Teaching Artists Organized (TAO) A project of Community Initiatives
NEW News (read below for Old News)
Teaching Artists Organized Updates: We've Been Busy on your behalf...
Interim executive director Sabrina Klein represented TAO at the California Arts Advocates Visioning retreat in Sacramento on January 12-13. The gathering was led by teaching artist advocate and educator, Eric Booth. The purpose: find ways to revitalized public understanding of, and government support for, the arts. As stated on the California Arts Advocates Website:
"This convening is not so much about finding new language to better describe or market what we do in the arts; this is about launching an unprecedented inquiry into what is needed for the arts to become an indispensable part of life to the diverse people and communities of California."
The upshot: for too long arts advocates have talked about the arts as special, something apart from regular life. More recently, we've talked about the arts in terms of instrumental value: creating jobs, revitalizing communities, providing tax revenues. These arguments and metaphors aren't sufficiently effective, especially in tough fiscal climates; we need to "revision" the arts. New research suggests we need to rethink the arts from the vantage point of regular people who already engage in art-making in their own lives. To read Arlene Goldbard's powerful address on this idea on the CAA Website, please see full text below TAO activity updates on this page. She suggests arts advocates take a new tack and speak from what we know to be true: that the arts have intrinsic value and are not just a means to achieving something else.
Sabrina will continue to represent Teaching Artists as the initiative takes root and will keep us posted about opportunities to participate in community conversations about the value of arts in our lives.
TAO held its daylong Teaching Artist Institute last month at California Shakespeare Theater in Berkeley, completing our 2009-2010 series. Some 30 TAO members gathered on a Saturday for a day of artmaking, srtory-telling, on-your feet (or on the floor) kinesthetic activities, all in service to deepening our understanding of various arts learning methodologies or pedagogies. Some of the feedback: "It was great to have such a smorgasbord of methodologies and experienced presenters! I am re-invigorated to look deeper into the methodologies that call out to me." "The entire day was interactive and participants were not only learning about the different methodologies but they were experiencing them." "Images from the Reggio Emilia school were amazing as examples of what is possible to achieve with young children. I was also affected by exercises that demonstrated embodied learning and the relationship between images, words and movement." "I was inspired and encouraged by meeting so many competent and talented Teaching Artists."
Many thanks to Cal Shakes and to our expert facilitators and the organizations that supported their participation: Sabrina Klein (Creative Education Consulting), Rica Anderson (Cal Performances), Dave Maier (Berkeley Rep School of Theatre), Sara Lenoue (Visual Thinking Strategies), Arlene Shmaeff (Museum of Children's Arts) and Jill Randall (Shawl-Anderson Dance Center).
P.S. - Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission has contracted TAO to present this same professional developent workshop on Arts Lerning Pedagogies to teaching artists in the Sacramento area on February 27th. A full house of 60 Teaching Artists is expected.
P.P.S. - Various pedagogies from this workshop will be offered as stand-alone sessions in this spring's Monday's at MoCHA. Stay tuned for the schedule.
TAO coordinator Belinda Taylor was everywhere last month
She represented TAO at an array of events including:
January 13 Bay Area Leadership Forum in Berkeley, "Taking Action for Culturally Responsive Education Strategies," sponsored by the Alameda County Office of Education and its Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership. Keynote speaker Dr. Mary Stone Hanley emphasized how academic achievement is increased through positive racial identify and culturally responsive pedagogy. She called for systemic change to adopt these practices and to increase collaboration between schools and community. She emphasized the importance of integrating quality arts practice and programming that embraces culture and community to increase learning across the curriculum. Belinda was invited to a post-forum luncheon and "Framers Market" organized by the Alliance's Louise Music and Justice Matters' Olivia Alveraz. Participants engaged in an arts-based visioning process whose purpose was to "grow, harvest and exchange local ideas, practices, and solutions rooted in community vision and values as a necessary process towards building a viable movement for educational change...." Belinda will continue to participate in this effort and report as it unfolds
A meeting convened by Theatre Development Fund, in conjunction with Theatre Bay Area, early this month of Bay Area playwrights, artistic directors, funders, theatre managers and others to discuss TDF's new book, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play. Belinda Taylor, herself a playwright, attended on behalf of TAO. The Berkeley gathering drew the largest crowd of any in the nation, reflecting the intense interest and engagement in creating new theatre works here in the Bay Area. Todd London, artistic director of New Dramatists (and author of Outrageous Fortune) and TDF executive director Victoria Bailey discussed trends, obstacles and opportunities in the process of taking a play from page to stage. Berkeley's Aurora Theatre hosted the event. Check out TBA's real time blog posts and tweets.
The California Arts Council's informational meeting at Berkeley Rep's Roda Theater, for its arts education grantees where Belinda and Sabrina presented information about the new Teaching Artists Support Coalition (TASC, see top story), and invited participants to join TAO and connect with TASC when it has its Website and infrastructure in place. The CAC is holding similar meetings in Southern California, as well as teleconferences, to update the field on grants programs and encourage participation with California's emerging TASC.
