The History of Teaching Artistry

The History of Teaching Artistry, by Eric Booth
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach—according to George Bernard
Shaw, who also wrote that he never learned anything from a teacher, he
taught himself everything; so maybe GBS had a little ax to grind. He got it
quite wrong—the truth is that those who can do two things well, at the
same time, in almost any setting, are teaching artists.
The History of Teaching Artistry:
Where we come from, are, and are heading
By Eric Booth
December 2010
PREFACE
To know who you are, you must know where you come from. So too
for the emergent profession of teaching artistry, which might be described as
a fastgrowing teenager—past puberty but still not moving with a
twentysomething’s confident stride. This essay aspires to trace briefly the
history of teaching artistry. It does not provide the academic rigor of a proper
history, and I hope an ambitious historian will take up the challenge and
provide an authoritative version for us all. Nor does the scope of this essay
allow me to identify the dozens of specific organizations and individuals who
have provided important flagstones on the path, or those who are currently
doing exemplary work around the country—they deserve to be recognized
and thanked. This essay offers a distilled sense of the journey, its general
contours, in order to ground our sense of the complex present and clarify its
proliferation of opportunity. Even though the characterizations of decades
and phases are oversimplified, given the jumble of activity that unfolded
during each decade, I feel the following descriptions are accurate enough to
propose as the truthful story. I also offer two organizational constructs at the
end of this essay; I hope they provide useful distinctions to elucidate our
ongoing evolution. I welcome others who wish to take this essay and expand
it in additional foundationbuilding ways.
In setting our historical context, let’s openly acknowledge some of its
“negatives.” The field of teaching artistry does not speak in a unified voice—
never has and possibly never will. (This does not negate it as a field at all;
does politics speak with a unified voice?) Our growing body of writing about
teaching artistry enables the field to begin to know itself. There are increasing
numbers of surveys that illuminate aspects of teaching artistry (the insights of
which have not been gathered for handy dissemination), and a first national
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research study coming to fruition. However, there is no widely accepted
definition of what a teaching artist is, no established set of work parameters
to clarify what a teaching artist does, nor any set of basic practices that may
be considered the key tools that teaching artists use. There is not even a sense
of what teaching artists should teach; a strength of teaching artistry is
responding inventively to specific goals, opportunities, and needs rather than
delivering any established curriculum. Teaching artistry has no national
organization, no national certification processes (although local and regional
processes are developing), no central location, no suggested sets of curricula,
no designated advocates (although many advocate out of personal mission).
This lack of key organizing elements may be viewed as a sign of the
immaturity of the field, or as a healthy refusal to adopt structures that do not
derive organically from the heart of the practice—there certainly is truth in
the former view, but I incline toward the latter. In some ways I think this field
is growing more wisely than it knows. Teaching artistry is indirectly choosing
not to become what hasn’t worked particularly well for other arts and arts
learning fields. Teaching artistry hasn’t found the embodiment as a
professional field of the authentic tools that provide its power in practice. Yet.
DEFINITION
A working definition: “A teaching artist is a practicing professional
artist with the complementary skills, curiosities and sensibilities of an
educator, who can effectively engage a wide range of people in learning
experiences in, through, and about the arts.” I have read a dozen other
definitions that are at least as good, and have written more than a few myself.
Some people think that the lack of a consensus definition demonstrates
weakness in the field; perhaps so, but please show me the consensus
definitions of “creativity,” “teacher,” and “friend.” Part of the challenge of
defining the role is its essential hybridity—it is neither one role nor the other,
but intentionally both. In an economy of specific job titles, traditional silos,
and government employment coding, this makes teaching artistry
inconvenient to categorize, until the world catches up to recognize the new
category. It is worth noting that surveys show that its two component
professions—teachers and artists—are both held in low to moderate esteem in
the U.S. public eye, or at least not in high regard. The opening quotation from
Shaw gives a sense of the negative prejudices around teachers; the 2003 LINC
research found that only 27% of Americans think artists contribute “a lot” to
the general good of society, suggesting some of the bias against artists. So, to
some degree, a teaching artist is tarred with the double disrespect of common
prejudice. In the long run, I think the hybridity will become its distinctive
contribution, eventually recognized as a new category, stronger for being an
alloy.
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LINEAGE
Teaching artistry grows from the soil of two different artistic
traditions: 1) the training of artists and 2) the democratic impulse to include
everyone in the cultural commons. These two traditions map roughly as the
specialist and the generalist or democratic tracks. Let’s pause for a quick
worldview before returning to these two tracks.
At UNESCO’s firstever worldwide arts education conference (Lisbon
2006), I discovered what an undistinguished place the U.S. holds in the world
landscape. Indeed, UNESCO originally forgot to invite America to the
conference (partly because we have been unreliable supporters of UNESCO,
no doubt). At that conference, it became clear to me that the U.S. is far below
most other UNESCO nations in arts education commitment—U.S. public
school students average less than one third the number of inschool arts
education hours than the average in other UNESCO countries. Given the
embarrassment of our far below average norms, I discerned four areas in
which U.S. arts education practice is the most advanced in the world: 1) the
breadth and quality of conservatory training; 2) the quality and depth of arts
learning experiments; 3) the quality and depth of arts learning partnerships
between schools and other organizations (which nurture most of those
experiments); and 4) teaching artists. The U.S. has the best teaching artists in
the world, the most advanced understanding of teaching artist practices, and
the broadest application of those capacities in an increasing number of
settings.
Back to our two teaching artist historical tracks. The artist training
track might also be called the conservatory track. The U.S. can now boast the
largest highquality conservatory training system in the world, having earned
unprecedented near parity among the many conservatory and university
programs, which align with high arts training throughout Western culture,
but exceed other countries in size and depth. Because our public schooling
has such undistinguished arts education programs to feed this track (with
some glorious exceptions), teaching artists have been used to supplement
perenniallyunderfunded school arts programs. Through most of the 20th
century, schooling offered a “gifted and talented” track in music and the
visual arts, while theater lived in and around English classes and dance held
a place in physical education. Organizations outside of schools—music and
visual arts schools, dance academies, theater programs and projects,
programs at arts institutions, after school and during summers—have
provided the essential education to feel the disciplinary training system.
