Empowering Art

While the arts offer unique pathways to understanding and support the realization of an individual’s identity, recent studies show that access to the arts and a high-quality arts education is not equitable. To level the geographic and economic playing field and extend empowering cultural assets to historically overlooked classrooms, Empowering Arts’ website offers art and lessons that infuse the arts and artistic thinking across the curriculum. Building on student engagement, collaborative discussions, and game-based resources, the lessons cultivate visual literacy skills and model generative strategies for teaching with the arts. Embedded links to hosting museums encourage students to follow their interests and explore international collections. Likewise, the libraries and national parks used to support inquiry studies introduce students to publicly accessible online archives that can support personal research and activism.

Recent studies1, 2, 3 have exposed the inequities underserved students face in accessing a high-quality arts education. In 2009, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities established that, “There is increasing evidence that the students in schools that are serving the highest need student populations often have the fewest arts opportunities.…It means that the students who could benefit most from the increased motivation and life/workforce skills fostered by engagement with the arts are the least likely to have the opportunity.” Studies on museum attendance4, 5 have established a strong correlation between museum participation, higher socioeconomic status, and higher levels of education, suggesting these inequities extend into adulthood. Students and museums alike would benefit from extending art’s culture of privilege to a broader, more democratic audience. The professional support and generative art-based resources Empowering Art offers will help teachers cultivate the complex mix of content knowledge and artistic sensibilities required to effectively integrate the arts into their teaching. By encouraging students to follow their interests into iconic art, the lessons build cultural capital and cultivate the familiarity and comfort that will help students benefit from and stay engaged with the arts.

To help teachers infuse art into their teaching, Empowering Art’s website offers mentor art and lessons that build on established curricula and popular instructional frameworks. For example, mentor texts have long been used to model writing techniques. Mentor art can likewise be used to inspire, teach, and refine student writing. Mentor art has the added benefit of addressing diverse learning styles and providing visual support to language learners. While teachers are well trained in unpacking literature, unpacking a work of art can be less familiar and more intimidating.   

To overcome this hurdle, Empowering Art’s website offers a range of strategies that take different avenues into the art. Organized around an inquiry-based, expanding-conversation framework, lessons involve students in exploring real-world issues and envisioning alternative possibilities. Chosen for their capacity to cultivate social imagination, these art works explore topics such as housing discrimination, wildlife preservation, worker rights, and Jim Crow laws. A wealth of cross-curricular connections link to carefully curated primary source documents from free online archives. In addition to providing mentor art, teaching strategies, discussion prompts, and game-based instructional resources, these lessons involve students in thinking like artists and highlight easily applied creativity research.

Empowering Art is born from my early teaching in a Yupik village on Alaska’s Yukon Delta. My students were fluent in their cultural art forms and deeply engaged learners in the art studio. In typical text-based classrooms they oftentimes struggled to engage and communicate. Access to mentor art could have opened instructional doors and helped them recognize shared interests in the larger world. There are 12.2 million public school students who attend schools where more than 75% of the student body qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (a proxy measure for low-income students). In America’s schools poverty is concentrated and racially biased. Like my Yupik students, a range of factors limit the economic and social capital resources to which these students have access. Empowering Art begins to address this need, helping students grow visual literacy skills and see their own interests and identities in iconic works of art. They are able to speak to the accomplishments of individual artists and identify their biases. Links to related free online literature and historic documents cultivate literacy skills and model how to think in expansive interdisciplinary ways. Students learn how to access online archives to pursue their own interests and activism. The lessons’ expanding conversation framework helps students co-construct knowledge, practice collaboration, and tap into social imagination. In 1980, Jean Anyon documented how the hidden curriculum in comparable courses perpetuated social standings by teaching certain skills and behaviors that positioned fifth graders to occupy particular rungs on the social ladder. This study has implications for Empowering Art on two levels. The skills and behaviors cultivated in the Empowering Art’s lessons reflect the high-level skills and behaviors taught in the more affluent classrooms. While Anyon’s research exposed the insipid nature of the hidden curriculum, imagine the even more egregious impact when blatant holes in the curriculum limit underserved students to fewer art opportunities than their more privileged counterparts. This brings added meaning to John Adams’s quote, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Empowering Art’s Look and Learn gallery walks promote learner engagement by encouraging students to follow their interests into the art from the comfort and safety of their own home. Game-based resources further enhance engagement and foster joyful learning. Likewise Empowering Art’s art and lessons also help teachers nudge their current practices to infuse art across the curriculum. The arts can offer alternative approaches into content, helping teachers personalize instruction, especially for language learners.   

