ARTSblog

Joyce Bonomini

As a practitioner, I have often taken quality, engagement and partnership for granted: they are a given. How could you live without any of them?

In fact, none of these factors exist without the other. Think about it. Think about how life would be…

I know that I am expanding the definitions in my head. I am not just talking about partnership of organizations here but individuals; such as teacher to student or the partnership a person has with their instrument, writing pen, script, or experiment.

I am talking about life with or without connection of self to others. I am not sure how quality of any level can exist without connection.

WOW, what an “AHA!” moment I just had because that is what we ask hundreds of thousands of students to do every day in the classrooms across this country.

Can we stop asking WHY students are dropping out?

I mean, don’t we know why they are BORED, feel unengaged, and often have no connection to either their instructor or anyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

Billie Jean Knight

Those who insist America’s position in the world is being diminished by global competition bombard us daily in the media. Fear, doubt, and worry are generated by a panic-stricken fear mongers who blame America’s schools for failing to prepare students to rise to the competitive challenge.

I take issue with the idea that America’s schools are failing in general, although many struggle.

I do believe that policymakers have failed to define and support what students need to be able to know and do for a newly defined global economy.

Yes, mastery of reading, writing, math, science, and social and historical perspective are of critical importance. However, these are only prerequisites for what is truly needed to be ultimately prepared.

The obsession with tangible low-level skills required to “pass the test” has driven American school systems out of curriculum balance to abandon important elements that made our nation a superpower in the first place: creativity and innovation. Read the rest of this entry »

Kathi R. Levin

Participation in and advocacy for the arts and arts education is a lifetime, persistent agenda that many of us believe is critical to living an educated, reflective, expressive, and complete life.

We are passionate people, often not afraid of sharing what matters to us. After all, the arts are about “making meaning.”

In that effort, sometimes we are so eager to share our beliefs that we fail to maximize the leverage that we might by encouraging learners – both adults and younger students – to articulate why the arts, participating in them as both artists and audience, are at the heart of what they have come to care about as an important part of their complete educational experience.

Thanks to the good work of Americans for the Arts, we actually have a great deal of the data we need about the economic impact of the arts and the 5.7 million jobs that are in place due to the arts.

Can you really make a living as an artist, or even as someone working behind the scenes in the governance and management of the arts and arts organizations?    Read the rest of this entry »