And last but not least, Belinda sits on the education committee of the Alameda County Arts Commission, and is assisting in the development of an arts education policy to support existing and future arts education programs. The Arts Commission currently partners with the ACOE Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership, and is taking a lead in planning events throughout the county for the 10th Anniversary of Art IS Education. Professional development for teaching artists is being discussed as a priority in the arts policy discussion.
Arlene Goldbarb's Keynote address to the California Arts Advocates Visioning Retreat
“Reframing the Role of the Arts in California,” on 13 January 2010 in Sacramento.Sensing The Demand
by Arlene Goldbard
If you have seen the Woody Allen movie,
impression on me. Woody Allen plays a version of himself, a neurotic, libidinous writer-comedian
who desires and mistrusts absolutely everything. In a moment of self-reflection, he imagines
returning to his elementary school classroom. One by one, the sweet-faced students rise and in
piping voices, announce their future fates. One is a dress manufacturer, another runs a plumbing
company, a third is a former heroin addict, now addicted to methadone. It’s not that their futures
are terrible—most aren’t—it’s just the poignancy of seeing so much pint-sized potential reduced
to the compromises and resignations many of us associate with adulthood.
This is similar to the poignancy of gazing at a roomful of artists and advocates who have spent a
lifetime trying to make their case to people who hold power, influence and resources in society.
Like the children in Allen’s film, each of us has our adult persona, the face we present to the
world. But underneath that, from where I stand today, I see a glimpse of who we really are, the
essence each of us brings into the world and retains all our lives. We might call ourselves writers
and musicians and painters, or artistic directors and development directors and general
managers, or dozens of other titles. But if we were to stand in turn and, speaking in our adult
voices, describe whatever lit the spark in our younger selves that has fueled our lives ever since, I
am certain that every one of us would have profound stories to tell, and there would be great
similarities in those stories, despite countless differences in circumstance and identity.
Some of us will have been blessed to grow up in the kind of environment every child deserves,
surrounded by loving people who support the process of becoming fully oneself, a fully creative
being. Some of us will have come to consciousness in a little world of family or community
incapable of truly meeting and receiving us. Those who share this experience may come to say
our lives were saved by art, by discovering in our own imaginations and capabilities a sanctuary
that no external threat could destroy.
Regardless of our individual stories, behind the choice to live one’s life in the arts, as a maker of
beauty and meaning or one who supports that process, there is always an awakening that must
be characterized in spiritual terms, as an encounter with the ineffable, with something that can
never be adequately expressed, but which ignites in our hearts the desire to keep trying. The
specifics of these encounters will be known to each of you. Perhaps you were taken for the first
time to a theater, a film, or a concert, transported in that darkened space to a time and place
markedly different from ordinary life, where your entire being was concentrated on receiving
something, where your body, feelings, mind and spirit came for the first time into absolute,
coherent focus, and where, when the lights went up, you knew you wanted to return as soon and
as often as possible. Perhaps you lifted your own voice in song, or raised a charged brush to Annie Hall, you may recall a scene that made a greatPage make a mark on paper, and in the moment of creation felt time standing still, with you at its
center, completely awake and completely dissolved in the experience.
I am not a musician, but a quotation from the English writer Walter Pater expresses it in a way
that seems very true to me: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” he wrote,
“because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form
from the matter, the subject from the expression.” Pater was writing about art in the narrow
sense, works created with the awareness and intention associated in the last few centuries of
western thought with high art. But I think he was also describing an integrated state of being that
most often arises from the encounter with the ineffable. Every human being has experienced this.
It is the way we feel in the full flow of creativity, when overcome by love, when gazing into the
heart of a rose, when standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon or the Pacific Ocean, bathed in
the light of the setting sun. It is one of the essential experiences of being human.
Arts advocates have been trying to pour the vast personal and social importance of this
experience into containers—into language, slogans, arguments, strategies—far too small to hold
it. The result has been almost unbearable frustration at being unable to put our point across. After
long exposure to the framework of understanding that insists on privileging material value and
things that can be counted, weighed and measured over all other forms of value, we have been
reduced to making weak, even desperate arguments that do not do justice to the powerful truths
contained in those experiences of the ineffable that set us on our paths in the first place.
As I pointed out at the beginning of this retreat, more than three decades of trying to justify art’s
value with flimsy data-based arguments such as the economic multiplier effect, or the relationship
between participating in the school orchestra and scoring high on the SATs, have yielded a net
loss of more than half the real value of federal arts expenditure.
Accepting the terms of the debate as primarily economic has made it unwinnable. Is there anyone
here who hasn’t been to a zillion briefings and absorbed a gazillion pointers on how to argue for
the arts’ economic impact, because getting it right will be the golden key to public funding? Do
you really think that after all this time, the problem is that we still haven’t discovered exactly the
right charts and graphs to hit the jackpot? On this point, we truly do have enough data: It is
intrinsically impossible to justify public investment in creativity using these tools, because art’s
essence is its ability to engage us fully in body, emotions, mind and spirit, to create beauty and
meaning, to cultivate imaginative empathy, to disturb the peace, to enable grief in the face of loss
and hope in the face of grief. Trying to explain or demonstrate this with numbers is like trying to
describe a rainbow without mentioning color. It is ineffective, discouraging and unworthy of who
we really are to keep trying the same failed approach over and over again. If we force ourselves,
our trying can’t help but turn half-hearted.