Teaching artists have appeared intermittently beside arts specialists in
schools, and independently, as “enrichment” for over a century to expose
kids to the feel and possibilities of the different art forms. The practices used
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in the conservatory track are not much different than those found throughout
Western countries, and valuable as they are, this arts education track has not
been the one to distinguish American teaching artistry.
The second teaching artist track, the democratic impulse to provide all
people, especially all young people, with arts experiences and opportunities
has given birth to the power of teaching artistry. It makes sense that this
phenomenon was born in the U.S. because it aligns with America’s history of
establishing universal public education, a widespread public library system,
the Settlement House movement, the progressive education movement, the
WPA Artists Project, and so forth. Perhaps the need that drove the emergence
of teaching artistry is less acute in other Western nations where cultural
norms are more arts inclusive, holding expectations that every child will
consistently participate in arts experiences. (I recall a conversation years ago
with French arts educators about teaching artists. When I described how U.S.
teaching artists turn young people on to the arts, making them aware of the
importance and relevance of the arts, the French colleagues looked confused
—they didn’t understand that special individuals were needed for this task
because everyone in a young French person’s life took that necessity
seriously.) Beginning as early as the 1830s, in the Boston area, the arts were
brought into schools. As public schooling grew, so did the sense that the arts
belonged as a part of citizenship preparation. Soon after the end of the
nineteenth century, the arts were a norm in U.S. public schools. There were
two main reasons for bringing the arts into schools: the inherent reasons that
argued that artistic capacity was an essential part of becoming an educated
person, and the instrumental reasons that argued that “the manual arts”
(particularly music and the visual arts, still our dominant instruction
disciplines) developed fine motor skills that prepared better workers for an
industrial economy. It is interesting to note that the inherent and instrumental
arguments are still used in arts education advocacy, with the inherent
arguments struggling for traction, and the instrumental view now arguing for
the 21st century learning skills required in the workplace of the future.
Throughout most of the 20th century, America believed that arts learning
belonged in public school education—elementary school teachers across
America were required to teach the arts (basic piano skills were a certification
requirement). Middle schools were an uncertain few years for youth arts
instruction, but high schools all offered various arts elective tracks and some
general instruction for many.
This inherent valuing of the arts as a life priority being less true in the
U.S. than in the Western European countries we looked to as models, cultural
leaders have assumed a proactive commitment to go out and include all
young people in arts experiences. The importance of such inclusion has
become an article of faith for those in the arts; it is a social mission (an
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expensive one) we take on in an artsambivalent culture. School based
programs have never been able to engage the entire youth population
adequately, so teaching artists became a significant instrument of this
endeavor. Special efforts have been made to engage young people on the low
end of the socioeconomic scale, where arts access has always been even
scarcer. (Similar efforts toward the “underserved” were not prioritized in
most other Western nations until recently.) For some decades of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, this inclusive impulse went so far as to propose that
the arts were a primary way to socialize new immigrants and the poor, in the
Settlement House movement. This sense of mission has been strongly
influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey, which affirmed the
essentialness of the arts in public education.
These two tracks—conservatory/specialist and democratic
inclusion/generalist both still exist, usually in a healthy mix of impulses that
makes them indistinguishable in practice. The following history provides a
view of the growth of the role of teaching artistry from those lineages, its
steady expansion into new capacities and professional aspirations, and its
recent moves into whole new fields of endeavor.
HISTORY
Artists have always visited schools, before and after the arts began to
appear in the common public school curriculum after the turn into the 20th
century. Throughout the 20th century, artists have been valued for providing
schools with enrichment experiences, and were also seen as introducing
career options, as firemen and doctors making elementary school
appearances did. In my own elementary schooling in the 1950s, I recall the
vivid impact of assembly programs in which performing artists spoke with
and performed for us. Will Geer, a Broadway actor at the time, and social
activist, later Grandpa on The Waltons, was one presenter who made a
lifelong impression on me. The first national marker of this teaching artist
commitment was the 1970 launch of a modest ArtistsinSchools Program at
the recently established National Endowment for the Arts.
In the ‘60s, and ‘70s, outsideofschool arts education programs became
more intentional in bringing performances and artists into schools. The
predominant oneshot performances and lecturedemonstrations sometimes
grew into longer durations, projects, and residencies. Schools had arts
programs—perhaps modest, but present in almost all elementary schools,
and turning into clear tracks for interested students in secondary schools. The
presence of the arts was consistent, plays, recitals, performances, and art
displays were structural elements of the school year. The arts were valued for
providing a “rounding out” of academic education, for social development,
for building school community, and for serving the needs of the gifted and
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talented. Visiting artists added a distinctive extra shot of energy and
excitement. Throughout this time, field trips to attend performances and
museums were a regular feature of the school experience, and the instruction
around and within such visits tended to be the delivery of information about
the art.
Many artists were, and still are, naturally good teachers, and those
who “had it” were the ones hired to bring their magic into the lives of
students. The ability to engage students was seen as a personality feature, a
kind of charisma—a la Leonard Bernstein, who was the international icon of
this capacity. His Young People’s Concerts were a beloved and highimpact
public beacon of teaching artistry, making a dramatic impression on an entire
generation of Americans. Bernstein’s brilliance was so definitive, the arts
world came to equate it with good teaching artistry, which was a mixed
blessing. I still encounter vestiges of the “charisma trap” in less advanced arts
learning programs, the uninformed belief that teaching artistry is for the
subset with public charm, not that it is full of many roles, many capacities
that can be developed, and truly the domain of all but an obdurate few.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, many if not most arts learning programs (both
independent organizations and those connected to cultural institutions)
became more complex, seeking to enhance the impact of the field trip and the
artist’s presence in school. Hiring to teach in these programs sought the
naturally gifted few; indeed, right into the ‘80s, most teaching artist hiring
was based on the magical thinking that some had the gift and others didn’t,
and you simply hired the ones who had it, and, bingo, capacity problem
solved. Slowly, beginning perhaps in the mid ‘60s, recognition arose that
there were extended roles and some training necessary for artists to develop
skills beyond performing and speaking engagingly. This training was not the
traditional training in how to develop good artists, but rather, the beginnings
of training in how to work with learners who were not already invested in an
artform. The training was often informal, and even perfunctory, but there was
an emerging sense that artists were not automatically good teachers, and that
there was something extra required to be effective with those who weren’t
already inclined toward an artistic path.
