Beyond Arts Integration
Defining learning in arts education partnerships

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Opening Remarks

March 11, 2005
Opening Remarks
Steven Tennen
Executive Director, ArtsConnection


Good morning. My names is Steven Tennen. I'm the Executive Director of ArtsConnection and on behalf of ArtsConnection and New York University, I want to welcome all of you to Beyond Arts Integration: Defining Learning in Arts Education Partnerships.

ArtsConnection is a dedicated arts in education organization. for the past twenty-six years, we have been developing high quality, in depth arts programming and training for tens of thousands of students, teachers and families annually in the New York City public schools.

Our programming has been constantly evolving. In the early years the work was centered around performances and workshops linked to performances-trying to reach as many children in as many schools as possible. Gradually, the work became more instruction-based and child centered - extended residencies reaching children over a sustained period of time. We developed curriculum, built scope, sequence and identifiable student outcomes into our lesson planning, and extended our professional development for teachers and artists. Our presence in schools grew from working class-by-class to grade-by-grade and whole school-by-whole school. We became more flexible in our approach to planning with schools, better listeners, more adept at trying new things. Our goal was to create greater depth in our work with children - creating longer residencies with more instructional time for each child. We no longer wanted to be visitors in a school, but to become full educational partners with the teachers and administrators with whom we work.

Our exploration of partnership was accelerated by a confluence of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Empire State Partnership Program at the New York State Council on the Arts and the Center for Arts Education's Annenberg Initiative.

Suddenly we had the wherewithal to create partnerships with a few, select schools which could serve as laboratories for developing this new, in-depth work.

We were immediately faced with questions of capacity:
•Did our staff and teaching artists have the educational knowledge and pedagogical skills necessary to take our work to the next level?
•Could we develop a more effective process for engaging school administrators and classroom teachers in a meaningful dialogue about the role of the arts in the education of the children in their schools?
•Were we asking the right questions? How do you move from prescribed to inquiry-based partnerships?

To address these concerns, we took some important first steps:

•In the summer of 1998, Carol Morgan, our new Deputy Director for Education, convened and facilitated an ArtsConnection Discussion Group, inviting the staff to read and discuss articles about the arts and education together. That fall, the program staff embarked on a year long series of meetings to study and discuss the key educational movements in the United States. It was more than History of Education 101-it was an opportunity for the staff-most of whom came out of an arts background-to develop a shared knowledge base about education and to begin to connect that knowledge to their expertise in an art form and to our work in schools. We were beginning to reposition the staff and the organization into a community of learners.
•We needed independent voices to join this community, and engaged Jane Remer, Rob Horowitz, Barbara Batton and Stephen Yaffe to serve as evaluators in key schools. They helped us articulate the questions that moved the work forward.
•With the approval of our board and thanks to financial support from the Dana Foundation and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, we made a major investment in professional development for teaching artists and classroom teachers.

We recognize that there are many valid program models. We work in over 120 schools a year and we develop programming through a process of discussion with school administrators and teachers. The most effective way to integrate the arts into the life of a school is different school by school. In some schools we continue to create arts integration models that relate directly to the academic curriculum. We have schools in which the social studies requirement is fulfilled completely by the work of our artists teaching to a theme grade by grade. But we also began looking beyond that traditional arts integration model in which the arts are used to illustrate other subject areas to a more authentic study of the arts-to define the skills and strategies that the arts teach and to find the parallel skills and strategies students need and use in studying academic subjects. To make this new model work we engaged our whole team: program staff, teaching artists, school administrators, classroom teachers-in a process to recognize and understand where, when and how these skills and strategies converge. it is an ongoing process.

By 1999, we needed a place to take our notions of partnership from theory to practice, and that place was CES 53, our Empire State Partnership school in the South Bronx. It was the perfect laboratory-a school with progressive and effective leadership, a real commitment to making the arts a part of every students' education, a history of working with ArtsConnection over many years and an existing inquiry based partnership for staff development with Lehman college. It was also a school with many challenges. 100% of it's 1,600 students qualified for free lunch. There was a faculty of over 100 teachers and up to a dozen classes on each grade. 10% of the students came from a local temporary housing facility. For many in the student population, English was their second language.

