Arts Education Forum Day 1

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on................................"

Introduction to the Arts Education Blog Forum

For the next four weeks, Julie Fry, Program Officer  in the Performing Arts Program for The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and I will host an ongoing discussion on arts education and the myriad issues and challenges facing the field in moving arts education forward.   So far, thirty-one arts / arts education leaders from across the country have agreed to participate over the course of the month as responders to initial questions put to them:

Week 1:

Kristine Alexander, Executive Director, The California Arts Project
Paul Ammon, Professor, UC-Berkeley, CA
Arnie Aprill, Founder and Creative Director, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, Chicago, IL
Eric Engdahl, California State University-East Bay
Nick Jaffe, Teaching Artist / Musician, Chicago, IL
Sabrina Klein, Executive Director, Teaching Artists Organized, Oakland, CA
Bob Lenz, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, Envision Schools, Oakland, CA
Jessica Mele, Executive Director, Performing Arts Workshop, San Francisco, CA
Louise Music, Arts Learning Manager, Alameda County Office of Education, Hayward, CA
Ruth Nott, Director of Education, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco CA
Chike C. Nwoffiah – Director, Oriki Theater, Mountain View, CA
Nick Rabkin, Teaching Artist Research Project, National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, Chicago IL
Eugene Rodriquez, Executive Director, Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center, San Pablo, CA
Ben Sanders, California Education Partners/CORE, San Francisco, CA

Week 2:

Gigi Antoni, Executive Director, Big Thought, Dallas, TX
Richard Kessler, Executive Director, Center for Arts Education; new Dean of Mannes School of Music, The New School, New York, NY
Joe Landon, Policy Director/Executive Director-designate, California Alliance for Arts Education, Davis, CA
Pedro Noguera, Professor of Teaching and Learning, NYU, New York, NY
Paul Richman, Executive Director, California State PTA, Sacramento CA
Laura Zucker, Executive Director, LA County Arts Commission, Los Angeles, CA


Week 3:

Janet Brown, Executive Director, Grantmakers in the Arts, Seattle, WA.
Cyrus Driver, Program Learning and Innovation, Ford Foundation, New York, NY
Bob Lynch, Presidednt and CEO, Americans for the Arts, Washington DC
Narric Rome, Senior Director for Federal Affairs and Arts Education, Americans for the Arts
Laurie Schell, outgoing Executive Director, California Alliance for Arts Education

Week 4:

Ayanna Hudson, Director of Arts Education, LA County Arts Commission, Los Angeles CA
Laurie Lock, Senior Director of Programs and Policy, VH1 Save the Music
Sandra Ruppert, Executive Director, Arts Education Partnership, Washington, DC
Chris Shearer, Education Program Officer, Hewlett Foundation, Menlo Park, CA
Larry Scripp, Director, Center for Music-in-Education

Each week will focus on one to three opening questions within different categories of issues as follows:

Week #1:  Practice

Question #1 (today, Monday July 25th):  Where does the debate on arts integration stand at present and what are the principal arguments and concerns on either side – pro or con?   What role can the arts play in the new Common Core standards?
Question #2:  (Tuesday, July 26^th): Where do we stand with higher academia in their participation in moving forward arts education?
Question #3: (Wednesday, July 27^th):  What is the role of artists and arts organizations in the wider arts education paradigm?

Thursday and Friday – follow up comments and questions.

Week #2:  Field Building

Question #1: (Monday, August 1^st):  What are we doing to help parents and the public understand:  a) Why arts education is essential to their child’s future, and b) What constitutes a high level arts education component?
Question #2: (Tuesday, August 2^nd):  How is the field addressing barriers to arts education beyond budget decreases – the need for relevant assessment and accountability methods, lack of equity and access, high turnover of education and arts leadership, the unspoken territorial divide between arts education people and the general nonprofit arts sector, and the history of the arts education segment’s ability to organize itself?  How do we get to innovation in the field?

Wednesday through Friday – follow up comments and questions.

Week #3:  Policy

Question #1: (Monday, August 8^th ):  What opportunities are there for developing a national arts education policy that can inform state and local policy? How important is it that the arts are part of Common Core Standards and the reauthorization of ESEA?
Question #2:   (Tuesday, August 9^th):  Many contend that arts education advocacy has largely been a failure.  Others disagree.  Where are the successes?  Where will funding come from in the future to implement policy?

Wednesday through Friday – follow up comments and questions.

Week #4:  Research

Question #1: (Monday, August 15^th):  How does the recent report from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities help to inform public debate on arts education?  What other new research data is out there? (FRSS, NEA, WESTAF, etc)
Question #2: (Tuesday, August 16^th ):  We have argued for a long time that the arts teach the necessary 21^st Century skills our students will need to be globally competitive, - that deeper learning in the arts delivers the skills and knowledge students will need to succeed in a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace, but what research or data to we have to back up those claims?  In what ways can we demonstrate and verify that it does prepare our kids for the future?  Along the same lines, what areas of research do we need to shore up?

Wednesday and Thursday– follow up comments and questions.  Friday final wrap up.

______________________________

We hope that both these initial questions and the initial responses to them each week will spur dialogue and discussion that will drill deeper into these and other issues.  We’ve invited and encouraged all our responders to follow along over the course of each week and comment and post their own reactions and conclusions to what is being said after the initial responders have weighed in.  Julie and I may have, from time to time, some follow up questions as well.  All readers are encouraged to enter their own comments and observations at any time to whatever is said by clicking the “comment” line at the end of each blog. 

I would like to thank all of those who agreed to participate in this forum.  While no group of participants could ever be definitive, nonetheless this assembled group includes some very accomplished and critical thinkers, and we hope that others will join in the discussion from across the country and throughout the field over the next few weeks.  I am especially (and deeply) indebted to Julie Fry for all her extraordinary help in putting this Forum together.  Her insights, knowledge, extensive networks and passion for the arena were critical in bringing this idea to reality.  I simply could not have done it without her help .

Let’s get started.

Week #1:  Practice

Question #1:   Where does the debate on arts integration stand at present and what are the principal arguments and concerns on either side – pro or con?   What role can the arts play in the new Common Core standards?

Arnie Aprill /(Founder and Lead Consultant for the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), comes from a background in theater as an award winning playwright and director. He consults nationally and internationally on school improvement through the arts.)

