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Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
203 N. Wabash, Suite 1720, Chicago, Illinois 60601-2417
312/870-6140 fax 312/870-6147
RULES FOR ARTS ED RADICALS
CAPE is committed to arts integration and arts education partnerships as valuable and under-utilized strategies for effective school reform. CAPE helps move schools beyond the rhetoric of change into concrete action. By supporting arts organizations and artists in becoming valued external partners and critical friends to schools and school systems, CAPE activates new thinking and new practices that successfully address such intransient educational problems as the achievement gap and the pressing need for professional development that actually improves teaching. As CAPE was first developing its practice, certain rules emerged for creating effective arts education partnerships. We hope that our experience proves useful to you as you identify your own rules for positive change in your own context. Click on any of the following Rules for further elucidation.
THE RULE OF EVERY AGENT AN AGENT OF CHANGE: In a rapidly changing world, all concerned parties need to perceive themselves as agents of change in order to not be overwhelmed by change. THE RULE OF THREE: It takes at least three change agents in any institution to activate a critical mass, a tipping point, for change. THE RULE OF MIXED TABLES or The Value of Generative Tension: Working across institutions and across constituencies can break down rigidity and introduce new genetic material into the idea pool of all the institutions and partners involved in long-term partnerships. THE RULE OF ARTIST AS RESOURCE, NOT RECESS and TEACHER AS COLLEAGUE, NOT AUDIENCE: The teacher and artist must actively partner with each other, or the value of the partnership for the students and the school is lost. THE RULE OF ALTERNATING CURRENT VS. DIRECT CURRENT, or Whats Wrong with Outreach: Programs dont last that only flow in one direction (from arts organizations that supposedly have culture to schools that supposedly dont). Leadership needs to become an alternating current, oscillating between both sets of organizations, in which one set leads in some areas and the others lead in others, and the collective leadership exists in a middle ground between the partners. THE NO BLACK HOLES RULE: Partners that start out being energy drains usually remain energy drains. Dont go there. THE RULE OF IF NOT NOW, WHEN?: Dont postpone your best work until some imaginary better time in the future. THE RULE OF JOY: Hard work is joyous when hard work is good work. Dont mistake unpleasantness for proof of dedication.
Arnold Aprill, copyright 2005 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This article appears in the Spring 2005 issue of the Teaching Artist Journal. For permission to use or reprint this article, contact the publisher: www.erlbaum.com.
For more information on arts education partnership development, see Learning Partnerships: Improving Learning in Schools with Arts Partners in the Community.
THE RULE OF EVERY AGENT AN AGENT OF CHANGE
In a rapidly changing world, all concerned parties need to perceive themselves as agents of change in order to not be overwhelmed by change. To do otherwise is to be caught in the crossfire of the social debris thrown about by large, convulsive shifts in the culture. Policy development in large public education systems and large arts institutions tends to warp and buckle as decision-making is squeezed between the pressure for immediate results and the significant inertia of large bureaucracies. In times of upheaval, the on-the-ground practitioner is typically subjected to fragmented, contradictory, and outdated top-down edicts, often working in difficult and even demeaning environments. The only way out of passive victim-hood is to become dilemma managers* by reclaiming judgment and responsibility in collaboration with colleagues, by remembering the beauty and the power of the students we are serving, by perceiving and even laughing about the absurdity of the unnecessary obstacles to their growth (and our own growth), and by inviting our supervisors to become shared problem solvers rather than managers.
Committing to becoming a change agent requires sharing leadership with other practitioners and contributing knowledge to the field, rather than just seeking perks for your school, your organization, or your self. Gail Burnaford, quoting from the artist Chuck Close, calls this developing a sense of all-over-ness looking at the big picture, not just your corner of the canvas. Teachers start out teaching because they want to teach, not because they want to comply with edicts. Artists start out making art because they are compelled by beauty, not because they long to compete in a market. Assuming the responsibilities of change agency reignites intention, hope, and vision. It returns us to a world in which teaching and making art are once again experienced as purposeful and satisfying work. * The concept of teachers as intentional change agents and dilemma managers was introduced to CAPE by Dr. Steve Tozer, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, quoting the article Preparing Teachers as Agents of Change G.A. Griffith (Ed.), The education of teachers (98th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I pp. 29 62) University of Chicago Press 1999. (back to top)
THE RULE OF THREE
It takes at least three change agents in any institution to activate a critical mass, a tipping point, for change. In the ecology of an institution:
One change agent is a mutation. (One point is a point of contention.)
Two change agents are a conspiracy. (Two points draw a divisive line in the sand.)
Three change agents are a team. (Three points define a field of discourse, open to others, with many entry points.)
