured.
  • Administrators, legislators and other advocates who support arts education funding in challenging times and understand the need to align policy with teaching practice.
  • Social media and its burgeoning power to share ideas, issues, and learning strategies among arts stakeholders.
  • Schools that recognize artistic excellence as academic achievement.
  • State leaders who mobilize arts education supporters at a grassroots level.
  • Standards-based arts instruction that acknowledges different modes of learning.
  • State laws that mandate arts education for every child in every district.
  • Arts educator evaluation that measures success based on learning and not test scores.
  • The teachers teaching others to become arts educators, not as a fall-back position, but as respected and valued professionals who are the gatekeepers of every student’s entry into the world of the arts.  
  • Green arts teaching and learning that advocates health, happiness, and inclusion of all points of view and belief systems, both secular and spiritual.
  • Art making by students of all ages that is meaningful to the maker and is beautiful and ugly, magnificent and troubling, challenging and comforting, inspiring and that looks, wondrously, like you, me, and everyone else who ever was and will be...
Please login to post comments.