Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Quarterly Magazine Staff:
TAG Executive Director: Jean Johnstone
TAG Membership Director: Kenny Allen
National Advisory Committee:
Glenna Avila (Los Angeles, CA) Eric Booth (Hudson River Valley, NY) Lindsey Buller Maliekel (New York, NY) Lara Davis (Seattle, WA) Kai Fierle-Hedrick (Denver, CO) 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) Louise Music (San Francisco Bay Area, CA) Maura O’Malley (New Rochelle, NY) Nick Rabkin (Santa Cruz, CA) 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)
Teaching Artists Guild is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives.
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Teaching Artists Guild is also made possible through the generous support of our members.
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Teaching Artists & Media Arts - SPRING 2020 -
Dear Teaching Artists, Welcome to a strange land. I spent the first part of the year worried about teaching artist worker protections, and the challenges for small arts organizations who were moving independent contractors to employees. Suddenly, this moved from a somewhat theoretical issue to an ALL CAPS, 96 point font kind of situation. Are you able to access unemployment insurance and other protections? I hope the CARES Act will do enough for artists and gig workers. I really hope it will pave the way for far greater worker protections across the board. As most of us struggle to work from home, or can’t work any longer; as we are furloughed, let go, or our hours are reduced; as we homeschool and care for our own children 24/7, and watch the world change dramatically before our eyes, whew, we are processing this change. For ourselves, and oftentimes for our students. I hope you’re able to slow down, breathe, and not let the expectations overwhelm you. I hope you are able to stay healthy. I hope your perspective finds its way back to you, if it’s taken a small break. I send you all warmth and light and connection. This issue was slated to have a focus on media arts months ago, and it was odd timing that all of a sudden so much of all of our work has gone headfirst into the digital realm to make it accessible to others. You’ll find more resources and good thinking here, as usual, from a slate of terrific teaching artist authors across the United States. We’ll also hear from our new regular columnist, the very only Eric Booth, with some crucial philosophic takes-- good medicine during these intense times. With you all, Jean
Jean Johnstone Executive Director Teaching Artists Guild
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
CONTENTS
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
STEM MUSIC AND THE TEACHING ARTIST Professor & TA Timothy Crist reflects on his experience in the spaces where STEM and the Arts intersect, particularly through the lens of project-based learning... p. 6
A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS For many TAs working in multiple settings, the resources available can differ greatly. So how can TAs bridge the gap to make an equitable experience? p. 10
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BUILDING THE HIVE Stevan Živadinović shares SAY SI's journey of creating a video game design program from square one. p. 12
RESOURCES FOR TAs Getting to Know the Arts for All Abilities Consortium -- Elise May interviews two experts about the consortium and making arts education accessible. p. 22
MEDIA ARTS IN THE CLASSROOM Amy Oestreicher talks harnessing the crossdisciplinary nature of the media arts to empower students. p.28
A FRESH VIEW
Courtney Boddie applies and discusses Daniel Levy's new book, A Teaching Artist's Companion p.32
32 PROBLEMS, PROCESS, PRODUCTS, PERSISTENCE
Nicole Upton's writes about working to ensure every student in Chicago Public Schools has access to the arts. p. 38
COVID-19 RESOURCES FOR TEACHING ARTISTS Where to get reliable information and help in these unprecedented times. p. 46
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THE DEEP END
Adapting, connecting, experimenting and more in the days of COVID-19 to make your TA practice work. p. 48 Page 5
STEM Music and the Teaching Artist By Timothy Crist
For many artists and scholars in the humanities, the concept of STEM education initially seemed to be the latest governmental snake oil to correct a national education system that has been in decline for many years. How could a learning environment without the arts and the pursuit of the understanding of human behavior ever prove valuable? In addition, it was clear that educational models mired in educational standards and benchmarks drifted far from the goals of learning, growth, and the pursuit of competence. What did STEM offer to correct the tragic departure from a learning model to a model that suffered under the influence of corporatism and governmental standards? STEM had a few things going for it. For one, the shift to STEM was an opportunity to create a better model of learning that employed motivators drawn from contemporary culture. In addition, the interruption of the normalcy of the present education system presented those critical of the status quo with an opening to design and innovate. But there was also a key factor that proved to be exciting for all educators, students, and especially artists. That was projectbased learning (PBL). In PBL learning, especially PBL that was student-directed, student focus sprawls into unknown territories creating a learning environment seemingly lacking in borders. In the STEAM school where I teach we call this “Controlled Chaos.” And if you poke your head in the door of a classroom, it resembles a cluttered artist’s studio, filled with the impulses of an almost manic, ever-expanding pursuit of solving a problem. The exploration of a problem or idea in this environment can lead to some very unexpected conclusions and realizations. And to STEM teachers, where students end up in their exploration of a concept never ceases to amaze! It is essential that students exercise their intrinsic motivators and code information in meaningful ways. PBL enables students to discover and involve their own interests and life experiences as integral parts of their learning path. Learning strengthens when we build on existing knowledge, and student-directed PBL has student interests at the center fueling and driving every inquiry. The STEM PBL requirement was a significant step forward for education. When artists surround themselves with scholars fascinated by the elements of STEM, extraordinarily fresh, imaginative, sophisticated, and exciting collaborative results are produced. In the context of STEM, art takes on a progressive personality. By your average arts consumer, STEM art is no longer viewed in a traditional manner, but it is understood as something generated in the context of the latest technological developments of the current generation. Bias as to what the artistic experience can be is largely removed, opening a doorway to student ownership and imaginative artistic results. STEM Expos present an incredible creative portfolio of student art work that is driven by imagination, curiosity, and the goal to improve reality.
"In the context of STEM, art takes on a progressive personality."
Obviously, it would be difficult if not impossible to imagine the arts without STEM. For example, STEM and music composition have countless points of agreement including such diverse issues as acoustic concerns, the occupation of space, or perhaps even the direct influence of helix spirals. The mindset and design process of an engineer is nearly identical to that of an artist. Both the engineer and the artist are optimists that look to seek a new, improved reality. Both work imaginatively, systematically, logically, and collaboratively in an iterative process, considering moral issues and relying on life experience in hope to find solutions to recognized problems. Technology is also so deeply integrated into music production it is hard to imagine a new musical work without the influence of technology. And musical sound has been an expression of math since the time of Pythagoras. Artists may find themselves not only very comfortable teaching in STEM environments but also inspired and supported by a likeminded community.
With that in mind, teaching music in a STEM school can be quite different from teaching music in a typical school. PBL allows for a completely new means of music making to take place. As a composer, I found myself perfectly at home in this environment. From day one, there was little transition and training necessary. Interests in the electronic musical arts, the experience and process of composing numerous works which involved the application of math and science, and encouraging interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary activity from my students all well-prepared me for this experience. But one of the most unexpected and exciting aspects of STEM music teaching was to discover how openminded STEM students are at not only making music in the traditional sense, but also reimagining music in new, novel ways. In fact, because of the PBL environment and the student expectations to imagine, to create, and to build, the students are eager to seek ownership in the music making process. Very often
the students request to compose their own music involving content from other STEM classes. This produces highly imaginative musical results that many times cannot be anticipated. Give a clarinet to a student and they must to a certain degree come into compliance with a great history of music making. Give a computer or a box of recycled materials to a student and music making is immediately liberated from any pre-conceived restraints. In STEM music we no longer view the music experience merely as being an orchestra, a concert band, or a choir. Rather, music creation involves the imaginative use of technology, as well as the more direct application of math, science, and engineering. The result promotes a degree of sophistication appropriate for a general education learning environment. This sophistication creates greater potential for students to find individual interests and to promote engagement. Broadening the scope of inquiry also produces work that reflects the life experience more fully and accurately. For example, in music, we not only hear the impact of a sound, but we visualize it, physically feel it, evaluate its expressive quality, connect it to history, and then perhaps encode it involving elements related to math, logic, and language, mong other subjects. In addition to the typical elements of music such as pitch, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, and other common parameters, music may be described in terms of less common perceptions such as color, weight, gravity, velocity, space, pressure, viscosity, ontrast, focus, geometry, temperature, and even cultural origin. When these aspects of the musical experience are evoked, it is easy to see how other disciplines may be contacted and interconnections established, increasing the coding of material, and empowering learning. The arts create a hub for learning that is powerful and invaluable in education. But all teachers, not just artists, need to leave space in their learning environment for their students to discover and discuss relevant interconnections of subject matter. The concept described above is true arts integration. Not an arts class siloed away from other courses, but rather a class that exists as a continuance and meeting ground for all other curricular subjects as well as the many aspects of life. For example, like other extramusical elements, the application of the visual in music encourages broadening the perception, meaning, and relevance of musical material. But it also provides an opportunity for nonmusicians to participate and engage in the musical experience. Viewing music as a threedimensional object where light, shadow, intensity, sharpness, amplitude, focus, depth, distance, movement, projection, and others all play a role in defining the character and quality of a musical idea allows for a completely new orientation in exploring its content, creating new opportunities for relevance and interconnections to be formed. This will many times encourage new modes of
perception increasing comprehension. The degree of connection among ideas is only limited by our willingness to reject our bias in favor of less common perspectives. Elevating above our biases and cultural forces that may dull our awareness enables a greater clarity from which truth projects and the artistic impulse can fully bloom. Most importantly, students are not placed in a position of compliance based on the assimilation of historical trends and objects, but are free to employ their newly formed competence in any number of subjects to produce something that better reflects their personal experience.
" students engaging in the arts in new ways will find value and meaning."
STEM schools have difficulty finding teachers skilled at teaching in a PBL environment. Certified educators with limited arts experience need to be trained to work in the STEM environment. Teaching artists, however, are the perfect addition to a STEM school. Teaching artists should be encouraged to seek regular employment at STEM schools as they will become a critical contributor to a robust STEM learning environment. Teaching artists who work at new STEM schools will discover that their expertise will serve their school extraordinarily well not only in instructional situations but in curriculum building as well. STEM PBL gives hope to a return to sophisticated arts instruction that empowers thought creating competent thinkers and artists. A return to sophistication in education has long been needed. The arts, when taught in the context of supporting general education, can play a critical role in returning complexity and consequently deeper learning to learning environments. As an added bonus, students engaging in the arts in new ways will find value and meaning. And by not holding students captive to the trends of the past but looking and building forward to a promising and exciting future, we will nurture the next generation of arts consumers.
