Arts in Education
by Scott Noppe-Brandon

As Executive Director of Lincoln Center Institute, an arts and education organization of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, I appreciate this opportunity to invite, challenge and promote dialogue among the many readers, print and web-based, around issues pertinent to everyone involved in education—teachers, school leaders, artists, arts organizations, parents, community members and policy makers of all ilks.

Many of us in the world of the arts, especially those of us who live in both the arts and education are trying to be more precise in exploring and implementing how the arts relate to the entire curriculum. Fortunately most people understand that the arts should be part of the everyday school curriculum, evidenced by public opinion studies (Gallup, Roper), which state that the general public (over 90%) wants the arts within public education. If dissent arises it usually surfaces around questions of how the arts fit into the already crowded (and growing increasingly more so with current mandates) school day. Yet this discussion occurs within the reality that most school districts either employ too few certified arts educators or districts engage the expertise of arts organizations on a “vendor” contract rather than on a “partnership” contract. This distinction is important as a vendor can best be described as someone who sells or peddles a product while a partnership implies a relationship in which each party has equal status, a certain independence and implicit obligation to the other. If arts organizations were selling #2 pencils to schools this would make sense but not when the relationship is curricular in design. As noted by Dr. John Goodlad, these casual or vendor relationships create an environment where “commitment and recommendations, like virtue, are commendable but insufficient in themselves.”

To avoid that insufficiency this discussion must lead us in to a non-vendor way of partnering between school systems and arts organizations and arts educators? The challenge to all educators and artists is to value this part of the human experience as a significant dimension of the learning process and to realize that what we have in the arts is a potent force in the struggle to ensure that the next generation will be able to function freely and inventively in the imaginative domain. This way of working will establish a different type of public-private relationship. It is my conviction that only then can our discussion about how the arts fit into a crowded curriculum, how they enhance learning, how they foster our ideals about life, democracy, imagination be better understood and implemented across the school day, across the curriculum, across teaching and learning.#

Scott Noppe-Brandon is the Executive Director of the Lincoln Center Institute. He will be a regular contributor to Education Update.

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