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program tracks

Arts Education: Sessions

Innovative Models: A New Market: Strategies for Arts Infusion in the Afterschool Hours

The fast-growing afterschool field across America offers a new potential market for the inclusion of the arts. A cadre of 21st-century grantees from across the country answered a survey about including the arts in afterschool programming. The survey identified what bars inclusion of the arts in afterschool hours. This session will offer researched and field-tested strategies that the arts can use to partner with afterschool programs. Brainstorming, sharing, and testing our work are encouraged during the discussion portion of this session, as we develop strategies to infuse the afterschool hours with the arts. Led by national leaders in afterschool time and a co-founders of the Arts Education Partnership.

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Advanced Practice: Aesthetic Education in the Age of Assessment: Designing for Outcomes that Sustain our Work

With over 100 trained artists, professional development workshops for teachers, a touring company, and a multimedia library, the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) has honed its “aesthetic education” pedagogy and impact over 30 years of practice. LCI is poised to take its work to an international audience with unparalleled quality. It has entered a long-range plan to articulate student outcomes and develop assessment methods. This presentation will include a brief aesthetic education workshop and an introduction of the outcomes identified over its three-decade history. The workshop will be followed by a discussion about researching student outcomes, with LCI’s Focus Schools as a model. We’ll also talk about how research will be positioned to affect both funded and earned-income work.

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SUPER SESSION: California Carries the Torch - First Half

Four energized projects in California are setting the bar at a new height for systemic and sustainable standards-based K–12 arts education for public school students. Counties and school districts from San Diego to Alameda are moving along this path.

  1. Assess our Needs
  2. Develop a Plan
  3. Implement
  4. Evaluate, Revise, & Expand

And each project has something to share about this moment in its life cycle: San Diego just completed its assessment and San Francisco just finished its master plan. Alameda and Santa Clara counties are at the implementing phase, and Los Angeles County is undergoing its first major revision and expansion. We’ll also talk about the effect of recent historic state arts education funding on systemic change. Interested in learning more?

Our first time slot will address Assessing our Needs and Developing a Plan (#’s 1 & 2). The second, from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. will address Implementation and Evaluation (#’s 3 & 4)

  1. Assess
    The San Diego Foundation’s assessment effort included one-on-one interviews with superintendents and school boards at all 42 school districts in the county. What did they say were the barriers to providing arts instruction, and what are the strategies to provide it? How do you get in the door? What questions do you ask? Knowing the school leaders’ answers is the first step to high-quality instruction for the kids. The foundation has the answers.
  2. Plan
    The San Francisco Unified School District launched its Arts Education Master Plan in September 2006, calling for an arts-rich learning environment for every student in every school, every day. The mayor, the superintendent, the board of supervisors, board of education, arts commissioners, teachers, and administrators unions said the level of partnership in this effort was unprecedented. But the 2 1/2 years it took to develop the plan was a road complete with potholes, detours, even angry pedestrians. What were the challenges San Francisco faced? What mistakes did we learn from? And what exactly is a plan anyway?

Each project will have a few minutes to present on their area of expertise, and then will host an intimate conversation with participants about it.

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Trends in the Field: Funder-Fundee Fishbowl

A funder and a fundee must always stay on good terms. Funders must be careful with their resources, which never seem ample enough for all the worthy projects. Fundees must maintain the confidence of their funders, which makes brutal honesty an impossibility. This session will tread lightly into this tricky but important relationship and try to bring some clarity to the what, why, and how of philanthropy and providers. Five representatives from each field will participate in the conversation. Audience participants will be minimal, but we think there will be plenty to talk about nonetheless.

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Innovative Models: Great Schools by Design: Supporting Schools as Centers of Community

An unprecedented $30 billion per year is now being invested in new school buildings. Great Schools by Design (GSbD), a national initiative of the American Architectural Foundation (AAF), improves the quality of America’s schools and increases student learning at this watershed in education spending. Collaboration with local arts organizations, artists, architects, and education leaders can build schools for arts or design integration, schools to raise test scores, and schools that become the center of an engaged community. Target, a presenting sponsor of GSbD, will join AAF to show you how to participate for the arts in this change for your community. Today’s 59 million students, teachers and others will be glad you joined this conversation.