About Timothy Crist Timothy Crist is a professor at Arkansas State University where he teaches electronic music composition, composition, theory, and classical guitar, and directs a music outreach program. He also works as a Teaching Artist teaching music at area schools, holding professional development workshops for teachers, and serving to have cultural impact through numerous guest artists series. His work at the award-winning Nettleton STEAM School contributed to the school becoming the first certified STEM school in Arkansas. He is currently writing a book concerning innovative music education in STEM learning environments.
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS Student access to technology and the production of meaningful music. By Ty Boyson
When in multiple teaching environments, can teaching artists create equitable experiences for students that have opposing access to resources? As a music producer and audio engineer, complex problem solving is an ever-increasing part of the job. I took it as a challenge to be able to provide quality programming to every child I serve. I found that by making music the tool, not the goal, the outcomes of the classes were running in parallel. In the first school, access to technology is all but nonexistent. Imagine teaching music production to a classroom of 35, highly motivated high school students, equipped with only a smartboard, personal laptop, a single midi keyboard, and a beat machine. I also purchased iPads and installed recording software as a supplement. A scenario like this is what can test a teaching artist's ability to be creative. Character development is at the core of each program. Students at the first school have the challenge of performing advanced tasks using little to no technology. An example of this would be for them to be assigned groups. The student designated as the producer would "program" members of their group with an instrument sound, tempo, volume, and placement in the stereo spectrum by moving them left or right. In this lesson, students develop skills in teamwork, management, and organization. School two is a technology loverĘźs dream. At the beginning of each school year, students receive an iPad to use for school work in the place of traditional books. Nearly every classroom is outfitted with iMac computers, and my classroom has professional-grade recording capabilities. Technology, used without a purpose most times is taken for granted. The challenge here is ensuring students are rising to the level of the tech they are using, and not relying on it to do the work for them.
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Students' projects are centered around creating solutions to what they conclude as social issues affecting their generation, and personal growth. One such lesson involves creating and recording an instrumental that sounds like their idea of what America represents. One student used the metonymy of a bass guitar representing the marginalized people of America whose voices are too "low" to hear. Another session invites students to practice storytelling in songwriting by developing personal stories about inclusion. The technical side of this allows them to grow their skills in recording and editing, while the real lesson is about connecting to an audience and making their work have a visual effect.
The one thing that is true about both environments is that the students do not decide who has access to technology and who does not. What is also true is that teaching artists can create safe, inclusive spaces, and remove many limitations by reevaluating our goals. Students understand from my classes that people do not become better people by making good music. However, they can make more meaningful music by becoming better people, regardless of having more, less, or the same. We should still strive for them to have the same.
About Ty Boyland Native Memphian, Ty Boyland, is a Billboard-charting music producer and engineer, social entrepreneur, and educator. Ty is a Senior Teaching Artist Fellow with the Memphis Music Initiative, Lead Consulting for Ty Boyland Consulting, and a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. www.facebook.com/TyBoylandMusic Ty Boyland
@mrboyland
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Building the HIVE How New Media got defined at SAY Sí by Stevan Živadinović Whenever I talk about our work, I get the impression I focus too much on the technical aspect of the instruction and the particularly nerdy details of the production process when the general public wants to hear a human story about cool kids being serious about their passions. I guess I feel obliged to justify how rigorous and STEM all this STEAM really is. Still, the guild is not the general public. I hope an abridged historic sketch of the primary tools and media, and our own evolving understanding of our own studio will be of interest to anyone trying to conceive a new transmedia program. SAY Sí (San Antonio Youth Yes) was an established youth arts organization of 20 years when it decided to start a video game design program. They hired me fortuitously a few weeks before the planned beginning of programming. When I walked in, there was a computer lab that they were gonna call the HIVE (Home for Innovation & Video Ecology), they told me they heard about this thing called Scratch, shrugged, and wished me good luck. When I joined SAY Sí, I had a degree in fine arts with a focus on painting and a career in design and web development which had honed my coding, production, and project management skills. I made a few weird comics. I had broad technical art knowledge and I was good at reverseengineering widgets, but I knew nothing about teaching kids. How hard could it be? SAY Sí has three other studios: Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, classic studio arts), Media Arts (film, photography, design), and ALAS (devised theater). The 2nd youngest studio is 7 years older. It was beneficial for the HIVE to have the overall pedagogy, structure and methods of the other studios to graft onto. With the exception of summer camps and the like, all SAY Sí programming is long term. Each studio has its own high school and middle school component. There are two recruitment periods in the year. A number of students stay in the program from 6th grade until they graduate from high school. In a school year there is time for about 4 major projects and a month of practica. In high school, students apply to one particular studio and participate in an open studio fashion. They commit to making at least 8 hours a week and it is up to them to figure out when exactly they’re gonna make those hours. Students often put in more hours during openings, installs, crunch, shoots, cons, fests, or tech weeks. Particular demos, presentations and rehearsals are scheduled, but there are no formal class times. Page 12
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
HIVE studio in its element. SAY SĂ's middle school program WAM (Working Artists & Mentors) meets only on Saturdays for a more structured day with more structured projects. HIVE started in the fall of 2014 as a WAM-only program with students who previously took the Media Arts WAM class. They were primed and purportedly excited about the new video game design program that was replacing film and photography for them. My support in the studio consisted of a volunteer retired teacher (Paul Gates provided an invaluable teaching crash course) and of mentors. Mentor is the official title of high schoolers in the program who are hired to teach the WAMmers alongside the primary teaching artists. Peer-to-peer is a big deal. It works. Since the high school studios are all mixed grade levels and proficiencies, this happens organically. In WAM some high schoolers are given formal job and teaching experience. Since I didn’t have a high school HIVE to draw mentors from, my mentors were veteran media arts students.
Scratch We started with Scratch because it was right there. We made music and animatics and small arcade games. Some kids were really into coding new systems and the form of expression that offered, others were more into reskinning provided templates. A number of students made cute and fun and exciting things. While there was a lot of creativity on display and kids had fun, Page 13
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
there was a bit of a chasm between the little demos we were making and what audiences and students themselves expected from the promise of getting to produce video games. Snapping code blocks together is all the rage in teaching basic CS concepts, but games are complex machines needing a lot of advanced understanding to implement seemingly simple behaviors. We were spending a large portion of the class time in rote recreation of boilerplate code and troubleshooting transcription sloppiness. When I provided templates, hoping to free students to make more interesting decisions at a higher level of design, the complexity of the templates made it more likely students would opt to merely reskin things that were there instead of designing a game. The constructivist project-based nature of SAY SĂ’s programming necessitates projects that culminate in some kind of showcase. If the HIVE spent the time it needed scaffolding all the competence with tunnel vision on making games, we would have one project a year, a bunch of school-like exercises and 60 bummed out WAMmers who made stuff all the time but never seemed to finish anything. Scratch is pretty powerful but it also has some major things going against it. There is no way to extract a game out of the website and there is little we can do to help it look polished for a gallery setting. Group projects were a struggle as it was impossible for multiple students to work on the same project at the same time.
Twine One takeaway from the early days and a bit of a specter that continues to loom over most HIVE projects is that coding is complex and requires one kind of focus and engineering rigor—while deeper conversations about themes, truth, ideas, communication require a whole different kind of headspace. When the conversation starts to include questions like whether a given mechanic or system is the best way to convey the theme and mood one is going for, the complexity spreads squarely to both proverbial sides of the proverbial brain. HIVEling in the zone.
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Interactive fiction (IF) with Twine was the first “next thing” and it partially solved that problem. Twine is easy and fun and puts creative choices game design is made of into the kids’ hands. There is also a ginormous indie IF community that makes some of the wokest games around. Downside to Twine games is that embedding pictures and other media requires some hacky HTML maneuvers and a lot of awkward file wrangling. There is only so much writing and flowchart management you can expect from a WAMmer before they revolt. We needed to mix it up again.
Programming
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Starting small and growing things is an important tenet of the SAY Sí way. We pilot initiatives, reflect on projects, and adjust course. You don't have to overplan and freak yourself out—just make a really good sketch, try it out, and take good notes. It is a process. Build in opportunities for feedback and critique. It is as important to commit and focus, yet not be afraid to change it up drastically if it makes sense. None of this should be foreign to artists, yet it seems a revelation to a lot of OST practitioners.
As we were drawing to the end of the first year in the video game design studio, we looked back and saw our accomplishments as lacking. Maybe it was just a matter of perspective and ambition, while there was actually plenty there to unequivocally celebrate. We were probably too hard on ourselves and asking too much from middle schoolers who were new at this. One thing was certain, the video game design studio was having a hard time designing games. While we could use Scratch as training wheels and graduate advanced students to pro tools, all projects would have multiple tracks where we would effectively have to teach multiple classes at once. This was untenable.
Files turned out to be a non-trivial issue. As soon as you start making digital art of any complexity, you have to deal with files. And files are shifty magical things: they are lost, corrupted and wrong, and either just don’t save themselves or save themselves all over the place. WAMmers needed more hands-on file experience before we could throw asset It also became starkly apparent that video games are a bunch of different media that happen to coexist. There is creative coding, game design, UX, interactive storytelling, digital art, graphic design, 3D modeling, animation, sound design, music, and so on. Maybe the best solution would be to explode all that and shift project focus, such that we could do a bunch of different complete projects that all together help students bone up on the skills needed to make games. And not everyone needed to be into all parts of the production, students could focus more on some things and work symbiotically in Honoring the youth voice is a successful part of SAY Si's mission. It's the thing that keeps them coming back. So we polled the WAMmers about their feels and not everybody was into all the things, but everyone liked something we were doing. A lot of them really missed digital painting and photography and the more intuitive processes. In the fall of 2015, with the start of the program’s second year, high school HIVE became a thing. We hired Daniel Jackson to be the HIVE’s other teaching artist. Older Page 15
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
teens with more time, commitment, focus, geometry, and capacity for abstraction joined the studio. So now that we are no longer game design, what are we? New media! Ok, alright, but what the heck is that? “New media” means many different things to a number of people and nothing to most. Some art authorities consider film and photography to be new media and video games novelty toys wholly outside of the realm of artistic inquiry. Clearly this is unhelpful for SAY Sí. Led by student consensus as to what to do next, we went through projects ticking off media available to us on the path to video games. We became the studio that made all things you did with computers—and then every summer, with the extended hours, made video games! As we unpacked video games into all this new media, we used a lot of Adobe software and did a lot of prep and finishing on paper. We discovered that comics fit at the intersection of narrative and animation. We were making storyboards already, comics are a way to showcase those. Plus, even when hand-drawn, they’re largely assembled and read digitally. With comics came zines and book arts. At the intersection of book arts and 3D modeling were papercraft figurines. Desire to work on game design without the complexity of programming led us to card and board games. Those are designed digitally anyway and we have paper skills. Sound design gave us soundscapes, radio dramas, and podcasts. Graphic design and all our work on paper led us to posters and tiled wheat paste murals. For a few years there, the HIVE didn’t repeat any projects. Getting lost in the weeds of breadth, we were anxious about finding a way to let students go deep on any one thing.