If you disagree, if you feel these are the winning arguments, then I ask you to return to your own
experience of awakening. Would you really be doing what you are doing today if the strongest
reasons for doing it were the economic impact of people buying theater tickets on restaurant and
parking-lot revenues? Would you really be doing what you are doing today if its most significant
impact was research results so flimsy you can’t distinguish cause from effect: do music lessons
( Page 3) affect dropout rates, or are the children of parents who push music lessons less likely to drop out
for other socioeconomic reasons? No one knows.
If these arguments truly do excite and compel you, then your challenge now is to find ways of
telling the same story that can actually excite, engage and mobilize other people. But if you are
ready to find something better, as I am, the time is right, because the breakdown of many old
verities has created an opening for new truths to emerge. The great James Baldwin said that
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” That is
exactly the opportunity we face now, peeling back layers of conventional and inadequate answers
to face the urgent questions at the heart of the matter. What is the public interest in art, and how
best to pursue and nurture it?
Let’s start with ourselves, then. It was our good fortune to first encounter the ineffable when our
receivers were tuned to exactly the right frequency to truly get the message, and to notice that
this was happening, and to remember it, and to make it the center of our lives. Every day, on line
at the supermarket, in school hallways, eating lunch on a park bench, we are surrounded by
people who have shared these glimpses, whose senses and spirits have been pried open by art
in remarkably powerful ways. No matter what else we do, we have got to begin recognizing those
experiences as integral and valid parts of culture and essential to the entire cultural ecology,
whether they take place in red-carpeted halls, on street corners, in community centers, in front of
computers, in church basements, on back porches. The invidious snobbery that has
contaminated much of the nonprofit arts sector has done more to alienate potential supporters
than any other factor.
The most striking example of arts snobbery I have encountered was at a gathering of arts
supporters nearly 30 years ago. The board president of a major symphony orchestra was working
herself up into a lather of enthusiasm, describing the wonderful work they were doing in
education, primarily sending small ensembles into classrooms. “And some of these children,” she
concluded, “had never heard music before!” Even people who harbor such prejudices know they
can’t really express them aloud anymore. But the tacit assumption that certain art forms and
styles are intrinsically superior is still a pervasive subtext in this sector, and it is time to recognize
it as just plain wrong.
In just the past few weeks, for instance, I’ve had a dozen serious conversations about spirituality,
culture and globalization stimulated by someone remarking on the film,
posted her New Year’s Eve ruminations about the music of Leonard Cohen, inspiring a swooning
cacophony of testimonies by others whose lives have been changed by his work. I got to post my
favorite bit of Leonard Cohen trivia, that his wonderful song “Alexandra Leaving” is an almost linefor-
line transposition of Cavafy’s amazing 1911 poem, “The God Abandons Antony.” Last week, I
walked down a busy city street eavesdropping on two young women, one of whom was
explaining that she was writing a paper that portrayed the “history of the eighties” through the
music of Madonna. Then I sat in a waiting room across from a child of six who was staging an
amazingly lively play starring two dolls and a plush watermelon with eyes.
What we know in every cell of our bodies and learn every hour of the day is true. The essence of
being human is to make art. We do it in red-carpeted halls and ramshackle huts, at every moment
(Page 4) of history, every time we mark the unfolding of our lives. Even under harrowing conditions, in
SuperMax prisons and concentration camps, people save precious crumbs or scrape up clumps
of mud to make sculptures. They scratch on prison walls with rocks or the burnt ends of matches.
I am awestruck to think that Herbert Zipper, the founding director of the National Guild of
Community Schools of the Arts, led a clandestine orchestra in Dachau. When human history
began, our ancestors circled their fires, turning their backs on the darkness to share stories of the
hunt, the trek, the storm and their meanings. Today we sit in neat rows in darkened multiplexes,
warming ourselves by the light of much busier and more complicated stories. But underneath, we
are the same.
The philosopher Denis Dutton has argued that human artistic creativity is rooted in our
development during the Pleistocene era. It turns out that these big brains that create pleasure,
make possible a remarkable and intense range of emotions, enable stupendous feats of
imagination, use storytelling as a path to problem-solving, and allow us to create beauty in so
many forms—our big brains are also a favored trait for sexual selection. When seeking mates,
our earliest ancestors valued innovation, dexterity, grace, and other forms of skillfulness
associated with art, which may be why there seem to be more and more artists in each
generation. This is also good news for countless starving artists looking for love in a time that
otherwise values earning capacity. Don’t give up: evolution is on our side!
