Americans for the Arts and NonFiction Media presents “Taking Stock: Connecting the Dots”, a video chronicling the Puget Sound Region’s Emerging Arts Leaders’ dynamic series of Creative Conversations.
Ride along as young arts administrators grapple with the shifting landscape of arts funding, advocacy and space use models.
Thrill to the strains of peer networking, collaborative problem solving, and mutual edification!
This film shows what is possible when today’s leaders come together to invent the way forward–rather than waiting to have it shown to them.
Web 2.0 sounds great, but…could this be a whole new culture to many? To encourage the online conversations to have some meaningful context, and buy in from techno-phobes / hostiles (a.k.a. arts professionals who fear the world outside their discipline) they must be fully equipped to participate in not only WHAT is being said, but HOW the conversation is happening. We will need to train potential digital technology users with a lot of side-by-side show me sessions.
As the consumer gains control of choices, I get that we (marketers?) must work in tandem with arts educators whether they are teachers, concert reviewers, or fellow [other] promoters. Most of our potential audience may be completely disconnected with art. Marketing must educate. Educators are the best marketers. And it’s not just the arts educators-everyone who talks about art (history teachers, scout leaders, etc) letting the audience educate themselves also means getting the good stuff connect-able to the audience. I can see more layers of information about upcoming events instead of short/description library of congress options.
The disappearance of the top-down corporate world will be almost as challenging to reveal to some old hands as their comb-over.
Week after week, story after story is published in newspapers and magazines all across the country. They take different angles, but they all have the same message: an education that includes the arts produces workers that companies want to hire.
The San Diego Business Journal writes that in an age of increasing globalization, jobs that lack elements of creativity will wind up overseas. So while math and science are important, it might be music and art that make the difference between a lay-off and a promotion.
The Daily Press in Escanaba, MI, published a story this week about China’s shift from a teaching-to-the-test curriculum to one that encourages creativity, just as the United States is doing the opposite. The No Child Left Behind philosophy is not preparing our children for tomorrow’s world.
Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is driving the point home in speeches on the campaign trail, saying that employers are looking for creative types. Like Richard Florida, Huckabee believes that creatives will make up the American workforce in the future.
So the word is getting out. The idea is catching on. Creative workforce has Buzz. And Buzz is the beginning. Before Paris Hilton was everywhere, she had Buzz in the Manhattan nightlife scene. Before healthcare reform was on every politician’s agenda, Michael Moore’s Sicko had Buzz.
But what do we do now? How do we in the arts harness the creativity Buzz and use it to ensure that every child gets a quality arts education? At Americans for the Arts, we are working on leveraging the Buzz to get foundations, corporations, and political leaders involved so that No Child Left Behind doesn’t leave the arts behind. We know you are working on it too. What are you doing with the Buzz?
Bob Morrison and host of other movers and shakers in New Jersey arts, arts education, education, and politics unveiled the results of the New Jersey Arts Education Census Project today in a graceful and eloquent press conference televised from the New Jersey Network studios in Trenton, NJ.
In a brilliant stroke, the new New Jersey Arts Education Partnership a coalition of supportive leaders and organizations speaking with one voice for arts education made the recommendations from the Project its strategic plan. Is there a better way to make an impact from the data than to make it someone’s to-do list? The Partnership is currently hosting committees addressing each major area of the report: students, teachers, policies, resources, and community.
The most potent piece of the data is the mapping: an actual picture of each school district colored according to their Arts Education Index a number like a grade, based upon flexible, comprehensive criteria for high-quality and fully accessible arts education.