For the past five years I have been developing lessons and strategies to prove the concept and model different ways to integrate the arts across the curriculum that is true to the art. These strategies have been adapted and revised through reflection and user feedback. New resources and features continue to be tested and developed. Site traffic has grown steadily over that time with over 23,000 users this past school year (September 1, 2020–May 30, 2021). Referrals from classroom websites such as classroomgoogle.com and littlerocksd.schoolology.com continue to grow. No institutional capital has been raised. For these reasons the stage of development would be prototype.

Educational sites, such as Khan Academy and The Art Story, offer art content in a directive text-based format that tells students what to think and how to see. Empowering Art’s lessons are inquiry-based and knowledge is co-constructed through expanding conversation. Generative strategies, discussion prompts, and carefully currated cross-cultural links help teachers infuse the arts into their teaching. The Look and Learn gallery walks are interactive and activated by student engagement. The link-rich environment encourage students to follow their interests beyond the lesson into online archives, such as the Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and Hathi Trust Digital Library, where they learn how to access these vast cultural assets for their own personal research and activism. 

For the past five years I have been developing lessons and strategies to prove the concept and model different ways to integrate the arts across the curriculum that is true to the art. Site traffic has grown steadily over that time with over 23,000 users this past school year (September 1, 2020–May 30, 2021). Referrals from classroom websites such as classroomgoogle.com and littlerocksd.schoolology.com continue to grow. This past school year, referrals drove 600 visits. Since these represent educational market appeal this metric is deemed significant. Next school year, with the introduction of new Look and Learn gallery walks that address popular searches and a growing array of calendar-based instructional games, it’s a feasible goal to increase site traffic to 40,000 visits and 2,000 referral-based visits. With a concentrated effort addressing market needs, it is a goal in five years to increase referral traffic to 15,000+ visits. In the long term, adding participatory options where teachers and students can rate lessons and resources, highlight strategies and adaptations that worked for them, and discuss ongoing needs should drive direct and referral traffic, and most importantly build a community of educators looking to integrate the arts across the curriculum.  

In the near term my impact goals revolve around building a community of educators who infuse the arts into underserved classrooms. Initially that focused on teachers. More recently, with the development of interactive modules and game-based instructional resources, that includes students. Site traffic is one way to monitor this. Going forward site traffic should consider new versus returning traffic, teacher versus student traffic, and grade level data—elementary, middle school, and high school. Returning site traffic and referrals are an initial measure of buy-in to this approach. Longer term, impact goals should establish the efficacy of this approach. Are students more engaged learners when the arts are integrated into instruction and does it enhance their comprehension? Are teachers more confident in their ability to integrate the arts into their teaching and do the arts help them personalize instruction?  Classroom partnerships can begin to answer these questions. Museum partnerships could help establish the impact Look and Learn gallery walks have on students when they visit exhibits in person. 

One person works on this solution on a part-time basis.

For 30 years my professional focus has been on K–12 educational publishing as I developed a broad range of literacy and social studies resources. At the same time my personal focus has been on creating socially conscious art. Now I am integrating these experiences to harness the power of art to develop an online professional development resource that uses art analysis, talk, and inquiry studies to nurture artistic thinking and social imagination across the curriculum. Empowering Art grows out of my early teaching in a Yupik village on Alaska’s Yukon Delta. My students were fluent in their cultural art forms and deeply engaged learners in the art studio. In typical text-based classrooms they oftentimes struggled to engage and communicate. Access to mentor art could have opened instructional doors and helped them recognize shared interests in the larger world. The thinking behind Empowering Art was further refined during my doctoral program at Boston College where I concentrated on social justice issues in education.