In 1958, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard coined the phrase “desire path” to describe
the paths that people naturally make in walking from one place to the other, as opposed to the
roadways that have been made for us. You can see these most easily in the snow: in the
absence of predetermined paths, people’s feet track the evidence of their desire, sometimes
taking the most direct shortcut between two points, sometimes meandering past an especially
beautiful prospect or a beloved natural feature. When the snow melts, a gap becomes evident
between planning and the wishes of the human heart. The hubris of modern times has been to
imagine that the looping meanders and rough edges of human desire can be supplanted by the
imposition of an artificial order that seems, in the Olympian space of the conference room or
laboratory, ever so much neater and more efficient. The smartest planners are learning now, half
a century after Bachelard coined his term, that an organic approach is far superior, taking time
and investing attention to allow the lines of desire to emerge before the paths are laid.
As usual, when new truths emerge in other disciplines, they have almost always been articulated
first by artists. Half a century before Bachelard, in his most famous work, the Spanish poet
Antonio Machado wrote lines that carry the same deep wisdom. Translated into English, they are:
Traveler, your footsteps
are the road, nothing more;
traveler, there is no road,
you make the road by walking.
Despite vast pressure to persuade us to walk a social path in which punishment or profit or
machinelike efficiency are our collective priorities, in actuality, our desire path, the road we have
made as individuals and communities, is the path of art. All around us, people are living out the
truth that has given shape to the lives in this room. Every day, in every corner of this country,
nearly every life, nearly every waking hour, is saturated with music, stories, visual imagery, and
conscious movement expressing the intrinsic nature and overwhelming resilience of human
creativity.
Page 5 The cumulative result of millennia of human creativity embodied in art-making is a repository of
wisdom, social imagination, empathy, beauty and meaning that is essential to surviving the crises
our society now faces. It sustains us through difficulty and inspires us to make change. It provides
the container, the matrix, for all human knowledge. And right now, we really need to get to know
each other. We need to share our stories and dream together how to change the big story of our
collective fate. We need the skills of imagination, improvisation and renewal that can be learned
more fully and deeply through art than by any other means. And we—the people who have made
art our life’s work—need to be able to express, embody and convey these truths without
hesitation or embarrassment.
You know Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? It’s actually based on a
much older fable that emerged from the ferment of Arab and Jewish culture in medieval Spain. In
the original, the con artists responsible for the emperor’s costume say that the clothes are
invisible to anyone who is not actually the child of his or her father, so the social pressure to see
more than a naked man was intense. Anderson lightened the story a bit, recognizing that general
peer pressure would suffice to silence most people. All of us understand what happens when you
are told over and over again that what you know to be true is just your imagination: you start to
take that doubting voice into yourself, you start to hear its echoes whispering in your own ear
even when no one else is around. You start to believe its whispers more than the evidence of
your own body, emotions, mind and spirit, like the courtiers in the tale of the emperor’s new
clothes. You begin to lose the courage of your convictions.
Take a minute to let yourself feel the weight of that frustration, that self-doubt. Where do you feel
it? For me, it pinches like a pair of shoes long outgrown. The remedy is to step out of our old
thinking, a container too small to hold the truth that needs telling now, and to walk on.
Now, think how good it would feel to step into a way of understanding and speaking about the
public interest in art that is fully commensurate with our truths. Our power to persuade is at its
height when there is absolute congruence between what we know and what we say. Many of you
are visiting legislators this afternoon. Imagine how it would feel to make even a subtle shift away
from repeating the same old and weak arguments, toward representing the much larger and
deeper truths that animate your work.
If anxiety arises when you consider that prospect, I invite you to reflect on its source. The great
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire contributed tremendously to our understanding of these
dynamics, how we are persuaded to internalize self-defeating messages, and how we come to
mistake them for our own ideas and feelings. He described a phenomenon he called “fear of
freedom,” in which people are afraid to let go of beliefs that no longer serve them, because the
prospect of living without them creates too much anxiety, often because they have been
persuaded there is nothing else. When you consider letting go of the old arguments for the arts,
the ones that have failed us over and over again despite our steadfast loyalty, what happens? If a
voice in your head says, “We can’t abandon the way we’ve been doing it for all these years! We’ll
be defenseless!” you know that old, impacted, disabling beliefs are standing in the way of your
bringing your full gifts and your full power to your chosen task, and it is time to break through.
We have a good deal to learn from spiritual traditions about how to do this, especially because
every wisdom tradition is filled with stories about standing for the truth against even the most
powerful opponents. I like the way Rebbe Nachman of Bratslov, the great 18th century teacher,
Page 6 put it: “A person needs holy arrogance, holy chutzpah. He should be bold as a leopard against
the people who are preventing him and mocking him. He shouldn’t subjugate himself before
them, and he shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of them at all.” I’ve had some amazing
discussions with powerful people that started by asking them to remember the first work of art—a
song, a book, a film—that moved and inspired them to see the world differently, even in some
small, personal way. Our interactions with such people tend to be constrained by social roles:
everyone knows what they should say and repeats their prescribed lines dutifully. What if you
showed up as yourself this time? What have you got to lose?