Experimental programs in the ‘70s stepped up the use of artists and
began to more widely recognize that more than personality magic was
involved—they proposed that there were skills to be learned, and that artists
could learn them. In line with this increase in experimentation was an
increase in research on learning in the arts. The ‘70s also saw teaching artists
beginning to move into the role of professional development of nonarts
teachers; the idea was that training one teacher to make appropriate, effective
use of arts learning could multiply the impact to 25 students in the classroom.
This decade also saw pilot programs that included teaching artists in
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collaborative planning with educators, administrators, parents, and students
trying to create richer school learning cultures. This impulse has popped up
irregularly, irrepressibly, ever since, all around the country, with the arts
offered as a school reform model in various ways, always with teaching
artists in the mix of design and delivery.
During this time, there was a lingering cloud of “kiddie art” that hung
over some of this development—condescending art, often of mediocre
quality, that tainted the emergent sense of artistic legitimacy, and highart
standards, in the school endeavor. There was a commercial aspect to the field
of “artists in schools,” and the quality varied. A recurrent concern in the field
that lingered (and some would claim still abides) is that many “consumers”
of such offerings, the educators who book such events, are often themselves
not artistically informed, and so can make choices based on other criteria
(such as liveliness, curriculumrelatedness, price, or convenience) than
quality. There were some teaching artists who were slicker in marketing
themselves than in delivering highquality arts learning. In this late ‘70s mix,
the term “teaching artist” arose, along with a handful of other popular labels
like “visiting artist” and “artistinresidence,” and “artisteducator.” These
labels were an acknowledgement of the necessity and value of artists who
choose to develop educational skills as an intentional and connected part of
their artistic careers. These terms distinguished an emerging role from the
longtime jumble of arts in schooling offerings and practices.
This evolution of the role of teaching artists accelerated in the ‘80s. The
reductions in school arts program funding that began in the late ‘70s
quickened in the Reagan Era, reversing a manydecades trend of steadily
increasing arts education experiences for American youth. The cutbacks
slashed open a void in young American’s experience of the arts; tapping their
entrenched sense of social responsibility, cultural institutions rushed in to
provide more experiences for students. Funders supported the impulse to fill
the gap with increased ways for artists to work inside schools. A balance was
shifting, and teaching artists were becoming significant players in this shift.
There was some tension in implementing these expanding and new
programs, as nonschool administrators and artists were often poor partners
with inschool arts teachers—often disinterested in the life of the arts in the
schools they visited, and sometimes even arrogantly disrespectful of the
heroic and essential lifeline the “arts specialists” provided. (These tensions
have diminished over decades, with occasional reeruptions whenever
delicate balances are dislodged by circumstance or insensitive individuals.
Some consistent underlying fears/angers that crack open under stress are:
(for teachers) that teaching artists are a cheap way to replace “real” arts
learning programs and full time teachers, and that teaching artists come in,
stir things up that are not supportive of the ongoing work in the school and
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then disappear; and (for teaching artists) that school programs are old
fashioned and dull, not good enough to turn on the young, and that arts
specialists are unable or unwilling to engage students ambitiously and
creatively.) There were also nascent tensions between teaching artists and the
arts institution administrations that employed them, to the degree that one
faculty formed an official union, organized under the United Federation of
Teachers.
Whatever the tensions, the ‘80s was a rich time for exploration and
experimentation in the field of teaching artistry, even as it was a stressful time
for school arts programs. Indeed, there is some consistency to this pattern—
diminishment of school arts program funding does lead to more
experimentation with teaching artists. Some opponents of the use of teaching
artists in schools find a cause and effect relationship in this pattern, feeling
the availability of lessexpensive parttime teaching artists allows for the
cutback of school programs. In my own observation and study of this claim, I
have found occasional situations that seem to bear out this fear. However, I
find many more situations in which teaching artists provide a stop gap place
holder for arts experiences that seek to, and notinfrequently are able to,
reengage the school community in such a way that it chooses to reinvest in a
fulltime teacher and program. I find that stopgap teaching artist programs
provide an important function of keeping the presence of the arts alive when
they are easily forgotten among stressed school priorities. I also find nearly
all teaching artists to be active advocates for the hiring of full time arts
teachers, even when talking themselves out of a job.
Intensive training programs appeared in this decade of the ’80s. As the
professional development of teachers to partner with artists emerged, and the
foundation understandings of the tools and skills of teaching artist increased,
so arose the first sense that teaching artistry was more than just a kind of gig
added on to an artist’s life, a particular kind of temp work.
In the ‘90s, the demands on teaching artists grew as programs explored
deeper relationships with schools. It is fair to say that the ‘80s surfaced the
power of teaching artistry, and the ‘90s sought to tap it, explore it, and
deepen it in a variety of ways. There was an increase in the funding for
experimental programs, models were developed and delved into various
aspects of arts in education. Several organizations launched national
programs to introduce particular models of arts learning to schools across the
country, all using teaching artists, and some explicitly presenting themselves
as school reform efforts. Teaching artists were asked to become partnership
builders.
Voluntary national standards were established for dance, drama,
music and the visual arts with little evident participation of teaching artists;
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and state standards emerged with slightly more participation by teaching
artists. However, as explicit connections to state standards became a
requirement for all inschool instruction, teaching artists were given the
added responsibility of identifying the ways in which their work with
students aligned with published standards. After some initial resistance,
teaching artists complied and soon found the task was not intrusive. Over
time, the task of “connecting to the standards” subsided from the original
aspirations of many to more deeply embed artistic traditions of quality into
school arts practices to a largely connectthedots administrative task that
teaching artists had to fulfill to be allowed to work in schools.
