THE
BUS
INE
SS I
SSU
E
Let’s Talk
CREATIVE BUSINESS
with Joyful Simpson!
USING THE ARTS TO HEAL CRISIS IN THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM HOMAGE TO A FRIEND: The Teaching Artists Journal
Exclusive Interviews with:
JEFF RAZ & WILLIAM HALL How Much Should a Teaching Artist be Paid? THE TEACHING ARTIST AS ENTREPRENEUR #3
The Business Issue December 2015
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
Teaching Artists Guild Staff: Executive Director: Jean Johnstone Membership Director: Kenny Allen Teaching Artist Hangouts Producer: Director: Lynn Johnson Membership Operations Manager: Beth Walker-Graham
National Advisory Board: Glenna Avila (Los Angeles, CA) Eric Booth (Hudson River Valley, NY) Lindsey Buller Maliekel (New York, NY) Lara Davis (Seattle, WA) Kai Fierle-Hedrick (New York, NY) Jon Hinojosa (San Antonio, TX) Lynn Johnson (San Francisco Bay Area, CA) Nas Khan (Toronto, Canada) Tina LaPadula (Seattle, WA) Miko Lee (San Francisco Bay Area, CA) Ami Molinelli (San Francisco Bay Area, CA) Betsy Mullins (Miami, FL) Louise Music (San Francisco Bay Area, CA) Nick Rabkin (Chicago, IL) Amy Rasmussen (Chicago, IL) Nicole Ripley (Chicago, IL) Sandy Seufert (Los Angeles, CA) Yael Silk, Ed.M. (Pittsburgh, PA) Jean E. Taylor (New York, NY)
THANKS Teaching Artists Guild would not be possible without funding from these generous organizations:
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Teaching Artists Guild is also made possible through the generous support of our members.
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
THE BUSINESS ISSUE
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Dear Teaching Artists and Allies,
You are a busy crew! Roaming hither and thither, practicing and performing your art form, giving lessons, teaching and mentoring, and holding down the many other aspects of life, being a teaching artist can be zanily busy. Being a freelancer, holding multiple part time jobs, gigs, balancing the books, and all the while looking out for new opportunities? Whew. With all that in mind, this Quarter we focused on...the busy-ness world (otherwise known as the “business world”!). For us that meant both the business of being a teaching artist, and the work being done by artists with members of the business community (What makes one part of the business community? Why are artists automatically assumed to be outside of it?). We’ll look at interviews with some high-powered performing artists who have taken executive training to a whole new level, a University program introducing the Arts to its Business School, and take a really exciting look at a new project on teaching artists pay rates across the US! With a little creativity and ingenuity (we have that in spades, don’t we?), there are many places for teaching artists to ‘do their thing’ outside the K-12 (the subject of focus for Issue 02), and to get paid well for it. We hope to illuminate each quarter some aspect of the work being done by teaching artists and provide you with a full range and understanding of the opportunities available for the artists in our world: teaching their craft or teaching through their craft, and working in communities of all kinds. This issue we also touch on health, and take a quick look at some of the projects for the field introduced at the National Guild for Community Arts Education conference this past November in Philadelphia. We are really excited to be part of the amazing work from artists and educators across the country who are furthering the impact of teaching artists. We here at TAG hope that whatever keeps you busy is interesting, life enhancing, and well-remunerated! Happy holidays and much prosperity to you in 2016!
Jean Johnstone Executive Director Teaching Artists Guild
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CONTENTS FEATURE STORY The Teaching Artist As Entrepreneur
by Lynn Johnson Lynn Johnson has been our resident expert on combining Teaching Artistry with business for a while here at TAG. We love her writing. It digs into the deep, sometimes spritual reasons we do this work. In this issue she takes us on a deep dive into the skills necessary to be a successful teaching artist entrepreneur. Page 8.
ON THE COVER Cover photo: Joyful Simpson is an actress, writer and creativity educator who combines improv theater, storytelling and mindfulness-training to create unique team building and leadership workshops for businesses and institutions. Inside, she writes about the creative ways in which the arts and business schools can support one another. Page 4
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REPORT BACK FROM #CONF4CAE The National Guild for Community Arts Education recently hosted their annual conference. There was a pre-conference entirely dedicated to teaching artistry! Read more on page 6.
THE TEACHING ARTIST AS ENTREPRENEUR
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Our feature article for issue 03. In this article, Lynn Johnson leads us through the skills of the Teaching Artist Entrepreneur and gives us some inspiration for the road ahead. Page 8.
HOMAGE TO A FRIEND The shuttering of the Teaching Artists Journal (TAJ) is a terrible loss for the field. On page 14 some words from TAJ founder Eric Booth and editor-in-chief Nick Jaffe.
TEACHING ARTIST PAY RATES Here we explore the issue of compensation and what sustainable pay looks like in this field, and how to achieve it. Page 20.
TEACHING ARTISTS + BUSINESS SCHOOLS
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Joyful Simpson, of UC Davis, takes us on a whilrwind spin through the incredible partnerships that can be made between teaching artists and business schools. Page 32.
HOW THE ARTS CAN HEAL COMPLEX TRAUMA Part 1 of a 3 part series, our friend Lisa Golda takes some time to explore the ways in which teaching artists can use the arts as a tool for healing complex trauma. Page 26.
Featured Teaching Artist INTERVIEWs In this issue we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing teaching artists Jeff Raz (page 30) and William Hall (page 38).
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CRISIS IN CPSD Chicago public schools are facing some pretty dire circumstances. Our advisory comittee member Nick Rabkin breaks it down. Page 25.
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TEACHING ARTISTRY IS ABOUT
IMPACT!
This November we joined colleagues in Philadelphia for the National Guild For Community Arts Education’s annual conference. Teaching Artists Guild worked with a team to plan a pre-conference day devoted to increasing the impact of teaching artists, and together with some incredible colleagues, we introduced several new projects to the field. This conference was the National Guild’s best attended ever, and there was robust participation from all in attendance. The pre-conference was not training or PD, but a chance to delve deep into particular issues with a group, and begin to build out a tool or resource, be it webpage, research or white paper, video or some other new product to help move the teaching artist field forward together. These projects will be worked on over the course of 2016, and if you would like to be involved, you can! Contact one of the project leads and get your name on the list! Join in! Listed here are the projects and their instigators, with emails so you can reach out and get involved. You can also read this great description by Maureen Sweeney, published on the National Guild’s web page describing some of our adventures! In this issue you’ll also get a deeper dive on one of the projects in particular, lead by TAG National Advisory Committee members Kai Fierle-Hendrick of Free Arts NYC and Lindsey Buller Maliekel of The New 42nd St. on the issue of compensation and what sustainable pay looks like in this field, and how to achieve it. And in the next issue of the Quarterly we’ll update you on some of the other projects progress and get a closer look at the process. Enjoy! Page 6
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
Funding the Teaching Artist Field: Past, Present and Future
Sharing Innovations in Teaching Artistry
Maureen Sweeney, project instigator
Travis Loughlin, project instigator
GET INVOLVED
GET INVOLVED
Create a Video Library of TA Tips
Social Justice in Arts Teaching and TA Practice
Beth Brandt, project instigator
Tina LaPadula and Robyne Walker Murphy, project instigators
GET INVOLVED
The Teaching Artist Philosophy Project Jean Taylor and Jean Johnstone, project instigators
GET INVOLVED
National Field of Teaching Artists in Creative Aging Maura O’Malley, project instigator
GET INVOLVED
GET INVOLVED
$
Teaching Artist Compensation: Opening the Secrets, Transparently Lindsey Buller Maliekel and Kai Fierle-Hedrick, project instigators
GET INVOLVED Inspiration, Aspiration, and Innovation Among Teaching Artists: Collaboratively Imagining the Future Courtney Boddie and Glenna Avila, project instigators
GET INVOLVED Page 7
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
THE TEACHING ARTIST
AS ENTREPRENEUR by Lynn Johnson
There is much discussion in our field about how and when to employ teaching artists. Should organizations find ways to bring teaching artists on as full-time W2 employees? Or, should teaching artists remain 1099 independent contractors? These questions speak to the need for stability – not just for the individual teaching artist but for the field at large. How can we sustain a field in which its professionals are constantly struggling to make ends meet?
“I’ve been engaged in this scary, risky, lonely work for over a decade now and I would not trade it for anything.”
I am all for organizations working to figure out how to employ teaching artists full time. As an employer, I think about this often myself. At the same time, I believe that self-employment is a strength of the teaching artist profession because it allows us to creatively blend all of the various parts of ourselves into a powerful, make-your-own career. I believe that, for those teaching artists who are comfortable being their own boss, embracing entrepreneurship is an excellent pathway towards longevity in the work. Yes, being an entrepreneur is scary and risky and often lonely. But, in my career as a teaching artist turned entrepreneur, I have found that I have been able to live my life on my own terms and build something that I am extremely proud of. I’ve been engaged in this scary, risky, lonely work for over a decade now and I would not trade it for anything.