So What’s New? A Brief History of Arts Integration

Before we investigate the pros and cons of arts integration, and whether the “arts integration vs. direct instruction” opposition is itself a false dichotomy, it may be useful to consider the history and context of art education’s connection to the rest of the curriculum in this country:

Is Arts integration a new idea? John Dewey may have been the first formal advocate for arts integration, with his 1934 classic Art as Experience, and his commitment to inquiry based teaching and learning. Building on Dewey’s theories, Leon Winslow published The Integrated School Art Program in 1939, proposing that the arts and all subject areas be connected in order to provide a richer educational experience for learners.

In the Forties and Fifties, it was normal for grade school classrooms to include pianos, and for teachers to be expected to know how to play them. Many classroom teachers were unselfconscious arts integrators.

In 1957, the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik created a national technological inferiority complex, and a call for “back to basics” put a chill on arts education for many years, creating a perceived divide between “hard” science and “soft” arts. Ironically, science education is also currently perceived to be a “soft” subject, with only math and reading seen as “hard” enough to merit time in the curricular day.

The sixties saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement, the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War, identity politics, and the creation of Headstart and the National Endowment for the arts. Visiting artist programs began to emerge, and new vocabulary was created: artist-in-residence, comprehensive arts, aesthetic education, arts infusion.

The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Educational Reform sent new chills through U.S. educational systems, and the arts were again placed on the sidelines. The Getty Center for the Arts was launched in this period, with its theory of Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE), integrating arts appreciation and criticism into regular classrooms, and simultaneously segregating the arts as their own distinct subject areas kept separate from the rest of the curriculum. DBAE, with its emphasis on looking at visual art, was perceived by some arts educators to be hostile to studio art practice and to other arts disciplines. School systems across the country suffered drastic budget cuts, and many arts education programs were eliminated.

The 90s saw the rise of the Standards movement, focused on clear sequences of instruction and on accountability measures; and simultaneously, the rise of arts integration and partnership initiatives such as the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE).

Arts integration has been around in different incarnations for a long time.

So what’s new?  New technology, for one thing. The access to information on the internet and students’ access to new tools for composing, producing, and distributing films, texts, images, music, blogs, podcasts, websites, etc. shifts all education toward increasingly student centered learning, more project based learning, greater need for “soft” 21st century learning skills (comfort with ideas and abstractions, analysis and synthesis, creativity, innovation, self-discipline, organization, flexibility, ability to work on a team), more cross-disciplinary learning, more differentiated instruction, more inter-age work, more connections between life inside and outside schools, and more “real world” tasks. Rapidly changing technologies call for “just–in-time” learning, and flexibility in dealing with technologies that become obsolete before they are perfected. All this argues for an increasingly integrated curriculum – not just between the arts and other subjects, but between all other content areas as well. New technologies also support more comprehensive curriculum in the performing arts – moving beyond performing into composing, curating, publishing, filmmaking, directing, choreographing, and playwriting.

Another change in the terrain of arts education is the creation of new classics and new canons. Popular and “outsider” arts are now considered legitimate subjects for arts learning. Students study quilting. There is a classic Jazz program at Lincoln Center. Film study has become a regular subject in many high schools. Middle-schoolers study computer game design. Most of this was unimaginable twenty years ago.

What else is new? Inter-cultural global communications systems creating whole new “languages” (young people are adept, unlike their elders, at multi-tasking and at composing and “reading” multi-media messages), and massive shifts in world populations. “Everyone” is has a camera in their telephone. “Everyone” is both a filmmaker AND a film distributer. Old identities are morphing, the U.S. is rapidly become a bilingual nation, and all the clichés about moving from an industrial economy to an information economy require a “whole new mind”, to use business writer Daniel Pink’s phrase.

Again, this suggests the need for more arts education, as well as for more integrated instruction in general. The whole discussion of the merits of arts integration and of direct instruction in the arts needs to be framed within this larger shifting educational context. It is this educator’s position that the old turf battle between arts integration and “arts for art’s sake” is the wrong lens for resolving the challenges to providing equitable arts education for our nation’s children. It is my belief that the focus needs to be on creating leadership capacity inside schools for engaging the arts in MULTIPLE ways, including sequential arts instruction by certified arts specialists, the engagement of visiting artists in long term relationships, in-school and after-school programming, and the co-planning of integrated studies among all stakeholders.

Nick Jaffe, Artist / (Musician, recording engineer, teaching artist, Illinois certified K-8 teacher, and curriculum designer based in Chicago. Nick is the Chief Editor of the Teaching Artist Journal, a print and online quarterly published by Routledge under the auspices of Columbia College Chicago.)

I should clarify that my comments here represent only my own views as a musician, teaching artist and curriculum designer, and certainly not those of the Teaching Artist Journal of which I am Chief Editor.  Along with a great team of editors, I work hard, to make the journal a genuinely inclusive forum for the work and thought of TA’s of all kinds, regardless of the philosophy or methodology they espouse or the organizations with which they are affiliated.  We feel strongly that TAJ belongs to the whole field and to all teaching artists everywhere.

Integrate schools.

The discussion around arts integration is shaped by scarcity and inequality, just like every discussion of education and pedagogy in this country.  As a field we are constantly asked to provide reasons why learning the arts is “good” for people or for society. And, perhaps inevitably, we often respond with utilitarian arguments about math skills, “creativity,” and self esteem.  These arguments might be valid, but they should not be the point.  They represent the logic of scarcity and race and class segregation; placing them at the center of what we do as artists and educators can only lead to curriculum and programming that is a deformed adaptation to a deformed social reality.  We’re artists; we’re supposed to be teaching people to make their own art and make it well.

In spite of the endless handwringing, scapegoating, and search for magical solutions that is the “education debate” in America, the solution is obvious.  To provide a balanced, thorough, rigorous but engaging education you simply need to replicate what is in place now at properly funded, well-run schools.  Some of these are expensive private schools; others are public magnets, or simply public schools in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods or suburbs. While such schools may also have their problems and weaknesses, the ones I’ve seen generally seem to educate students well without much reference to pedagogical fads.  They attract teachers who are well trained and provide them with good support (though they are often underpaid); curricula are heavy on content but also allow for lots of interpretive and creative work by students; class sizes are reasonable, and there’s plenty of equipment, books and computers.  There's recess, and comprehensive athletic programs.  And, there’s lots of art and music making; usually a nice balance of classes taught by full-time arts specialists, and more integrative or cross-disciplinary arts projects led by teaching artists.  In these schools no one ever seems to feel it necessary to debate whether one should teach “art for art’s sake” or explore “arts integration.”  They just do both and often it’s hard to tell the difference.