Teaching artists were increasingly asked to contribute to the
assessment and evaluation of the work in their programs. This also met with
some initial resistance, with teaching artists fearing that assessment meant
“grading” creative work and that it would diminish the very core of their
power with young people and the joy they found in the work. Over time,
most teaching artists have adapted healthily to the assessment challenge,
finding that documentation and assessment of a few selected aspects of the
learning does not damage the quality of the learning, but indeed illuminates
accomplishments for the learners, the educators involved, and for those who
support the programs. Many teaching artists became adept and creative
assessors, contributing new tools and practices to the field. Some became part
of formal research programs that sought to clarify and verify aspects of arts
learning practice and impact.
Teaching artists became more involved in designing and leading
teacher professional development; and in many locations were invited to try
new methods based on improved evaluation of existing programs that had
revealed their weaknesses. They were drawn into advocacy for arts education
programs. They took on more responsibility in curriculum design and even
program design. They were asked to take on roles as facilitators of planning
and partnership building. Entrepreneuriallyinclined teaching artists
launched independent programs, some of which grew to significant size and
impact and still thrive.
Conservatories and university training programs introduced courses
and even sequences of courses that could be called training programs to offer
teaching artist training as a part of conservatory training. An increasing
number of high profile arts organizations chose to deepen their investment in
teaching artists, to go beyond “exposure” programs and brief residencies, to
train artists for programs that aspired to significant impact with young
people.
Teaching artists became further involved in artsintegrated programs
that wove arts learning with other subject areas. The pedagogical connections
between arts and other subject learning have long been exploited by good
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teachers—I recall working on my beautiful fifth grade rain cycle diorama, and
doing role play in seventh grade history class, with nary a teaching artist in
sight. Teaching artists sometimes participated in interdisciplinary teaching as
early as the ‘70s. By the ‘90s arts integration had grown into an important part
of the whole arts education landscape. I refer to it as the great gamble: that by
bringing arts learning into the instruction of other subjects (which still are
assessed for that other subject’s accomplishments and not the art’s), both
kinds of learning can be advanced in ways they couldn’t be when separate.
The losing side of the gamble appears if the arts are allowed to serve as a
handmaiden to other subjects—they lose their identity and are valued only to
the degree that they can produce results in the other content area. However, if
artsintegration is effective, we win—everyone involved viscerally
understands afresh the power of the arts, and students develop some new
artistic capacities and ways of thinking. Teaching artists have been prominent
inventers, practitioners, and advocates in this great gamble, among the
fiercest protectors of the quality and equality of the arts component in the
curricular mix.
During this time, a sense of teaching artistry as a profession began to
emerge. While “the gig” mindset continued for many who chose to develop
these skills (or at least cash in as they could using their natural instincts yet
avoiding explicit training), others began to see teaching artistry as a part of a
larger concept of an artist’s career. There was a nascent sense that one’s work
as a teaching artist informed and enriched ones work as an artist, as one’s
interests and processes as an artist continually energized and developed one’s
work as a teaching artist. There was a feltsense that the two aspects together
formed a new and enriched whole life as an artist. (In the final section of this
essay, I introduce the three tracks I currently see within the profession of
teaching artistry.)
Toward the end of the ‘90s, tipping into the new century, the term
teaching artist seemed to gain general acceptance, and was adopted (without
fanfare) by programs that had used other terms. The first fulltime contracts
for teaching artists appeared; a national website with resources and an
informative listserve appeared; a peer reviewed professional journal
appeared; regional professional development opportunities popped up to
answer local interest and need. A little later, degree/certification programs
for teaching artists were established at universities, high profile Fellowships
were launched, a national award program arose (and sadly disappeared), and
a first textbook by a major publisher appeared.
A decade into the 21st century, the evolution has continued at a fast
pace. The Teaching Artist Research Project (TARP) from NORC at the
University of Chicago (the first national study of teaching artists) asserts the
following: Currently the mean age of teaching artists is 45 years old; over half
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have 10+ years of experience; stay with employers six years or more on
average; earn a mean of $17,000/year from teaching artist work, just under
half of their personal earnings; and are motivated predominantly by love of
their artform and of teaching and the wish to contribute to their community.
Fully 90% say their teaching artistry has had a positive impact on their
artistry, and 84% would take more teaching artist work if it were available.
As the field has grown, expectations have increased, and inherent
“professional” frustrations also increase. The predominant frustrations are
(according to TARP): a persistent lack of visibility and respect for the role and
skills of good teaching artists; low pay and lack of other kinds of respectful
support like health insurance and job security; an employment ceiling—in
most programs, there are few if any ways that greater skill can grow into
greater responsibility and more challenging work. Frustrations increase
because national economic recessions impact teaching artist employment
levels significantly; schools in general (with beloved exceptions) have become
more difficult and less rewarding as teaching artist partners they have
struggled in the No Child Left Behind Era. TARP found that dissatisfaction
increases slowly with experience in teaching artist’s careers.
MOVING FORWARD
There is an unmistakable trend, perhaps even an evolutionary impulse,
to expand the power of teaching artistry. This force and its decades of recent
history since the growth spurt in the ‘80s have carved their deepest
expression in schools. That is the laboratory within which most of the energy
and practice of teaching artistry has been dedicated and grown. However, in
the last decade, the No Child Left Behind era of schooling, many of those
dedicated to arts learning and to teaching artistry have found school
partnering to be a less effective way to deliver the power of the arts. In recent
years, I have heard deep frustrations with these limitations, especially as
financial crises forced damaging cutbacks in many programs that were
already struggling for support. The evolutionary impulse to make use of the
power of teaching artistry has hit a blockage in schools, at the same time that
savvy people in other professions are recognizing the power of teaching
artistry. The result has been an increasing proliferation of new ways that
teaching artistry is explored and developed. The majority of teaching artist
work still takes place in schools, much of it good, and holding its own, but
other areas have captured more of the innovative, exploratory energy.