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My Story My business is called Glitter & Razz Productions. We produce Go Girls! Camp, a summer camp based in the San Francisco Bay Area where girls create and perform their own plays, make art, music, and media that promote social/emotional learning.
In 2003, at the ripe old age of 30, after already spending 12 years teaching drama at summer camps all over the country, I was just self-important enough (in a good way) to believe that I could create a camp of my own. I had always wanted to own a business…to be the boss. But, I wanted my business to reflect my values, talents, and interests as a community-based theater artist. My work devising original theater with folks of all ages had taught me that, when people get the chance to be in a play that they helped to make up, they learn and practice essential life skills such as
communication, empathy, and risk-taking. They grow more confident in themselves and hopeful for their future. These are such richly valuable skills that I bet that there would be people who would pay to have an experience like I could provide. The budding entrepreneur in me set out to figure out how to make that happen.
So, with my then-girlfriend/ now-wife, Allison Kenny, whom I had met (not surprisingly) teaching drama at a summer camp, we connected with Emily Klion who, at that time, was directing the Marsh Youth Theater and was looking for someone who could lead a camp for young children. We told her, “We can do it!” and we wound up spending four years producing “Glitter & Razz Camp” in her space in San Francisco. It was such an amazing opportunity to have our new project incubated within the context of an existing entity (a pathway that I highly recommend). In our time with
Emily, we were introduced to all the foundational elements of running a summer camp like how to process registrations, hiring and managing staff, and how to deal with parents. For this experience, Allison and I will be forever grateful. Eventually it was time to take the plunge and form Glitter & Razz into its own business entity. We moved across the Bay, set up shop in Oakland, CA, and set out on the task of teaching ourselves how to run a business. We moved our operations into a 2200 square foot church basement and experimented with all sorts of programs from afterschool classes to toddler/parent groups to birthday parties. We read lots of business books, inspirational books, self-help books. We took classes and attended seminars and asked lots of people for help. We made many mistakes. We had a bunch of successes. We borrowed and begged to keep ourselves a float. We worked outside jobs and took on extra consulting work. We considered quitting a million times. Then, in 2008, 17 girls - and only girls – signed up for our summer camp. Since we had already structured our camps around devising original plays based on social/emotional themes, we decided that the theme that year would be “the magic and power of being a
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girl.” We called it Go Girls! and it was a huge hit. We asked the girls if they would return again the following summer if we did Go Girls!, this time, on purpose. They squealed a resounding “Yes!” In 2012, we made the choice to “prune the roses,” as we called it. We left the church basement and discontinued all of our other programming to focus on our new mission of “igniting a compassion revolution by putting girls center stage.” Today, our business employs me, my wife, and our Program Director full-time. We have three other year-round part-time employees and employ over 30 teaching artists during the summers. In 2016, over 600 Go Girls! will participate in our camps in Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Alameda, and Palo Alto and our revenues will exceed half a million dollars. And, in addition to our Bay Area summer camps, we are launching a series of online courses for parents and professionals and will premiere our first franchise in Sonoma/Napa.
The Skills of the Teaching Artist Entrepreneur As a teaching artist, you have already been thrust into the position of self-employed worker. You are out there on your own, fighting the good fight. You are balancing your art-making and your teaching. You are working in a variety of settings. You are figuring out how all of it fits together in one cohesive, satisfying, and fruitful life. In addition to being strong in your artistic discipline and knowing how to teach and move groups
of people, your career also depends on you needing to have what I call “The 4 Essential Skills of Self-Employment.” Being a successful self-employed worker means that you can: I know that many of us are intimidated by what it takes it be effective in self-employment. As artists, we may feel like we’re not good with money or we are uncomfortable promoting ourselves. All of these fears and mental blocks make total sense. Society has been pretty cruel to artists. It tells us that we are ineffective dreamers. It tells us that we can’t make a living doing what we love. But, there is good news. First, we don’t have to believe these messages. And second, we don’t have to run our businesses the same way everyone else does. Just because some guy with an MBA tells you there is one way to promote your work or one way to manage your money doesn’t mean that you have to believe him. As teaching artists, we know that there are always multiple paths to solving a problem. Your job as a self-employed worker is to figure out the paths that work best for you and are most effective in your business.
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“YOUR TIME IS LIMITED, SO DON’T WASTE IT LIVING SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE. DON’T BE TRAPPED BY DOGMA – WHICH IS LIVING WITH THE RESULTS OF OTHER PEOPLE’S THINKING. DON’T LET THE NOISE OF OTHER’S OPINIONS DROWN OUT YOUR OWN INNER VOICE. AND MOST IMPORTANT, HAVE THE COURAGE TO FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND INTUITION. THEY SOMEHOW ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOU TRULY WANT TO BECOME. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SECONDARY.” - STEVE JOBS But, embracing your inner entrepreneur is about more that just rocking the “The 4 Essential Skills of Self-Employment.” It is about daring to do the impossible and create something that no one else can see but you. This is a mighty big job. But, who better to take this job on than teaching artists? We are intimately familiar with creativity, innovation, and motivating others to do their best work. At our best, we are hopeful and compassionate, reflective and flexible, courageous and confident. At our best, we want to change the world. That desire, is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Page 11
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Here’s what the world needs…and you can provide it We live in a society that is often disconnected and disengaged. We long to re-connect to each other and ourselves in meaningful ways. We seek all kinds of products and experiences to help us feel human again. As teaching artists, we are in the business of leading folks through the creative processes; helping them make stuff in ways that also helps them grow and question and reflect and change and wonder and dare and connect. These are just the kinds of experiences that people want. These are the kinds of experiences that change people’s lives for good. Your work has incredible value. I am almost certain that you are sitting on a whole mountain of talents that you can turn into a business. From where I see it, here are the top 10 businesses that teaching artists would lead best – all of which have been proven to be quite lucrative: Certainly, there are as many more ideas as there are teaching artists. This list is just to get you started. The important thing is to get started.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Summer Camps (I am, of course, quite partial to this one) Birthday Parties for kids Teaching improvisation to professionals Music/movement classes for babies and their parents Creating instructional and/or promotional videos for businesses Leading creative/spiritual retreats Creating a dance/fitness system that becomes the next Zumba Running maker/co-working spaces Doing personalized mural painting for kids rooms Event/portrait photography specializing in kids and families
You can do this!
“You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.” -Beverly Sills Due to the fact that you have read this far, my assumption is that you are either already an entrepreneur or you have dreams of becoming one. If that is the case, I am here to encourage you to keep going. Entrepreneurship is all about trying stuff, failing at that stuff, and trying more stuff – over and over again – until something works. And, if you truly believe in what you are building, something will work. Believe me. As you head out or continue on your path, here are 5 things to remember: 1. Keep your vision big and your steps small. You have big ideas. Your job as an entrepreneur is to bring these big ideas to life. The key is understanding that growing your business is a marathon, not a sprint. Creating something new that has value takes time and that’s okay. I used to feel frustrated with myself that I wasn’t rich and famous yet. I wasn’t growing as fast as I thought I should be growing. Then, I realized that Page 12
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there is absolutely nothing wrong with slow growth. It’s better for me to love what I am doing, to live a happy and balanced life, and to allow plenty of space for my business to grow into what it’s meant to become. 2. You don’t have to be “good at business” to be an entrepreneur. Seriously. Owning and operating a business is really not as complex as it seems. Sure, there are a bunch of terms you may not have heard…but you can Google those. There are a lot of rules and regulations related to how money flows in and out of businesses…but that’s what lawyers and accountants are for. And every marketing professional has millions of stories of “best practice” in how to get what you’re selling in front of the people whom you want to buy it. And, although many of these ideas are smart and helpful, all of these folks are really just figuring it out as they go, just like you. At its essence, having a business just comes down to making something awesome and finding enough people to buy that thing. You can do that, right? 3. Failure is both inevitable and completely impossible. Everything about entrepreneurship is risky. Absolutely nothing is certain. Every day you will make mistakes, big and small. Some of these mistakes will even lead to big hairy failures. The only choice is to fully embrace the failure. You do this by saying yes to it, welcoming it into your life, and seeing each failure as an opportunity to learn something new and make a different choice. When you can do this, you can practically render failure obsolete. 4. Get over your thing with money. There is no nice way to say this – the “starving artist” doesn’t look good on you. Let go of it. I understand that money has been at the core of really evil dealings throughout history. But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any. Money is the tool you need to bring your vision to life. The world needs your vision. You need money to make it happen. Get over it. 5. Your tribe needs you. Find it. Build it. Lead it. We are all desperate for leaders – for people who have a strong vision of the world they are working to create and who dare to share that vision out loud. When you do this, when you take your place as a leader, people will follow you. Not everyone will follow you, and that’s okay. Don’t worry about the people who don’t share your vision. Focus on your tribe – the people who do share your vision. These are the people who will support you, buy your products/services, and praise your work far and wide. If you have any inclination at all to be an entrepreneur, I urge you to follow it. The more of us there are in business, the better things will be. I truly believe that. You can do this. I will help you. If you want to talk, contact me, and we will find a time to come together, to face the fears, and bring your vision to life. Lynn Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of Glitter & Razz Productions LLC, producers of the highly popular Go Girls! Camp. She proudly serves on the National Advisory Committee for Teaching Artists Guild. Follow her on Twitter @lynnjohnson.