I am very glad that you want to tackle this question, because we need new frames equal in
potency to the stories they will hold. In cognitive linguistics, a “frame” is one of the conceptual
schemes that organize our thinking, coloring the meaning of words, images, and other
information. Frames are embedded concepts—constructed of words and images, metaphors and
parables—that shape our perception and therefore, our opinions. The meanings of facts change
depending on the frame, so that the same piece of information can be seen as essential or
irrelevant. In the political arena, most frames incorporate moral appeals. The debate over
reproductive choice, for instance, evokes two principles many people hold sacred: personal selfdetermination
and the sanctity of life. Embedded in each frame is the implication that adopting
that position makes you a good person, while the opposite opinion is morally questionable.
Charlotte Ryan and William Gamson have written a great deal about the use of framing in
influencing public opinion. “A frame is a thought organizer,” they write. “Like a picture frame, it
puts a rim around some part of the world, highlighting certain events and facts as important and
rendering others invisible. Like a building frame, it holds things together but is covered by
insulation and walls. It provides coherence to an array of symbols, images, and arguments,
linking them through an underlying organizing idea that suggests what is essential—what
consequences and values are at stake. We do not see the frame directly, but infer its presence by
its characteristic expressions and language.”1Everything we know about the centrality of story, the universality of artistic creativity and its roles
in human and social development is demonstrably true, yet we are still laboring under the social
superstition that says art has nothing to do with the serious problems we face, that creative work
is trivial and negligible, meaningful only for its commodity-value. Open the arts section of any
major U.S. daily: if you eliminate the reviews and announcements, you will find that this is the
main focus: which TV shows drew the most viewers and sponsors, which movies and plays
earned the largest box-office revenues, which songs sold the most copies, which performers
made the largest fees. We are trapped in an economistic frame. If all you have is a cash register,
everything looks like a sale.
But the big frame we need now is this: that art is the secret of survival, that if our resilience,
creativity and future sustainability are riding on the stories that shape us, we had better invest in
our collective capacity to create and share stories.
Page 7 Many people are approaching this now in their own ways and their own communities. I am eager
to work deeply on this with anyone who wants to give it serious attention, so I invite you to call on
me.
Before I close, I want to tell you about a couple of experiences along these lines. Last May, I
helped to organize a group of artists and organizers to come together as part of a White House
Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery. After our conversation with
administration officials, we adjourned to another location to hold working group sessions about
what to do next. I convened a working group on cultural policy. Group members gave ourselves a
challenge we have been working on ever since. We knew that hearing the word “policy” makes
many people want to lie down for a little nap. It conjures endless boring documents in which every
detail is spelled out, like the boilerplate in a contract. But our goal was to wake people out of that
somnolence. We challenged ourselves to use plain language to concisely convey the compelling
necessity of a bold new investment in culture and community.
We asked ourselves this: what if instead of following the defensive strategy that has kept art and
artists marginalized for so long—instead of making ourselves smaller or trying to camouflage
ourselves as a way to improve tax revenues and test scores—we spoke and acted as if art were
the secret of survival and sustainable community? As if the cultivation of personal and social
creativity were an absolute necessity for any healthy society? As if art were the essential way to
teach the imaginative empathy and social imagination that underlie cultural recovery, without
which no lasting economic recovery is possible?
Our collaboration produced a new policy proposal entitled “Art & The Public Purpose: A New
Framework.” The Website promoting it is at
download the Framework to see one attempt at generating a new frame for this debate. By
gathering individual and organizational endorsements, circulating the Framework for discussion,
and encouraging people to place the topic of art’s public purpose front and center, we hope to call
attention to a story that needs telling: that our own creative actions may be precisely what’s
needed to strengthen democracy now. It’s early days and we are still finding our way to push this
out.
One point of the Framework calls for a new WPA, a public service employment program
supporting art’s public purpose through jobs for artists in schools, prisons, hospitals and all kinds
of constructive community settings. This year, 2010, is the 75th anniversary of the Works
Progress Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal. Some arts groups have begun to use the
anniversary to call attention to artists working in public service. For instance, WomenArts
(formerly the Fund for Women Artists) is dedicating its annual day of action to this theme. If you
go to the Website—www.womenarts.org—you’ll find historical information, resources for teachers
and communities, and soon, a new play that can be downloaded and performed by anyone,
weaving together voices of women artists of the WPA with contemporary women artists.
I especially love the idea of using a play to tell this story. I am certain that the most effective
actions we take to establish new frames for this debate will make full use of our artistic creativity
such that, as Walter Pater wrote, “the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the
matter, the subject from the expression.” Instead of repeating half-hearted arguments or trying to
cram our truth into containers that cannot hold it, if we will bring all we know and all we are to this
effort, that can turn the tide.
Even mundane things can be lifted up if undertaken with a sense of larger purpose and meaning.
We could look at this effort as some people have, as “rebranding” the arts, or as becoming better
marketers and better lobbyists. But that would deprive us of the opportunity this moment
presents, to be part of a seismic shift in human history, in which the things that have been
shunted off to the margins—beauty, meaning, reflection, creativity, facing loss and finding
resilience—in which these important things will be given their true value. Forms of work not
previously recognized as having social utility will emerge as worthy, in part because the old jobs
are disappearing, necessitating a redefinition of work. New creative technologies will emerge to
seize public attention, and older technology will be repurposed, but not forgotten. Whatever
happens, art will foreshadow, portray and interpret it, lifting countless lives from the merely
bearable into beauty.