Pico Coding with blocks gets old. There comes a point where you just want the thing to let you paste in some code from a website. PICO-8 emerged as our favorite alternative to Scratch. It is a beautiful development platform. The 16-color palette, 128px square screen and other “fantasy hardware” limits are quirky but perfect enabling constraints for coders of all levels. Lua is an excellent choice of programming language for intro to CS concepts. There is a large community designing for PICO-8 and source code and assets of any game can be explored. Teaching animation in PICO-8 is a joy. It looks sharp in an arcade cabinet, can run on a Raspberry Pi or in a browser, and can be managed from the command line. We stitch group projects together with Git. SAY Síers always get a kick out of getting to make real things. SAY Sí in general is widely lauded for its commitment to solid presentation. When new students join the program, they’re not quite aware of the level of finish they will regularly bring to their creations. It will set in a couple of projects later when they exclaim in critique, “We just made a real <thing>!”—be it a video game, a play, a film, a gallery show, or an interactive transmedia installation. It is important for projects to be real—in contrast to Scratch which is clearly for kids.
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
SAY Sí seniors spend their last semester working on a thesis project.
Love
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In 2016, a year into high school HIVE, we got an opportunity to share a corner of the San Antonio Game Devs booth at PAX South (Penny Arcade Expo South). It was quite a maiden convention voyage for the students. We wanted to have something special to show off. We felt that after a year of smaller projects the studio was ready, and 14 students seemed like a good team size for one big group project. At the onset, during a week of consensus brainstorming we churned through half-a-dozen different ideas and settled on Date Me Super Senpai, an open-world, inclusive, dating sim RPG set in a high school for superhumans. It was very important to all HIVElings that this dating sim be inclusive. The idea belonged to Chabriely Rivera Roldan and so she was our lead. That meant she was in charge of the vision and keeper of the project’s soul. We programmed it in LÖVE because it uses Lua like PICO-8. There was a healthy community and a number of libraries out there, plus any found Lua scripts could be repurposed. There was a fairly robust RPG system under the hood, allocating points for actions on two axes of personality. Exploring the school, making choices, and advancing the story actually affected how people responded to you and who you would match up with. A core story group wrote out the most interesting characters into fully dateable senpai. Other characters thrown around in the brainstorming made it in as regular NPCs. Page 17
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
The instructors were the producers on the project. Daniel Jackson left right before to do other cool things, and Rick Stemm replaced him as second TA, himself coming from game design and interactive playwriting background. Ned Meneses moved to be the HIVE’s 3rd TA after teaching in the Media Arts Studio for a dozen years. Senpai ended up being SAY Si’s longest project ever. We eventually had something resembling a working production pipeline, but in the early stages we hoped that we would fill leadership roles and allocate tasks through initiative. People who reluctantly stepped up for roles they didn’t fully understand were not best situated to decide how to delegate tasks. The pace was frenetic, it alienated most of the students who joined the studio as production was ramping up. There were large stretches in production where some students were bottlenecks and others had nothing to work on. We had a sweet demo for PAX, but needed six more months to wrap up the project. We were probably not as ready as we thought we were. Important code organization patterns had to be grafted into the game late. The map-drawing plugin we found online never really sorted objects’ depth well, and most of my time on the project was spent debugging it. We ended up filling the game with physics-based chairs the player pushed around which provided enough grit to the sorting system that the more stubborn-to-debug flickering edge cases hardly ever crashed the game. The debugging itself was too esoteric and not a very interesting case study to more broadly help the studio level up its coding game. There was no way to divide the tasks so that everyone could get a real feel for the problem. By the time I explained the nature of the issue and reasoned my way out of it, we'd have a working solution, so what would be the point of having them redo all my typing while there is so much other work still to be done? Date Me Super Senpai made it clear that there was a conflict between demands of production which require demonstrating competence on a tight schedule, and demands of teaching which require room for exploration and failure. It seemed at the onset that one big project with all hands on deck was HIVE in top form, but it turned out to be bad for learning. Perhaps it was only right to dip into industry crunch culture, what with SAY Sí’s commitment to being real. At PAX professionals were impressed by how much of a game a bunch of teens had to show. Students mingled with designers they admired. We tabled at every convention in San Antonio and one in Austin that year. We launched the game at Video Games Live at the Tobin Center in 2017. Local queer magazine wrote a feature. I am proud of the game. Everyone who made it through the production was in some way wiser on the flipside. It might not have been the best opportunity to teach creative coding, but it leveled up our projects game, collaboration skills, and studio cohesion.
Unity In 2018, with the start of the longer summer hours, we had HIVE’s first Game Jam. Studio had 24 students at the time, 4 of whom were Senpai veterans and 14 of whom had been in the HIVE WAM class. Unity was on the table for Date Me Super Senpai but we didn’t go with it—mostly because we were tickled by the idea of making a dating sim in an engine called LÖVE. We also felt that an environment requiring more interaction with code would give us more opportunities to teach coding skills. In retrospect we should’ve used Unity and bought as many plugins as we needed. Page 18
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Unity at first glance has an intimidating interface, but it is not hard to make a game with hardly any coding. It is one of the most widely-used professional game engines of the last decade and it exports to all platforms. There is an ecosystem of components that can be activated through a graphical interface and game design can happen while coding is deferred down the line for when one has internalized some of the jargon and abstractions related to building interactive spaces. We have used Unity for a few projects before Senpai and a number since. We used it with Kinect. We made an augmented reality installation. HIVE Game Jam 2018 was gonna be all Unity. Before starting, we warmed up with a 3-week general Unity tutorial and talked over ideas. Students filled out brief proposals answering pertinent project questions and sketching out production calendars. We brainstormed down the ideas and organically created teams around the top five favorites. To jumpstart production we invited guest artists with game jam experience to help us with coding and music (Sam Marcus and Ian Faleer). All groups used some quick scripts Sam wrote and all had to modify code at some point to extend their behavior, creating opportunities for students to explain to each other how these plugins worked. There was enough programming, writing and art roles to go around. We talked a lot about the standards of clear communication expected from everyone and team leads in particular. Graduating 8th graders who joined high school HIVE from WAM right before the summer break were the most passionate backbone of the project. At the culmination of the three weeks, we had a big party with pizza and the wider SAY Sí student body. Judges picked five categories of achievement and The Best. Several games went on to receive national honors from Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, with one receiving the 2019 Electronic Software Association Foundation Award for Video Game Design.
A number of HIVE games can be downloaded from SAY Sí’s Itch page. Guest artist Nadia Botello helps test out different materials to build a speaker out of.
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Patterns
In the summer 2019 we took another stab at doing one large Senpai-like project with the whole HIVE participating (an alternate reality game played through QR codes on posters plastered around story-relevant landmarks), but it only reaffirmed that putting all our eggs into one project doesn’t leave the HIVE in the greatest shape. Over the years we established some patterns that allow us to consistently scaffold our craftsmanship and artistry. Some of our projects start with practica, where we spend several rapid fire back-toback weeks on intros to different adjacent topics (PICO-8 + Twine + Unity, or character design + storyboarding + animation/comics), then allow a month for completion of one of the started projects. This allows us to create a variety of portfolio work as some students finish multiple projects. Every year SAY Sí puts on the Stories Seldom Told exhibit on an important little-talkedabout theme students select. We mix up all the studios, so everyone works together with artists they seldom interact with, and they make interactive installation art. The format allows us to pilot different exotic techniques. We usually make two or three installation pieces per studio, allowing each experiment to have a more manageable scope than were we to try to introduce whatever (electronics, augmented reality, data visualisation, barcode scanners) as a monolithic project that everyone in the studio needed to engage with at once, whether individually or in groups. Senior thesis show is an opportunity for veteran students to apply their HIVEly skills and their last semester on either materializing any novel transmedia visions (transducers, automata, Kinect, lenticular art, etc), or on going deeper with any of our core media.
One project a year we take to conventions (games, zines).
All SAY Sí studios develop a unique culture of their own. HIVElings are good collaborators eager to support others’ projects as well as do the work of building support for their own ideas. They make great lists. The cornerstone of HIVE’s work is creative coding and graphic design. While all other studios use computers in one way or another, embracing the media and tools native to the digital realm is where our practice starts. That is our litmus test for, “is it a HIVE project?” It is very easy to exclude things because they’re not 100% made on computers, but our threshold is more lenient. This is for the better, as tools shouldn’t be a tedious imposition but something that opens possibilities. Similar to other SAY Sí studios, the HIVE challenges youth to reflect on the world around them, to do research and to critically analyze art, technology, and other contemporary topics important to them. Students use professional software, rely on technical documentation, learn to troubleshoot projects, and have opportunities to code in a number of different programming languages. Since technology is always evolving, the HIVE fosters a commitment to self-directed and peer-to-peer learning that is beneficial beyond the specific technical skills learned in the studio. Page 20
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Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Encouraging pennant and multiple whiteboards can only mean game production is going down.
About Stevan Živadinović Stevan Živadinović was born once upon a time in a fictitious country, but has since gotten better. His attention is split between making art and artists. Recent notable projects include Word Salsa random poetry generating machine (wordsalsa.com), the Seditious Industrial Complex Licensing Office installation (industrial-complex.com), and Hobo Lobo of Hamelin, a modern retelling of the Pied Piper story as a digital popup book (hobolobo.net).
SAY Sí SAY Sí ignites the creative power of young people as forces of positive change. We value artists, empower marginalized communities and advance culture. SAY Sí defines marginalized communities as people of color, women, LGBT+, and the economically disadvantaged. Page 21
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
RESOURCES FOR TA S:
GETTING TO KNOW THE ARTS FOR ALL ABILITIES CONSORTIUM
INTERVIEW WITH LISA DENNETT & STEPHEN YAFFE BY ELISE MAY
Lisa Dennett
Stephen Yaffe
(Please note this interview was completed before the COVID-19 pandemic.)