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T
This Fall saw the shuttering of our field’s only academic journal, the Teaching Artists Journal (TAJ). We took a moment to check in with founder Eric Booth and Editor in Chief Nick Jaffe about the history and life of the Journal since its inception 15 years ago. While there is still hope that new funding may be found, in the meantime, a shout out to Teaching Artists Journal and all its contributors and editors. It will be missed.
Some words from Founding Editor, Eric Booth: When I sat down with Lawrence Erlbaum in 2002 to pitch that his publishing company launch a professional, peer-reviewed journal for the field of teaching artistry, he started by telling me that he found my written proposals unconvincing, and that he only met me because he had a special fondness for Juilliard, where I taught. (And it helped that I had owned and run a newsletter business.) I talked for about 20 minutes, making the case so many have tried to make, that even though it is a confusing job to describe, and disorganized and largely invisible as a field, the raw material of an Page 14
active and valuable national network was there. And that a professional journal could be a crucial catalyst to activate the potential of the field, not just the thousands of disconnected individuals employed by hundreds of disconnected programs. At the end of my earnest pitch, supported with plausible but creatively invented statistics about the size and composition of the potential subscriber base, Erlbaum said this: “Not one single thing you have said makes me think there is a market to make this journal succeed. And I am going to do it anyway.”
His gut sense there was something there, something bigger than what appears to a casual or data-driven eye, has been a sense many of us have shared in growing this field. Nick Rabkin gave us our first numbers in his Teaching Artist Research Project, and Nick Jaffe gave us years of evolving issues of the TAJ under his guidance. In those early years at Erlbaum, we presented our field’s first national face. An impressive list of “big names” stepped up as an official Advisory and Editorial Board; leaders in the field stepped up to contribute foundation articles about the state of the field, its history
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and potential future; teaching artists who had never written before took great pains in sharing their craft and best practices. We gathered research studies that shed light on our work, and resources that could help individual TAs keep growing. A year after we launched, Erlbaum asked me to join in him for lunch. He told me he was astonished at what we had created, “unlike anything else he had ever published.” (He certainly mentioned it was already running in the black.) The TAJ kept evolving, in response to what the editors heard from the field. It found a new home when Erlbaum retired, and new features as fresh energy kept infusing its content--just the way teaching artists work with learners. The slightly irrational, gut feeling Larry Erlbaum had--of potential, of significance--that convinced him to invest in teaching artistry, is much the same that keeps the field growing, and will keep the aspirations of the TAJ alive, if not in paper form, in the gut investments of so many to keep the field growing.
Here’s Nick, Editor-in-chief of the Teaching Artist Journal : A lot of fellow teaching artists and arts educators have been asking me why TAJ is no longer—at least in its present form. I should make clear that as is usually the case with journals published by academic publishers, TAJ is owned by our publisher Taylor and Francis. They have expressed interest in finding a new home for the journal, which is to say, new funding. I hope they succeed in this where we have tried and failed. As an editorial team, we’ve always felt that it was a sign of the field’s weaknesses that there was only one journal of this kind, and we’ve always tried to support the creation of more forums like TAJ. We look forward to a time when American arts education has many independent journals in
which more teaching artists can put forward their ideas and work and in which the challenges and opportunities in our work can be freely discussed. Before I talk about the journal’s apparent demise I’d like to talk about its life. It’s been an incredible privilege to have had the chance to collaborate with all my co-editors and with the very many incredible contributors to and supporters of the journal from around the world. Together (and this has always been very much a team effort) we’ve done our best to genuinely represent the full range of practitioners in the field; their varied approaches and philosophies, and backgrounds. We’ve worked hard to seek out and make more visible the work
We look forward to a time when American arts education has many independent journals in which more teaching artists can put forward their ideas and work and in which the challenges and opportunities in our work can be freely discussed.
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of black teaching artists, women teaching artists and all teaching artists who are marginalized or rendered invisible by the very oppressive society and educational system in which most of us work. We’ve been intentional in seeking out international contributors partly because our field is worldwide, and partly because the perspectives of teaching artists from other countries is a
“
for any field to develop, free, open and critical discussion of all questions, especially those deemed most “controversial,” is essential
necessary antidote to the particular pressures that can sometimes deform practice in the U.S.—the extreme racial segregation of public schools and other institutions foremost among those pressures. We’ve worked closely with first-time writers and less experienced teaching artists to bring their often innovative and fresh perspectives to press. We hope that our commitment to making the most innovative work visible, and to give voice not just to one philosophy or approach, but to as many as possible, has also furthered our field, our shared fight for access to quality arts edu-
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cation for all people, and for the expansion of full-time arts programming staffed by professionals working at union wages to all schools. We have always stood for the idea that freelancers and arts specialists must make common cause; that arts specialists are also artists; and that teaching artists must never allow themselves to be used to outsource or undercut fulltime teachers.
We’ve also fought hard to remain editorially independent, and to serve working teaching artists first and foremost. This has not always been easy. Our field is largely privately funded by corporate and philanthropic donors who often know little of the details of our work as artists and teachers and whose priorities are often starkly at odds with the primary role of teaching artists: to teach the techniques and concepts of their media and to thereby empower students to make their own work. Nor has public funding been free of political strings; after all, the shift
in federal funding in the 90’s away from supporting practicing artists and toward arts education was occasioned by a conservative attack on artistic freedom. The journal’s editorial team has also felt these same pressures to promote one philosophy, institution, or organization over another; or to put forward one view at the expense of others. We’ve always felt that for any field to develop, free, open and critical discussion of all questions, especially those deemed most “controversial,” is essential, and I sincerely hope that we’ve lived up to that belief in practice. This brings me to the question of the end of TAJ in its present form. I see two factors that have played the decisive role in bringing us to the current situation in which we have not been able to secure sufficient funding for our editorial work. The first has to do with trends in publishing and is largely out of the control of arts educators and teaching artists. Academic and professional journal publishers have shifted from a business model that emphasized hard-copy subscriptions for both individuals and libraries, to a model that emphasizes expensive single-article downloads purchased by academic researchers. This is obviously a more profitable approach than mailing hard
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copy journals. Ironically TAJ has been fairly successful in this new model, but unfortunately it does not well serve our field which is made up mainly of freelance teaching artists who often cannot afford to regularly buy such articles, and cannot even afford the very high prices charged for subscriptions. We have continuously struggled to find ways to bridge this gap and have been moderately successful at finding ways to get the publisher to discount subscriptions and to get arts education organizations to subsidize subscriptions for working teaching artists. But the larger trend means that, at least where prestigious academic publishers are concerned, hard copy journals, and even subscription-based online journals, are quickly becoming either an anachronism, or only affordable to institutions. The more important trend that I think has brought about the demise of TAJ has to do with larger trends in American arts education. To put it bluntly, over the past 15 years or so many of the major organizations in our field hitched their ideological wagons to the “education reform movement,” and its faddish emphasis on a utilitarian justification for arts education. To teach and learn to work skillfully and freely in arts media has been deemphasized as a worth-
while educational goal in itself. The idea that students should have a right to quality arts learning as part of a balanced education that affords students full access to all aspects of culture, and the freedom to choose for themselves what to do with that education; this idea has been discarded by many funders and even educators as not viable or even desirable. Instead we’ve seen a rising tide of pseudo-theories about how arts teaching and learning can serve other goals: how the arts can improve everything from test scores to self-esteem; how the arts can somehow magically compensate for horrific racial inequalities in education; how the arts can prepare a workforce that can serve the needs of 21st Century industrialists and managers. Rather than band together to educate, and where necessary struggle with funders, too many of our arts education organizations and institutions have pandered to these trends and embraced their specious arguments and sketchy “data.” Too many of the organizations in our field have traveled too far down the road of chasing funding by echoing the arguments of the “reform movement” instead of advocating for the idea that the real experts in our field, the teaching artists and arts specialists, should design and
evaluate curricula and programming. This has left us with a field that is much more “turfy” than it should be—with organizations competing for funding where they should be presenting a united front of advocacy. It has militated against genuine, open, critical debate about what constitutes quality in arts teaching and what doesn’t. In place of such critical discussion we’ve seen the proliferation of consultants and evaluators who often have little or no specific knowledge of the arts media being taught, and the shaping of curricula that have less to do with quality arts teaching and more to do with satisfying the priorities of funders. Thankfully, the falsely named “education reform movement” is increasingly discredited among educators, artists, parents, and students. Every day it becomes clearer that it is primarily an attempt by big money and politicians of both parties to destroy teachers’ unions as one of the few remaining bulwarks against increased inequality in public education; and to further open public education as a multi-billion dollar market for everything from tech hardware to this week’s magical “teacher-proof” curriculum of choice. The massive charter school industry has been exposed as a breeding ground for fraud, exploitation of teachers, and outrageous inequality that even exceeds
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that of some urban public schools. In this unfortunate climate it is perhaps not surprising that funding for an independent, rigorous, critical journal is not forthcoming. However, I do believe that this will change, and probably sooner than later. Malke Rosenfeld’s brilliant and inspiring curating of TAJALTspace.com has both provided a new model for open, concrete and critical discussion, and a new model for the dissemination of such discussion. Everywhere I go I find teaching artists chomping at the bit to not only share the exciting insights of their work, but also to join forces with educators, parents and students to beat back the attacks on public education and fight for an end to the test-driven, anti-teacher curricula, and for depth, quality, and above all equality in education.