Having at least three on-the-ground change agents plus a change agent supervisor (such as three engaged teachers and an activist school principal) forms a tetrahedron- a three dimensional pyramid- and a very stable structure for withstanding the pressures of change.
Change agents are can be daunted by the sheer magnitude of their task (fostering flexibility among the cryogenically frozen**, the monolithically intransient, and the morbidly inert). But you dont need to convince everybody in order to initiate meaningful change. Our experience has been that three is enough to get the ball rolling, even in large institutions such as universities, in which the lines dividing colleges and departments can make cross-sector collaboration extremely difficult. There are unexpected allies everywhere. Look for them.
The civil rights organizer, historian, and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon, of the ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, gave a talk in the 90s in Chicago about organizing Black voter registration in the Jim Crow South. One of the many wise and fierce points she made was that the focus had not been on getting a majority to demand justice, but rather, on getting enough people putting their lives on the line to keep the flame of freedom burning.
She also articulated the need for persistence. Her team didnt have a Rule of Three they had a Rule of Ten. Every organizer was expected to keep approaching each potential voter until he or she had said No ten times or until the potential voter had stuck a shotgun in the organizers face.
The three people in the Rule of Three are only the beginning the seed crystal of an expanding constituency for change. Change agents needs to be open, respectful, and inclusive of others- and need to document their successes in ways that are meaningful to themselves and their skeptical colleagues. If change agents are disrespectful or patronizing to their colleagues, they end up being divisive rather than progressive. For example, one of our schools started calling the CAPE teachers the art Nazis. If we arent both respectful and strategic, we can end up back behind square one. But if we tell the story of what went right in a clear and compelling manner, and are frank about what went wrong, we can kindle interest in coworkers who imagine that they have no options. People who perceive no options behave poorly. They literally cannot see what were talking about unless we give them something to look at. And we must remember, as education writer Robert Evans has pointed out, that No is the first thing skeptics say to give themselves space to consider what Yes means.
The Rule of Three requires letting go of the romantic notion of the isolated rebel educator and the brave but alienated artist. The Rule of Three requires renouncing self-sacrificing loose-cannon lone-gunmen of every stripe. And this is because martyrs are not, by and large, real change agents. ** The phrase cryogenically frozen, in the context of school reform, is a quote from Robert Evans, the author of The Human Side of School Change: Reform, Resistance, and the Real-Life Problems of Innovation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000. (back to top)
THE RULE OF MIXED TABLES or The Value of Generative Tension
Working across institutions and across constituencies can break down rigidity and introduce new genetic material into the idea pool of all the institutions and partners involved in long-term partnerships. CAPE calls this practice Mixed Tables.
The Rule of Three is useful for initiating bottom up change, but institutions and bureaucracies often seem to be genetically constituted to resist, stall, assimilate, and neutralize change as if they were organized to prevent their stated functions. For example, Jung looked at organized religion with a jaundiced eye, and perceived its purpose to be the prevention of religious experience. It is not that bureaucracies are not valuable they are necessary for the broad implementation of policies, and for the scaling up of meaningful practices. CAPE, for instance, does not believe that home schooling is the answer to school reform. But bureaucracies are peculiarly resistant to change, and require the variety of lateral interventions made possible by Mixed Tables.
Bringing together educators, artists, parents, students, and administrators, bringing together pre-service teachers and classroom teachers, bringing together artist interns and veteran artists, and bringing together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners has proven to be a highly effective strategy for the development of CAPEs work at the classroom, school, district, state, national, and international levels.
The concept of Mixed Tables grew out of CAPEs basic design of long term partnerships between teachers and artists (initiated by Mitchell Korn of ArtsVision), and was further developed by a series of discussions with the playwright and author Sterling Houston and by in-depth collaboration with Gail Burnaford, Ph.D., Teacher Education Department Chair at Florida Atlantic University, and one of the primary contributors to CAPEs development. Gail and Sterling pushed us to think about whose talents are truly needed by the culture, whose gifts actually get valued, how we develop distributed leadership, who gets to the sit at the table, and what helps leaders learn from people who are different from them. The approach was strengthened by incorporating the Teacher-Artist-Scholar framework developed by Larry Scripp, Ed.D., Director of the Research Center for Learning Through Music at New England Conservatory. The concept was further reinforced by the Work Circles practice at Northwestern University, in which classroom teachers, university students, and professors developed science curriculum together under the direction of Louis Gomez, Ph.D.