My teaching artist practice has always included students with disabilities (SWD’s) in inclusion and self-contained settings. When I learned about the Arts for All Abilities Consortium (formerly the Arts in Special Education Consortium,) I started attending their yearly conference. I wanted a broader community of teaching artists to be aware of what the consortium does and the resources it offers. To that end, I interviewed two of its co-founders, Stephen Yaffe (SY) and Lisa Dennett (LD). The result follows, edited for length. And, full disclosure – we are all on the Consortium’s Steering Committee.
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Briefly, Stephen is an Arts and Education consultant whose professional development (PD) work has been called “brave, visionary, smart” (Director of Education Programs, PBS). He has mentored classroom teachers, teaching artists and arts administrators in inclusive practices nationally, served as the VSA Teaching Artist Fellows coach and provided PD to those working in the field of disability on five continents. He is a recipient of the 2018 VSA NYC Arts Advocate of the Year and serves on the Arts Committee to the Panel for Educational Policy of the NYC Department of Education. Stephen has been using a wheelchair for the last 15 years.
Lisa Dennett became a teaching artist when she was looking for work between acting jobs. At the same time, she spent her free time volunteering with people with disabilities of all ages. In an effort to address the disconnect between theater arts education and students with disabilities, she developed a program which blossomed into a nonprofit that operated for nearly twenty-five years. She has created theater with a vast myriad of youth and adults with disabilities. She is a member of NYSTEA and former chair and co-chair of the NYC chapter. Currently Ms. Dennett is a working actor, consultant, sign language interpreter and occasional teaching artist.
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Find Arts for All Abilities on:
For those who have never heard of it, what is the Arts for All Abilities Consortium (the Consortium) and how and why did it come into existence? SY: In December of 2007, a small group of teaching artists, Arts administrators, a school principal and a NYC Department of Education supervisor came together to address an important need: There were many stakeholders in Arts Education for students with disabilities in New York who shared similar goals. They had little-to-no means of coming together. LD: While other arts education conferences may have been good, they lacked anything related to special education and disabilities. We wanted the same type of conference conversations with other professionals doing the work we were passionate about. We were teaching artist, administrator, and consultant, but were working with paraprofessionals, teachers, related service providers such as PT (physical therapists), OT (occupational therapists), ST (speech therapists) and mental health professionals, and as we progressed we realized parents and others might also benefit and have a lot to add to the conversation.
SY: The Consortium provides these constituencies opportunities to engage with one another, share ideas, perspectives and solutions. Our purpose is to deepen practice, understanding and the quality of Arts Education provided students with disabilities (SWD’s). Can you share what your yearly conference offers Teaching Artists? LD: Each annual conference is different. TAs can learn about successful partnerships, techniques and best practices from TAs and other professionals who present. Connections between professionals and shared practices can be invaluable in continued learning as well as validating one’s own practice. What else does the Consortium offer? SY: We offer a variety of Professional Development as well as mentoring opportunities for TAs and their administrators. We convene focus groups, facilitate an ongoing professional learning community and have been known to respond to requests through our website for advice and recommendations.
You both have different experience with students with disabilities. Can you share what gaps you hoped the consortium would fill? LD: For me I had hoped the Consortium would provide a place, albeit abstractly, where anyone who was doing the work in arts education with young people with disabilities - particularly in schools - could share a common language. SY: I was a TA for over 20 years. I received no training in working with students with disabilities. It was all trial by fire. I had no one to go for advice in any art organization that hired me and knew of no TA who’d received professional development (PD) in the area. This was the 70’s. Things have gotten better since, but not enough. This was a gap the Consortium needed to address. Another gap - The largely unspoken idea that artistic rigor and special education are mutually exclusive. I saw how often expectations for SWD’s were unnecessarily lowered. When you expect less, you often get less. Which is to say, you can get a very inaccurate sense of what someone can actually do.
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TA Congress 2017 - Master teaching artists convene at the Consortium’s inaugural Teaching Artist Congress – NYC, 2017
Going into a wheelchair gave me a fresh and much deeper understanding of access – in the classroom, studio, theater, as well as in lesson and unit planning. UDL (Universal Design for Learning) was not well-known and even less consciously practiced (in NYC) in 2007. The Consortium has advocated strongly for it, offered conference sessions and non-conference professional development in it. What advice would you give teaching artists new to working with students with disabilities? SY: Research and find training in the following areas: • Understanding Disability Classifications and Their Pedagogical Implications • Understanding and Providing Adaptations and Modifications • Modifying Behavior • Working in the Inclusion Page 24
Classroom • Working in the Self-contained Classroom • Universal Design for Learning (UDL) • Understanding by Design (UBD) A combination of long-term, sequential and arced PD in conjunction with mentoring is the best way to go. By mentoring, I mean the ability to observe a master teaching artist at work, de-brief and co-teach with them, teach solo and receive feedback on in-class work and lesson/unit planning. LD: I have always wanted TAs to be open to asking questions. There are questions that wouldn't typically come up in general education. Questions can be asked of the arts organization, if working with one, of the classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, related service providers, and often the students themselves! Questions like: How many
paraprofessionals are in the class and are they for the entire class or individual students? Do any students have related therapies? Are there behavior rules in the classroom that need to be reinforced? Are there sensory or motor challenges to be aware of? Shockingly, this information was and is still often not provided from the start. Do your homework. Make your needs known. The next step is finding out how to adapt anything you've learned from the questions you've asked and/or the information given. I'm a firm believer that any activity can be adapted to include everyone, it just takes more advance planning. The jargon seems to change frequently. How do Teaching Artists know which terminology to use? LD: This made me laugh.
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
, s a e r a h t w g o n r i g h c t s a e e t g g s i n t i b n e , e t d h s t u e t f g s o g i h e t b i n w O e h g t n i t k o r n o w f i s i . y s r t e i s t i l i arti b a s i d h t i w Visual Arts 2014 - visual arts session work from the Consortiumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 2014 conference, Revealing Capacity: Opening the Inner and Outer World.
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Heidi Latsky - Heidi Latsky and Jerron Herman deliver the keynote at the Consortium’s 2017 conference, INCLUSION – Practices, Partnerships and Possibilities
Yes, alphabet soups and jargon. It's a good question. In NYC the vast majority of TAs work through an organization, or many organizations. I think the onus should be on the administrators to pass on current lingo to their TAs. However, I know in other geographic areas TAs work more independently. In those cases, I would say to be sure to have a relationship with the school arts administrators on this as well as arts education organizations on any level, local, statewide or national.
depending on the type of school as well as geographic location, so it's not a simple answer. The same with community settings. That makes things even more variable. Sometimes the partner sites feel they are revealing some secret if they share information about a student’s needs. They don’t understand it will simply help a TA design activities to maximize learning. It’s important to have everyone at the table, so all involved understand what is needed to set expectations for success.
What kind of support can Teaching Artists expect when working in classrooms with students with disabilities? What about in community settings?
SY: I want to talk about what TA’s working with SWDs should expect – and push for.
LD: I think this is different
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You should expect greater support in your work and in the level and scope of professional development you
receive. You should expect greater support through expanded partnerships. You should ask for and take advantage of collaborations that include not just the host classroom teacher/s, but, for example, related service providers. You will learn from them. They will learn from you. You should know your value. One of the biggest growth areas, if not the biggest, in teaching artistry is working with students with disabilities. More and more students are being diagnosed with disabilities and more are being mainstreamed. There is great demand for teaching artists who can work skillfully and meaningfully with these populations.
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Is there a place where TAs can go to find or share best practices for working with SWDs? SY: In the spring of 2017, the Consortium launched its Teaching Artists Initiative, convening a Teaching Artist Congress to examine best practices for Teaching Artists working with students with disabilities. That was the first step in our putting together a best practices publication addressing this. Stay tuned.
P177Q - P. S. 177 Technology Band perform at the Consortium’s 2014 conference, Why Good Work Works: Raising Expectations
The Consortium, along with others in the community, worked with the NYC Department of
Education’s Office of Arts and Special Projects to develop the NYC Department of Education’s Students with Disabilities Online Resource Compendium. That compendium can be found here. You might also visit the Resources section of our website for information on a wide variety of areas, including Specific Disabilities, a Glossary of Important Terms, Classroom and Art-Specific Resources, Notable Pedagogies. You can find it here.
2018 Conference - Small group planning at the Consortium’s 2018 conference, INCLUSION – Practices, Partnerships and Possibilities (Another Take).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elise May, an independent Teaching Artist/Arts Administrator, creates original programs focused on enhancing communication skills through theater arts, empowering students of all ages and abilities. Programs include Storytime Theater, Expressive Elocution, Multicultural Voices and Creative Readers (an inclusion program, 2017 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award winner). She is on the Steering Committee for the Arts for All Abilities Consortium and currently devising and performing in a sensory immersive show for audiences on the autism spectrum at Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. www.expressive-elocution.com Page 27
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
MEDIA ARTS IN THE CLASSROOM Multi-diciplinary Creativity at Work! by Amy Oestreicher
I
n my work with students that are recovering from various types of trauma, I’ve learned that words and talking about what they're feeling, or how they feel about something won’t always give the most accurate picture. As an artist, I’ve discovered there are many different ways to communicate, and some are more effective than others, just as there are many different types of learners. The essence of the media arts is its cross-disciplinary nature, empowering every student with a voice, their own form of communication, and the capacity to mold all of those skills, passions, interests and inquiries into one finished work. It is a beautiful thing to witness.
"AS A TEACHING ARTIST, STORIES, LEFTOVERS AND SCRAPS ARE MY CREATIVE FUEL." As a teaching artist, stories, leftovers and scraps are my creative fuel. In my own artistic process, I’m a scavenger, telling stories through mixed media art, movement, music, and text to make reimagined meaning from catastrophe. In my first TEDx Talk, I called myself a “Detourist,” embracing these unexpected routes and “obstacles” as opportunities for creative adventures. These multidisciplinary “adventures” can fuel us with a sense of identity, and help us make decisions in order to take charge of our own lives. Healing from trauma is a multidisciplinary experience, involving all senses. These multidisciplinary aspects clicked with a quote from “The Body Keeps the Score,” a groundbreaking book on PTSD by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk: “The imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented Page 28
sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations.” What better way to express these “sensory and emotional traces” than through media arts? Youth spend a great deal of time engaged with the media that surrounds all of us. As we enter a new time of Instagram rather than art galleries, we need to start thinking about the arts experiences we offer as teaching artists. And, perhaps what media arts can offer beyond traditional arts education. Media arts and its use of electronic equipment and new communication technologies and strategies, allows us to expand our view of creativity as a mindset, a way of seeing the world different, and the best way to problem-solving and find innovative solutions. Encouraging students to express their thoughts, ideas and feelings through technologies requires them to collaborative, create, connect and communicate in new ways.