“the fight for genuine equality and integration is the leading edge of a struggle... that can make students more free and more powerful.” As I write this from Saint Paul, MN, seven families
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have recently initiated a suit against the Minneapolis and Saint Paul school districts charging that they have used the ruse of “neighborhood schools” to bring about ever greater racial segregation, and demanding a regional desegregation plan. Teacher unions and parents across the country have been taking similar stands in recent years and “integration” and “busing” are no longer the “dirty words” that false reformers have tried to make them, but battle cries in a renewed fight for equality. It seems clearer than ever that just as race and class segregation has been the real force behind not only cuts to arts education but the wholesale destruction of quality public education; the fight for genuine equality and integration is the leading edge of a struggle that can return depth and quality to the classroom and that can put teachers, arts specialists and teaching artists back in charge of developing the kind of curricula and programs that can make students more free and more powerful. As the climate shifts and the struggle heats up I have no doubt that teaching artists and forward-looking arts educators of all kinds will continue to do their part to fight to make teaching and learning in the arts better, stronger, more inclusive and more interesting and exciting. I have no doubt at all that
new national and international journals will emerge that are better and more innovative than TAJ and that are able to operate independently and freely to empower teaching artists and their students to learn and innovate. I know that many of you, along with all of us at TAJ are ready to help such forums and publications in any way we can.
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Nick Jaffe is a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based musician, recording engineer, teacher and editor. In addition to playing music he currently teaches audio engineering and music to kids in student-run studios and is the Chief Editor of the Teaching Artist Journal, a print and online quarterly published by Routledge.
As an actor, Eric Booth performed in many plays on Broadway, Off-Broadway and around the U.S. As a businessman, he started a small company, Alert Publishing, that in seven years became the largest of its kind in the U.S.. As an author, he has had five books published. He has written dozens of magazine articles, and was the Founding Editor of the quarterly Teaching Artist Journal. In arts learning, he has been on the faculty of Juilliard (13 years), and has taught at Stanford University, NYU, Tanglewood and Lincoln Center Institute (for 26 years); he has given workshops at over 30 universities, and 60 cultural institutions.
From all of us here at TAG :
THANK YOU,
TEACHING ARTISTS JOURNAL FOR YOUR YEARS OF SERVICE TO OUR FIELD.
YOU WILL BE MISSED. Page 19
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IS IT PAYDAY YET?
by Lindsey Buller Maliekel and Kai Feirle-Hedrick
I want you you to imagine that there is a woman named Aline. She is a teaching artist in visual arts in Los Angeles and has been teaching for about 25 years. She has an MFA from UCLA. She works at schools, community centers, museums, and also teaches private lessons once a week in her studio. She regularly leads professional development for teachers through one of the museums she is affiliated with in the area. She is recently divorced and has two daughters in high school. • How much do you think she makes per year? • How much do you think she SHOULD make per year?
D
Does your opinion change if you know that the estimated cost of annual necessities (housing, food, childcare, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes) for a 1 parent/2 child household in LA is $69,230 (or $5,769/month)? That’s according to the Economic Policy Institute’s 2015 Family Budget Calculator, which measures the annual cost of necessities for a family to live a secure yet modest lifestyle in over 600 locations across the United States. These are the questions we explored at the National Guild of Community Arts Page 20
Education’s pre-conference this past month. The answers about how much we (a mix of teaching artists, administrators and university professionals) thought she SHOULD make varied wildly, from $50,000 to $100,000. Pay rates for teaching artists are often a closely guarded secret. Teaching artists will trade that information in the coffee shop as they try to decide whether to apply for a job. Administrators will trade their pay rates surreptitiously to discover where they are in the pay hierarchy of their region - but there is little information that exists for each region about the pay rates.
Here is what we know from several studies in the last 10 years: 1. Both the Report on the Teaching Artists Research Project: Teaching Artists & the Future of Education (NORC at the University of Chicago) study in 20__ and the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation study in 2014 for the Philadelphia region put the average around $40 per teaching hour. 2. The average teaching artist works less than 10 hours per week as a TA and makes $9,800 per year from this work (and $36,000 per year overall). (NORC) 3. 62% of Teaching
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Artists are not paid for their planning time. (NORC) 4. 87% of teaching artists have bachelors and 49% have master’s degrees. (NORC) 5. The average age of teaching artists is 45, and they have been a teaching artists for 12 years. (NORC) 6. 76% of teaching artists do not have children. (NORC) 7. 51% of teaching artists have no retirement plan. (NORC) These are not numbers that inspire me. As we grow as a field, it is challenging to guide someone to consider a career as a teaching artist if all we can promise them is that they can afford to stay in the field as long as... They enjoy living with roommates; They don’t have children; They marry someone who can help support them; and/
or They don’t mind being financially shaky. Being a teaching artist offers so many benefits, but it doesn’t actually offer health benefits (let alone dental or vision). Being a teaching artist offers huge rewards, but those rewards are not often financially robust. We are a field that is so tied to arts access/equity, and social justice, yet we seem to widely accept pay rates that put some of our teaching artists at risk of living in poverty. In our pre-conference working group we heard a lot of half-jokes about needing to marry a doctor, lawyer — basically anyone with higher earning potential than a Teaching Artist — in order to stay in the field long term. If we accept that anecdotal baseline, that it’s only really
62 87 49 76 51
% of teaching artists who are not paid for planning time % of teaching artists with bachelor’s degrees % of teaching artists who have master’s degrees % of teaching artists who do not have children % of teaching artists without a retirement plan
possible to sustain a longterm career as a Teaching Artist with significant outside financial support, what does that say about who we believe the field should even be accessible to? And what are the social justice implications of that? As organizations, so many of us are in a bind because we
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would love to pay our TA’s more, but that often means we would serve fewer of our students. Or maybe we are aware that program administrator salaries are also too low and that we can’t raise everyone’s rates and stay financially solvent. Perhaps we have a deeply embedded sense that people do this work because it is as much of a calling as a career, and therefore teaching artists are willing to work for very little money… all of these might be true and the issue is complex. As a result, the plan of action that came out of our working group at the pre-conference was not to lay blame or heap guilt on our current practice, but instead to switch the conversation to our aspirations for the field:
What is a living wage? Is there advancement in the field? Can someone stay until retirement? Should they be able to? What are the factors that should add to a person’s take home pay? As a first step from the pre-conference, we want to create a Teaching Artist pay calculator that would calculate an aspirational benchmark teaching hour rate based on your region. Teaching artists could use this to negotiate and set their rates, administrators could use this in grant proposals to give context to their TA wages as part of their program costs. We might even be able to convince foundations to create a wage expectation that they ask all grantees to be above in their teaching artist rates. And — as a crucial next step — to actually dedicate funding to helping organizations bring their teaching artist pay rates up to meet the aspirational benchmark.
planning? Prep? materials? Travel? Reflection? Teacher Meetings? Administrative responsibilities?
