Teaching Artists and the Future of Education by Nick Rabkin, Michael Reynolds, Eric Hedberg, and Justin Shelby

"A majority of artists are men nationally, but two-thirds of TAs are women. TAs are more racially diverse than artists nationally. They are also better educated. Half have master’s degrees and two-thirds have degrees in an art form. One in eight has a degree in education, and one in six has been certified to teach by a state board of education. Their average age is 45, and the average TA has 12 years of teaching experience. Most enter the field in their early to mid-30s. A large majority, 70 percent, of the managers of the programs for which TAs work have worked as teaching artists themselves, and 59 percent are still teaching artists."

"TAs teach primarily because they enjoy the work and because it is a way to earn money in their artistic field. Many are motivated to teach in order to contribute to their community and social change. Most believe that teaching makes them better artists."

"The characteristics of good teaching cluster in three categories:

§ Good teaching is student centered. It starts with students’ interests and what they already know, offers them real challenges, choices and responsibilities, and features curriculum that connects, rather than fragmenting, ideas across subject areas.

§ Good teaching is cognitive. Learning is the consequence of thinking and making work that demonstrates mastery of meaningful ideas and compelling problems. Good teaching employs the range of communicative media – including the arts – and makes student reflection a regular part of the learning experience.

§ And good teaching is social. Students learn better together. The classroom is a community, and students are its citizens. Teachers nurture the community and provide intellectual, emotional, and social supports to students. (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000) (Perkins, 2010) (Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde, 2005) (Smith, Lee, & Newman, 2001)"

"We found this approach to teaching, in some respects, is a consequence of dispositions woven into TAs’ identities as artists and the complex of mental processes that are integral to making works of art – vision and planning; imagination; discipline; attention to detail; seeing the whole; pattern making, finding and breaking; reflection, revision and assessment; persistence; judgment; spontaneity and play among them."

"The alienation that is too prevalent in many schools does not end when an artist walks into a classroom. TAs must win students’ commitment quickly to accomplish anything of significance in the brief hours they spend together. Principals and teachers we interviewed confirmed that they are very good at that. “Perhaps it’s because they don’t have all the proscriptions and requirements that teachers have. They get an energy flowing right away,” a teacher told us."

"TAs frequently spoke of finding ways to connect curriculum to the world outside the classroom and to students’ own experiences. They did not, as some might fear, suggest that students’ interests should dictate curriculum, or that the norms of school behavior should be abandoned to develop student voice. TAs indicated that they found that students want to understand their own world, but they also want to broaden it."

"TAs take advantage of their novelty, capture students with appealing tasks and skills, create a “safe space” where students can take risks, and quickly get students started with simple assignments and simple rules, allowing them considerable freedom to make aesthetic choices themselves." 

"Opening assignments are designed to yield reliably good results, build students’ confidence, and whet their appetites. Warm ups, exercises artists themselves use to get their minds in gear and move them into a creative modality, are usually done in groups, connect students with each other, and act as a gateway into the content of the lesson."

 

"We learn best by exploring questions we find compelling, and good curriculum poses compelling questions about big themes, concepts, and problems. These can almost always be explored through multiple lenses, using the disciplinary tools of different subjects to develop understanding."

"Artists reflect on their work. They measure its progress against their vision. They imagine how it will “work” for others. They tinker, tweak, and revise. They make judgments based on intuition and imagination, trial and error, and learn from mistakes. These are sophisticated meta-cognitive functions, and they are assessment practices that are authentic to artistic production. They are one important way artists learn and get better at what they do. That is, of course, what we hope students will do, too – learn and get better at what they do."

"Building critical skills like systems thinking, creative problem solving, collaboration, empathy and innovation. (Institute of Play, 2010)"

"Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently wrote, “Education in the arts is more important than ever. In the global economy, creativity is essential…The best way to foster that creativity is through arts education.” (Italics added.) (President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 2011)"

"Teaching artists lead isolated professional lives. They need communities that support them professionally. Some are emerging in study sites, focused exclusively on TAs. Others are more fluid and include TAs and their partners in education – classroom teachers and arts specialists. We recommend that these networks and associations be developed everywhere."

"Too much training and professional development appears to be aimed at new TAs, and not enough is designed to challenge and advance the development of veterans. Too much training is limited to orienting TAs to the logistical requirements of programs, and not enough to the big ideas and concepts that make the work coherent and powerful." 

"TAs are hungry for professional development that conforms to the qualities of good teaching: centered on the practice and experience of TAs themselves, built on a foundation of big ideas about the arts and learning, filled with hands-on project-based experiences, centered on meaningful questions from the field... and social."

"There is a need for specialized professional development in advanced topics like working with special populations..."

"Some elements of professional development are best provided by programs themselves, of course, but some elements are common to virtually all programs, and communities can (and in some cases already are) provide professional development that cuts across many programs. We recommend such efforts be developed in all communities and that they are nationally networked."




Read the Teaching Artist Research Project Executive Summary here.

The Teaching Artist Research Project was conducted in a dozen communities from Boston to San Diego between 2008 and 2011. More than 3500 artists and program managers completed a survey, and over 200 key informants were interviewed in the various sites. The project was supported by grants from twenty-five funders – private foundations and state arts agencies. The entire report, from which this executive summary has been drawn, is available at the NORC’s website. NORC at the University of Chicago is an independent research organization headquartered in downtown Chicago with additional offices on the University of Chicago's campus and in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, Maryland.