We can’t predict how things will morph over the next decade or two. But because so much is
unknown, if we come to the fore with energy and vision, our ideas can have influence. I don’t
think there is one right answer to the inquiry we are undertaking. We need to engage many
questions, generate many ideas, to experiment, make mistakes and learn from them. I hope to
have dozens of mind-blowing conversations about these essential questions, to clear out all the
cobwebs and the old answers, and with others as excited by these challenges as I am, to come at
this task with fresh energy and vision.
“This is the most important experience in the life of every human being,” Abraham Joshua
Heschel wrote, “something is asked of me. Every human being has had a moment in which he
sensed a mystery waiting for him. Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is
found in sensing the demand.”
I’m honored today to address a roomful of people whose course in life has been set by sensing
and responding to just such a demand. It is clear that something is being asked of us now, and if
we accept the challenge, I know that we will be equal to it.
# # #
OLD BUT STILL INTERESTING NEWS ....
PRESIDENT OBAMA SIGNS $12.5 MILLION BOOST FOR NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS Learn More about This Funding Increase On October 30, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the FY 2010 budget for the Department of the Interior into law, which resulted in a $12.5 million funding increase (from 2009’s budget of $155 million) for both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Both agencies are now funded at $167.5 million each. The final budget represents a compromise between the $170 million that was in the House version of the bill and the $161 million in the Senate version, which was also the amount requested by the White House. House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee Chairman Norm Dicks (D-WA), Ranking Member Mike Simpson (R-ID), Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI), and Congressional Arts Caucus Co-Chairs Reps. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Todd Platts (R-PA) all played vital roles in securing the highest NEA funding level since its peak in the early 1990s. For more information on the congressional appropriations process, please contact Associate Director of Federal Affairs Gladstone Payton at gpayton@artsusa.org.
HEALTHCARE REFORM BILL HELPS ARTISTS Further Details on the Arts in Healthcare In a historic vote on November 7, 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly passed its version of comprehensive healthcare reform. The bill would help artists by extending universal coverage, prohibiting discrimination based on preexisting conditions, creating health insurance exchanges where small employers and individuals could shop for affordable coverage, and providing tax credits to help pay for coverage. The Senate Finance Committee’s bill did not include a provision that would have aided small nonprofits (not eligible for federal income tax incentives). The Senate is in the process of combining the two different Senate committee bills for a floor vote. Americans for the Arts has been working with a coalition of nonprofit organizations to ensure that the arts-friendly provision makes it into the final legislation when the House and Senate merge their respective healthcare bills. For more on the status of healthcare reform, please contact Associate Director of Federal Affairs Gladstone Payton atgpayton@artsusa.org-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OLDER NEWS
Interview with New York State Association of Teaching Artists director (full story started in the June TAO Newsletter Dale Davis is the executive director and one of the original founders of the Association of Teaching Artists (ATA) of New York state, a professional organization that came into being 11 years ago and which today links a community of 1,000 teaching artists around the state. With a modest annual budget of $17,000, provided primarily by the State Council of the Arts along with donations, ATA is among the earliest professional associations for teaching artists in the nation.
More than ever today, Davis says, the role teaching artists play in arts education needs to be publicly understood and supported. "TAs have always been vulnerable because we are invisible," she points out. " We need to make our professional issues public. And we need to make clear we are not in competition with teachers or arts specialists!"
In an effort to broaden the conversation, ATA's governing board is looking to form a national board and has plans to hold a national teaching artist conference in 2010 in NY state. The agenda could include an issue Davis finds most irksome: Professional development unrelated to pay equity. "There is no professional career ladder for teaching artists. They take endless professional development courses, but it does not at all affect what they are paid."
ATA has a listserv for Teaching Artists that reaches beyond New York state, even connecting internationally. A lively blog by teaching artist Michael Wiggins is updated daily on the ATA site and appears on Facebook (address below) . For more information about ATA and its listserv, check out the ATA Website at http://www.teachingartists.com/.
The Association of Teaching Artists was founded at a Summit in Poughkeepsie in April 1998. Teaching Artists, arts administrators, and leaders in statewide arts funding came together at the request of The New York State Council on The Arts to consider the need and feasibility of forming an organization of Teaching Artists. The Artists Summit group met again in June 1998 in Troy and developed and adopted a mission statement, goals, and the name of the new organization. ATA was incorporated in September 1998 and officially introduced to the Arts In Education field at the annual statewide Arts In Education conference, Common Ground, in October 1998.
With support from the California Arts Council, Teaching Artists Organized has been engaged in a similar conversation and process here in California, meeting with like-minded teaching artists, arts providers and arts councils from throughout the state. Participants have convened twice in the last two years. Next steps call for a working committee to write a plan for a statewide network, refine it with feedback from the field, then adopt it along with a shared mission statement and set of working goals.
Davis’s advice: “Don’t promise the world and not deliver.” Message received.