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The next step we think is necessary is to bring transparency into what expectations accompany a ‘teaching hour’ for organizations. For example, does that rate include: As long as organizations’ hourly rates include different combinations of the above, it will be impossible to compare rates organization-to-organization and get a clear picture of the field and its payscales. Therefore, we’re seeking to create some field-wide recommendations for best practices for structuring pay rates, so that teaching artists, hiring organizations, and funders all have a shared understanding about how much teaching artists are truly getting paid, and for what. I want to recruit people into our field because of their passion and skillsets, and I want to be able to tell them they can stay in the field throughout an entire career, not just until they want to live in an apartment without roommates and save for retirement. And if you want to do more of your own research, here are the studies we looked at during the pre-conference to get you started: 2009-10 Teaching Artists & Their Work (Association of Teaching Artists): http://www.teachingartists. com/Association%20of%20Teaching%20Artists%20Survey%20Results.pdf 2011 A Report on the Teaching Artist Research Project: Teaching Artists & the Future of Education (NORC at the University of Chicago): http://www.norc.org/PDFs/TARP%20Findings/Teaching_Artists_ Research_Project_Final_Report_%209-14-11.pdf 2014 TAG Shared Benefits Research Project Final Report: http://teachingartistsguild.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/07/Teaching-Artist-Shared-Benefits-Project-Final__Sept-30-20141.pdf 2014 PAY RATE SURVEY TOTAL RESULTS: ALL DISCIPLINES (Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation): http:// bartol.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Pay-Rate-Survey-2014-All-Responses.pdf * Also available broken down by discipline.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This article - and the project it outlines - is heavily indebted to the Teaching Artists and Arts Administrators who joined us at the pre-conference to move the work forward. Thank you for your inspiration, thoughtfulness, and commitment to Teaching Artists and we look forward to our continued collaboration! Kai Fierle-Hedrick is the Director of Programs & Community Partnerships at Free Arts NYC, and a poet (http://oriuminprocess.blogspot.com). Prior to joining Free Arts, she worked as a teaching artist/consultant in London, UK – developing and facilitating visual arts, video, and writing programs with organizations including General Public Agency, Arts Council England, the East-Side Educational Trust, and Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a Member of the NYC Arts In Education Roundtable (active on the Teaching Artist Affairs Committee), a Co-Founder and Steering Committee Member of the National Teaching Artist Asset-Mapping Project, and currently serves as the Recording Secretary for University Settlement’s Cornerstone: Campos Plaza Advisory Board. Page 23
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Lindsey Buller Maliekel is the Director of Education / Public Engagement for the New Victory Theater (American for the Arts Education Award recipient, 2008) and oversees all programs and content for family audiences as well as the theater’s youth development programs. She manages a roster of 50 teaching artists, as well as continuing to teach in the schools and family programs throughout the year. Prior to joining the New Victory Theater in 2004, she created and taught curriculums for the Creative Arts Team. As the Associate Director of Summer Theater Institute, she worked with youth from around the world to devise original theater. Lindsey has been a consultant, curriculum writer and Master Teaching Artist for such organizations as Girls Leadership Institute, TheatreWorks: Silicon Valley, and StageWrite. She is also a Thesis Advisor for the first American Masters program in Applied Theatre at City University of New York. In 2014, under her oversight, the New Victory Usher Corps program won the National Arts and Humanities award, given by Michelle Obama for outstanding programs in creative youth development. She received her Masters degree from the Gallatin School at New York University focusing on Theater as a Tool for Communication and Learning.
Nick Rabkin is the managing partner of reMaking Culture, a research and consulting firm for the cultural sector and philanthropy that is focused on revitalizing the arts and culture and reimagining the roles they play in building communities, making our democracy more robust, our lives richer, and leveraging learning. He has studied and advocated for the arts’ and artists’ roles in making our communities, schools, and our democracy stronger for three decades. He has been the executive director of a nonprofit theater, Chicago’s deputy commissioner of Cultural Affairs, the senior program officer for the arts and culture at the MacArthur Foundation, and directed the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College. He was a senior research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago, where he did a major study of teaching artists who work in communities and schools across the country. As deputy commissioner, he was part of the team that developed Chicago’s first cultural plan, and he was a consultant on its second in 2012. reMaking Culture is working now on a cultural plan for the Village of Oak Park, research research on the public benefits of the arts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, a community music project in Chicago’s infamous Back of the Yards neighborhood, and evaluations for two Chicago theater companies. Nick is the author of Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing education in the 21st Century (2005); an NEA monograph, Arts Participation and Arts Education in America: What Declines Mean for Participation (2011); and Teaching Artists and the Future of Education: The Teaching Artist Research Project (2011). He writes about the arts on occasion about the arts for Huffington Post.
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CRISIS IN CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS by Nick Rabkin Way back in 1979, Chicago Public Schools laid off all of the elementary art and music teachers in the district. They were among the first victims of a financial crisis that has never been resolved. Efforts by arts education advocates have succeeded in restorating many of the positions that were lost then, but periodic financial relapses have made those positions and many others deeply insecure. Virtually every year CPS caulks gaps in its budget with budget cuts, layoffs, and creative accounting. Art and music teachers are often among those laid off. Though teaching artists had played a role in Chicago schools long before 1979, their role grew after all those layoffs. Principals who recognized the value of the arts for their students found that one way to keep the arts in their schools was through partnerships with arts organizations, and those partnerships have now become a
part of the operating systems of a large proportion of the 600 plus schools in the district. In fact, Ingenuity, an advocacy organization that has collaborated with CPS to grow arts education in the schools has created a multi-million dollar fund with private contributions that supports partnerships with modest grants. But the financial condition of CPS is bottoming out again. Over the summer the system borrowed over $600 million to cover unfunded pension obligations, closed fifty schools, cut budgets for most of the rest, and provoked a hunger strike by community activists to keep open an African American high school named for the music teacher ran the program that produced Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington back in the day. CPS has demanded that the state cover teacher pensions in Chicago, as it does for all the other districts in
the state, and provide a half billion dollars for operations. But the state has been unable to fund its own pension obligations, and the Democratic legislature will not pass the draconian Republican governor’s budget. 5,000 teacher layoffs are expected soon after New Year’s, leaving about 150,000 students without a teacher. The teachers’ union, which struck in 2012, will certainly strike again. The prospects for arts education and teaching artists, in particular, are worse than uncertain in this volatile and unstable environment. Ingenuity’s good efforts to bring meaningful art education back into the district on an equitable basis, fund scores of partnerships that employ hundreds of artists, and raise money to grow those resources will surely be in jeopardy if private funders don’t have faith that the system will hold up its end of the bargain.
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Lisa Golda is an active teaching artist, working to understand poverty and childhood trauma in the US educational system, and how arts integration can help. This is the first part of three articles sharing her connections and learnings, her surprises, and her advice to others navigating the waters of arts and students who experience poverty or trauma. If you are interested in sharing your written work with us, please submit articles to kennyteachingartistsguild.org.
ARTS HEAL COMPLEX TRAUMA
Missed Connections: Complex Trauma, Adverse Childhood Experiences, Arts Integration, and the “Achievement Gap”
Part I of 3
If you’ve ever taught in an impoverished urban school district and looked down with despair at your disengaged, clearly distressed students, you may have at some point referred to them as “traumatized”. It’s not necessarily hyperbole. And a few people are starting to figure this out, though not yet enough to make a difference for the one in four US children who come to school potentially traumatized by their poverty in ways that stunt appropriate neuro-sequential, and hence, academic and social, development. Even fewer educators, if any, have made the connection that arts integration, a proven tool in “closing the achievement gap”, may actually be so effective because it remedies what is actually a brain development gap. But it’s difficult for the arts integrators, the neurologists, Page 26
and the teachers to combine resources and research to change educational policies for the better when administrative decision-makers refuse to put the blame for the gap where it belongs: not on teachers and testing, but on poverty and the associated Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACES, that cause complex and lasting trauma to the brain. It’s even more difficult to make these connections when teachers and teaching artists are intuitive but uninformed about the neurological challenges they are actually facing in the classroom. This article, the first in a series, will introduce teaching artists and their classroom colleagues to Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACES (poverty being one), first defined in a 1990s study by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, and the associated health issues. I will also discuss complex trauma, a neurological and
by Lisa Golda © 9/21/2015
developmental arrest that results from ACEs, but which is still an emerging awareness in the general educational profession. I encourage all arts educators reading this article to consider whether our work, especially arts integration, might be so effective, indeed literally healing (to be addressed in a future article) because the arts require activity in the very areas of the brain impacted by adverse childhood experiences. I also encourage any reader to note that food scarcity alone has been known for decades to lead to compromised brain development. Finally, I would remind readers that poverty and associated circumstances can and do impact children of every race. Although certain groups have and continue to be disproportionately impacted by poverty, adverse childhood experiences and the resulting complex trauma, especially in our current socio-economic climate, are a growing threat to every child.
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Complex Trauma in California On August 20, 2015, Attorney Mark Rosenbaum of Los Angeles filed a lawsuit in US Federal Court on behalf of five Compton Unified students and three teachers alleging that the students’ educational environment failed to meet their needs as students who suffer learning disabilities caused by “complex trauma”. According to an article by Stephen Ceasar of the LA Times, Compton Unified school district attorney David Huff stated that the students, while recognized by school staff as traumatized, have not provided evidence that their traumas caused learning disabilities requiring special treatment. Huff also added that the lawsuit could lead to wholesale classification of all (impoverished) Compton students as disabled. He’s right. And it should. And that’s the Pandora’s box of “children’s ‘demons’ ” our government and our society is terrified of opening.
Adverse Childhood Experiences At least one in every five US students is defined as impoverished, qualifying for free lunch and other food assis-
tance. As those of us who teach in poor neighborhoods know anecdotally, many of those students also endure inescapable neighborhood violence, absent incarcerated parents, neglect, and verbal, sexual, and/or physical abuse and neglect. Many of our students have also reported experiencing multiple violent deaths of friends and family members. These conditions were defined as “adverse childhood experiences”, or ACEs, in a 1990s study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to that study, and subsequent follow-ups, one or more ACEs experienced in childhood lead to drastically increased incidences of poor long-term health outcomes, including suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, depression, heart and liver disease, and unintended pregnancy. Risk for these and other health issues increased as ACES experienced in childhood multiplied. It should be noted that 74.8% of the original study participants were Caucasian and college-educated. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, pediatrician and founder / CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco, dynamically discusses ACEs and her current efforts to address them through clinical screening and health interventions, in a recent TED talk. Only 125k
viewers have accessed her YouTube video. This should be required viewing for every educational professional in the nation. Yet most teachers I have discussed this issue with have never heard of either ACEs or complex trauma; and even so-called trauma sensitive school districts, such as Compton Unified, may be reluctant to accept the full societal implications of this now decades-old data. As Dr. Burke Harris also discusses, ACEs lead to documented changes in brain function and interrupted neurological development. A severely impoverished child is a severely stressed child, at least by virtue of the poverty and due to the frequently associated ACEs such as absence of parent due to incarceration or neighborhood violence. According to an analyses by Child Trends of a 2011-12 National Children’s Health Survey, “poor children and near-poor children are more than twice as likely as their more affluent peers to have had three or more other adverse experiences. Fourteen percent of children living at the poverty level or below had three or more adverse experiences, compared with 12 percent among children with family incomes between 101 and 200 percent of the poverty level, and six percent among children living at more than twice the poverty level.”
