More Boothstuff--shoot me before I blog again
Sam, those thought-experiments are useful to me. May I add one. What if...we stopped trying to leverage more 40 minute blocks of time for arts education (only the hardest currency to get in schooling), and considered "creativity across the curriculum." I have done some work with classroom and arts teachers at every level to create two to three minute activities that they can do five days a week that isotonically develop basic arts skills like ideational fluency (generating multiple solutions) or metaphor-making, or pattern-recognition, etc. What if those skills and others were distributed throughout all classes, and all activities in school, and arts teachers were the resource leaders for how to introduce such skills in twenty ways throughout every day? My early dabblings in this approach tell me it works, bigtime.
And responses to John's three accurate throws from left field. To #2--in Scotland they have developed an official national cultural rights policy to announce what ALL Scots can expect culturally from their culture (to address the inequitable distribution problem) (this is akin to the work Bill Ivey is doing and published in his latest book--and interesting, John, that Bill is heading Obama's arts/culture transition team), AND Scotland instituted a music education policy that equates all kinds of music. The state schooling does not prejudice violin over electric guitar, and takes responsibility for developing skills in either, determined by the interest of the learner, to the level of expertise the learner wants to go. To John's #3--the advocacy dream I have, that people laugh at, but I am serious, is to have pairs of adequately trained artists knock on every single door in America to talk about the arts in people's lives. To let people know about local resources, free and not, to engage in dialogue about artistry and personal history in the arts, etc--all the stuff you can do one on one. The Wallace research in Dallas found that lack of awareness and transportation were the biggest blocks to greater arts participation for residents. So I imagine a national initiative to get artists and arts-lovers in every community mobilized to knock on doors and listen and share and connect. Yes, it is like Jehovah's Witnesses, but I think it is an answer that can work.
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Our Bloggers
Sam Hope, executive director, The National Office for Arts Accreditation (NOAA);
Jack Lew, Global University Relations Manager for Art Talent at EA;
Laura Zakaras, RAND;
James Cuno, Director, Art Institute of Chicago;
Richard Kessler, Executive Director, Center for Arts Education;
Eric Booth, Actor;
Midori, Violinist;
Bau Graves, Executive director, Old Town School of Folk Music;
Kiff Gallagher, Founder & CEO of the Music National Service Initiative and MusicianCorps
Bennett Reimer, Founder of the Center for the Study of Education and the Musical Experience, author of A Philosophy of Music Education;
Edward Pauly, the director of research and evaluation at The Wallace Foundation;
Moy Eng, Program Director of the Performing Arts Program at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation;
John Rockwell, critic;
Susan Sclafani, Managing Director, Chartwell Education Group;
Jane Remer, Author, Educator, Researcher
Michael Hinojosa, General Superintendent, Dallas Independent School District
Peter Sellars, director
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