Excellent afterschool arts learning programs have gained visibility and
support, especially in inner city settings. The President’s Committee on the
Arts and Humanities gives out annual awards for exemplary programs.
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Summer programs have been growing, especially in inner cities, even as arts
camps for more affluent young people grow stronger. Programs that bring
teaching artists into correctional facilities, hospitals, and other social service
settings are increasing. The emergent field of “creative aging,” founded by a
teaching artist, now has a center in Washington DC and hires teaching artists
across the country—demand for teaching artists who work well with seniors
outstrips supply. Teaching artists work increasingly with and within
corporations.
The beginnings of even deeper models of work with young people
have appeared in Artist Corps and MusicianCorps, which aspire to Peace
Corps understandings for teaching artists working full time in inner cities,
including in schools, to build community through music. The explosion of the
El Sistema movement in the U.S., inspired by the Venezuelan music learning
system, challenges teaching artists to revise the way they were taught music
to develop a new curriculum of holistic child development through intensive
afterschool ensemble music instruction. Teaching artists in this stream of
work join the social service moment. They revert to the time before “art for
art’s sake” when humans believed in “art for many sakes.” In this view, the
purpose of art is not to provide a particular exquisite kind of aesthetic
experience of deep value, but rather, the purposes of art is manifold.
Engagement in art accomplishes many worthwhile ends, including aesthetic,
emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. It heals, and teaches, and changes
people’s actions, and changes the directions of people’s lives. Teaching artists
join forces with community development and youth development colleagues,
bringing a powerful new tool to the social service movement. This thread
hearkens back to the enthusiasm of the Settlement House movement, where
some claim teaching artistry was born. We have begun to see this work
funded in new and promising ways—juvenile justice money, gang violence
reduction funds, poverty reduction programs invested in arts learning and
teaching artists. An oldnew territory inviting teaching artists to homestead.
As the buzzword of “creativity” in education becomes more prevalent,
with the arts conspicuously absent from mainstream and policy discussions
(although recently beginning to find a seat at the table, after the first courses
have been served), there is an opportunity for the arts to make an authentic
and dramatic contribution to an emerging educational trend that has wide
interest. People in the arts have been weak in providing clear and compelling
contributions to the discussion; indeed, arts people have been less able to
articulate well what they bring to the movement than other fields like science
and engineering have been. This situation presents a great opportunity for
teaching artists to step forward and provide the language that can bring the
arts into active play. Teaching artists are well positioned to do this since they
lead the field in clarity and communications about artistic processes and their
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place in learning.
As we complete this first decade of the new century, I see two models
of the way teaching artistry is developing. I would like to introduce them
both. The first is an analysis of the six strands in the arts learning ecosystem,
and where teaching artists fit into each. The second describes the three tracks
within teaching artistry itself that seem to be presenting themselves to
practitioners. These models intend to illuminate natural distinctions in
interrelated practice rather than encourage the development of new silos of
separation.
THE SIX STRANDS OF THE ARTS LEARNING ECOSYSTEM
I use the term “arts learning” ecosystem rather than the more common
“arts education” because the field is larger than the school connotations of the
word education. While most of teaching artist work does happen in schools,
teaching artists increasingly work in a variety of settings—from arts
institutions to nursing homes to hospitals to corporate board rooms. Arts
education professionals, as well as those with only a vague sense of the field,
tend to blur the distinctions among these six, viewing them as one giant
undertaking, rather than interdependent and overlapping elements. These six
do not function in discrete, exclusive ways, in reality or in good practice.
However, there is a value in clarifying the distinctions, pointing out the
differences in their goals, beliefs, locations and delivery systems, and the
different roles that teaching artists take within each strand. The sequence in
which the six are presented does not suggest any kind of prioritization, and
so, are not numbered.

Arts appreciation
Skill building within an artform
Aesthetic development
Arts integration
Community arts
Extensions

Arts Appreciation
Main purpose: Teach about art.
This kind of traditional arts education relies heavily, almost entirely, on
giving information as the path to greater appreciation. We associate this
thread with academia (college survey courses, general music in primary and
secondary schools), but it appears in lecture series, preconcert events, in
parents telling children about the arts. Its strength can lie in the profundity of
Page 13
the arts and in the knowledge of most presenters; its weaknesses are its
reliance on telling (and showing) and the belief that information is a powerful
way to open up the power of the arts.
Today, fewer and fewer Americans can take that kind of information
presentation and turn it into powerful personal experiencing in listening to
the music, in grasping the visceral language of the dance. This is the thread of
connoisseurship and has the taint of elitism and higher education. It tends to
ignore or assume the learner’s motivation. Its effectiveness is most often
assessed by testing the retention and mastery of the information given. This
thread produces effective results for those already in “the art club”—the
small percentage of Americans (maybe six to eight percent of the population)
who already feel they belong inside an artform, know how to speak and make
meaning in its language based on experience and instruction in their
background. This thread can also be effective with those who are excited by
the lecture format, and those with academic aspirations in their listening.
Many people in the arts have had lifetransformative experiences of brilliant
teachers who were masters of this thread, who may or may not be termed
teaching artists.
Teaching artistry doesn’t have much of a place in this thread. Some
individuals with teaching artist skills do participate in this strand, but there is
limited play for their teaching artistry within its historical goals. Teaching
artistry does not happily limit itself to the goal of teaching about art; a good
TA giving a lecture instinctively expands the goal of the occasion to include
elements of the other strands below. There are extraordinary examples of
teaching artists leading college level courses that introduce the arts in
innovative, highly engaging, distinctive ways that do not rely on information
transmission as the key tool in developing arts appreciation.
Skill Building within an Artform
Main purpose: Teach you how.
This is the artist training strand, containing the many ways in which
motivated people gain the skills, knowledge, lore, and savvy of an artform.