It seems clear to me that as artists and educators we should advocate for universal access to the full range of arts teaching and learning as part of a larger fight for equal, (“not separate but equal”), democratically funded, comprehensive and rigorous public education for all.  More teaching artists; more full-time arts teachers; recognition of both as educators and practicing artists; decent pay and benefits.  And incidentally we should be very vocal in defense of teachers and teachers unions in this climate that outrageously seeks to scapegoat them for the grotesque inequalities of segregation.  It’s really part of the same fight.

We should also be proud, as arts educators, when we find ourselves bearing the torch for the reintroduction of curricular depth in classrooms where boring, superficial, algorithmic curricula have become the rule.  We are the natural allies of teachers in this fight, and we can help them to carve out space and time to really teach what they know and what interests them.  If that’s what Arts Integration means then I am an enthusiastic proponent of it.

All art making is integrative.

As I see it, all art making involves the investigation of many different areas of knowledge, experience and material reality.  The earliest preserved cave art is replete with highly anatomically and behaviorally accurate depictions of large mammals in action.  It appears to be the work of people who were very interested in their own lives and the world around them, and had clearly had studied both in great detail; after all, the artists achieved such accuracy and expression in their work some time after they viewed their subjects—they were painting in caves from memory.  The fact that much Paleolithic cave painting appears to be the work of adolescents and children makes this evidence of careful study all the more striking (see Guthrie, R. Dale.  The Nature of Paleolithic Art.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).  So it would seem that as long as we’ve been artists we’ve also been arts integrationists.

Also, any area of human work and thought, from plumbing to theoretical physics, engages the tools of art making, whether visualization, improvisation, or expressive experimentation.  So why not sometimes consciously combine art making and other types of study and work?  It’s fun, and potentially generative and educative.

Integrate what you know.

Can 6^th graders write poetry about physics?  Sure. Can it be good poetry?  Absolutely.  Will it lead to novel insights, and a deeper understanding of the science?  It might well.   The models and questions of physics, both classical and modern, are full of astounding and moving metaphor, symbol and narrative, some of which might only be well expressed in poetic language.  Poetic expression of the same is also a reinterpretation and reframing of scientific truth in ways that can bring clarity, and even new insights that are not only literary, but may spur scientific thought.

It also might suck. A superficial, formulaic or forced attempt to use an arts medium to explore academic content often leads to confusing false analogies, oversimplifications, and sterile, unoriginal art making that is alienating to students, teachers and teaching artists.

It won’t suck if: 

-The teacher knows the physics.

-The TA knows poetry.
-Both the TA and teacher are personally interested in exploring the connections between their disciplines, and both have time and space to find real, and interesting points of intersection.

In the absence of any or all of these conditions I think it’s probably a better and more fun use of everyone’s time (especially the students’), to just teach the physics, teach the poetry writing and forget about a mechanical “integration.”  If the teaching is any good it’s likely at least a few students will write some cool poems about physics.  They’ll certainly be equipped to think about metaphor physically, and physics metaphorically, and isn’t that really the point anyway?

Bob Lenz / (Chief executive officer and cofounder of Envision Schools - an innovative educational model through its four urban high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mr. Lenz is recognized nationally as a leader in high school redesign, project-based learning, twenty-first-century-skills education, and performance assessment. He served as president of the Buck Institute of Education and serves on the Advisory Board for the Kalmanovitz School Of Education at St. Mary’s College of California.)

"I wrapped up this trip in Oakland at the Envision Academy of Arts and Technology. We saw some performances by the students, and we also visited some of their classrooms. It’s very inspiring to see what they’re doing there. The arts are integrated into the entire curriculum, and you really see points of intersection between the arts and other subjects… It was really neat to see this kind of intersection. It became very personal for them. And it’s clear that in this school, and in so many of the arts charter schools, it’s not really about art, it’s really about the intersection of art and everything else. Art becomes a very useful portal to almost any subject, and it’s neat to see."

Rocco Landsman, Chairman - NEA

Envision Schools is an education non-profit that started and runs four innovative arts and technology themed college prep charter schools in the Bay Area. We believe the “basics,” including reading, writing and arithmetic offer a necessary but insufficient foundation for success in today’s world. The extent to which a young person possesses a critical, creative mind and is capable of using, applying, and communicating knowledge is ultimately what will determine success in college and beyond. In today’s global, interconnected, digitally driven economy, one must collaborate, be technologically adept and remain aware of intellectual strengths and areas of growth. Envision Schools has been successfully modeling this kind of education for First Generation College Bound students for almost a decade: 90% of our graduates attend college and over 90% of our graduates are still enrolled in college in their second year (as opposed to only 40% college going rate and 60% retention rate in California.)

The integration of the arts is critical to the success of our students and to all young people. The power of this type of learning is best demonstrated by examples:

Who Am I Project

This is a six week 9^th Grade integrated project exploring the question, “Who am I?” The students worked on the self-portraits in both their visual arts and language arts classes. Chuck Close's portraiture inspired the students to further their exploration of self through the use of portraiture. The essential question was “How does a portrait inform the viewer or tell facts about our lives?”

Using their knowledge of scale, proportions, and the grid process, students first enlarged a photograph of themselves on a 14 x 17 inch sheet of Bristol paper. The second part of this large-scale portrait included a personal symbol, created in the first quarter of visual art, and a color scheme that reflects a metaphor about who they are. The final part of this exhibition piece was an artist statement. In this statement, students connected their personal symbol, literature read in language arts, short stories written in their language arts class, and their color scheme to who they are socially, potentially, metaphorically, and creatively. Students presented their work and read their statements to a live audience of parents and other adults in an evening exhibition. This is the first project that all students in Envision Schools complete.

Self Portrait and Artist Statement by Isais Garcia-Ramos

The importance of all my different representations of myself was best shown throughout my painting’s unique use of colors and blending values to create a distinct mood. The background is painted in different shades of orange to show how the outside world is always teaching me to find the strength to recreate myself in a better future. I am painted with many shades of blue to show how I am always trying to find a deep inner peace, but I’m not always easy on myself as I’d like to be. I’m always trying to find answers to my inner struggle and that is why I am looking up at my personal symbol in a thoughtful posture to show how I am always thinking of ways to better myself. The way all of these elements come together, despite their contrasts, is what I believe gives my painting its power and balance. This is who I am, and I’m very happy to be exactly me.

Integrating the arts achieves simultaneous outcomes: Students master core academic content knowledge and skills; students learn the artistic discipline; students learn important deeper learning skills like collaboration, critical thinking, communication and project management and students learn to be metacognitive and reflect on their learning so they can transfer their knowledge and skills to new context in the future. Students accomplish all this learning AND have fun through the arts!