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Most adversely of all: a severely stressed child’s brain may never grow up.
The Fearful Brain The constant “fight or flight” stress associated with poverty, as well as abuse and ambient violence, keeps the brain in primitive brain stem function, preventing the development of the mid-and highest level functions needed for successful social and academic functioning. Physio-neurological effects of adverse childhood experiences can include measurably decreased development of the corpus callosum, a layer of tissue that enables the right and left sides of the brain to communicate and translate experiences into narratives; the limbic system, which assists in mastering complex physical tasks such as playing an instrument; and the pre-frontal cortex, which regulates the highest brain functions associated with socio-emotional learning and 21st century skills such as cooperation, perspective-taking, empathy, collaboration, and creativity. Incidentally, activities in arts integration, as well as arts for their own sake, require engagement of these very areas. This is not intuition, but neuroscience.
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Aside from their academic consequences, these failures in brain development can be characterized in children and adults by difficulties with relationships, goal setting, intimacy, critical thinking, communication, anxiety, sense of self, construction of narrative, and verbal self-expression. This is the complex trauma, also known as complex PTSD, that the Compton high school students mentioned in their lawsuit. “Complex”, because the timing, duration, and inescapable nature of childhood trauma results in pervasive developmental arrest, rather than the comparatively discrete wounding suffered by a functional adult who suffers trauma and subsequent PTSD. Complex also, because of the multitudes of social issues that might be associated with it given the above symptoms; and because of the comparatively slow rate of adult brain development with regard to healing, which requires both a completion of neglected brain growth AND late learning of neurosequential skills that are more naturally acquired in school and family environments. Other issues characteristic of impoverished schools, such as high levels of suspension and harsh discipline, are probably very often reflections of administrators’ un-
informed or underfunded approach to a disproportionate level of traumatized students’ academic and social symptoms. Even Compton Unified, with a so-called “trauma sensitive” staff, refuses to validate their students’ assertion of trauma-related learning disabilities. This, similarly to victim-blaming in rape cases, is secondary trauma that only compounds our students’ issues. How can the risk of suicide NOT be up to twelve times higher in traumatized populations with multiple ACES? Given the abject failure of local, state, and national government and the society that elects them to recognize or address the actual roots of our educational crisis, teachers and teaching artists continue to be tasked with resolving it. And arts integration is a miraculous, yet still-misunderstood, magic bullet. Arts integration in its various guises has become one of the go-to interventions in the disadvantaged classroom. Its benefit in closing the so-called “achievement gap” when applied to impoverished students have been measurably documented. (Here, here, and here.) But the potential connections between arts integration approaches and the brain trauma I theorize they may
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actually be addressing have yet to be made by the general educational establishment, especially given that trauma itself is not necessarily on teachers’, administrators’, or legislators’, much less the general public’s, radar.
their compromised learning abilities. (As if a homeless and repeatedly abused student’s mention of “demons” in his head is not documentation enough.) It is not just their problem. It is a societal problem.
How ironic that arts were cut from schools at just the time that poverty and the associated trauma began to explode exponentially in our society. How ironic that the arts, which inarguably foster abstract thinking, perspective taking, goal-setting, and problem solving, were cut at just the time that the opportunities for economic advancement became connected with the very social-emotional aptitudes and 21st-century skills that trauma-affected brains will fail to acquire. Given new research that demonstrates that the effects of adversity linger in our genes, the cycle of trauma and poverty is virtually doomed to continue without substantial immediate intervention, sentencing the US to obsolescence in the innovation economy and endless generations to needless misery.
But teaching artists and their certified classroom partners have been gazing into that box for years without realizing just what they were looking at, and why their arts integration work helped the “demons” in that box to disappear.
It’s understandable that the lawsuit-averse Compton district didn’t want to acknowledge this Pandora’s box of poverty-linked trauma, much less open it, asserting that their students hadn’t effectively “documented”
Next: Arts Integration and the Brain Additional Information: https://www.newscientist. com/article/mg22429941200-the-lifelong-cost-ofburying-our-traumatic-experiences/ http://www.childtrends. org/?indicators=adverse-experiences http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Excerpt-from-TheBoy-Who-Was-Raised-as-aDog
Lisa Golda has provided arts integration consulting and professional development services to organizations including Ravinia Music Festival, Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Chicago Arts Educators’ Forum. Her teaching artistry expertise was gained in long-term residencies with Chicago Opera Theater and Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, particularly the Portfolio Design Project. Lisa is a former Resident Artist of Portland Opera and an Actors’ Equity Candidate with numerous theatrical and musical performances to her credit. Her Master’s of Vocal Performance is from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Lisa is currently an Arts Integration Coach with The Right Brain Initiative in Portland, OR and continues her independent consulting and teaching artist activities. She is also a digital self-portrait photographer. www. lisagolda.com
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INTERVIEW with TEACHING ARTIST & CLOWN JEFF RAZ What do you do? My work these days is a mix of consulting, teaching, performing, directing and writing. I regularly work with Cal Performances as a teaching artist, most recently going to classrooms in advance of Mummenschanz performances. My next performing role is with California Revels, opening in mid-December, I am writing a book subtitled “A backstage tour of Cirque du Soleil and The Clown Conservatory” loosely based on the year I spend playing the lead in a Cirque show while running my school for professional clowns and I am a communications consultant with two boutique firms that work internationally. In the next couple of years, I will direct shows with the S.F. Arts Education Project and Zaccho Dance. In addition,I am the Artistic Director of the Medical Clown Project, which I co-founded in 2010.
theater with the next generation(s) of artists; to see kids light up when the toilet paper roll in their hands becomes a puppet; to learn.
Why do you do it? To make a living; to create art that engages people, to support communities of people with circus and theater; to hang out with vibrant people; to work within rich, warm ensembles; to challenge myself; to share what I have learned about circus, clowning and
What would you recommend other artists who teach or work in communities to do if they are interested in this kind of work? Study different methodologies - Lincoln Center Institute, Augusto Boal have both given me invaluable tools to create great structures (great structures = constantly great
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How did you begin/what has your path been to this work? By the time I was 15, I was juggling for money at the Renaissance Faire and on the streets of Berkeley. That led to circus classes with Larry Pisoni, work as a clown/ juggler in circuses and more classes in dance, acrobatics, etc. Seeing a S.F. Mime Troupe performance of “The Dragon Lady’s Revenge” inspired me to get acting training, which I did at Dell’Arte International. Would you consider calling yourself a teaching artist, in some part? Yes, I do call myself a teaching artist when I’m working in educational settings teaching art. I also use teaching artist skills in all of my other work.
work and opportunities to improvise and grow). Partner with lots of different teaching artists from different disciplines. Go into every class truly believing that your students are creative, resourceful and whole people (this is from co-active coaching). Last Question: What are you surprised by? What do you love? What scares you? I am surprised by how hard it can be to teach in classroom, how challenging it can be to manage the time, the energy and the focus. I thought I would see multi-modal, experiential teaching become the norm in American education by now -- we are far from it. I am in the Jews Who Love This Pope fan club and am deeply scared by Donald Trump.