All teachers dedicated to bringing young talent into the artform and
developing that talent as far as it can go belong to this same strand—from a
preschool music teacher through the top masters at the top training
programs and conservatories.
Some say this purpose is exactly what distinguishes teaching artists
from other artists who teach—TAs do not train young artists for the
professional track. It is said that the stern advanced ballet instructor at the
School of American Ballet is not a TA. In truth, it’s not so simple—if she is
exclusively focused on technique, perhaps she is not exactly a teaching artist;
but if, as is likely, she teaches about musical elements, opens up connections
Page 14
between ballet and life…who are we to say she isn’t a teaching artist? And
what does it matter anyway? Let’s err on the side of inclusion.
This thread is doing very well in music and visual arts, although some
argue it is less vibrant in other artforms. It is fair to say that the technical
training of musicians in conservatories and university programs is at the
highest level ever; and many report a healthy vibrancy in the visual arts
training—the number of students taking the College Board’s Advanced
Placement exam in Studio Art increases every year. A weakness of this thread
is that the students, the world, and the professional field are changing faster
than the training programs. This creates a tension between the skills being
prioritized and those needed to live a full, rewarding life in the arts. I believe
this strand is in the slow process of redefining the essential skills of the 21st
century artist. This strand will eventually include teaching artist capacity as
an essential capacity in the artist’s kitbag, thus redefining the very nature of
this strand. Since this is the most ancient of the arts learning strands, going
back to epochs before the arts were distinguished from the essentials of
community life, the emerging change in its lineage identity is historically
unprecedented.
Many teaching artists also teach in private lesson settings and in
schools of different art forms. They tend to be excellent arts teachers, highly
effective at fulfilling the goals of this strand, as they use their expanded
education skills to personalize, deepen and intensify their students’ learning
journeys.

Aesthetic Development
Its purpose: Invite you in.
Although the word aesthetic sounds esoteric, this thread is the antidote
to elitism. This is the learning that opens up the power of the arts to the
widest number of people. The need for this thread has grown steadily as the
culture changes. I believe that the gap between the sense of having a rightful,
meaningful place in the arts and the average citizen’s sense of self has never
been greater for any culture in human history.
Teaching artists are the masters of this strand of arts learning. If magic
is defined as the experience of a result without an awareness of the process,
then teaching artists are the shamans of the magic of the arts. They know and
are able to open up the processes, and enable a wide variety of people to
discover the power of meaningful, personally relevant arts experiences.
This strand of arts learning develops audience skills—the cognitive,
emotional and spiritual tools to set aside caution and prejudices in order to
enter artworks and make meaningful connections. This strand taps innate
aesthetic competences, so that people can enter the arts without having to
build up skills or formal knowledge in a discipline. This strand can involve
Page 15
the development of critical capacity too, and these analytic skills are quite
different from audience skills. The skills of the critic include the use of prior
knowledge to make judgments of quality, to place artworks in contexts and
illuminate aspects of them; audience skills, by contrast, are about willing
suspension of disbelief, wholehearted entry into the world of an artwork and
discovery inside it. Of course the two work well together, naturally
interweave, but we tend to train neither and live with sloppy examples of
both. Our cultural disregard for both skill sets leads to disrespect for both
roles—current audience behavior often makes it hard to attend fully, and we
now conflate the artistic role of the critic with the commercial role of the
reviewer who helps people make good decisions about where to invest their
discretionary time and money.
As the importance of this thread expands with the necessity and
difficulty of attracting new audiences to traditional arts offerings, the demand
for teaching artists rises. I believe it will rise so high that teaching artistry will
come to be seen as an essential tool of the 21st century artist, and as an
essential capacity of arts organizations.
Our culture is coming to a new understanding of “aesthetic capacity”
that takes it off the elitist periphery and brings it closer to everyday concerns.
Cognitive psychologists and educators are discovering that the aesthetic
component is fundamental to all learning and is a crucial element of great
schooling, not just a special skill for those few on an arts path. I will often
start a speech to nonarts audiences with a pop quiz: “How many have made
an important business or personal decision recently based on your high
school algebra or trigonometry? [Few hands are raised.] How many have
made an important business or personal decision recently based on
aesthetics?—and let me add that includes not only the appearance of things,
but also a choice based on a gut feeling, applying a lesson from a previous
experience, using intuition? [All hands go up.] Well, now that we have
redefined aesthetics and established its importance to our lives, let’s talk
about art.” Neuroscientists even admit that the formative process that
transforms endocepts (prethought) into identifiable entities we can call
thoughts is informed by aesthetic considerations as much as any other—our
innate aesthetic capacity even determines the very thoughts we can have.
And about that word aesthetic. Its etymological meaning has nothing
to do with esoteric or intellectual processes; it means to perceive. The
philosopher John Dewey once remarked that he was unable to define the
word aesthetic, but that he did know its opposite was anesthetic. That is the
aesthetic development teaching artists most value—waking people up from
the somnolence propagated by our aggressively anesthetizing commercial
culture, to see the beauty, meaning, humanity, courage and joy around us.
Page 16
Arts Integration
Its purpose: Catalyze learning.
This is the biggest experiment in arts education in America, probably
the world, today. It is a crucial experiment because so many programs are
placing their chips on its essential gamble: by bringing arts learning together
with learning other subject matter, both can go further as a result. In the early
going of this experiment, results are mixed.
Teaching artists stand out front in this experiment. They are asked to
collaborate with other educators in designing and often in leading such
projects. The stakes are high—the arts are easily used as window dressing to
pep up a boring curriculum. But the potential to expand the presence and
power of the arts in young lives is real, and in my view, generally, where
teaching artists are centrally involved (and given adequate resources) in an
arts integration program, the arts component is well represented and the
gamble pays off well. Many school districts that follow this model remark on
how invigorating it is for classroom teachers to partner with artists in an arts
integrated curriculum—the revitalizing impact spills over into the rest of
their subject area instruction.