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Trends in the Field: I Teach What I Do, I Do What I Teach: Teaching Artists in Schools

Teaching artists are providing increasing amounts of arts instruction during the school day all. A recent study of teaching artists in southern California public schools describes the work they’re doing, the training they bring into schools, and the opinion of school leaders about teaching artists. Incorporating quantitative methods to survey teaching artists and school principals as well as qualitative methods to investigate specific experiences of teaching artists, findings from this study suggest that teaching artists include many different experts in many different fields. A typology of artists will be presented to better understand these unique professionals.

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Innovative Models: Jazzing Up the Curriculum

Jazz is a truly original American art form and an educational treasure. What else integrates history, social studies, mathematics and culture? What else requires teamwork to showcase independence and originality? What else rewards a respect for diversity or requires organizational and mathematical skills to stimulate and celebrate improvisation? This session may include a live performance. Participants can expect to learn about why and how to teach jazz in the schools from a range of perspectives, including higher education, K–12 education, and a museum setting. Participants will learn about and receive free resources and advocacy materials, and they will hear about what a successful school/jazz organization partnership looks like.

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Advanced Practice: Early Childhood Communication Skills Through the Arts

The Bradford County Regional Arts Council is a national leader in early childhood education and the arts. This multi-year, award-winning program brings age-appropriate music, storytelling, dramatic play and visual arts activities to Head Start centers. To ensure a significant, lasting impact, activities include professional development for early childhood practitioners. In this session, you’ll learn about the program's design, implementation, evaluation, and results. Be prepared to move, explore, and have fun with two program artists while experimenting with arts activities designed to introduce developmental and curricular elements of early childhood education. Ample hand-outs and materials to take back to your teachers and students are included.

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Innovative Models: Taking the Lead: Positive Student Outcomes Through Ballroom Dance

The mission of Dancing Classrooms, which teaches ballroom dance to fourth and fifth graders in the New York City Public Schools, is to build social awareness, teamwork, confidence, and self-esteem through social dance. Currently, Dancing Classrooms serves 19,000 students in 195 schools. This case study presentation will describe how the program reaches children of diverse socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds (including English language learners). It will include results of the program’s first outcome evaluation that incorporated feedback from children, teachers, Teaching Artists, and parents. There will be three presenters (including the evaluator) and one-third of the session time will be dedicated to audience discussion.

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Innovative Models: Teaching Artists and Shared Values: An Approach to Building a Community of Arts Educators

This session will demonstrate and reflect on a teaching artist training model employed by the New Victory in September 2006 as part of a grant from the Dana Foundation. Inspired by an intensive group and individual review process at the close of the 2005/06 season, this model was developed to create a set of shared values around our work, with a particular focus on classroom management, questioning for deeper learning, collaboration with the classroom teacher and artistic integrity/ownership. Participants will experience the strategies just as the teaching artists did and then reflect upon their experience, making connections to their own work and the field at large.

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Trends in the Field: Teaching Artists: Developing the Profession

Despite the critical role that artists have played in education since the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts, only recently has their work been recognized as a professional field. In this session, we will examine the current state of teaching artists and discuss strategies for strengthening practice and practitioners. Though the professional publication, the Teaching Artist Journal, is in place, challenges  remain such as professional development and recognition, insurance, certification, peer networks, and variable pay scales. No Child Left Behind and aging professionals are threats in some communities. Join this dialogue to make some decisions about what we need next and how to make it happen.

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Advanced Practice: Arts and Learning in Schools and Communities: Changing in Order to Succeed

In a moderated panel conversation, arts educators talk about their responses to the shifting needs of public schools, communities, and within cultural collaborations. They address the challenges they face and the solutions that are making a difference. Pacific Northwest Native American tribes and civic groups asked Maya Lin to participate in a project commemorating the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The collaboration resulted in the Confluence Project, a series of seven art installations along the Columbia River that joined communities, tribes, and schools in responding to art. With ever increasing school concerns about achievement gaps in math and literacy, Arts Impact, a teacher training program and multiple U.S. Department of Education grant winner, examines the changing ways they work with schools and the ongoing role of training teachers to use arts learning in everyday classroom curricula. From children’s concerts to community-wide celebrations, the San Francisco Symphony collaborates with a broad spectrum of communities throughout the San Francisco area.