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
It may be easy to categorize media arts as a technology skill that lies outside the realm of “artmaking.” But outside of media production “technique,” students are required to interpret, reflect on and relay their own media messages with properly focused learning objectives. Having students work across disciplines also helps them expand their views of creativity and work in a larger context. Working in the media arts with students calls students to action to be active listeners, taking turns, assigning toles, and being attentive to the needs of others in the group, as well as the “audience” they are delivering their message to. It’s another easy for them to tell a story – thinking of sequences of events in multidimensional ways, whether through a storyboard, timelines, or series of photographs to create a narrative. Each student can access their own strengths and interests, while learning new skills. There is a wealth of different skills to choose from to express a message metaphorically. For example, a soundtrack in the background of a short film could express a certain mood of a story, or certain background colors of a scene can be selected to convey a tone. Students can jump into multiple roles and wear many hats, while learning to respect the needs of others. By producing their own works, they are actively developing their own voices, identity, and beliefs. This is also a great opportunity for students to tune into the world around them with inclusive attentions – looking outwards while also tuning in. As students learn the technical media arts skills in the classroom, while also participating in prompts around identity and their own values, and creating narratives, I find that my students are suddenly aware of the messages they are receiving from the media differently. It is a subtle shift, but a great way to emphasize the inquiry based learning that comes with media arts. For example, my students can now look at a news story or documentary, and interpret the intent behind the message the story may be conveying in order to give the viewer a certain impression. In addition to creating pieces reflecting their own beliefs, students work to articulate why a movie, broadcast, or other story didn’t resonate with them. “Eh, I didn’t like it” turns into “”I found that they portrayed the story in a way that gives the viewer the wrong message.” This Page 29
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starts a larger conversation when each student can reflect on how the media was used to give a certain message. Eventually, by the time their final projects are due, they are able to discuss their own work, feel like they have mastered new skills and tools for creating art, and can specifically share how they used specific media to convey that message. In a classroom setting, media arts are a fantastically innovative way to empower every student with their own voice, while building community.
"MEDIA ARTS ARE A FANTASTICALLY INNOVATIVE WAY TO EMPOWER EVERY STUDENT WITH THEIR OWN VOICE, WHILE BUILDING COMMUNITY."
About Amy Oestreicher Amy Oestreicher is an Audie award-nominated playwright, performer, and multidisciplinary creator. A singer, librettist, and visual artist, she dedicates her work to celebrating untold stories, and the detours in life that can spark connection and transform communities. Amy overcame a decade of trauma to become a sought-after PTSD specialist, artist, author, writer for The Huffington Post, international keynote speaker, RAINN representative, and health advocate. She has given three TEDx Talks on transforming trauma through creativity, and has contributed to NBC’s Today, CBS, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen Magazine, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and MSNBC, among others. Amy has toured her multi-award-winning musical, Gutless & Grateful, to over 200 venues from 54 Below to Barrington Stage Company since its 2012 NYC debut, and developed her fulllength play, Flicker and a Firestarter, with Playlight Theatre Co. Her multimedia musical, Passageways (original lyrics, music, book and mixed media artwork) has been performed at HERE Arts Center, Dixon Place, and the Triad Theater. Her plays have been published by Eddy Theatre Company, PerformerStuff, Narcissists Anthology, New World Theatre’s “Solitary Voice: A Collection of Epic Monologues,” and were finalists in Manhattan Repertory’s Short Play Festival, NYNW Theatre Fest, #MeTooTheatreWomen, "Women in the Age of Trump," and Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans Literary Festival. She has recently published her memoir, My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful. See more at www.amyoes.com. Page 30
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Teaching Artistry Podcast: New Video Series Promotes
#KEEPMAKINGART Together, Teaching Artistry with Courtney J. Boddie podcast and Creative Generation announce their partnership to produce a video series titled, #KeepMakingArt. The series will explore the work of creatives all around the world as they respond to the global COVID-19 pandemic and will be released regularly on the Teaching Artistry with Courtney J. Boddie YouTube channel. This partnership, and resulting series, is a component of the #KeepMakingArt campaign, which is facilitated by Creative Generation. The goal of the campaign is to inspire and support youth, educators & artists, parents, and organizations to keep making art despite the tremendous circumstances we are facing. The campaign toolkit can be found here.
Available Episodes Episode #1 - Jeff M. Poulin Episode #2 - Jono Waldman Episode #3 - Idris Goodwin Episode #4 - Nathallie Barret-Mas Episode #5 - Eric Booth
About Teaching Artistry with Courtney J. Boddie Teaching Artistry blends creative and educational practice in service of community building, social justice, and inspiring joy. Courtney J. Boddie, Host and Creator, chats with teaching artists and arts educators who are driving professional teaching artistry forward. Courtney and her guests discuss personal journeys, celebrate triumphs and challenges, and advocate fiercely for the arts in all communities. Listen & subscribe on your favorite podcast player, today! Learn more here.
About Creative Generation Creative Generation works to inspire, connect, and amplify the work of individuals and organizations committed to cultivating the creative capacities of the next generation. Learn more here. Page 31
AonFRESH VIEW Teaching Artist Strategies
by Courtney J. Boddie
When I first fully understood what the term
of is supporting the growth of emerging teaching
“Teaching Artist” meant, I was new to grad school
artists as an adjunct professor in the Educational
and working at Roundabout Theatre Company as
Theatre program at New York University. My
an intern. The first day on the job, I sat in on an
syllabus for the course has changed over the
audition where artists
years to include many
taught a segment of a
texts and now I have
lesson plan, and I was hooked. From then on, I learned my craft on the ground and sought out resource after resource, approaching colleagues
“Teaching Artist” is a universal term of which I am incredibly connected.
a new one to add. For so
many,
the
term
“Teaching Artist” is still so unfamiliar. Recently, I led a retreat with participatory artists in
to help deepen my skills
Wales and I shared the
as a teaching artist. It
TAG’s Teaching Artist
would have been great to have a resource like
Manifesto and one Welsh artist said, “Teaching
Daniel Levy’s A Teaching Artist’s Companion:
Artist?! Yes that is what I am! How have I never
How to Define and Develop Your Practice. Almost
thought to call myself this before?!” In the US,
two decades later, I support the professional
there are many words or terms that essentially
development of the 55-60 New Victory Teaching
mean an artist who facilitates the creativity
Artists, and I am the creator and host of Teaching
of others in various communities or learning
Artistry with Courtney J. Boddie, a podcast that
settings, but “Teaching Artist” is a universal term
celebrates teaching artists and advocates for
of which I am incredibly connected. It’s been
community engagement. A role I am very proud
wildly exciting to see the immense expansion of
professional resources available in the field of
to share with emerging teaching artists in the
Teaching Artistry and it’s my pleasure to share
grad course, staying current with trends in the
that Levy’s book is a huge value add.
field, etc. While this may have been the first
The first time I met Daniel Levy was at
time we spoke, I realized later that I had seen
the International Teaching Artist Conference in
him before, working as a musician in a short
September 2018 in New York City. I was sitting
documentary about Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby
alone on the roof deck of Carnegie Hall’s Weill
Project. In the film he was playing guitar and
Music Center, nervously preparing for a panel
supporting a new mother to find the right melody
discussion that I was moderating as part of the
for an original song dedicated to her young child.
conference activities. It would be the first ever
I was intrigued to see someone who was able to
live recording of my podcast with my global
gently engage a new parent, who I imagine must
colleagues as the audience. I noticed this gentle,
have been extremely vulnerable, and create a
salt and pepper-haired man stepping in my
piece of music for her dear loved one with such
direction to introduce himself. In our conversation,
grace in what might have felt like a high-pressured
Daniel shared that he was writing a book that
moment. I recognize that same level
would be published in the near future and that
of
care
he hoped I would find it useful for my
A
Teaching
work and in the field of teaching
when
reading
Artist’s
Companion. I am duly
artistry. I immediately liked
impressed
his presence, energy and
the
with
framework,
style. As we chatted, I
case studies and
thought that it would
resources in this
be great to see that
book made for
book as I am constantly
Teaching Artists
looking to augment the
wherever they are
resources at my disposal
on their journey.
the
VIEW-DESIGN-RESPONSE Cycle
Daniel Levy takes his own teaching experience, informed by pedagogy of Maxine Greene’s
Aesthetic Education, Vygotsky and John Dewey, and presents a model that gives clear language to a process that many intermediate and master teaching artists have likely honed organically over time. Levy describes the framework of the VIEW-DESIGN-RESPOND cycle as deceivingly straightforward but that while these elements are dependent on each other, they can also overlap. There is a great flow chart on pp. 33 to showcase how the cycle and how intertwined each phase is interconnected.
Daniel shares his foray into teaching as an inexperienced and naive classroom teacher in a New
York City prep school and how he quickly learned on the job. While he respects full time classroom teachers, it wasn’t for him. As a reader, I loved learning about Daniel’s own journey to fully discovering
himself as a teaching artist. The storytelling aspect of the book vividly paints a picture for the reader through his personal accounts, including his Buddhist practice which permeates his teaching and learning framework. He shares example after example of his successful sessions, missteps, #fails and feedback from mentors and colleagues. All of which endear the author to the readers, who can often feel isolated. There are also practical hints and tips along with checklists, worksheets, diagrams, etc. that are helpful tools to engage deeper critical thinking about one’s own teaching philosophy, approach and curriculum design when working with communities of learners.
As a director of education, I don’t often have the chance to teach directly in the programs I
oversee, and yet, recently, I was in paradise fostering my artist-self at Hermitage Artist Retreat, where I was asked to work with a group of theater students at Booker Middle School, the only arts magnet school in Sarasota County, Florida. I decided to take the challenge to use elements of Levy’s book in preparation for my workshop sessions. I planned a studio workshop with theater students who were creating their own pieces of work to be performed later in the semester. I would work only once with these students so I wanted to support the teacher’s goal of building skills with developing a character’s physicality.
