State budget cuts and the often long wait that schools face for payments from the state have hurt arts education. Art teachers have been laid off. Schools sometimes forgo buying supplies such as paper and paint when the state is slow to pay, because often those are some of the only things in their bottom line that are flexible.
I remember visiting an elementary school a few years ago, and seeing a shelf of construction paper with a note reminding teachers that what was on the shelf was all that was left for the year because the state payments were late. It was near the end of the year, and I am not saying that conserving school resources is bad idea. But it did make me a little sad. How do you tell the child excited about an art project that you are out of his or her choice color of construction paper? As a teacher’s kid, who has an art teacher as a best friend, I know that dedicated educators often make up for a lack of supplies out of their own pocketbooks or make projects possible that would never happen if they didn’t provide some of the extras needed.
Education policies, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, that focus heavily on math and reading and the need for continually improving test scores pull emphasis away from the arts. It becomes harder to justify time and money spent on music, visual art and theater when the curriculum requirements for core subjects just get steeper and steeper.
In the pages of this magazine, there have been stories about layoffs, budget cuts, the backlog of overdue bills and many of the challenges facing education that trickle down to the arts. For a story on teacher layoffs that ran in Illinois Issues in May 2010, I spoke with a dedicated and energetic art teacher who lost his job because of budget cuts. A tech savvy teacher who encouraged his students to write blogs about their artwork, he drew some media attention when he began his own blog about his experience and provided a place for other educators and school employees who had been laid off to air their stories. The future for education funding in Illinois does not look sunny, but many in the arts education community are taking to the Web for advocacy, information and low cost resources.
Arts Alliance Illinois partnered with several artists, arts organizations and education institutions — including the Illinois Arts Council and the Illinois State Board of Education — to launch the Arts & Education Exchange in October. It is in essence a networking site for art educators and art professionals.
Swerdlow says arts education resources often come from sources outside of the classroom. “I think on the one hand, while may schools are making cuts to their arts programing, increasingly you are seeing teaching artists and arts organizations trying to fill that void.”
The exchange is meant to help facilitate a partnership between art teachers and professional artists who are interested in education. The site could, for example, help a teacher find a theater troupe willing to visit the classroom and put on a short play, or a ceramics artist to demonstrate a special glazing technique for students. The exchange also could also help artists who want to get involved but don’t know how. Swerdlow says many artists do not know the best way to “get their foot in the door” to volunteer at a school, meaning they are unsure of whom to contact or where to go.
The exchange is open to Illinois teachers and art organizations, as well as arts organizations from out of state that provide programs in Illinois. Visitors create a profile as either an arts educator or an arts provider and then are able to access the site’s information as well as post in their own. There is information about funding sources for both educators and artists and an online forum for teachers and artists to share ideas. Arts organizations can post details on offerings, such as after-school programs, that teachers can pass along to students. Teachers looking to incorporate an artistic demonstration into their lesson plans can post project requests.
Swerdlow says that connecting artists to art educators can create exciting learning opportunities for students, but teaching artists cannot replace trained professionals who are both knowledgeable in the arts and have received a degree and training as an educator “It’s our belief at the Arts Alliance is that what’s ideal is to have both of those things going on in the classrooms,” says Swerdlow.
From the alliance’s statement on the subject: “Effective instruction in the arts requires knowledge of artistic processes as well as an understanding of the developmental needs and stages of children. Certified arts teachers are experts in both their arts discipline and the appropriate pedagogy for their students. It is essential that schools and districts invest in the hiring of certified arts teachers so students receive the same quality instruction in the arts as in other subject areas. …Programs found on the Arts & Education Exchange are meant to enhance a school’s existing arts resources. Arts partners and teaching artists should complement — not replace — certified arts teachers.”
However Swerdlow says budget cuts have left some parents and teachers looking to arts programs outside of school. “Given that state of the economy and given the reality of school funding … we thought it was important to give educators and parents full access to all the resources that are available.” As of early December, 200 art providers had registered with the exchange.
A project from the nonprofit organization Ingenuity Incorporated will piggyback on the exchange. The organization partnered with Chicago Public Schools to create an interactive map of groups that provide arts education help to Chicago schools. The map will show which organizations are doing work in what schools, and as new groups register with the exchange, they will be added to the map. “The mapping system could be used in a multitude of ways, depending on who you are and what you are interested in,” says Paul Sznewajs, executive director of Ingenuity Incorporated.
Sznewajs gives the example of two arts organizations that have been working in the same school for years unaware of each other. The map could change that and give them a chance to collaborate. He says parent organizations could see what other neighborhood schools are doing and use them as a model to get more help in their own arts departments. “How is it that they are doing it? And my school three blocks this way could benefit from more arts programs,” he says.
A group of former computing consultants is providing teachers with an innovative way to display their students’ work around the world. Artsonia is a Web-based art museum that and preserves student art permanently in an online archive and showcases it at www.artsonia.com.
Once parents give approval, teachers can then take pictures of student’s art and post it to the site. Artsonia has instructional videos to walk teachers through posting process. There is also an Artsonia application that teachers can use on smart phones and tablets. “We really just supply a set of tools and the art teachers themselves are the ones who do all the work to upload,” says Jim Meyers, cofounder and chief operating officer of Artsonia, which is based in Gurnee.
Meyers says that when he and his coworkers were launching the site, they assumed they would be able to drum up cooperate sponsorship. But, Meyer says, the timing was not good. The dot.com bubble of Internet businesses was starting to burst just as he and others were working to get Artsonia off the ground. The solution Meyer and his colleagues finally reached turned out to be fund raising opportunity for schools as well. The site sells merchandise, such as coffee mugs or cards, with student artwork printed on them. Schools arts programs get 15 percent of the profit from any products that bear their students’ creations, and the rest goes to run the company. Art departments can get a check any time there is money due to them. They can also ask for art supply gift certificates instead to ensure that any money coming in is spent on the arts.
Meyer says in Artsonia’s first year, the site received about 10,000 submissions of student art. By the end of the current school year, he estimates Artsonia will receive about 4 million submissions from around the world. The site awards an “artist of the week” plaque, and Meyer says, “We hear stories of how that’s changed a little artists life.” Artsonia partnered with the Big Screen Project to get a 30-minute show of students’ work shown on a 30- by 16-foot video screen in Midtown Manhattan. Patents, kids and teachers made the trip to see the showing, and one teacher told Meyer of a student’s reaction: “‘You just created an artist for life.’” Artsonia is planning more shows with the Big Screen Project in 2012. Meyers won the 2011 award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Education Outside of the Profession from the Illinois Art Education Association.
Such examples of online innovation in arts education are encouraging. But technology is not perfect. Artsonia relies on photos, which cannot always capture the texture of a piece, such as a painting or textile. Anyone who has done much online shopping knows that real life colors do not always translate well in digital form. You cannot pick up a ceramic piece or look at it from all sides on a computer screen. Internet forums and tools can also leave behind lower-income parents and families, who do not have a home computer or readily available Internet access. Those and other online projects are a useful component to the art education community, as long as it is not forgotten that nothing can replace the opportunity to learn about and practice the arts under the direction of a trained teacher in a classroom that offers the same opportunities for all kids. And nothing beats the childhood joy of taking a pair of scissors and a little glue to a fresh sheet of construction paper.
Illinois Issues, December 2011