The Mixed Table brings these strategic advantages to partnership development:
Diversity of Thought and Style: Working across constituencies increases the opportunities for bringing together varied working styles, thinking styles, skills, knowledge and vocabularies to find innovative solutions to intractable problems. Teams are not most effective when everyone has shared working and thinking styles, counter-intuitive though this may seem. Variety is not just the spice of life; it is an essential element of effective partnerships. This is cultural diversity in the broadest sense.
Positive Frustration: An unfortunate legacy of the assembly-line manufacturing economy has been the institutionalization of social segregation: teachers talk to teachers, artists talk to artists, baby boomers talk to other boomers, gen x-ers talk to other x-ers, and nobody learns anything new from anybody outside their hermetically sealed little universe. Just as the child psychologist Jean Piaget theorized new cognitive structures developing in the childs mind from encounters with irreconcilable new data, old dog adults and old dog organizations only learn new tricks by encountering thinking outside their system of thought. One of the primary purposes of partnerships is to increase discomfort with business as usual by interfering with the partners assumptions. The grants given to the original formative partnerships in the early days of CAPE can be viewed as payment to partners to tolerate the frustrations of those first CAPE collaborations. No pain, no gain. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us that if we are comfortable with all our partners, our coalitions arent big enough.
Fast Track Professional Development: Mixed Tables stimulate the intersection of theory and practice (what the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called praxis) at an accelerated rate, because everyone in a Mixed Table partnership is simultaneously an expert and a novice in different areas (a concept brought to CAPEs attention by James Pellegrino, Ph.D., from the University of Illinois at Chicago), allowing all participants to teach and learn at the same time (a very efficient use of intellectual resources). Shared problem solving across diverse knowledge bases allows modeling, implementation, and analysis to happen simultaneously. Freshman university students working as guided interns in arts education partnerships can end up with Masters level understandings of applied knowledge.
Diverse Messengers: Mixed Tables not only serve as demilitarized zones for detaching from outdated assumptions and exotic terrains for generating new models, but they also serve as useful structures for transmitting the new ideas generated by transformed partners, because their diverse membership allows them to speak as peers to diverse audiences.
Access to Underutilized Resources: The partners that comprise Mixed Tables are connected to diverse resources. Struggling initiatives need to fully access the underutilized resources hiding in plain sight in their local contexts.
The Mixed Table is not about token representation of constituencies, but rather, about working relationships between constituencies. (back to top)
THE RULE OF ARTIST AS RESOURCE, NOT RECESS and TEACHER AS COLLEAGUE, NOT AUDIENCE
The teacher and artist must actively partner with each other, or the value of the partnership for the students and the school is lost. It doesnt even matter how good the visiting artist is on his or her own. Unless the teacher/artist team models true collaboration, the artists gifts devolve from eliciting higher order thinking into demonstrating technical skills that some kids have and some kids dont.
Larry Scripp reminds us that there are at least three stages in learning to make art: I) initial exposure to the art form and experimentation with the materials of the form, II) the development of technical skills, and III) conceptual and design work.
Arts education advocate Eric Booth, editor of the Teaching Artist Journal, has wondered if the field is overly focused on stage II. Authentic partnerships between teachers and artists move students very quickly from stage I directly to stage III, engaging a high level of conceptual and aesthetic thought from the beginning, and thereby providing strong motivation for developing stage II skills. The vivid conceptual and aesthetic thinking produced by pre-schoolers in Reggio Emilia, Italy demonstrates that such an approach is appropriate for even very young children. Arts integration is an understanding of arts learning as authentic intellectual work:
Authentic intellectual work involves original application of knowledge and skills (rather than just routine use of facts and procedures). It also entails disciplined inquiry into the details of a particular problem, and results in a product or presentation that has meaning beyond success in school. (Newmann, Lopez and Bryk, 6) ***
Authentic intellectual work requires teachers to become increasingly confident of their students abilities to create rigorous original work. The artist is such a valuable and reliable engine for this change because the artist is COMPELLED to create in fact the artist cannot NOT create. Even if conditions are hostile, even if resources are limited. But the artists positive compulsions (to take initiative, to invent, to make discriminating judgments, to revise, and to share) only assume significance in schools when the on-site exemplars of learning (the teachers) embrace those practices themselves, and the students see the artists embrace those risk-taking teachers as thinkers and leaders. We acknowledge the powerful social conditioning that causes teachers to see themselves as not creative, and artists to see themselves as not connected. But while skeptics say that only a very few talented teachers have the ability to partner with artists, and that artists are too self-involved to really listen to teachers, our own experience with real, live teachers and artists contradicts this deficit model of teacher capacity and artist social engagement. The stability and predictability of the artists urge to innovate and of the teachers longing to release their students capacities make teacher/artist collaboration a dependable and practical strategy for school improvement.