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Advanced Practice: Working with Districts to Create an Arts Supervisor Position

Two projects in two corners of the country, initiated by the private sector, have resulted in new, senior arts positions in local public schools. The West Valley Arts Council and the Chicago Community Trust have both sought sustainable, systemic advancement of arts education by working with schools to create a supervisory position for the arts. The project lead and the hired arts staff person from each effort will talk about using this tactic in your community.

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SUPER SESSION: Influencing Education Decision-Makers

Influencing those with power is instrumental to ensuring arts education has a life beyond the field trip. In this session, national grantmakers and local school leaders will whet your appetite with concise presentations, after which you will be sated by their hands-on, clinic-style dialogue with participants.

  • Negotiating with School Leaders
    Meeting with people in power needn’t be a fight-or-flight experience. Former New York City Principal Phil Tritt will teach you the negotiation tactics used in diplomacy so that everyone walks away feeling good. 
  • Getting Past the Scheduling Challenge
    Sure, money has always an issue. But have you ever heard, “We don’t have time in the day for arts instruction”? Laurie Schopp from VH1 Save the Music will teach us how we work with principals to overcome the fallacy of the too-short-for-arts-ed school day.

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Advanced Practice: Leveraging the Power of the Media at the Community Level: A Guide to Marketing PSAs, Your Organizations, and Causes

For current and interested Public Service Campaign Partners

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Innovator: Sir Ken Robinson & MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series

This joint session with the Private Sector track will feature an interview with Sir Ken Robinson followed by a panel of respondents from education, business, and the arts. Representing the culminating event in the MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series, the forum will conclude with a dynamic working session in which participants will begin to craft a policy statement on the value of the arts in the entire human life cycle.

Leaders from a diverse array of fields, including banking, law, commerce, education, psychology, government, science, culture, and the arts, are implementing strategies to draw on the assets and innovation of hundreds of citizens.

Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. Now based in Los Angeles, he has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. They include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the Royal Ballet, the Hong Academy for Performing Arts, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the J  Paul Getty Trust and the Education Commission of the States. For ten years he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick in England and is now Professor Emeritus.

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Trends in the Field: Arts Integration Survives!

As the movement gains some traction and the funding community continues to pay attention, join this conversation that will set the agenda for the next five years of arts integration work. What is the state of Arts Integration today? How much impact are you having? What do national and state organizations need to do to strengthen local work? Do we need assessment structures? Research on impact? Curriculum development? What are the next steps for the field, and how do we make that change happen? Join us to weigh in with your thoughts about advocacy, funding, and best practices.

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Innovative Models: Rolling the Dice: The Gamble of Visionary Collaboration

What happens when state and local arts agencies work as partners? Can a year-long school residency with an internationally acclaimed performing artist have enduring value in a local community? This session presents the Hayashi International Artist Residency Project as a case study for program collaboration and the unexpected impact an immersive artist residency can have on students, organizations, schools, and communities. Join us in a conversation about this ground-breaking endeavor: what worked, what went wrong, and what implications it may have for your organization if you decide to gamble on a complex collaboration.

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Innovative Models: Changing New Orleans Communities through Arts Integration

Activist and artist Mat Schwarzman is leading a five-year initiative to improve student engagement and mastery of Math and Science (among other subjects) while giving young people power over the future of their community. A multi-racial, multi-disciplinary team of artists and teachers will teach you how to do the same using hands-on, interactive lessons. Participants will walk away with new techniques, lesson plans and connections with colleagues.