In conversations with Principal David Vas Nunes and his faculty, the word communication kept coming up. Students needed to find new ways to communicate in class and with one another, to build their verbal and non-verbal communication skills, to have the confidence to speak before or perform for others. Our programming at that time consisted of Thematic Arts Residencies that reached every grade but only about a third of the student population. David noticed that in those classes studying dance and theater, the kind of communication skills he wanted for his students grew naturally out of the work. He asked us to refocus our program at the school; to develop a grade appropriate sequence in theater and dance and to expand the scope of the work so that every one of the 1,600 children kindergarten through grade 5 would receive both dance and drama instruction every year.

To facilitate communication among the students, we needed to first facilitate communication between the adults. We piloted a new planning and reflection process which changed how we developed a residency with classroom teachers-allowing us to set goals for every participant-children, teachers, teaching artist-and guaranteeing time to review and amend those goals; deal with problems and recognize success. We also began training our program staff to serve as facilitators of meetings between teachers and teaching artists grade by grade. We began to use video as a professional development tool. The Video Description Process allows artists and teachers to build a shared understanding of what and how students are learning in the arts by observing and describing the work of children engaged in an arts lesson captured on videotape. To facilitate improved teaching practice among artists, we created Study Groups so that they could build a shared knowledge base for teaching and learning in the arts. Through their work in the Study Groups, our twelve artists teaching at this one school were developing into a faculty-and they in turn were becoming part of the larger teaching faculty at the school. It was clear that through this relationship something was happening to the children, to the classroom teachers and teaching artists, to the school administrators and to ArtsConnection. Could it be documented and validated?

So in 2001, when the US Department of Education announced their Model Development and Dissemination Program-looking to replicate arts partnership models that work and to facilitate research to find out why they were working and what they were accomplishing vis a vis teaching and learning, we submitted a successful proposal to take what we learned at CES 53 and see if we could have the same success at two other sites-PS 130 and PS 39 in Brooklyn. Today's program will describe what we did and what we learned over the three years of the grant.

I do want to say a word about school leadership. The school principal is the key to this work. Partnership can only grow in schools with principals who support and value it. Partnership is expensive, it is time consuming and it requires hard decision making on the part of the school and the arts organization. Two-thirds into the grant period, David Vas Nunes retired and the leadership at CES 53 changed. That change affected the atmosphere in the school, the commitment to the arts and to our partnership. Key players in the partnership-teachers and administrators-transferred to other schools. At some point, you have to admit when something isn't working any longer. In one of the hardest decisions we ever had to make as an organization, we decided to leave CES 53 and consequently add a fourth school, PS 38, to the study. That said, the voices of CES 53, David, the teachers and the students, are very much a part of the content of today's conversation.

This is the third time in the last eight years that ArtsConnection has reported back to the field. In 1997, following two three year US DOE Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented grants we held a two day symposium entitled Learning and the Arts: New Strategies for Promoting Student Success. In 1999, with the field rapidly changing in New York City, and with new demands on the teaching artist, we organized a four day meeting entitled CLASS ACTS, The Artist's Voice in Arts Education.

Today we will report back once again. Beyond Arts Integration: Defining Learning in Arts Education Partnerships, will look at the Conditions in the field and the questions we as a field are asking or need to ask to move forward; the Practices ArtsConnection developed for teachers and artists to move our own partnerships forward and the Outcomes-the cognitive, social and personal development implications of our work as seen through the research efforts of Dr. Rob Horowitz.

We hope that what we have to say about partnership-and what we all have to say to one another-will have implications in your work, your classrooms and your partnerships. Most of all, we hope it will have positive implications for the children you work with. That is after all, what this work is ultimately all about-creating opportunities for children to learn in and through the arts that will make them more successful in school and more successful in life.

Return to the main symposium page here