Cynthia Weiss, Director of Columbia Colleges Project AIM in the Office of Community Arts Partnerships, and one of the originators of CAPEs methodology, has pointed out that it is actually the friction between the teacher and the artist the struggle to understand each others conceptions of children, of time, of space, of meaningful communication, that sparks growth in both of them, and opens up for students what the performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena calls a free idea zone.
There are obstacles to the partnering of teachers and artists old wounds that distort their collaboration. Most teachers primary experience of the arts was childhood humiliation and shame (you cant draw, you cant dance, you cant sing...), and most artists primary experience of schools was over-control (stop drawing, stop dancing, stop singing...). Reticent children, seeing adults heal old wounds through shared work, are emboldened to push past their own fears of appearing foolish or of losing control. *** Newmann, F.M., Lopez, G. & Bryk, A.S. (1998) The quality of intellectual work in Chicago schools: A baseline report. Chicago, IL: Consortium on Chicago School Research, p.6. (back to top)
THE RULE OF ALTERNATING CURRENT VS. DIRECT CURRENT, or Whats Wrong with Outreach
Programs dont last that only flow in one direction (from arts organizations that supposedly have culture to schools that supposedly dont). Leadership needs to become an alternating current, oscillating between both sets of organizations, in which one set leads in some areas and the others lead in others, and the collective leadership exists in a middle ground between the partners.
How has CAPE worked to overcome these power imbalances? CAPE partnerships are directed by Mixed Table steering committees of educators and artists. Rather than training artists separately from teachers, and asking artists to take the lead in planning collaboration with teachers, CAPE provides professional development to teachers and artists working together in teams to co-create curriculum, instruction, and action research, and to exchange knowledge between teachers and artists throughout the process. Rather than seeing artists as employees and teachers as clients, teachers and artists are both seen as a co-equal constituency. And both are paid to create their collective work.
The outreach model is a scarcity model, in which art assumes its value in direct proportion to its exclusiveness, placing arts organizations in the awkward position of struggling to connect to those it has excluded. This one-directional process tends to exacerbate ethnocentric assumptions about the cultures and capacities of the communities being out-reached. As an alternative, CAPE has developed an in-reach model, in which schools and communities curate their own exhibitions and performances in partnership with professional arts organizations, drawing directly on the resources of the arts organizations, but maintaining their own active leadership in the program design from beginning to end. (back to top)
THE NO BLACK HOLES RULE
Partners that start out being energy drains usually remain energy drains. Dont go there. This is not about avoiding challenging partners. Challenging partners can be highly stimulating. But it is important to detach from partners that monopolize conversations, fail to come through on commitments, convene longs meetings that dont progress to decision-making, and generally deplete the energy of the collaboration, (even if their intentions are good). Take risks, but also have a respectful exit strategy if things dont work out. Dont shop in closed stores. Only ask people to do a job who have the capacity to actually do it. Dont be misled by titles and positions and awards. (back to top)
THE RULE OF IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
Dont postpone your best work until some imaginary better time in the future. Thinking that Ill become the real me in the future belongs to the world of advertising (at the cost of some product), not the world of art or education. Difficult times actually require MORE commitment to core values: if you have limited options, youd better prioritize your most ambitious, not your least ambitious goals. Schools and arts organizations can become addicted to the innumerable obstacles thrust in front of them. When CAPE invites teachers and artists to imagine their ideal working conditions (It is five years from now, you have unlimited resources, all your best dreams have been realized. Now tell us, speaking in the present tense, what exciting things are happening at your school) they tend to be remarkably stingy with their hopes (It would be really nice if we could maybe someday get one more small clarinet for our barely attended after-school music program squeezed into the dilapidated janitors closet). In purely pragmatic terms, it is important to dream big. We have found that once ambitious hopes are articulated, many, if not most of these supposedly wild, blue-sky fantasies of what-could-be are entirely doable. We certainly cant negotiate for what we really want for ourselves and for our students if we never name it.
“If not now, when? (Talmudic scholar Hillel 30 B.C. - 10 A.D.)
Everyone I know has a big but. (Pee-Wees Big Adventure) (back to top)
THE RULE OF JOY
Hard work is joyous when hard work is good work. Dont mistake unpleasantness for proof of seriousness. Celebrate your valued colleagues and let them celebrate you. Dont go to the usual suspects. For example, the Dean of the College of Music might seem like the obvious choice as your university partner, but what about that associate professor that created the digital music project your school found so intriguing? Work with the people that genuinely challenge and stimulate you. They are there, even if they are not obvious. You know who they are. (back to top)