Despite being in business for more than a decade, ATA still struggles with issues that sound familiar to us: what are the artistic and education standards for TAs? “If we don’t set them ourselves, others will do it for us.” Where have we heard that before? “Should there be a credential? In schools, credentials matter.” While stressing that teaching artists are not in competition with credentialed teachers, Davis sees a need for some kind of standards system and terminology to emerge. “For that matter, what are the credentials for the head of a cultural organization that’s putting artists in schools?” ATA did a survey of its associates and discovered most had master degrees. “But I’ve known TAs who don’t even have a bachelors, and they are fine teachers
Other burning issues for ATA include lack of intellectual property protection. “You design a unit, it can be used by others for the next 10 years, with no acknowledgment of the origination. “Our most filled workshop was about copyright and intellectual property. Our next most successful was about special education. The ones that really fill are the business issue workshops.”
ATA starts every year by contacting all the cultural organizations that receive state arts council funding and asking them if they will need teaching artists in the coming year. This information goes onto the ATA Website (updated regularly) and into their listserv. ATA makes annual awards to honor exceptional TAs and an administrator of a cultural organization. They also hold an annual Common Grounds conference for the arts education field in New York state.
Serving as executive director of ATA is a part time job for Davis, who also works as Executive Director of The New York State Literary Center, an organization she founded in 1979. “We work with adolescents at the highest risk of educational failure. This is how I have come to know Judith Tannenbaum and The Beat Within, both San Francisco treasures!” She founded the Center based upon a pedagogy that evolved from her experience working as a teaching artist. In 2006 she founded The New York State Arts in Correctional Education Network to facilitate dialogue and collaboration among arts organizations, artists, and correctional education programs and to support artists and arts organizations with the knowledge and training needed to better serve correctional education.
Of her ATA work, “It can eat you up!” But she’s never too busy to answer the most frequent question she gets from the field: “How can I get started?” -- By Belinda Taylor
********************************************************************************************************************************************* Check ATA out on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Association-of-Teaching-Artists/45276461667 _________________________________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership Launches Nation’s First Teaching Artist Certification Program with The University of the Arts, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
PHILADELPHIA (May 1, 2009) – Recognizing artists as a vital component in Pre K – 12 educational reform, The University of the Arts and the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership (PAEP), in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, will begin offering a first-in-the-nation Teaching Artist Certificate through the University’s Continuing Studies Division this fall. “This program was created in direct response to President Barack Obama’s call for a corps of trained teaching artists to work in community sites and collaborate with educators in schools preparing students for success in the 21st century,” said Erin Elman, Dean of Continuing Studies at The University of the Arts.
The research-based certificate program is inclusive of visual, performing, literary, media, and crafts and aims to build the knowledge and capacity of artists to work alongside teachers and arts specialists in Pre K – 12 classrooms and community settings to create and implement best practices residency programs that support learning in and through the arts.
“Establishing this certificate program is a major milestone for an emerging field,” said national arts education consultant Eric Booth, who co-founded the Art and Education program at Juilliard and will serve as the first chairman of the Certificate Program’s National Board of Advisors. “Until now, artists with a passion to include teaching artistry as a committed career component have had to piece their training together and learn on the fly. This new program provides America’s first comprehensive training offering, and establishes a new standard of professionalism for this burgeoning field.”
The program is designed for practicing artists interested in building a knowledge base and capacity for bringing their skills into the classroom. “This exciting new certificate program will foster a new generation of Teaching Artists,” said Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Executive Director Philip Horn, “a generation who, in partnership with educators, will bring the unique benefits of arts learning into today’s classrooms and educational settings.”
Through PAEP’s status as regional arts in education partner with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, this innovative program is able to draw upon the leadership, expertise, and resources of the statewide network of arts in education partners. The University of the Arts’ unique position as the only university representative of all of the visual and performing arts provides the scope and breadth necessary to launch a program of this magnitude. “We’re rolling out this program locally with plans in place to offer it statewide through online, distance learning and by building affiliations with institutions of higher education across the state,” stated Pearl Schaeffer, CEO of the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership.
Students will not only receive their certification from The University of the Arts but will also be granted alumni status providing many of the unique opportunities for alumni that the University has to offer. Deadline for fall 2009 enrollment is Tuesday, June 30, 2009. For more information, course descriptions or to request an application, please visit www.uarts.edu/ce, email ce@uarts.edu or call 215.717.6095.
The University of the Arts is the nation’s first and only university dedicated to the visual, performing and communication arts. Its 2,300 students are enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs on its campus in the heart of Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts. The institution’s roots as a leader in educating creative individuals date back to 1868.
The Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership (PAEP) promotes learning in and through the arts working in collaboration with education and arts communities. PAEP builds excellence in arts in education practices through residencies and professional development programs and is a regional partner with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Arts in Education Division serving southeastern PA.
Thanks to Wayne Cook of the California Arts Council for forwarding this article. Let us know if you have other interesting news worth sharing.
Even Older (but still relevant) News
Haas Fund awards grant to TAO! Teaching Artists Organized has received its first operating grant, $10,000 from the Haas Fund as seed money for our start-up phase. The Haas money will subsidize the largely volunteer activities of current TAO staff, working toward a minimal infrastructure that will allow us to provide the services you've told us you want: advocacy, convening, professional development and other basic operating costs.