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“I use teaching artist skills in all of my other work� Page 31
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CREATIVE BUSINESS by Joyful Simpson
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CREATIVE BUSINESS “The Master of Fine Arts is the new MBA,” claimed author Daniel Pink in his seminal New York Times story about the new creative economy. While this statement is perhaps a wee bit dramatic, its implications are powerful; we are experiencing a paradigm shift and our appreciation for creative thinking is expanding. This is great news for teaching artists who are being called on to share their knowledge! Theater and improv training in particular are finding applications in the business community, evidenced by the rising popularity of improv theater training within top MBA programs; Duke, UCLA, MIT and Stanford all teach improv to their Graduate Management students. This is because improvisers and theater artists happen to possess many of the qualities we look for in good employees and leaders: creativity, resiliency, agility, heightened tolerance for risk, collaborative awareness, and high levels of emotional intelligence. If you told me 5 years ago that I would be consulting in business schools, I may have burst out laughing. Choosing to be a theater maker, as I have done, is almost never seen as a savvy business move! And to put it mildly, my upbringing did not place importance on financial success. My parents were members of “the Diggers,” an iconic radical group of guerrilla theater performers from San Francisco in the 1960’s who sought to create a society free of money and capitalism. In 1967 the Diggers actually held a “happening” titled “The Death of Money,” in which they dressed in animal masks and carried a large coffin full of fake money down Haight street. My parents later went on to start their own radical theater company, where I spent my youth on stage dressed up as various members of the animal kingdom, unwittingly espousing anti capitalist rhetoric. Not the best credentials for teaching in business schools, right? But like many of the best things in life, when you follow your passion, unexpected opportunities present themselves. It turns out that my outside-the-box childhood, coupled with my 20 + years in the theater, are precisely what makes me eligible to be a creativity and communication consultant. While working towards my MFA in Dramatic Art at UC Davis, I stumbled across the application of theater and improv in MBA programs as a tool for career development. As a teaching artist, I have long been interested in the overlap between theater and human potential. At UC Davis I had the opportunity to help build the curriculum for, and teach an introductory acting class that was widely attended by students across disciplines. Because UC Davis is a science-heavy cam-
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I had long been interested in the overlap between theater and human potential.
pus, our classes were chock-full of neuroscientists, biologists, stem cell researchers, physicists and engineers. The students all came with their own particular set of reasons to take an acting class: to get out of their shells, to gain confidence in front of an audience, or because they had always been curious about acting and thought it would be an easy A. Without exception they always left with more than they had bargained for. They would arrive as an awkward group of 25 shifty eyed strangers, and end the quarter as an ebullient bonded family. Working with students of such diverse backgrounds and interests — many of them being international — and seeing them flourish in this atmosphere, I couldn’t help but remember the profound learning byproducts of teaching theater: heightened empathy, self knowledge, interpersonal awareness, ability to work well in teams, how to take constructive criticism, and how to be present. My students transformed before my eyes. I delighted in watching timid foreign exchange students, who could barely speak in more than a whisper at the beginning of class, surprise themselves by jumping into an absurd improv exercise just a few weeks into the course. It was a thrill to watch, as they would become flushed with self-confidence from their own audacity. This is a state that improvisers and performers know well, this moment where fear meets exhilaration and inhibitions drop away in an atmosphere of trust. In this atmosphere you can access the collective intelligence of the room and welcome in the unexpected. This is the essence of creativity. This is what people want access to. This is also, as I would soon find out, what the MBA program wanted.
THIS IS THE ESSENCE OF CREATIVITY
When my graduate cohort was approached by the MBA program, looking for people interested in
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designing an improv/theater training program for their department, my first reaction was “Say what? The business school wants us to what?” Yet it hadn’t escaped my attention that I had essentially been honing the skills to apply theater-based skills to non-actors over the last two years teaching undergrads. So like a good improviser, I said yes, and… began to learn precisely what the business community desired from theater and improv. While there are many buzz words thrown around like soft skills, agility, and innovation, I have tried to distill the learning they desire into two core categories: emotional intelligence and creativity — emotionally intelligence to teach a host of communications skills, and creativity for the generation of new ideas. Since the mid 1990’s the ideal for the modern business man/woman has been shifting. Where we once wanted the rational strategist, we now want the nimble renaissance man/woman, with a keen sense of emotional intelligence. People now want innovators, risk takers and empathic leaders. Author and psychologist, Daniel Goleman put the term “emotional intelligence” on the map in 1995 with his best selling book by the same title. According to Goleman, one’s ability to
People want innovators, risk takers and empathic communicators. navigate the world emotionally, known as one’s Emotional Intelligence, or “EQ,” is starting to be recognized as equally important to one’s IQ. (Side note, in my opinion this general trend coincides with the rise of women in the workplace. Just saying.) Emotional intelligence is now understood to be a core competency for MBA students. Unlike the IQ, which is thought to be static, the EQ is something that we can strengthen. Because no one teaches emotional intelligence in school, people reach adulthood with major learning gaps in this regard. Dramatists have been perfecting techniques to teach these skills for thousands of years, and with minimal adjustments, are able to translate this teaching to myriad cohorts, MBA students being only one. (The medical community is another arena where applied theater is finding a foothold.) Although the MBA students were undoubtedly more sophisticated than my undergraduate students, for many of them this class was still the first chance they had had to jump into a creative environment. An environment that is participatory, vulnerable, egalitarian, playful and naturally generative; an atmosphere where you are expected to show up emotionally and connect in an authentic way, not only with others, but also with your self. And like the undergrads, they were always surprised by the energizing effect of this atmosphere. You can read about creativity and
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
emotional intelligence until you are blue in the face, but until you actually have an opportunity to learn it experientially, it is just a concept. The business community is starting to catch on that theater is an amazing way to facilitate this experiential aspect of professional and personal development. While designing my curriculum for the business school, I was happy to discover an amazing network of people using improv and theater in a similar manner. I had the pleasure of attending the Applied Improv Network (AIN) conference in Montreal in September, which gathered 300 plus facilitators, consultants, teaching artists, scientists, aid workers, therapists, managers, and coaches to share ideas and support each other’s endeavors. I have rarely been amongst such a generous, inspired, and non-competitive cohort of people. Clearly, this is a group of people who are practicing what they preach. Though I do not exclusively use improv in my classes — I also lean heavily on my ensemble theater and acting background — I have begun to adopt the term “applied improv” because it connects me to this rich community of people using theater as a tool to transform individuals and organizations. If I am honest with my self, my hippie ethos causes me to occasionally pause and investigate my motivation for working in the business community. But it seems to me that at it’s best, this relatively new relationship between theater training and business can be a symbiotic one, one which helps infuse empathy into the corporate community and also continues to catapult artistic training into a place of value in our culture. If theater is helping to build more empathic leaders, than I am proud to do that work. I did have a good chuckle with my father the other day as I told him that I would soon be an adjunct professor at an MBA program. You might think he feels that I have defected, or have gone to play for the other team. But the truth is I can hear the pride in his voice. Our generation didn’t get the radical Cultural Revolution they did, (at least not yet,) but we do get the quiet job of reminding people to listen to themselves and each other.
Joyful Simpson is an actress, writer and creativity educator who combines improv theater, storytelling and mindfulness-training to create unique team building and leadership workshops for businesses and institutions. Born into an entertainment family, she has been preforming professionally since childhood. She studied theater and dance at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and received her MFA in Dramatic Art from UC Davis. While a students at UC Davis she helped re-design the curriculum for a very popular undergraduate course, “intro to acting,” which is widely attended by students from across disciplines. In additions she spearheaded an improv theater-training program for the Graduate School of Management. She has trained at Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles, appeared alongside Will Smith in the Pursuit of Happyness, and her collaborative improv cabaret troupe Rococo Risqué was awarded the title of Best Theater Ensemble by the SF Weekly. Visit her website here, or contact her. Page 37
& TEACHING ARTIST
WILLIAM HALL ACTOR, DIRECTOR, Mask-MAker
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing William Hall over the phone. The following article is my stab at a written transcript from our recent phone conversation. I hope you’ll be able to hear his unique voice, and I hope you will find some inspiration in his answers. I did! William Hall is an actor, director, trainer, mask-maker and teaching artist in San Francisco, California. He is the editor of The Playbook, Improv Games for Performers. Hall is one of the founding members of BATS Improv, an improvisational theatre, and the last remaining “OB” (original brother) of Fratelli Bologna. Jean Johnstone Executive Director, TAG
What do you do? My parents asked me 15 years ago, “We don’t know what you do”…it upset me for a long time…. let me tell you about my week, about my month….and at the end of it they still didn’t understand. It was more about, ok, what do we tell our friends that you do? So we came up with a basic one-sentence response but it never really tells the whole story. I work with individuals and organizations to increase engagement. I design and develop training activities. Some of it is more traditional theatrical training, acting skills; and for some, it shows up in other ways. I’m on the teaching team at Stanford at the Graduate School of Business, I work with the London School of Business. I am delivering the training for the thousands of volunteer hosts of the Super Bowl- 1500 people at a time! At the same time I am a performer. I founded BATS Improv which creates magic in the moment with a live audience. The business world has changed dramatically. The idea of a business plan is forever changed. But one thing remains true: if you can’t get up in front of people and inspire action you are going to have a hard time.
Why do you do it? My father was an Episcopal clergyman, my mom a nurse: community, service, big picture; I’ve always been drawn to that. I do believe that everyone has this beautiful place inside that is playful and engaged and resourceful and generous. I think that I am looking for that: the humanity. So I might be in front of a room in China and it may look like leadership skills, but in my mind I am teaching humanity skills.