The new English Language Arts Common Core standards lend themselves very well to this type of learning. The Next Generation of Assessments of the Common Core promise to include performance assessments. Schools that integrate the arts and ask students to not only master knowledge but demonstrate it and apply that knowledge through the arts are most likely going to out-perform schools still using a traditional approach to teaching and learning. The Common Core and the new assessments are a great opportunity for arts integration to move into the mainstream of education reform.

Louise Music / (Arts Learning Manager at the Alameda County Office of Education; she is the Region IV Arts Lead for the California County Superintendents of Education Services Association.  Recent publications include “Arts Learning as Equitable and Meaningful Education,” in Artful Teaching (Teacher’s College Press, June 2010).

Quality arts integration keeps students in schools, and prepares them for the challenges of work and life. For more than a decade, prominent arts educators have established the value and inter-relationship between discreet, disciplinary arts education and arts integration..  As a growing movement of academics, classroom teachers, parents, students and community artists, we have moved past the false dichotomy of “straight arts instruction” and arts integration as an either/or.

The Alameda County Office of Education’s Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership has developed expertise in demonstrating the effectiveness of arts integration through more than a decade’s worth of experience working with strong partners in higher education, the arts community, school districts and multiple growing networks of schools. In this time, 38 Arts Learning Anchor Schools in Oakland, Berkeley and Emery School districts have successfully integrated the arts to improve student success across all content areas.  These K-12 schools vary widely –small / large, elementary / secondary—and all are committed to arts learning for their students, arts integration and professional development for their teachers, and community-building through effective partnerships with community arts providers.

The arts, by themselves, are not a silver bullet.  They are an essential, and currently largely missing, component of a quality public education that fully engages students, and provides multiple entry points and means for expression according to student interests, strengths and learning styles.  Teachers in all content areas need to build confidence and skills in teaching and integrating the arts.

Effective arts integration is designed to connect with and build upon student interest and prior knowledge, and is intentionally integrated with, and aimed at, important learning goals across the curriculum.  What’s important to understand is that effective arts-integration promotes learning across all areas of curriculum which includes teaching the discrete arts discipline where students learn methods and techniques through active practice.  Integrating the arts with other subject areas also provides clarity about disciplinary learning goals in both content areas and creates opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning in new and original work through artistic application.

Instructional Thinking Frames for the Real Benefits of the Arts in Schools

Our work towards effective arts integration has been greatly informed by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Project Zero, who have made an important contribution with the Studio Habits of Mind.   The Studio Habits of Mind have been adapted by teachers across the curriculum to dance, music, drama and math, science, history, social studies and English language arts.   The Studio Habits of Mind provide a vocabulary for what is taught and learned, beyond skill and technique, in and through the arts, including: how well students observe closely and learn to focus, how they envision what can be and generate new ideas, how they express themselves, how they engage and persist through problems, and how they reflect on their work, revise, and improve it.

Using the Studio Habits of Mind allows teachers to design intentional arts integrated instruction that creates multiple opportunities for students to develop subject matter understanding by applying their knowledge in original work: drawings, dramatizations, videos, sculptures and dioramas, etc.

Across the country, students and teachers in arts classrooms in Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Berwyn Illinois, Los Angeles and the northern California region are working with networks of schools and school districts are using this vocabulary to provide a fuller picture of students as learners.  There is a transition underway from Studio Habits of Mind to Student Habits - as these habits map onto the 21st century workforce skills students will need for success in their futures. In Arts Learning
Anchor Schools in Alameda County, arts teachers, teaching artists and their students use the Studio Habits of Mind and Teaching for Understanding thinking frames to focus and deepen their arts integrated instruction, and to combine the use of those thinking frames with techniques from Project Zero’s’ Making Learning Visible project to document student work and classroom practice, reflect, revise and improve.

Arts Integration Engages students and keeps them in school:
Across a four-year period, overall graduation rates for students in Arts Learning Anchor Schools were significantly higher than for students in the general population in Emery, Berkeley and Oakland school districts (92% for Arts Learning Anchor Schools, compared to 69%).  The difference is most profound for African American students; in 2006, 94% of African American students in Arts Learning Anchor schools graduated, compared to 64% of their peers in non- Arts Learning Anchor Schools.  

 Arts Integration addresses the “Achievement Gap” through culturally responsive teaching:
Arts instruction that is intentionally integrated with, and aimed at, other important learning goals can, and is, eliminating the racial predictability of success in school. In year two of a three year US department of Education funded project in San Leandro Unified School District, 82% of teachers reported increased ability to differentiate instruction; and 92% percent of teachers reported that the project presented opportunities to create and implement culturally responsive teaching strategies.  District Superintendent, Cindy Cathey, reflects that while administrators and teachers had engaged national experts, and embraced the notion of squarely addressing issues of racism, it was only when the arts were intentionally integrated to build on the strengths and assets of every child, that the district began to see the improved student outcomes they were looking for.   Click here:  http://www.vimeo.com/acoe/tarislihttp://www.vimeo.com/acoe/tarisli

Arts Integration provides tools for teacher effectiveness and builds reflective, professional learning communities:
The Alameda County Office of Education has formalized a decades’ worth of experience, with growing networks of schools and districts in arts learning and arts integration, into a regional Teacher Action Research Institute, and an Arts Integration Specialist Program where arts teachers, teaching artists, multiple subject, and single subject non-arts teachers are building the capacity to lead school-site based professional learning communities through the use of research based, analytical thinking frames for curriculum design and assessment, collaboration, and teacher action research.  As a regional lead in the CCSESA (California County Superintendents of Education Services Association) Arts Learning Initiative, this is a model for regionally developing communiteis of educatorsm, artists and universities that can respond to the ongoing, ever-changing learning needs of California's students.  http://www.artiseducation.org/teaching-learning_palette-of-possibilities

Arts Integration and Common-Core Standards
We are at a critical time in public education, where educators are acknowledging the failure of the No Child Left Behind policies and accountability systems.  We need new ways to assess how well our schools are educating our children, not by counting and sorting who has succeeded and who has failed, but by providing both ongoing and summative assessments so that teachers can revise their instruction according to student misunderstandings, and so that educators can provide students with useful information and next steps about how to improve and achieve.  The arts and arts integration are essential to finding new and responsive ways to address the instructional and assessment needs of students and communities in our large and diverse state.

When the most daunting and urgent of educational challenges is the count of students who either drop out or graduate unprepared for college and the 21st century workforce, we must ask ourselves which strategies will actually support educators in addressing the problem at hand. Educators make a mistake when they privilege teaching standards, over teaching students.  In thinking about the value of arts in public education and the role they play in the new Common Core standards, an important, fundamental question should also be raised, “what are the Common Core Standards good for?”

