Teaching Artist Research and Center for Arts Policy News

Several months ago some of you received an email from the Center for Arts Policy with the message that, after a decade of pathbreaking work, Columbia College Chicago would close the Center for Arts Policy at the end of August.  Columbia's generous support for the Center sustained it for a decade, but the financial realities of Columbia's rapid growth made it impossible to continue the subsidy the Center required.  Many of you responded with heartening support and sympathy.  My staff and I promised to look for ways to sustain the Center's projects, and we promised to let you know just how things worked out.

The Center had a consulting agreement with NORC, a major research center at the University of Chicago to work together on the Teaching Artist Research Project (TARP).  I have now moved to NORC, where I will be TARP's principal investigator.  Several new funders have made significant grants to expand the scope of the project from three to twelve site studies of teaching artists in diverse communities.  We are doing preliminary data collection in four of TARP's study sites:  Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and Providence.  Data collection from the additional California sites (Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and Humboldt County) will begin shortly.  We expect to complete the research by August, 2010.  TARP will do more than document the educational, economic, aesthetic, and demographic dimensions of teaching artistry.  We hope it will make a significant contribution toward understanding the unique value teaching artists add to the arts, education, and the lives of young people.  Perhaps most important, TARP will help identify the organizational, structural, institutional, and moral supports that enable teaching artists to do their best work, and spark serious discussion of policy changes at multiple levels that can develop their great potential.  From time to time I will be happy to update you about what we are learning from TARP.  More important, along the way I expect to write about questions that need input from the artists, program managers, teachers and others at the "point of instruction" in communities, schools and arts organizations.  Teaching artistry is a field in which, I believe, practitioners are significantly ahead of policymakers and researchers.  There is much to be gained by making artists the focus of the project.  My updates will generally be about one of those issues, and they will invite your responses.  Of course, if you're not interested, just let me know, and I'll delete you from the email list.

Two of the Center's programs are remaining at Columbia.  Nick Jaffe will continue editing the Teaching Artist Journal as he has done so well for the last two and a half years. The Democratic Vistas Forum series will morph this year into a series honoring the legacy of Columbia's longtime president, the late Mike Alexandroff.  The "Founders Lectures" has already begun, but the remaining speakers are absolutely outstanding:  Sir Ken Robinson (12/2), Anna Deavere Smith (1/27/09), and Richard Florida (4/30/09). Details, reservations for the free lectures, and full biographies of the speakers can be found here  Don't miss them.

One last thing:  Chicago-based violinist Rachel Barton-Pine brings a remarkable energy and openness to her music.  She brings the same to her thinking about the arts in general.  Over the summer Rachel and I had a conversation about the arts, democracy, education and learning that she has posted as a podcast on her website here.  Check it out.

I'm sorry, of course, that the Center for Arts Policy is no more.  I'll miss Columbia, and my colleagues there.  But this is a promising and exciting moment of change - in our politics, of course, but also in the broader culture and in the arts themselves. Artists will surely play important roles in the changes that lie ahead, and I'm hopeful that the Center's work and its continuing programs will contribute to our understanding of how the arts and artists can make powerful and meaningful contributions.
 
Best
Nick Rabkin