Many thanks to Frances Phillips, Haas Fund Arts Program Officer, for her support and belief in our mission and proposed range of services. The grant offers tangible evidence that our cause -- to advance and professionalize the role of teaching artist -- is important and worthy of support in the eyes of funders.
"We are thrilled to receive this early acknowledgment from the Haas Fund," stated Jill Randall, TAO advisory board chair and a teaching artist at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. "It convinces me that we are on the right track in our efforts to build professional support for teaching artists in the Bay Area. Our new workshop series (see below) represents just the sort of thing we want to offer on a regular basis."
Fingers crossed: we have a grant proposal pending at the San Francisco Foundation, and will know in March if we passed the first round.
Teaching Artists Journal TAO associates can subscribe to the TA Journal half-price --$22 per year --by signing up through TAO. As soon as we have 8 more sign-ups, we can activate your subscription. Make out your check to TAO, and mail to the address below.
OLDER NEWSVolume 1, Issue 2 August 2008 Teaching Artists Organized (TAO) is now officially “a project of the Community Initiatives Fund (CIF) of the San Francisco Foundation,” giving TAO access to the benefits of being a 501(c)3 and providing fiscal administrative support as well. This means CIF can receive and disburse money for TAO. As of the moment, there are no funds, so it’s not a burning issue, but we will be receiving some support soon to plan and facilitate a statewide gathering of organizations that support the work and training of teaching artists ( more about that in a minute).
Acting project director Sabrina Klein (Creative Education Consulting) and acting advisory committee chair Jill Randall (Shawl-Anderson Dance Center and Dancers Group) signed the papers with Community Initiatives Fund of The San Francisco Foundation. This sponsorship moves us closer to our goal of becoming a full-fledged member service organization; we intend to launch a membership drive in the fall. Initially, member benefits will include a monthly newsletter, regional networking opportunities, information about jobs, informal brown bag lunches in our new office and more.
Funding Jill Randall, Dale Albright and Belinda Taylor met with John Killacky at the San Francisco Foundation last month to outline TAO’s goals and efforts to bring a fully-functioning service organization for TAs into being. They received a warm reception, and were invited to apply for funding in the fall. This doesn’t mean TAO will get funded, but it is a positive sign. Frances Phillips on behalf of the Haas Fund, has also agreed to accept a proposal for seed funding for TAO. Again, accepting a proposal isn’t the same as making a grant, but it means our ideas and aspirations are being taken seriously. It also means we’ve got some work to do to start deciding what “membership” in TAO will mean. Jill Randall, Mary Sutton and Belinda Taylor are heading up our membership committee and will report at our October Brown Bag lunch.
Statewide meeting on Teaching Artists’ Professional Development The California Arts Council has granted $10,000 to the Alameda County Arts Commission to host a major convening of teaching artist support organizations from around the state this November. TAO was asked to plan and facilitate the meeting; ergo, our first funding. The topics for discussion will include professional development for Teaching Artists, professional standards for TAs, credentialing –an admittedly controversial topic -- and other issues, including models for regional partnerships and creation of a statewide network in support of TAs. This will be the second CAC-sponsored convening of this group; the first was last November with the goal of articulating the growing role of the TA in schools as arts learning has begun returning to the classroom.
TAO will collaborate with the Alameda County Arts Commission, San Francisco Art Commission, Sacramento Arts Commission, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the California Arts Council to plan the meeting. The San Francisco Foundation has graciously offered their conference room for the November 6, 2008 gathering. ª
Honing your teaching artist skills (tips for the new TA parent!)
By Rica Anderson, Education Program Administrator, Cal Performances and parent of baby Tamsin, born April 26
Theater
· Long Night’s Journey Into Colic
A series of monologues set in the wee hours of the morning, whispered to crying, insomniac baby as a silent TV flickers in the background. Pacing the floor and rocking in a chair, the caregiver-actor performs a stream-of-consciousness piece touching on memories, absurdist musings and repeated comforting phrases accented by long pauses and light snoring. One part Beckett, one part O’Neill, three parts infomercial.
· Pantomime Playhouse
Forget striving for a subtle, layered performance. Ever wanted to play scenes way over the top while indicating broadly? Now’s your chance to indulge as you chew the scenery out of “Good Night Moon” and other children’s books. No “less is more” for baby, bigger is best, and frankly, pandering to this audience feels great.
Dance
· The Jiggle Dance
This structured improvisational duet uses bouncy movement that builds in intensity depending on duration and volume of baby’s crying. The dance is often accompanied by desperate shushing sounds or lullabies sung at the top of one’s voice.
· Toy Trippin’
A purely improvisational dance set into motion as the caregiver-dancer trips over a baby’s rattle and is pitched into a minefield of soft-looking yet surprisingly painful educational toys. Types of movement: Lunging, weaving and wild hopping with a crash-bang finale that ends on the floor. Vocals include: A series of “Ows” and loud swearing, followed by apologies to baby. ª