As a hiring manager for a Head Start national center I have learned it is not enough to say, “we are an equal opportunity employer.” Because job posting sites, search engines, and job search websites filter candidates, they may inadvertently harbor implicit biases. You can’t just be open to diverse candidate, you need to actively pursue them. While I am not currently building a leadership team, I apply this same thinking in curating the iconic artworks in the Empowering Art gallery. Historical bias and privilege skew “iconic” artists toward dead white males. But, by actively exploring a painting’s backstory, a more holistic, ethnically diverse story can be told. These paintings are not inherently better works of art than others, rather over time they have accrued cultural capital. For example, while the art movement that fed Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware quickly fell out of favor, this theatrical myth-making image captured the popular imagination and has become a touchstone for artists and social commentators alike. Looking deeply into its backstory empowers students to see the art in its historical context, identify cultural artifacts and personal bias, and find inspiration in shared interests. Through engaging, reflective study students accrue their own cultural capital and come to "own" these iconic works of art.

I initially applied because this is a smart application that makes me
rethink what I am doing and it challenges me to get out of my comfort
zone. Even if you are not a selected, completing the application has
good return on investment. Being selected only ups the ante. To be
worthy of the honor and the community you need to recommit to your
solution. Joining a network of impact-minded peers and mentors for a
9-month period presents a unique window of opportunity for action. In
addition to the empowering network, successful applicants receive much
needed targeted guidance. Technical expertise could guide the
development of a responsive, collaborative platform that would be
instrumental in this solution realizing its full potential. Developing a
business plan can be intimidating—so many steps, so many unknowns, so
many opportunities for expensive mistakes. Strategic coaching can help
navigate anticipated hurdles and find solutions that are true to the
solution’s mission. The fear of infringing on an artist's or writer's
copyright is limiting. Confidently understanding my rights and
responsibilities may open doors to more contemporary content and
instructional opportunities.

Crafting lessons and seeing the interdisciplinary potential in a work of art is my sweet spot, but simply posting them in a blog is a bit like singing in the shower. Going public, really putting yourself out there with a business plan, takes me beyond my comfort level. Entrepreneurial coaching and business planning may help me navigate financial and emotional vulnerabilities and nudge me off the dime.  

Copyright infringement is always a concern. When it comes to copyright, I err on the side of caution and avoid all art and interdisciplinary readings with questionable public domain/creative commons status. This can be tremendously limiting. The more I have studied copyright law the broader the grey zone grows between right and wrong. Legal guidance on copyright could bring clarity and open instructional doors to more contemporary art and artists.  

Empowering Art’s instruction is organized around an expanding conversation framework. Bringing this sensibility to the platform would benefit it significantly. Adding participatory options where teachers and students can rate lessons and resources, highlight strategies and adaptations that worked for them, and discuss ongoing needs would help cultivate a community of shared interests. Crafting such a responsive collaborative interface requires technical skills that elude me at this time.

I am open to partnerships and collaboration, but cannot identify specific organizations or individuals who might be interested in advancing this solution.

I believe Empowering Art is qualified for the ASA Prize for Equitable Education. This solution responds directly to recent research exposing the inequities marginalized students face in accessing a high-quality arts education. Building on established curricula and popular instructional frameworks, Empowering Art’s website offers mentor art and lessons that help teachers infuse the arts into their existing primary and secondary curricula. The professional support and generative art-based resources Empowering Art offers helps teachers cultivate the complex mix of content knowledge and artistic sensibilities needed to use the arts to engage students, increase learner motivation, and cultivate life/workforce skills. Building on student engagement, collaborative discussions, and game-based resources, the lessons cultivate visual literacy skills and model how to think in expansive interdisciplinary ways. Embedded links to cultural institutions—art museums, libraries, and national parks— support inquiry studies and introduce students to publicly accessible online archives that can support personal research and activism. In addition to providing mentor art, teaching strategies, discussion prompts, and game-based instructional resources, these lessons involve students in thinking like artists and highlight easily applied creativity research.

I do not believe Empowering Art qualifies for this prize.