As leaders in education, we are challenged to move out of our silos and to respond as a collective field to make good on the promise of a high quality education for every child, in every school, every day.  We must ask ourselves how we can work together to apply what we know about the essential role the arts must play in a high quality education that engages students purposefully in school today, and prepares them with the knowledge, skills, enthusiasm and abilities to be successful in career, college, community and citizenship.

Our Unified Voice and a Collective Call to Action

What will it take to bring pockets of practice where arts integration is transforming teaching and learning, so that all students are building the knowledge, skills and dispositions to engage the world and participate in global solutions, into a comprehensive approach to public education?

 As educators and community leaders, we can be confident that arts integration is an essential part of the solution.  There is no topic more pertinent to preparing our young people as participants in a healthy, multi-cultural national democracy to address global challenges of human conflict, economy and environment.

Ben Sanders / (Center for Education Policy/CORE)

I am not aware of anyone who doesn't think the arts can and should play a central role in K-12 education.  Indeed the arguments in favor of arts integratrion are myriad - everything from what it means to be a fully educated person (in the 21st or any century); to how, as research shows, a sustantial grounding in the arts can directly contribute to achievement in other content areas; to how the arts provides a hook for many students to persevere in school (when they might otherwise retreat); to the ways in which the arts provides a complementary, sophisticated means of expression and communication of ideas (along with reading and writing); to the ways in which the arts can help students build and refine the knowledge, skills, discipline and habits of mind that will serve them well in virtually all future endeavors.


The arguments against arts integration, such as they are, seem to me mostly practical.  The main culprits are a) a perceived lack of time in the school day (available to adequately address the “core” subjects of ELA, Math, Science and History), b) dire budgetary pressures which take their toll first on so called non-core areas like the arts—resulting, for example, in slashing arts programs and school-based arts specialist positions, c) a lack of what we might call arts-related “pedagogical content knowledge and expertise” on the part of regular classroom teachers as to how to fully integrate the arts, and d) a general lack of awareness and/or understanding of the central role that the arts can play in increasing overall achievement.   

I believe the arts can play a central role in the new Common Core standards. The very nature of the standards themselves, with their emphasis on sustained, “deeper learning;” on vertical and horizontal/cross curricular alignment and connections, lends itself extraordinarily well to the full integration of the arts.  For example, a quick glance at the “mathematical practices” that recur and guide learning at every grade level, illustrate this potential.  After all, what studio artist, musician, dancer or dramatist does not, at one time or another, need to attend to: making sense of problems and persevere in solving them, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, constructing viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, using appropriate tools strategically, attending to precision, looking for and making use of structure, and looking for and expressing regularity in repeated reasoning (all of which are the Common Core’s “mathematical reasoning standards”)?  

In short the skills and habits of mind that one develops through a rigorous study of the arts—i.e., precision, attention to detail, discipline, preparation for performance, ability to connect with an audience, recognizing interconnections—are all directly relevant and transferable to the learning expectations outlined in the Common Core.  It is exciting to envision the possibilities!

Check back as additional participant comments are added.  Tomorrow will post question # 2.

Don’t Quit.
Barry

Ah But I Was So Much Older Then, I’m Younger Than That Now

Good morning
“And the beat goes on……………………”

 èNote: Next Week begins a Four Part Intensive Dialogue and Discussion on Arts Education and the whole range of attendant issues -hosted by myself and Julie Fry from the Hewlett Foundation - featuring 30+ leaders from across the field. I believe this will be a very important forum and exchange of ideas and hope you will follow along over the course of the next month. The conversations among the participants will be along these four broad categories (one per week – with subtopics and specific questions): Practice, Field Building, Policy and Research.

We plan to talk about everything –

· from the ‘direct arts instruction’ vs. ‘arts integration’ as a strategy debate, to the role of artists, arts organizations and higher academia in the ecosystem for the provision of arts education;

· from an analysis of what we are and are not doing (and might do) to help parents and the public understand the value of arts education, to addressing the various barriers beyond budget shortfalls – including lack of equity and access, high turnover in arts education leadership, the need for relevant assessment and accountability, and the status of innovation in our efforts;

· from the efforts to develop a comprehensive national policy on arts education to the problems of effective arts education advocacy and the great wall of budget cuts;

· from the recent President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities Report on Arts Education recommendations to where we stand on the development of credible research in support of the proposition that the arts do indeed teach the very skills supposedly wanted in the new global market place.

We hope this forum will explore a wide range of the issues that must be addressed to move arts education forward, and in the process kickstart more attention on September as National Arts Education Month. We also hope this forum will help to frame some of those issues and future discussion at both the Arts Education Partnership (September) and the Grantmakers in the Arts (October) conferences – both in San Francisco this year.

On another note -- thank you for all of the positive response on the interview with Bill Cleveland. It is gratifying to know that there is a large appetite out there for drilling deeper into more meaty subjects. And I would like to remind you that if you have a comment you would be willing to share, rather than email me, please click on the comment icon at the end of the current blog and enter it in the box.

The Cycles of Life and the Arts in Keeping Us Young

Bob Dylan wrote of the phenomenon of how points at certain of the times of our lives affect the way we see things. In one of my favorite of his poems (songs –but I always thought of him as the Poet Laureate of my generation) - “My Back Pages” – Dylan lamented the conceit that in the fiery brand period of our college age youth, we knew it all. The great moral questions of life were black and white to us at that juncture in our lives – and we knew, just knew, what was right, what was wrong - about virtually everything in the world. Having moral certitude on your side allows for huge leaps of faith in coming to conclusions and we suffered no shortage of confidence in the rightness of our beliefs (Boomers have always been sure of themselves, indeed sometimes “too” sure perhaps).

At some point early on you lose the childhood innocence and wonder and confusion – the magical place where being sure of something isn’t all that important - and you become dogmatic and intractable, and even smug in your outlook. The arrogance of youth knows no generational exclusivity – it rears its head every generation. It may simply be part of growing up.

Dylan wrote of that stance eloquently. (and if you’ve never heard Dylan’s or the Byrd’s version, you really should download it and hear the lyrics sung). Listen:

My Back Pages

“Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.”

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

And then over time (hopefully, but sadly not true with everyone) you enter another phase where it dawns on you that the world isn’t so black and white, and things are more gray, and there are no easy answers – if indeed there are any answers at all. When you’re young you have the luxury of being right all the time. As you grow older, your obligations, your commitments along with your dreams and aspirations all get tempered by changing perspectives. Ideally, you realize this happening, and you see that in your haste and hurry to grow up and take your rightful place as a ‘decision maker’ in life, anxious for the time you can right the wrongs of the world, you forsook and relinquished an extraordinarily valuable gift – that profound knowledge and understanding of things that comes only with innocence and naivety. An involuntary exit from Paradise and the Garden of Eden.