COURTNEY'S VIEW:
Levy notes how important it is to be clear
about your point of view on your core beliefs as this helps define curriculum design, teaching style
“The social contract of my workshops is that we
and even decisions about what career choices
see ourselves as…”:
one might make. I talk a lot about artistic core
Theater-makers, co-creators and risk-takers or
values in the same way to inform the choices we
trier outers.
all make as teaching artists. In the book, Levy invites teaching artist colleagues to share their perspectives in a section called Compendium of Views (pp. 39). I loved seeing a wide array of artists’ views and how they have similar themes. Using the prompts Levy provides (pp. 28), here are my answers:
“The best practice of my workshops is that we…”: Pop with ideas, that we listen to each other and honor prior knowledge both kinesthetically and intellectually; mining our own internal libraries to build new work within parameters
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
“My student’s role is…”: To take the wheel and fly “My approach, attitude, or philosophy is…”: They have all the tools they need, I’m here to make an offer and help name things as necessary “The strategy I use to bring all this together is…”: Be open, be in the moment, give clear and loving eye contact, listen, really listen. Ask questions I am actually interested in hearing their answers
MY DESIGN
In my planning call with Booker Middle School Theater teacher Carrie Mills, I was able to obtain
the 5W’s (pp. 54) and tailor the content accordingly for each group. WHAT: Theater classes WHO: One 6th grade class and one 7th grade class WHEN: A Tuesday WHERE: Middle School black box theater room with chairs around the perimeter of the room for an open space to work WHY/HOW: Both classes are working toward performances later in the semester. She was hoping to create an opportunity for her students to better connect physical movement with character building.
Next, I mapped out the lesson thinking about these essential practices of teaching artist craft (p 55):
ESTABLISHING SAFE PLACE: We opened in a circle and shared our name and the type of artist we identify as that day. I shared more about me and the work we would do during the session. ACCESSING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: I asked if they had heard the term “devise” and if they had ever worked non-verbally before. USING OPEN QUESTIONS: First we played alphabet relay where we split into 2 teams to generate words in alphabetical order under the theme of “teens.” Then I asked questions like “What did you notice?” about the two lists of words to compare and contrast. CONSTRUCTING
ANALOGIES:
I
ended
up
using
analogies,
unexpectedly, because the 6th grade group actually ended up using the theme of “the animal kingdom” instead of teens. In the next activity, I taught simple physical vocabulary and in the first round a small group of volunteer performers improvised while the rest of the class watched to see what happened. In the second round, a new set of performers were invited to select a word from the generated lists to help inform the quality of their improvised movements. Since I didn’t want the students to perform animal characters, I asked them to think about the qualities or traits of their chosen animals to inform their human characters. Page 35
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
HOW I RESPOND:
Daniel describes the third section of the overarching framework as the way a teaching artist
responds during a session that is informed by their views. This is how we curate throughout a session, moving with the group, making accommodations or guiding the group to be as successful as possible to maintain the goal of the session. I am always wanting students to feel heard, their voice matters. As we were experimenting I asked three simple questions after each round: • What did you notice?
• What did you like?
This reflective protocol is a simplified
• What did you wonder?
most magnificent way!! Overall, the
version of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process,
students
which is a way to give and receive feedback
each other, embracing of me
on works in progress. This process helps the
challenging them and so well
audience describe what they saw in each improved
behaved! They also were
scene and give positive feedback to their peers.
ready to try, to take risks and
With the last question, there is a chance to offer
it was a thrilling experience.
suggestions to strengthen the performers’ choices
It was also exciting to use
as we continue to create. This feedback process
Levy’s framework as a way
connects to my view of wanting learners to see
to prepare and reflect on the
and be seen in a positive and constructive manner.
experience.
As we would reflect, many students wanted to add
dialogue to the scene work, which was in direct
Companion* created an opportunity for me to look
opposition to the goal, however I didn’t want those
at my own teaching artist work with fresh eyes. It’s
students who were quite adamant about adding
a strong tool for facilitators of others’ creativity in
text to feel unheard. So we paused to discuss
the myriad learning communities with which one
why that suggestion was not selected as a
could work. Daniel gives the reader the choice as
directive to the performers and how
to how to use this manual in a way that suits one’s
we could make stronger choices as performers to communicate effectively
of
Daniel Levy’s A Teaching Artist
own needs, experience and interests.
Next up is for me to incorporate A Teaching
Artist Companion as required reading in my
physicality. At the end of
syllabus for the NYU grad course for the upcoming
the class, the students who
semester. It’s exciting to have this book added to
wanted to use dialogue
the field of teaching artistry.
most
were
initially
reticent,
were
the so
focused on communicating through facial expressions and large physical movement that they stole the scenes in the Page 36
supportive
their
and
through
were
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
About " A Teaching Artist’s Companion: How to Define and Develop Your Practice
A Teaching Artist’s Companion: How to Define and
Develop Your Practice is a how-to reference for veteran and beginning teaching artists alike. Artist-educator Daniel Levy has been working in classrooms, homeless shelters, and correctional facilities for over thirty years. With humor and hard-won insight, Levy and guest contributors narrate their successes and failures while focusing on the practical mechanics of working within conditions of limited time and resources. With the aid of checklists, worksheets, and primary sources, A Teaching Artist’s Companion invites you to define your own unique view, and guides your observing, critiquing, and shaping your practice over time. Available from Oxford University Press and Amazon.
About Courtney J. Boddie
Courtney J. Boddie is an actor, director,
teaching artist and artistic director of a theater collective called a space between. Director of Education/School Engagement, The New Victory Theater
overseeing
New
Victory
Education
Partnerships bringing 40,000 students from over 200 NYC schools, after schools, and summer programs to see high-quality live performing arts; classroom workshops; professional development for classroom teachers, and supervises 55+ teaching artists. President of the board of directors for Association of Teaching Artists; editorial board of Teaching Artist Journal; NYC Arts-in-Education Roundtable: Teaching Artist Committee and Taskforce on Equity and Inclusion. She is adjunct faculty for the Educational Theatre Graduate Program (course: The Teaching Artist) at New York University where she also received her Master’s degree. Page 37
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
PROBLEMS, PROCESS, PRODUCTS, AND PERSISTENCE
A Citywide Effort to Define Quality in Arts Education Programs. By Nicole Upton Director of Partnerships and Professional Learning, Ingenuity, Chicago
Introduction and Background on Ingenuity Ingenuity was founded in 2011 and works to increase arts education access, equity, and quality in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Our mission is to ensure every student, in every grade, in every school has access to the arts as part of a well-rounded education. Ingenuity is a national leader in arts data collection and mapping, a leading strategy partner to city and CPS leadership, and a staunch advocate for the arts in CPS. As Chicago's chief thought partner on arts education, Ingenuity takes a consultative approach to integrating arts education into our schools, and focuses on four primary strategies:
1
Data and Research: Ingenuity collects and disseminates data on arts access in schools to inform and fuel strategies to expand arts programming across the District. As a leader in data collection and impact assessment, Ingenuity provides the most accurate picture of arts education currently available for CPS. We provide stakeholders with this information via www.artlookmap.com.
2
School Leadership and Professional Development: Ingenuity designs and implements between 40-60 professional learning Institutes each year aimed at training and supporting hundreds of teachers, staff, and arts partners who coordinate and advocate for the arts in CPS.
3
Advocacy and Systems Building: Ingenuity advocates for strong policies that ensure the arts are available to all students.
4
Direct Investments in Arts Programs: Ingenuity is home to the Creative Schools Fund which provides grants to schools to support arts resources and expand arts programming.
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THE PROBLEM
What IS quality, what ISN’T, and who decides? If you were to survey 50 arts education program providers and teaching artists about how they define quality in arts education programs, you’d likely get 50 distinctly different answers. The question of quality certainly isn’t new. In addition to the seminal Qualities of Quality1 report released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2009, the efforts of cities around the country to promote quality in arts education have been well researched and documented, most notably in Boston2, Dallas3, and Seattle4. In recent years, Chicago has achieved success in expanding arts access within CPS, thanks to the collaborative efforts among CPS, the arts and arts education sectors, Ingenuity, philanthropic and cultural leaders, and the public at large. The individuals and organizations involved in this effort share a commitment to providing an equitable arts education to all youth in Chicago. Chicago has also made great strides in contributing to the national conversation and interest in arts education program quality. It is our belief that equity requires both access and quality. Now that access efforts are well under way in Chicago, we felt it was time to turn to quality—to understand what quality is, what it requires, and what it will take to make sure all students have access not just to arts education but to quality arts education.
THE PROCESS
How does a community create a shared language of quality? Ingenuity launched the Quality Initiative in November 2015 to define, assess, and enhance quality in arts education programs implemented by community arts partners and teaching artists. This inquiry took shape as a community engagement process in order to better achieve three core goals: to draw on the insights of practitioners in defining quality; to make sure that any products or tools created reflected the complexity and diversity of practice; and to make sure that the products or tools could be implemented in a useful, meaningful, and legitimate way. The work took place from November 2015 through July 2017. [1] Steve Sidel, Shari Tishman, Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, and Patricia Palmer, The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education (Cambridge, MA: 2009). [2] Boston Quality Review: http://www.creatingquality.org/home/bostonma/boston_quality_work.aspx. [3] Six Dimensions of Quality Teaching and Learning: http://test.creatingquality.org/Portals/1/DNNArticleFiles/634562569583116827CQ-6Dim-Qty-Teaching-Learning.pdf. [4]Community Arts Partner Roster Guidelines: http://www.creativeadvantageseattle.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2017-Guidelines-.pdf. Page 39
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PHASE ONE The first phase of Ingenuityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Quality Initiative explored the question of quality through community conversations and yielded a set of values and priorities for quality. A working hypothesis about how the arts education ecosystem must collaborate in pursuit of quality was developed. Additionally, sector-wide professional development needs were articulated. QUALITY CONVERSATIONS. Twenty-two quality conversations engaged 240 members of the Chicago arts community from 127 organizations in discussions on what quality means to them and their organizations. The conversations provided an opportunity for practitioners to come together and think deeply about quality, and generated data for research and further work. VALUES OF QUALITY. The Values of Quality were crafted after looking at quality conversation data. They are high-level descriptions of the shared priorities, values, and practices of quality in Chicago, though they clearly resonate with national concerns and priorities across the arts education sector. QUALITY ECOSYSTEM. A model for how quality works The Five Lenses tool completed in a in practice, particularly in terms of who is responsible quality conversation on June 28, 2016. for working toward quality and the relationships among those actors. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NEEDS. In the course of the quality conversations, participants repeatedly mentioned desires for more professional learning around traumainformed practices, classroom management, designing and using assessments, and communicating and engaging with families. Two additional areas of focus (setting learning objectives and outcomes, and record keeping, documentation, and student portfolio review) were also identified.