Presenters:

  • Matthew Schwarzman, Director, Crossroads Project
  • Luther Gray, Teaching Artist, Musician
  • Margo London, Teacher, Physical Science
  • Roque Caston, Student Educator-Sophomore
  • Ira Ferrand, Student Educator-Junior
  • Rose Gilliam, Student Educator-Freshman
  • Sam Hurts, Student Educator-Freshman
  • Donnanice Newman, Student Educator-Junior
  • Will Powell, Jr., Student Educator-Sophomore
  • Brandy Thomas, Student Educator-Senior

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SUPER SESSION: California Carries the Torch - Second Half

We’ll continue our conversation started this morning about four projects in California Counties and school districts from San Diego to Alameda are moving along this path.

  1. Assess our Needs
  2. Develop a Plan
  3. Implement
  4. Evaluate, Revise, & Expand

Our first time slot addressed Assessing our Needs and Developing a Plan (#’s 1 & 2) from 10:15 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. This one will address Implementation and Evaluation (#’s 3 & 4)

3. Implement
A successful campaign to secure state funding for arts education is one thing. Ensuring access to quality arts education for California’s K–12 student population of six million is quite another. Learn how countywide efforts to build sustainable programs work in tandem with statewide efforts to advocate for arts education. Through a “top down” and “bottom up” approach, Alameda, Orange, and Santa Clara counties, along with the California Alliance for Arts Education, are making gains through a network of mutual support.

4. Evaluate, Revise, & Expand
Arts for All: Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education is five years into systemic, sustainable, standards-based K–12 arts education for all public school students. With a new advocacy effort to pave smooth passage for the Arts for All program and the program’s first major overhaul under its belt, Arts for All has expertise to share on providing every student sequential, standards-based arts education, one district at a time.

Each project will have a few minutes to present on their area of expertise, and then will host an intimate conversation with participants about it.

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Innovative Models: Motivating the English Language Learner through Drama

Those learning English face a daunting task. They are asked to quickly learn to simultaneously speak, read, and write a new language.  This process can be exciting as well as intimidating and stressful. As receptive language (understanding) usually precedes expressive language (speaking), students often are reluctant to risk speaking an unfamiliar language.   Drama’s kinesthetic and imaginative process engages, excites, and motivates students to speak. Further, oral language is a rehearsal for written language. Once students dramatize a concept, idea or story in their own words, they are eager to transform their work into the written word.  In this session, participants will learn by doing a number of simple drama strategies that can motivate the ESOL student to speak, read, and write a new language.

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Class Act: A Documentary about a Transformational Teacher

The filmmakers of the documentary Class Act were fortunate to be taught by Miami Beach Senior High School drama teacher Jay W. Jensen. Jensen launched the careers of such influential individuals as Andy Garcia, Roy Firestone, José Behar, Desmond Child, Brett Ratner, as well as rabbis, doctors, and teachers. 

While profiling Mr. Jensen’s legacy, the film investigates arts education in America today. The heartfelt stories of arts teachers, experts, and students from across the country, as well as the indomitable and irreverent Jensen, will be shared in film clips and a discussion hosted by the filmmakers. 

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SUPER SESSION: You, the Parents, and the Basics of Successful Advocacy

Make a difference in the lives of the kids in your community, by making a difference in your programs and parents. In this session, local practitioners and national experts will introduce their experience, expertise, and research to ensure you’re able to increase parental advocacy and leverage your own successes to make great arts education available to all children.

  • The New Nuts & Bolts of Advocacy
    Support Music has created a kit of ready-to-use presentations, fact sheets, and grassroots how-tos. Sandra Jordan will share new intelligence about research and advocacy techniques to sway PTAs, principals, and other classroom gatekeepers.
  • How to Reach the Arts-Smart Parent
    Parents can have great influence in local education decisions. Jennifer Hahn, Principal at Douglas Gould & Co., will teach us what we need to know about getting parents involved in improving arts education and rallying them to our cause.
  • Upping your Visibility and Funding
    Demonstrate your impact on students and oil your income stream by mixing marketing into your day-to-day operations. Christi Wilkins, Director of Dramatic Results, and Kathi Dunkin, a California marketing consultant, will teach the basics of communicating your impact on students, including setting realistic objectives.

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For more information about this program or any Americans for the Arts programs and services, please contact us by e-mail or call us at 202.371.2830

Last Modified: 04/05/2007

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