The key to the arts integrated curriculum is artistic engagement of the
learning on the front end of the project, and then guiding that creative energy
that is released, that personal investment and curiosity, into serious play in
the subject area. Arts learning practitioners are discovering their way into this
strand. Teaching artists are usually determined and often articulate
champions for this arts engagement component, while other practitioners
who are less steeped in the subtlety and ineffability of arts engagement can
let its primacy get lost in the competing, louder, more readily assessed
aspects of the arts integrated project.
Community Arts
Its purpose: Enrich community life.
This strand may manifest as a play dealing with a community issue, a
mural on a public wall, a chorus—and there are hundreds of arts
organizations, usually small and extraordinarily dedicated, that live for this
work. There is a whole field of community arts with community artists who
have refined this practice over decades. I recommend you read Arlene
Goldbard’s seminal book New Creative Community (New Village Press, 2006)
to learn more about this field if you are interested.
There is uncertainty in the arts learning field about the difference
between teaching artists and community artists. The debate is mostly a waste
ofenergy red herring—the same individuals participate in both kinds of
work, and there is a huge overlap and intermixing of practices. The only
useful distinction to draw is regarding ultimate goals: teaching artists aspire
Page 17
to have their learners engage in meaningful art making, and community
artists seek to enhance the lives of communities through meaningful art
making. If I were to generalize about the negative prejudices each carries of
the other, for the sake of illuminating the historical distinction: community
artists (CAs) assume teaching artists (TAs) want art for art’s sake and
promote the agendas and beliefs of arts institutions; and conversely, TAs
assume CA projects place artistic quality in secondary position and produce
less than the best possible art. There is a grain of truth in those prejudices, but
reality and a growing arts field do much better if we build on the far larger
common ground—TAs create healthier communities wherever they are
allowed to work at any length, and CAs produce excellent artworks with
their participants even as they make life better for those participants.
Community artists are the lead figures in this strand, and they are often the
same people that practice teaching artistry. Although I have described the
evolution of teaching artistry in this essay, I think community artistry is
evolving as well, and the two are growing further into one another. In the
three part track of the emerging field of teaching artistry I describe below, the
most advanced track seems indistinguishable from community artistry—the
boldest and most committed practitioners of these two fields are becoming
one.
In 2004, I helped design and lead a rare joint conference of Americans
for the Arts and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, the two largest
arts advocacy groups in the country. This was an enormous gathering of the
suits and other advocates of the arts. The conference theme was making
communities more livable through the arts. Throughout the conference I had to
keep reminding the participants that the goal was not to get communities to
support the arts, nor to find ways to bring communities into the arts, but for
the arts to serve the needs of communities. The arts people kept defaulting to
more selfserving views of deeper relationships with communities, probably
because survival thinking is so prevalent in arts organizations. By the end of
the conference the shifted priority had settled in, and I was able to announce
to the field this conclusions from my observation, “The era of art for art’s sake
is now officially over. It was a fiftyyear experiment, in a time of affluence,
and it failed: it did not expand the impact of the arts, enhance the quality of
art, or improve the lives of artists. We close that experiment like good
learners and return to a time of art for many purposes, which had existed for
the previous thirty thousand years—and this doesn’t mean that the art we
produce from these purposes is necessarily of lower quality.”
Extensions
Its purpose: Use the power.
The transformative power of artistic engagement is increasingly being
Page 18
tapped to accomplish other goals. The creative arts therapies are used to ease
psychological distress and make people’s lives work better. The arts are
finding a place in healthcare, as medical scientists discover more and more
benefits: patients leave hospitals sooner, depression can be alleviated, pain is
less debilitating, children heal faster, wellness requires creative expression,
etc. Medical schools are using teaching artists to enhance the observational,
empathetic and communication skills of doctors in training.
The arts are appearing in businesses to develop teamwork skills, boost
creativity, and to build leadership. This is serious money—Second City, the
improvisational theater company in Chicago, now makes well over a million
dollars a year in its corporate work. In his bestseller A Whole New Mind,
Daniel Pink proclaims that the MFA is the new MBA.
The school reform movement advocating for the development of 21st
Century Learning Skills is growing in size and impact, yet has largely left the
arts behind. Teaching artists are taking a lead in illuminating ways in which
good learning in the arts develops creative capacity. Few people doubt that it
does, but teaching artists are helping to discriminate the skills within creative
capacity and how arts learning develops them. The most common gig I am
asked to do with businesses is teach “creativity but no art.” They want the
businesscertified goodies of creativity—competitive advantage, profitable
innovations—their future depends on it, but they don’t want to gunk it up
with all the gooey irrelevancy and emotionality of the arts. I can deliver it,
staying under the “art” radar with the activities that tap art skills without
naming them. How glorious it will be when we need not apologize for the
word, when Americans think of art as powerful, relevant and fun.
Teaching artists stand at the entrepreneurial forefront of this strand. It
is just beginning. People in the arts are discovering they have skills that the
world wants to acquire, and effective teachers who know the arts (that’s right,
TAs) are positioned to lead the advance.
The strength of this strand is its unlimited potential and effectiveness
in achieving many kinds of results. The weakness is that few TAs have
experience making the transition from achieving arts learning results to
achieving the other results nonschool clients want. There is not yet a body of
practice, accepted conceptual groundwork, broadly applicable evaluation
tools, or a communications mechanism for the pioneers of this field. But it
will grow into a major new opportunity as we learn how to deliver this
power, with teaching artists doing the laboratory work that moves the strand
and its resultshungry culture forward.

THE THREE TRACKS OF PRACTICE WITHIN TEACHING ARTISTRY
Page 19
The emerging profession of teaching artistry is developing into three tracks
which I will call:
A tool in the kitbag;
An in depth component to an artist’s life;
A whole new world.
It may well be argued that these named distinctions are actually just
different locations upon a single continuum of teaching artist activity. For the
sake of clarity in this essay, I will address them separately, without
belaboring the ways in which they are fully connected.