And that cycle seems to continue across the plain of one’s life. As you get much older, you yearn to return to again being younger than that now. You seek conscious ways to try to shed the yoke of the years on your psyche, get beyond that which “deceived you into thinking you had something to protect” and again bathe in the serenity of not being so sure, not being so smart anymore. At some point, you come to know that there is a danger in becoming the very thing against which you so railed – at least for so long as you cling to the lie that you know all the answers. And isn’t that much of what is wrong with the world today - that far too many decision makers (and everyday people) remain older than that now – mired in their prisons of the dedication to absolutes?

While the world demands that we question all the old assumptions, challenge the current ways of action, and re-invent much of the way we approach everything, resistance is fierce and people cling to the perceived safety in the sanctity of change refusal. Still, if we are smart, we will at least accept, if not embrace, change.

I think sometimes that we in the nonprofit arts sector would be wise to make some effort to be a little younger than that now too; to shed some of our dogmatic, hard and fast conclusions about who we are, what we are doing, and how we approach it all. I’m not talking about the proverbial “out-of-the-box thinking we all so champion, but rather just the everyday approach we take to what we know or don’t know. I’m not so sure we know as much as we claim we know. I hope we can be at the vanguard of “younger than that now” thinking and not just play catch-up to the real thought leaders of the future. Someone once said that the way to have a good idea, is to have lots of ideas. And you can more likely have lots of ideas if you are open to your own thinking being biased and perhaps not as well founded as you may think.

I have come to the conclusion that the arts are one of the threads in our lives that not only allow us the true luxury of being – from time to time – “younger than that now”, but which actually propel us away from the dangerous trap of keeping us “so much older then.” The arts are, for our psyches and mental health, like the anti-oxidants that track down and destroy the free radicals that roam our bodies destroying cells; the very force that can keep us young in thought by challenging our beliefs. I suspect that over the next 50 years there will be verifiable research collaborating the thesis that the arts play a significant role in keeping us young – physically and mentally.  A daily dose of the arts may be as good for you as the daily handful of vitamin supplements.

I went and saw a retrospective Picasso exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco last week. I need to do more of that. It wasn’t the crème de la crème of all his work, but it was a fabulous retrospective and the two hours spent there were sublimely enjoyable, beautifully stimulating and made for a standout day. [And, on the positive side – at least for blockbuster museum exhibitions – the place (on a Thursday mid day) was jam packed.] Picasso, it seemed to me, was able most of his days to look at life as someone perennially “younger than that now”. Refusing to ever get pigeon-holed into any single style, he seemed not to succumb to knowing all the answers to anything, but rather remained enthralled by the questions and the possibilities. He lived a rich and long life. Isn’t that the goal?

Of course, almost no one can be a Picasso. But then you can’t define “good and bad quite clear, no doubt, somehow” forever. And perhaps we can all be “younger than that now.” Easier to do that if the arts are a part of your life.

Have a great week. And please pass the word about next week’s start of the Arts Education Forum.

Don’t Quit

Barry

Bill Cleveland Interview - Part III

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on............................."

Part III of the Interview: 

BARRY:  You conclude at one point that: “The trivialization of the arts in contemporary society has produced many negatives.  But none has been as damaging as the undermining of this connection between man and the artistic illumination he needs to explore the transcendent.”  Didn’t this loss of the sense of ‘magic’ of the power of the arts go by the wayside a long time ago?  How do we get that back?  (BTW – I agree with you completely.)

BILL:  Art is the one of the most important ways that humans explore the mysteries of the universe. Science and the market have separated the heart and the soul from the head. They are not completely severed but they are pretty far apart.  So, in the modern world the head leads.  To my mind this is not at all healthy and I think we are suffering the consequences.  Another way of putting it is that left-brain dominance is becoming an increasing impediment global health and survival.  There is a lot we can learn from our indigenous neighbors and the newcomers to our land whose traditional cultures retain some of these vital connections.

BARRY:  We surely can, but how do we do that in a culture that now unmistakably values celebrity over artistry; fame over knowledge; the lottery over hard work?

BILL:  Yes, and as my friend Milenko Matanovic, from the Pomegranate Center says in the book- “We live in a society that can’t tell the difference between cleverness and true creativity.” But, of course, if that were not the case we would not be having this conversation.

Over the past 40 years I have been extraordinarily privileged to have spent most of my time working with people who do know the difference and have their values straight. They have taught me that values and actions most often align when they are part of a system that has accountability built in. That is why I believe that working in urban neighborhoods, small towns, communities of practice and the like are critical to advancing a thriving, life affirming society.

BARRY:  What promotes and nurtures our individual and collective creativity, and of those factors which ones can we actually exert some control over or impact on?  Do those things change with time?  How do we control those factors?  I get the impression that, like me, you think we need to begin soon to address the bigger picture implications of creativity and the arts on a sector wide scale and fast track the idea of brainstorming the challenges until we come up some very specific strategies to move towards the arts taking its role in changing worldviews – is that right?

And given this history of the arts sector’s difficulty to organize themselves just for simple advocacy purposes, what gives you encouragement that as a field we can consciously act in this arena?

BILL:  This touches on the last of those three assertions where we state that the shift in worldview toward sustainability cannot come about without the involvement of the worlds art makers.  The folks who are spending trillions of dollars annually to maintain the current worldview have known this for a long time.  And, they are certainly not likely to yield their gains easily. They are employing some of the most creative folks in the world to create powerful stories that are very good at stimulating unsustainable consumption across the globe.  Most of the people who are working to change the global mind-set do not know that they can’t succeed without linking the right and left hemispheres of the brain with the heart through culture. They are still doing power point presentations.

One of respondents in the Grace and Fear book is a guy named Burt Mulder who has been both the chief IT advisor to the Dutch Parliament and a member of the EU Cultural Parliament. His view is that the full participation of the cultural    sector is crucial to world survival.  I happen to agree with him, nonetheless, that kind blunt force assertion would be a hard sell here in the US.  It would be a much easier conversation to have with leaders working for sustainable community development, social and environmental justice, education reform, and the like. Not meaning to beat a dead horse here, but again I would ask: When are we going to initiate and sustain and then capitalize on those cross-sector conversations? The folks in the book from those and other related sectors are in complete agreement.  Alas they are very likely a small minority. 