The Arts Partner Standards of Practice encompass both Instructional and Organizational Quality, and provide tools and resources for implementation. Page 40
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PHASE TWO During Phase Two of the Quality Initiative, Ingenuity undertook additional research and development activities to complement the core principles of quality identified in Phase One. These activities were:
MORE QUALITY CONVERSATIONS. By design, all of the Phase One quality conversations were multidisciplinary. Though this was valuable in understanding shared perspectives and philosophies across the sector, it did not help us to understand the ways in which quality practice may vary by discipline. Phase Two included targeted outreach to expert teaching artists representing each discipline to address specific questions raised during Phase One. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. Our data set was largely missing information pertaining to two key best practices of educators as defined by the Danielson Framework for Teaching5 and the research literature. As a result of this research insight, Ingenuity’s 2017– 18 Professional Learning Institutes were aligned to these needs and interests.Phase One. EXPERT WORKING GROUPS. During the Phase One, participants in conversations emphasized that it was important for arts partners to understand child development, differentiation, and how to teach students with special needs; to understand how to work with students affected by trauma in a safe and supportive manner; and to practice cultural inclusion and to build more diverse organizations. However, quality conversation participants did not feel that they had the requisite background to make specific recommendations. In Phase Two, we convened Expert Working Groups of individuals with professional expertise in these areas, who contributed tangible recommendations backed by research and practice. FUNDER ADVISORY GROUP. Throughout Phase One, participants repeatedly discussed the critical role of funders in supporting quality practice. Many of these participants were arts partners who shared best practices for working with funders, and criticisms of funders too; other participants worked for foundations and contributed the funder perspective on quality. As a result, funders were directly engaged in Phase Two. QUALITY COHORT. Phase One conversation participants frequently requested a “toolkit” which would help them to build skills and knowledge, implement quality, and collectively strategize as an organization. We identified a need to convene a “Quality Cohort” of arts partner organizations during Phase Two to help to build actual tools and resources, and to serve as a laboratory for strategic planning for quality within organizations. The Quality Cohort brought together arts partner organizations from across Chicago, comprising a cross-section of disciplines, sizes, and approaches represented in the city’s arts education sector. Together, the Cohort worked on improving one key aspect of the quality of their practice over a six-month period. SECONDARY RESEARCH AND SYNTHESIS. After analyzing the data from all of the above-mentioned research activities, Ingenuity’s research team worked to fill a few gaps. Additionally, we wanted to ensure that the final products and tools were aligned to insights from the existing literature on quality in arts education that were gleaned in Phase One. [5] Charlotte Danielson, “The Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument: 2013 Edition,” The Danielson Group, accessed September 12, 2016, https://www.danielsongroup.org/framework/. Page 41
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THE PRODUCTS
How can we codify three-years of work into understandable and useful tools and resources? Three-years later, and at the conclusion of Phase Two, we had engaged more than 400 arts education stakeholders in a robust conversation around community arts education programs and teaching artist quality. The Arts Partner Standards of Practice (APSP) are the result of this work and designed to be used by the more than 1,100 arts organizations and Teaching Artists who work with CPS schools (Upton_15_photo4). The Standards of Practice include tools and processes to help arts organizations improve arts program outcomes. The Standards also serve to establish consensus values about how to define, assess, evaluate, and improve the quality of Teaching Artist instruction, and how to best align to school district priorities. THE FRAMEWORKS. The Arts Partner Standards of Practice articulate a vision for quality teaching and learning in practice through two lenses: Instructional Quality and Organization Quality. Recognizing that many stakeholders must work together to bring quality arts education to thousands of people across Chicago, Frameworks have been designed for both. Each Framework describes the unique role and responsibilities of Teaching Artists and community arts partner organizations. The Instructional and Organization Frameworks are modeled structurally after Danielsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Framework for Teaching6, adopted by the Chicago Public Schools as the CPS Framework for Teaching. The Frameworks are designed to help organizations and Teaching Artists better align artistic and education work, and can be used to structure continued progress toward enhancing practices of quality
Over the last two years, Ingenuity engaged over 400 arts partners in a series of conversations as part of the Quality Initiative. The Arts Partner Standards of Practice were born from those conversations.
THE GUIDE. The Guide is meant to serve as a companion to the Arts Partner Standards of Practice The purpose of the guide is to help: Teaching Artists reflect on their current practices. Teaching Artists and program managers learn more about elements of the Frameworks. Teaching Artists and program managers engage in professional conversation about the Framework. Teaching Artists and program managers gain a better understanding of how Teaching Artists demonstrate proficiency in practice. Program managers design, implement, and monitor Teaching Artist training and development. Funders understand the roles of Teaching Artists and arts partner organizations in pursuing quality, so as to support best practice and capacity-building. Funders understand the role of the funder in the arts education ecosystem, so as to align funding strategy and catalyze system-wide supports. Page 42
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THE TOOLKIT. The Toolkit provides multiple pathways into the cycle of thinking about quality, and a structured process to help organizations define their vision for quality practice in dialogue with the vision that has been developed by the arts education community. Organizations work on isolating and drilling down on a problem of practice one at a time through Toolkit exercises. INSTITUTES, MINI-COURSES, AND SUMMITS. Ingenuity has created professional learning opportunities to help ensure that the hundreds of community arts partners who provide services to CPS schools each year have access to the relevant learning needed to propel highquality work in schools. Institutes and Summits focus on educating and preparing external arts and cultural partners to more effectively align their work with the CPS priorities. Programs and events are aimed at helping partners to distribute their programs more efficiently and equitably across the district. The Frameworks can be used: AS A TOOL TO HELP COORDINATE FUNDING. Partners can use the Frameworks to map out goals and ascertain which will require new and/or continued funding. After mapping out their needs, organizations can then systematically determine which needs are appropriate for each of their funding requests. Partners can use the Frameworks as a starting point for conversation and include it in grant applications. AS AN ASSESSMENT TOOL IN THE CLASSROOM. The Frameworks shine as a description of what Teaching Artists and organizations actually do in practice. Teaching Artists can use the Instructional Framework as a self-assessment, walking through each focus and determining which level of proficiency in each is most applicable to their practice. Similarly, program directors can use the Instructional Framework as a tool for classroom observation and to structure dialogue and feedback surrounding classroom observations.
PERSISTENCE
What’s next? How will the Arts Partner Standards of Practice be sustained and supported? The most important next step for the arts partner community is to begin to shift practices of quality by using the Arts Partner Standards of Practice as a guide. However, implementing quality across the sector will be challenging. Engaging in quality work is time, labor, and cost intensive and most arts partners will need financial and technical support through the quality process. Holding arts partners accountable for quality programming is challenging, and most arts partners have a difficult time assessing quality. We are currently exploring two main systems-level challenges: How can different stakeholders hold partners accountable? How can partners be incentivized (financially or otherwise) to complete the quality process? [6] Chicago Public Schools, “The CPS Framework for Teaching,” Chicago Public Schools, accessed February 8, 2016, https://cps.edu/ ReachStudents/Documents/FrameworkForTeaching.pdf. Page 43
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While working towards a shared vision of quality presents its challenges, a shared language for defining, assessing, and enhancing quality paves the way for increased, multidirectional accountability. Increased external accountability means funders and schools can hold organizations accountable for delivering high-quality programs. Increased internal accountability means organizations can be more accountable to themselves by being able to articulate the quality of their programs and make continuous improvements. Ingenuity is working to build out additional resources and explore sustainability models over time in response to partner needs, including: EXISTING SYSTEMS. Embedding the APSP into existing procurement, vendor expectations, request for qualifications bids, and other systems at CPS. TIERED-SYSTEMS OF SUPPORT. Developing a dedicated resource to support the capacitybuilding necessary for organizations and teaching artists of all sizes, capacities, and budgets to improve practice by implementing the APSP. ALIGNMENT TO PROFESSIONAL LEARNING. In order to help arts partners and Teaching Artists identify areas of strength and prioritize learning in areas of improvement, all annual professional learning events align clearly to the APSP. PROFESSIONAL LEARNING QUIZ AND ONLINE RESOURCES. Designed to diagnose and assess practitioner strengths and opportunities in the Arts Partner Standards of Practice focus areas, an interactive online Professional Learning Quiz was created. After taking a short 5-minute quiz, program managers and teaching artists receive customized results to assist in igniting learning, close knowledge gaps, engaging in professional conversations, and advocating for further staff development and professional investment. Additionally, customized and curated links to online resources in the form of presentation slide decks, worksheets, and exemplar tools directly support participant immediate needs in each identified area for growth or learning. TEACHING ARTIST STIPENDS. In the 2019-2020 school year, Ingenuity began to offer professional learning stipends to teaching artists attending Ingenuity training. These stipends are designed to support teaching artists in building proficiency in the APSP components, and to increase teaching artist knowledge, skill, and impact in classrooms and communities. Using the Teaching Artist Guildâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pay Rate Calculator7, Ingenuity determined that for the Chicago area, a $50/hour stipend was an appropriate rate (contract-based, emerging teaching artist, zero dependents, mid-sized organization). Additionally, arts organizations were required to act as the lead applicant for the stipend, and commit to sending one additional teaching artist to the training and pay them at the same $50/hour rate. Though Chicago has made great strides in ensuring all students have access to an arts education, it is now time we double-down on the matter of quality. As you think about access and quality in your own context, consider who is at the table. What are the conversations you are having? Who is missing? The critical conversations you have towards reaching your own goals around access, quality, and ultimately, arts education equity, will deeply impact your students today, and leave a lasting impact across the country tomorrow.
[7] Pay Rate Calculator, Teaching Artists Guild: https://teachingartistsguild.org/pay-rate-calculator/ Page 44
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The Quality Ecosystem focuses on individuals and organizational entities who have the capacity to act and interact for quality, and how they need to come together to ensure quality in the classroom.