A tool in the artist’s kitbag: Most artists recognize they are going to teach at
some point in their careers—research suggests that ninetysomething
percentage will. Many recognize that teaching artist skills will help them be
more effective when they teach, that they will be able to benefit from that
income stream more effectively (and hopefully more pleasurably), and that
they can add educationrelated offerings to their creative work. Many, if not
most, small (and not so small) arts ensembles find that their education work
keeps them financially afloat; and those with innovative and highly effective
educational offerings can consistently boost their bookings. However much
teaching artists on this track enjoy and value their educational work, they
often bring a “gig” mentality to their educational work, feeling it is apart
from their main artistic aspirations.
Indepth component artist’s life: Some artists invite teaching artistry into a
more central place in their hearts, minds, spirits, and expectations. They blur
the distinction between their art making and their teaching work because it
blurs naturally in their personal experience. They find a healthy synergy
between the two, and they have a taste for the pleasures and provocations of
the mix. For example, an unexpected statement or creative idea from a
youngster resonates deeply enough to invite rethinking of their own rehearsal
work. Or the theme they are exploring in their artmaking colors life so
interestingly that they have to bring it into their work with young people.
These artists/teaching artists are making a mark on the field, changing
the definition of success, expanding traditional terms and limits, brushing
aside old silos of identity and practice. These are artists who can move into
nonarts settings and engage the artistry of any participant, drawing them
into creative expression to achieve many different kinds of goals. These are
the artists with the understandings and skills to reignite the relevance and
value of the arts for the ninetysomething percentage of Americans who are
not in the “art club”—the fortunate group with arts an background who
understand, value and actively participate in the languages and locations of
the high arts. The arts club knows how to enter the world of a complex
Page 20
artwork and make relevant meaning, and to how to turn information about
the arts into rewarding arts experiences. These teaching artists open the walls
of the arts club, enabling everyone to actively participate and find the
pleasure of relevant, meaningful artistic experiences. The teaching artists of
this track increasingly recognize that the artistic experiences they evince can
happily, healthily, and authentically be applied outside artistic media, in any
medium into which an individual chooses to pour her artistic self.
A whole new world: In the last few years, the evolution of teaching artistry
has begun to distinguish a new identity. Certainly, there have been
individuals and small organizations dedicated in this way for a long time, but
there has been an increase in activity and awareness that invites us to
distinguish a new species. Some teaching artists have a vision and/or a fire in
the gut so strong that they are creating a whole new level of investing the
artist in them. These pioneers have moved beyond the traditional
understandings of what an artist does to inhabit a new space. As the physicist
David Bohm said, “Any time you see seeming polarities, look for the greater
truth that contains them both.” Given the traditional conceptual framework
of art and education as separate but related endeavors, these artists have not
only identified the greater truth that contains them both, but they yearn to
live there. These are artists, like Gustavo Dudamel, who experiences the same
artistic joy and satisfaction conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as working on a reduced version of it with an
inner city children’s orchestra. These are artists like Liz Lerman whose
definition of dancers includes everyone, and whose subjects and purposes for
dance extend to community development, scientific understanding, and
more. These are the artists who see the preperformance contact, the lobby
activities and program, the postshow encounters as equal opportunities for
artistic engagement in the artist’s aspiration. These are the artists, like those in
Community Music Works and Streb Ringside Sport Dance, who choose to
reside in the community with which they engage. These artists do not strive
to engage people in the relevance of their artwork—they don’t have to—
because the authentic expression of their artistselves emerges from its
relevance among the people they live, learn and experiment with. Perhaps the
pioneers of this track need a new label, since they have found the common
ground of art and learning; and they live, create, and bring others to that
longlost commons.
These three expressions of teaching artistry are all good. Certainly
there are greater numbers of individuals in the first group than the second,
and in the second than the third. And yes, a majority of American artists may
still not even identify themselves as being part of any of the groups—they
Page 21
believe their job is to make art. Period. And to do some necessary teaching on
the side. Their own teachers probably believed that, and their teacher’s
teachers probably believed that, when they were learning in a very different
era. I worry less about their resistance or their dismissal of the emerging
changes in the careers of artists and the viability of teaching artistry than I
used to. They have many valid perspectives and evolution will bring many
rigid perspectives to “change or die” moments sooner or later. I am heartened
by a growing belief in the arts that this evolutionary process is not only
unavoidable but also positive—think apes rather than dinosaurs—we are not
losing our soul, but expanding authentically into new realities as the arts
have always done. I believe “whole new world” artists are our essential
innovators, quietly changing our sense of the possible and developing a new
feel for the delightful and the worthwhile. I believe those who live with
teaching artistry as an “indepth component” of their careers are the
examplars of success who will demonstrate what careers can become, so that
young artists and those who train artists can adjust their frameworks of
expectation and join the evolutionary process. Those with teaching artist
skills, even if used only with a “gig” mentality, are the ballast that will give
weight and authority to the emerging redirection of the arts. They will help
us learn how to maintain high quality as we expand to include those who are
now uninvolved in “arts” offerings. They will reduce the fear of change to
welcome new definitions of art, new ways of thinking about how art serves
life, and will radiate the deeper pleasures of an expanded life in the arts. They
will demonstrate vividly how the arts can thrive outside arts institutions and
buildings, engaging the vast majority of the population that is unengaged, for
a variety of different purposes, and revitalize the life of arts institutions and
communities in the process.
Personally, I feel extremely lucky. What a gift of fortune to have my
work years coincide with a period of rapid evolution in the field I love. If we
assume teaching artistry began when a cave dweller taught someone younger
about drawing on walls, and guided the rest of the cave dwellers in ways to
respond to the drawings, then how lucky are we to be living during the time
of explosive expansion of this role. I have been able to witness a change
process that accelerated while I happened to be watching and contributing.
You may not have felt it until now, but you are equally lucky to be invited to
witness, contribute to, and even lead in an emergent field that can change the
world in ways it desperately needs and is slowly discovering it wants.

Page 22

The History of Teaching Artistry

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The History of Teaching Artistry, by Eric Booth

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