Some aspects of the siloed sectors syndrome are being breached, by both design and by necessity.  These conversations are happening in universities, foundations, in the business world, and most of all in the street. The reason we wrote the book is because the arts silo is one of the most separated in terms of community-wide conversations.  Actually, the place where I see cross-sector conversations and collaboration involving the arts is most often is in urban neighborhoods and small towns.  There truly is a slow culture movement emerging.  Not as a result of a national campaign but because these are the places where the distance between the doers and the gatekeepers are very short and relatively open to influence.

They recognize that getting people to question their foundational beliefs about how the world works requires a powerful and persistent provocation that goes beyond factoid pile-ons and fear mongering. They recognize that the coherent, authentic “story” or narrative is a transformational key.  My point here is that we don’t need to be alone in this conversation. There are many out there with whom we can join, not in making the case that art is so separately special, but to argue that it is an essential part of the newly emerging, integrated whole.  An argument the arts community has thus far failed to effectively make--- not that it is easy.

The art and culture sector suffers from its status as a multivalent, multi-capacity resource.  It is process and product, it is means and end, it is reflective and representational, it can be clever as well as transformational, it can be both separate, and the glue that binds. In the comodified, hierarchal world, the transformational, sticky parts have been given short shrift. Unfortunately many of us in the “arts sector” have been  co-conspirators here.  It’s the clever, sexy, end product-oriented stuff that gets the headlines, so we are inclined to go there. We know that the connective, process intensive aspects of the creativity are important but the translation is difficult, so we tend to leave it alone.  Then we convene our own separate parties where we complain that we never get invited to there really big dances.  Obviously, I’m unfairly generalizing here because there are a number of cultural leaders who speak to these issues very well.  Arlene Goldbard, Judy Baca, David O’Fallon, Claudine Brown, and Lilly Yeh, all of whom are in the book, have a lot to say about this kind of imbalance. 

BARRY:    Unfortunately, these leaders, good thinkers all, are our leaders and speak largely to the choir.  Where are the outside leaders to take up our banner?

BILL:  That is why most of the folks in the book are not the usual suspects. For example, Harry Boyte is a well-respected political scientist and organizer, Linda Whittington is a member of the Mississippi State Legislature and youth development advocate, Wilson Yates is President Emeritus of United Theological Seminary and Rod Mast is a marine biologist and Vice President at Conservation International. It’s an eclectic group that all have powerful and insightful things to say about the role of human creativity and the arts as the world confronts its most daunting challenges.  Most importantly though, they are all talk-walkers. Their often audacious thinking is informed by long and practical experience.  These are extraordinary people, but they are not an isolated group.  I cross paths with hundreds of creative leaders like this every year.  The good news is that they are keen to learn from and work with the creative community. 

Bert Mulder, the Dutch technology futurist, whom I mentioned earlier, is another of these cross-sector creative leaders.  One of his main points is that arts folks are eventually going to be invited to the big dance to help answer some of the most vexing societal questions. Things like: How do we function without conflict in an increasingly multi-cultural world?  How does art-making prepare us function effectively in complex systems?  How do we respond sustainably in a change constant environment?  But, he also warns that we are ill- prepared to engage effectively because we have so little experience working with large systems and translating across sectors.

BARRY:  I agree entirely, but when we will be invited to those dances remains a vexing possibility, not yet any probability.  Are we running out of time?  What makes you think that invitation will someday come? 

BILL:  People like Mulder are already extending a hand. In his role as a member of the EC Cultural Parliament he has been working with artists and cultural policy makers to redefine the arts as an essential international resource. As you are aware the Europeans are much more amenable to this line of reasoning. The TED folks are certainly doing it. You may not be aware that after a software or product idea leaves Steve Jobs hands the first place it goes is to a team of 13 artists headed by a guy named Jonathan Ive. All the engineering from that point on in the process is done to fulfill the Jobs-Ive function and design concept. In most companies the design part happens last. Ive, a graduate of the Royal College of Art is the principal designer of the most of the major Apple products for the past decade.   Many foundations are beginning to meld their programmatic departments into whole systems-whole communities’ initiatives. In some cases this leaves the arts out in the cold, but in others it has produced an invitation to the big dance.  So, arts folks are being asked the same questions as those in the education, social services, and health sectors.  “How does what you do contribute to the vitality and resiliency of our community.”  This same question is being asked in city council budget hearings across the land.  As you are aware in many jurisdictions the arts are, once again, being pushed aside. But in some the case is being made to stay the course.  Interestingly, it is the enlightened business types that are making the case.

BARRY:  How can the arts contribute to the development of caring, capable and sustainable communities?  And how can we leverage those contributions for better support?  What are the structure and dynamics of a healthy artist ecosystem?  How would it work?

BILL:  I think the arts community is beginning to recognize sustainability as a both a value and a benchmark. But there is a worry that the sustainable community development movement is bypassing the arts. Some see the trend as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they see an opportunity to show the rest of the community how the arts sector personifies the idea of a locally developed, renewable, non-polluting, social, and economic resource. Some artists understand that as creators and tellers of meaningful stories, they can be important contributors to the significant shifts in worldview necessary to achieve “sustainability.” On the other hand, many from the cultural sector are concerned that both the “impending emergency” and  “back to basics” aspects of the sustainability impulse will become the rationale for abandoning the cultural community.

There is also an increasing concern that the current cultural “system” is flawed, increasingly stressed, and, ultimately, “unsustainable”  (ex., lack of health insurance, high unemployment and lack of a living wage for artists, a myriad of nonprofit governance and management issues, etc.). Others view the traditional governance and management structures that support and often define cultural production as becoming increasingly unsuitable and unresponsive for artists navigating a changing cultural landscape.

The health of the overall cultural ecology is highly dependent on the health of its creating and interpreting artists. Some see funding for artists as the critical factor for artist sustainability. No one could argue that funding is not critical but there is much more.  Ann Markesun and Maria Rosario Jackson have both done some great research on what artists need to thrive.  We have been integrating these factors into our work with the McKnight Foundation in Minnesota where we are trying to better understand the structure and dynamics of the artist ecosystem.  These elements include: markets (monetary, barter, ideas), a system of validation for artists and their work, access to training (arts and business), the existence of formal and informal learning/sharing networks, access to facilities (studio, rehearsal, exhibition, etc.), employment opportunities (as artists, teachers, consultants), benefits (affordable healthcare, pensions, professional development) and much more.

BARRY:  Are there not Techtronic changes afoot with the next generation and their perception of what they need to survive and thrive?

BILL:  Every one of the elements in the healthy artist ecosystems has a digital manifestation operating as a tool, a delivery system or some form of market.  Younger artists are not only tapped into these systems they are inventing them. 