About Nicole Upton As Director of Partnerships and Professional Learning at Ingenuity in Chicago, Nicole designs, develops, and delivers over 40 professional learning experiences each year to build capacity, strengthen leadership, and facilitate collaboration of arts and cultural organizations, teaching artists, and arts teachers. BA in Theatre, MA in Educational Theatre. facebook.com/ingenuitychicago twitter.com/IngenuityChgo linkedin.com/company/ingenuity-incorporated vimeo.com/user21861033 youtube.com/channel/UCuY5an-c-r6nlmfHUvDU0-w Page 45
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
Functioning in these ever changing days:
COVID-19 RESOURCES FOR TEACHING ARTISTS From Teaching Artists Guild
On Friday, March 13, 2020, Teaching Artists Guild joined with the Association of Teaching Artists, the National Guild for Community Arts Education, Creative Generation, NYC Arts in Education Roundtable and the Teaching Artists of the Mid-Atlantic to present a webinar for teaching artists bracing for the impact of COVID-19 on the United States. During the webinar, many excellent resources were shared by panelists and participants alike, and there were numerous requests for a “master list” to be collected and published for the benefit of everyone in the field. We have published the recording of that nation-wide webinar (the transcript of that webinar is available for download here), as well as our master list of resources, and a form that will allow you to submit more resources for the benefit of the community. Please share, and add any new resources!
IMPORTANT POLICY UPDATES AFFECTING TEACHING ARTISTS, ARTISTS, AND GIG WORKERS! If you are an employee, you have access to unemployment benefits if you have been laid off. You can also apply for lost wages if your hours have been reduced because of the pandemic, but you’re still on payroll. Search the web for your State’s Employment Department for more information and to apply. If you are an independent contractor, you may now apply for unemployment as well, thanks to the passage last week of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus, which includes new unemployment benefits for self-employed, part-time and gig workers who in the past haven’t been eligible for such benefits. This is huge news for artists and gig workers who make some or all of their income as independent contractors. Go to your State’s Employment Department for more information and to apply! The Federal CARES Act increases weekly benefits for ALL unemployed workers by $600 a week for up to four months and extends benefit payments from 26 to 39 weeks. Please take care of yourself and if you feel you may be eligible, apply. Page 46
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Additionally, small businesses and nonprofit organizations can apply for loans to cover rent, utilities, and payroll, up to $10 Million, and may apply for loan forgiveness. See this article for details. This is huge news, and we hope many of you will be helped by the CARES Act and other local measures to support workers. Thank you to all who wrote letters to their representatives urging support!
UPDATES FROM TAMA (The Teaching Artists of the Mid-Atlantic) In these unprecedented times, we turn to our community that is both rich in spirit and generosity for inspired local and regional networking! TAMA’s networks, serving DE, DC, MD, NJ, NY, PA, VA & WV, are here for you! Last month we launched the TAMA Salon Series as a way to entertain, inspire and motivate each other during the present and into the future! Three ways to participate in the TAMA Salon Series: 1. RSVP for the TA CAFÉ! Details below. 2. Email us a Salon topic and host it using TAMA’s zoom account 3. Organize a Local Network in your area. Learn more about being a Local Coordinator TA CAFE: Mondays | 9:30AM Start your work week out with TAMA! Rise and shine TAs! Before you plug into the news, grab your coffee or tea and plug into your network. As Teaching Artists are invited to reinvent their work, this is an opportunity to share your dreams and invent the future together. Break out the comfy chair in your living or settle into the corner of your porch that faces the sunrise. Dress up or arrive in your PJs. Bring a special friend (pet, rock, child). Share a creative activity – knitting, a poem, a mandala, a book, a script idea. Attend with your video on or off. What do you want? What do you need? This is an informal time together where we each set our own rules and play together. Our hope is to support and empower each other because together we are stronger! Click here to RSVP Click here to learn more tasmidatlantic@gmail.com teachingartists.org facebook.com/TAsMidAtlantic/ @teachingartistsmidatlantic Page 47
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
THE DEEP END Creating Future Health in a Viral Present By Eric Booth
I write this as the frightening numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths keep rising, particularly in my home state of New York—the U.S. has become the global hotspot of the pandemic. Our field has been largely shut down, teaching artists are staying at home, solving shortterm problems in life management, as serious longer-term questions lurk—a time of uncertainty. I feel the immediacy of the crisis and its attendant emotions as I write from quarantine, having contracted the virus, and having seen almost all of my paid work disappear. Our field has taken hits before, recession cutbacks, shocks like 9/11, but I have not seen anything quite like this in my four-plus decades as a teaching artist. The day my physical symptoms appeared is also the day I came across this essay from one of the nation’s leading arts industry analysts (Alan Brown at WolfBrown). This is the first time I have seen a top consultant identify teaching artists as a crucial component of the arts ecosystem, and name teaching artists as the most economically vulnerable sector. Amazing, right?—a rare high-level shout-out about our importance paired with a warning about our fragility. The next day, the entire 40-member teaching artist faculty of the New York Philharmonic, one of the best in the U.S., was dropped without pay. One of the most useful tools in my consultant’s kitbag is The Cynefin Framework. It organizes the challenges people (including teaching artists) and organizations face into categories that guide decision making. I have written about it before, and there is a lot of material on the web—be warned, it is seriously heady stuff. One of the domains it investigates is chaos. Teaching artists (and many others) find themselves in chaos right now, and Cynefin has some guidance about how we might think and make choices in this time of turbulent disruption, when patterns of cause and effect in our work are no longer reliable, circumstances keep shifting, and we have to deal with the now rather than rely on norms and old solutions.
"I have not seen anything quite like this in my four-plus decades as a teaching artist.
Page 48
I think of the chaotic quadrant of the Cynefin framework as the artist’s domain. These are natural ways of working in our artmaking: We know how to function well within uncertainty (we know what to do when we don’t know what to do). We use the decisionmaking sequence of act-sense-respond, which doesn’t work well for the other problem-types. We look for what works, and, from that, we look to find new order rather than applying an outside scheme. We privilege intuition over logic. We naturally return to core principles and experiment boldly from there. Amid the churn, we can stop—as the saying goes: “Don’t just do something,
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
stand there.” In our creative processes, we know to listen and look to truly see what’s going on. Here are a few practical implications of Cynefin’s theory for ways teaching artists might manage this time: Experiment. Experiment with ways to bring the distinctive potency of teaching artistry into online activity. There has been a characteristically inventive and energetic burst of activity online by teaching artists, driven by urgency and aimed at keeping connections and communication and creating visibility. This is fine. But the real experimentation we need, to turn this crisis into an opportunity, is to stand firmly on our distinctive strengths as teaching artists and devise new ways to engage with our best strengths as TAs, within the enabling constraints of virtual connection. Of course keep going with the gotta-get-stuff-out-there necessities, but experiment more deeply too with the capacity to activate the artistry of others. I once watched a teaching artist activate the artistry of six teenagers who were deaf and blind, and bring them into a percussion ensemble in 45 minutes. If one of us can go that deep into our true teaching artist genius, the creative power of all of us can pioneer new ways to achieve our core missions. Currently, video games show the power of online engagement, and there are endless arts-making instructions online, but where are we? Think of that most marvelous work you can deliver in a workshop—and relentlessly experiment toward that, online. All of us. Now. As Barack Obama said when faced with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, “A crisis is too good an opportunity to waste.” "Think of that most
marvelous work you can deliver in a workshop—and relentlessly experiment toward that, online. All of us. Now.
Connect. I now hear from friends and colleagues I haven’t been in touch with for ages, and the same is happening for others. We are a field; can’t you feel it now?—even though we function mostly as freelancers. You know this from your work both as an artist and as a teaching artist: your work advances better when you are connected to a like-spirited group of colleagues. Now is the time to re-contact the creativity-boosting friends you haven’t been in touch with for a while—not just with a Facebook “like”—to have a Zoom glass of wine with three colleagues who think like you, to invite someone from another organization you’ve always wanted to sit down with to share a Skype lunch. And when you do, don’t get stuck in dealing with current difficulties. Do what teaching artists do: inquire and improvise together, play with possibilities, make new worlds possible. There is joy in connecting with your spirit-mates. Allow yourself joy. Learn. In the past three weeks, there has been a tenfold increase in registrations at Kadenze, the foremost online arts learning platform (and the only one with an online teaching Page 49
Teaching Artists Guild Quarterly: Issue 18
artist course). I hear from others who are feeling a “should” about devoting this liminal time to advancing some part of their work, but who haven’t actually found the time and new habits to do so yet. Now is the time to inquire into new areas that have that tickle of interest. As an artist, you recognize that the blip of curiosity is the beckoning finger of yearning and creative drive. Listen for it; follow it. It knows something deep; it offers new paths. It may be a book to read, or a conversation to have, or exploratory writing, or messing around in your medium. Merlin’s advice to young King Arthur in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.” One of the fundamentals of teaching artistry is our relentless urge to reach beyond the literal, beyond the expedient, beyond standard solutions and “good enough” creations. We see the world as if it could be otherwise, and we have the skills to bring that new world into being. Now is exactly the time for that.
About Eric Booth Eric Booth (Hudson River Valley, NY) In arts learning, he has been on the faculty of Juiliard (13 years), and has taught at Stanford University, NYU, Tanglewood and Lincoln Center Institute (for 26 years), and he has given classes for every level from kindergarten through graduate school; he has given workshops at over 30 universities, and 60 cultural institutions. He has designed and led over twenty research projects, and seven online courses and workshops. He serves as a consultant for many organizations, cities and states and businesses around the U.S., which has included seven of the ten largest U.S. orchestras, five national service organizations, Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center. Formerly the Founding Director of the Teacher Center of the Leonard Bernstein Center (now on the Board of Directors), he is a frequent keynote speaker on the arts and teaching artistry groups of all kinds. He is the Senior Advisor to the El Sistema movement in the U.S. He gave the closing keynote address to UNESCO's first ever worldwide arts education conference (Lisbon 2006), the opening keynote to UNESCO's 2014 World Conference. He led the First and Second international Teaching Artist Conferences (Oslo 2012, Brisbane 2014). Page 50
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JOIN THE TEACHING ARTISTS ASSET MAP TODAY teachingartistsguild.org/asset-map Page 51
TEACHING ARTISTS GUILD
www.teachingartistsguild.org