How did you begin/what was your path to this work? I was bad at English and my father said maybe you would appreciate a drama class. All the other classes were oppressive, but not the theater class. So I went to college for that at Boston U, same class as Geena Davis, moved to California- I wanted FRESH theater. Within months I met Sam Shepard at the Magic and just jumped into the theater scene here (San Francisco). In the early 80’s, so many theaters were here; some of it was really interesting! It was out there! John Page 39
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O’Keefe and John Lyons. Then I went through an uncomfortable divorce and went back to NY to be a “Real Actor”. It ended up I performed Commedia Dell’arte, it was absolutely asinine —I thought, that’s the past! That’s not the future of theater!— But then they came around again and I thought ok, I’ll hang out with these guys and have some fun. That led to a Main Stage performance at the Renn Faire (the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Novato, Ca), then cast as a group in a movie called “The Right Stuff”…and suddenly we had a platform. Newspapers were writing about us. So we started doing a play, companies started asking us to do stuff, traveling around world with Global Business Network (GBN) and Peter Schwartz. They were scenario planners…. how do you plan for the future. At first Fratelli Bologna was a messy fart joke company with physical theater. Then BATS Improv (William Hall was a co-founder), Keith Johnstone theory around improv, status, masks, form and energy- With Fratelli Bologna, we had nothing to say and we said it loudly! Suddenly with the Johnstone work, we had something to say. I was with him in the summer in London, he is good stuff. Then I met Thiagi, the instructional designer. I came to believe I could walk into any class and teach it regardless of the subject matter. I’m now Certified in Thiagi.
Would you call yourself a teaching artist? I think of myself more as finding the path. The path that resonates with me and what resonates with the world. When I made the choice to stay in San Francisco, I looked around for a model of sustainability for a career. Teaching your art was a path. So I began to cultivate that. I once taught Bible school in Barbados. I said, there has been a big mistake, I really don’t know enough about the Bible. That loaves and fishes seems a little suspicious to me. “Ask your class,” says the Bishop, “what it means”. I can do that! Good thing I was fortunate enough to realize a good teacher is not someone who knows anything but is willing to step into that space.
What would you recommend to others who are interested in this work? You have to find your own path. Realize you are building your own path. Art and Fear is an amazing book about getting over it, getting on with it. I am a big fan of - if there is something you want to do, do that. Do it. Don’t say you need the credentials, the website. I think there is a lot to be said for doing it. Find others doing it. Or a mentor. Or others like you who are going through this. And the other advice I give- NEVER WORK FOR FREE. EVER EVER EVER. It doesn’t mean you have to work for money, but never work for free. Send them a bill - put the amount of money you would bill if they were a fat corporate client and write: “fee waived”. That’s for you. That’s for the artist. You are not a starving artist - they need you. They need you.
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“You are not a starving artistthey need you. They need you.” Let me tell you a quick Whoopi Goldberg story, this was before she moved out of town. A big sponsor, Chevron, was in the front row, and Whoopi came out and said, “I want you to know we don’t need your money,”— “but we are happy to have it”, she smiled. We do this because there is something we need to say. We have to get the voice out. We have f---ing shit we have to get done! It’s a wild roller coaster ride. Getting a job does not make a career- choosing the job makes a career. I’ll also share the advice that changed my life: In college, I had a movement class, and my teacher, his mantra as we would be slowly moving on the floor, he would say,
“You are going to have an incredible career. It just might not be the career you are imagining right now. But you are going to have such a great career.”
“WE DO THIS BECAUSE THERE IS SOMETHING WE NEED TO SAY.”
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
THE ARTIST BUSINESS CANVAS by Kristine Maltrud Founder / CEO of ArtSpark
Are you an artist who is adept at the business-side of making, marketing and selling your work? If you’re not, don’t fret… most artists find it challenging to mix art with business. However, most artists are small business people. We create lives that include art-making, different “day jobs” to accommodate creative practice (including teaching art), traveling for gallery shows or performances, marketing events, updating fans via email blasts and social media, continuing education and training, and sometimes even hiring an assistant or staff.
“MOST ARTISTS ARE SMALL BUSINESS PEOPLE”
Learning about and crafting an artistic career or business is increasingly necessary for artists who want to make a living making art. And, with current technology like easy-to-make websites, social media, and fundraising tools, artists have more tools than ever to connect with potential audiences, get the word out about events and even share digital content.
Yet it also can feel burdensome when the time for business starts to compete with precious time and space for creative work. James Judd, monologist and writer writes about this dilemma in a blog post, “All in a Day’s Work; My Day as a Working Artist.” At the end of his workday (12:15AM), James asks himself if it was a good day; “Was it artistically fulfilling? No. It didn’t include any work on my script, or, heaven forbid, rehearsal. Nothing in it made me feel like I’m becoming a better artist.” Because many teaching artists are also practicing artists, managing both within a single business or career can offer benefits yet also be tricky. For example, teaching art can provide a decent source of revenue/income, and teaching art is not too dissimilar from artistic practice. For many artists, teaching art is a welcomed and sought-after “day job.” Teaching can also give energy and creative juice. Yet teaching art also takes a lot of energy and requires preparation. It can be a challenge to reserve enough time and energy to make, market and sell one’s own Page 42
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art. And both endeavors – teaching art and creating art – are different enough that building and attending to the business side of each can be daunting. Becoming friendly with a foundation of business understanding isn’t very difficult and doesn’t require that much time. A lot of the task of understanding business is becoming familiar with business language or jargon and using it to your advantage. Knowing basic business concepts related to business planning helps too. While it’s not necessary that artists become business experts and gain the ability to take on the technical ingredients of a successful business (e.g., accounting and legal), it is essential that your art business or career is under your control and contains your own voice. ArtSpark (www.art-spark.org) offers business development learning opportunities and technical assistance to artists, arts organizations and educational institutions. We serve a wide variety of creators including fine artists, designers, makers/artisans and creative entrepreneurs. We’ve discovered that many artists are eager to explore basic business concepts and business planning, but in a creative way that’s accessible and relevant to them as artists. To meet the need for business basics, ArtSpark created an artist-centric version of the Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in their book, Business Model Generation. The Artist Business Canvas provides an uncomplicated and useful business “blueprint” that artists can use to map out nine essential business strategies including: identifying your audience(s) and what you as an artist offer them; online + offline communications and social media channels; partners, resources and activities; and costs and potential revenue streams. Pictured above is the book Business Model Generation, by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, which the Artist Business Canvas is based-on.
(The Artist Business Canvas is currently offered in a workshop that is hands-on, interactive and creative. Workshops are currently offered in Albuquerque and the San Francisco Bay Area. Please contact us: workshop@art-spark.org for more information and upcoming workshops.) ArtSpark’s CEO/Founder, Kristine Maltrud is a life-long dance and theater artist, director and producer with a passion for the arts and creativity. She is committed to discovering new arts support networks and mechanisms, including the intersection of technology, new business models, impact investing, philanthropy, and arts entrepreneurship. Kristine has been a community facilitator for over 20 years, including extensive work with American Indian/Alaska Native grassroots leaders. The inspiration for ArtSpark came from many years of being successfully funded as an artist in NYC – which often turned out to be gigs that paid pennies per hour. Page 43
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
WAIT A MINUTE...
THERE IS A NATIONAL GUILD Yes!
Hello, pleased to meet you. We are the Teaching Artists Guild.
For those of you who are new... Teaching Artists Guild (TAG), a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, is a member-driven organization committed to the professionalization and visibility of artists who teach. We are the voice of the teaching artist, communicating the depth and breadth of work that teaching artists provide our educational systems and communities. TAG is about and for YOU – the Teaching Artist – both in service and in leadership. We strive to professionalize the field and work towards your sustainment and success, building tools and services for the development of the field and the growth of teaching artists across the US. Join us! Page 44
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
D FOR TEACHING ARTISTS?! SO WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO? TAG is strengthening our field by advocating, honoring, supporting, and convening artists who teach all over the country in schools, community centers, cultural institutions, hospitals, prisons, businesses and beyond.
ADVOCATING
HONORING
Our Teaching Artist’s Asset Map is deepening our collective understanding of the field and promoting the valuable and often underrepresented good work being done by Teaching Artists and teaching artistry advocates.
We believe that Teaching Artists have the combination of skill, passion, and experience to bring about small and large scale social change. We honor the work of Teaching Artists by sharing stories of this good work with the broader community. This quarterly magazine is one of the multiple ways that we honor teaching artists.
SUPPORTING
CONVENING
Our premiere membership program provides Teaching Artists with the benefits and services you need to do your best work in the world. Membership benefits include discounts to dental care, vision, and alternative health practitioners, financial planning tools, free and lowcost professional events, and discounts to publications, local businesses and cultural institutions.
We bring Teaching Artists together (both online and in-person) to connect, learn from each other, and deepen our level of engagement with our professional field. Check out our “Teaching Artists Hangout” on our YouTube channel and look forward to the conversations we will be hosting in cities all over the U.S. in 2016.
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
BECOME A MEMBER OF TEACHING ARTISTS AND RECEIVE DISCOUNTS ON... DENTAL, VISION, & ALTERNATIVE HEALTH CARE, TAX, FINANCIAL, & LEGAL SERVICES LASIK Surgery, Pet Medications, Online Shopping, Identity Theft, Child and Elderly Care, and Concierge services... NEED WE GO ON? Page 46
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 03
S GUILD TODAY!
Members also receive... - Featured placement on the tAG member directory - Placement on the Teaching Artist asset Map - Access to the TAG Job and Events Boards - the TAG Quarterly magazine - Exclusive event invitations - ...and more!
MEMBERSHIP STARTS AT $7/MONTH GET SOCIAL WITH US!
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TEACHING ARTISTS GUILD
www.teachingartistsguild.org