Also key is a healthy community of small and mid-sized arts organizations These organizations not only facilitate the transfer of artwork from creators to interpreters, they also provide the creative spaces that serve as the interlocutors between creative products and local audiences. We also believe that growing cultural participation in what are often referred to as “underserved” communities happens best with the advancement of artists working in and for local venues in those communities.

BARRY:  And yet the inequity in funding remains constant.

BILL:  Yes, Yet another argument for devising new creative economic models at the local level. Bedlam Theater, in the Twin Cities has combined community engagement, civic discourse and a cutting edge, experimental, fringe repertoire. A line up which is not typically regarded as a road to riches in the arts.  Nevertheless, In 2004 Bedlam was named one of 12 innovative companies to watch nationwide by American Theatre Magazine.  From 2006-2009 Bedlam grew more than ten-fold in terms of audience, creative output, community activity and budget. They have done this by establishing themselves as a center for spectacle, satire, absurdism, multimedia and music theatre, good beer, fantastic parties, and a great place to hang out in between shows.

BARRY:  What is the single best idea that might impact the nonprofit field that you have heard in the past year?

BILL:  It’s a small one.  The Community Supported Arts program created by Springboard for the Arts in Minnesota has adapted the Community Supported Agriculture model to promote and sell artists work.  Check it out at  http://www.springboardforthearts.org/AboutUs/AboutCSA.asp.   It’s simple, it's basic, it’s fun and it has worked incredibly well.  I think this is representative of Slow Culture, cross-sector strategic thinking at its best that has great promise.

BARRY:  You have made a comparison between the nonprofit arts and the concept of ‘peak oil’ – wherein you argue that the economy that the arts live in is like the economic concept of ‘peak oil’.  Can you elaborate on what you mean? 

BILL:  Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. The Hubbert Peak Theory has accurately predicted that US oil production will peak between 1965 and 1970.  It also postulates that world oil production will peak in 2020, and that demand will outstrip supply beginning in 2015. Environmentalists have used the Peak Oil concept to drive home the point that oil is a non-renewable resource with an inevitable toxic and political, environmental, and economic downside.  Which in turn buttresses the argument in favor of the development of new renewable energy sources.

It occurred to me that we might be in a similar situation with public arts funding.  If you look at public arts giving over the past three decades one could postulate that while it follows the general up and down trends of the US economy, there seems to be a natural ceiling somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion.  This is particularly true in light of    the current downturn where arts advocates are defining victory as either minimizing the hit or holding on to an address and a phone number in anticipation of better days.  (Battle weary arts advocates will tell you that one of the most difficult advocacy challenges is to reclaim lost ground.) So, since public support peaked somewhere around 2001-02 and is not likely to go higher in real dollars for a long time, maybe we should get serious about the need for new resources, new economic models, --- IE. The cultural equivalent of a green car.  I say this not to urge the abandonment of advocacy for public dollars (which I think should continue with gusto)  but to spur what I think is a an urgently needed conversation about the condition of the American cultural ecosystem.

BARRY:  You and I have previously discussed the idea that the business sector is virtually obsessed with the idea of creativity, imagination and innovation – yet, there seem to be almost no intersections between our field and business on this topic.  One would think we are the natural partners for business in moving forward this concept, but that collaboration is virtually nonexistent.   Why is that, and what can we do to make those connections happen?

BILL:  First of all we need to recognize that there is a very large community of sole proprietors out there that we call “individual artists.”  They may not all belong to the chamber of commerce, but, if they are in any way successful, it is because they are operating effectively both artistically and business wise.  Also, more and more younger artists that I meet are much more attracted to entrepreneurship than they are to non-profitness. What are the implications of this last statement? See earlier comment on next generation above. So some of our first arts and business intersections should probably be with colleagues who are already a part of the growing for-profit artist driven business sector.   

Next I think it is important to recognize that the business world is not a monolith.  There is an emergent part of the business sector that is challenging prevailing assumptions about the nature of profit and the development of sustainable business models and markets.  Organizations like the California Sustainable Business Council, The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and The Bainbridge Graduate Institute here on Bainbridge Island are all potential fellow travelers.  This is one of the main points made in the book.  These sustainable business and community development impulses are present in most communities large and small, the arts sector just needs to get its multiple heads out of the sand and make some new friends. 

BARRY:  How might we better intersect with those entities?

BILL:  We could start by call them up, introducing ourselves, and going out for coffee. Seriously, one of the reasons we put the book together is to spur those conversations. That is why we asked people who are leaders in these other sectors about the need for new bridges between the arts community and their neighbors who are on the front lines as change agents. 

Finally, the cutting edge discussions that the arts community desperately needs to be exposed to and involved in about communication, technology, markets, and yes, even creativity are happening in the business environment.  If I were running a non-profit arts organization right now I would be spending time listening to TED talks or attending the Innovations Uncensored Conference.  On the flip-side, a great symptom of a healthy arts ecology would be arts conferences that were seen as places where new and interesting ideas were flying and folks from all sectors would go to be re-wired and inspired.

BARRY:  I echo your clarion call for this to happen, but who is going to try to make it happen, who will pay for that effort, can it be done without someone taking responsibility to move it forward?  The private business sector prefers to use the word "innovation" where we say "creativity."  The linkage between the two may be obvious to us, but not yet to them.  Why? What can be done?

BILL:  It doesn’t matter what they call it, they are lusting after it.  It’s up to us to do the translation.  I think that’s supposed to be one of the things artists do well.

BARRY:  We have both lamented the lack of any national conversations on key, critical issues to the arts, and our own lack of success in trying to jumpstart those dialogues and interest those with platforms that might make those conversations happen to do something.  Why do you think there is such reluctance and resistance to supporting those kinds of efforts and is there anything you think we can do about that?

BILL:  I am a believer in having conversations with folks who are interested in listening and exchange. That’s the great promise of connecting to people in other community sectors who are interested in building healthy communities. But I also think that when assume that some people are going to be adversarial there is a greater likelihood that they will be.  When I was running the Arts-in-Corrections program in California one of my jobs was to communicate to community leaders in the 40 or so communities that surrounded correctional facilities. My best audiences during this time were the local Rotary Clubs.  During my 10 years at the California Department of Corrections I probably did 20 or so lunchtime Rotary talks a year.  Those Rotary folks were interested and engaged and open to the idea that the arts could contribute to public safety. Many of those chapters ended up as our strongest supporters. 

BARRY:   Thank you Bill.

Have a good weekend.

Don't Quit.

Barry