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. Schools that are serving the highest need student populations often have the fewest arts opportunities. To level the geographic and economic playing field and extend empowering cultural assets to historically overlooked classrooms, Empowering Art's website offers art-based games and lessons that infuse the arts and artistic thinking across the curriculum. Building on student engagement and collaborative discussions, student resources and lessons for teachers 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.

Empowering Art’s website offers both student resources and teacher support that help infuse art across the curriculum. The art-based student resources—interactive games and nonfiction texts—are easily scalable and build on student engagement. These resources use gamification to teach visual literacy skills and foster artistic thinking. For example, while unpacking iconic works of art piece by piece, the “Puzzled by…” series encourages students to follow their interests as they explore an artist’s inspirations and intentions. The “That’s Not Mine Tic-Tac-Toe” games compare and contrast the works of like-minded artists and help students differentiate different artistic styles. “Art Talk” games build vocabulary and explore foundational concepts that help them look deeper and discuss works of art.  

To help teachers infuse art into their teaching, Empowering Art also provides 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 and thinking. Mentor art has the added benefit of addressing diverse learning styles and providing visual support to language learners. Organized around an inquiry-based, expanding-conversation framework, these 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, Jim Crow laws, and the dangers of fanaticism. 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.

Recent studies1, 2 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 attendance3, 4 that establish a strong correlation between museum participation, higher socioeconomic status, and higher levels of education, suggest 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 value and stay engaged with the arts. 

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. This also grows out of my experience growing up in rural Vermont, where geography and economics limited access to art museums. Since then, three decades working in the educational publishing industry have helped me appreciate both the power and bias embedded in our educational resources. It is not just what content is “covered,” but also how the material is presented and how it engages the learner. More recently, as a product development manager in a Head Start national center, I have become even more acutely aware of the insipid influence poverty plays in our educational system. Community and user feedback will be enormously helpful in further developing the art-based games as this initiative moves from a prototype to a pilot stage of development.

I initially applied because it 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 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.

For this project to move from prototype to pilot, I will especially need partners in schools and in art museums to help me prove the concept. These are just a few of the questions partnerships can help address. Will students find the art-based games engaging and informative? Do the art-based lessons provide teachers with the support they need to infuse art into their teaching? How can these be improved? Will the student resources make museum visits more enjoyable and productive? Will the familiarity with the arts fostered by the games and lessons drive museum traffic and interest in the arts?

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 interactive games are unique in their art-based focus and their approach to learning. Requiring only limited background knowledge, which is provided in each game’s introduction, students are immediately immersed in art and encouraged to trust their eyes. The non-threatening game approach builds on student’s strengths, offering deeper insights in accessible passages that integrate text with visuals. Interdisciplinary links and open-ended questions foster artistic thinking. This 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. Students learn how to access these vast cultural assets for their own personal research and activism.

Empowering Art’s teacher resources are inquiry-based and knowledge is co-constructed through expanding conversation. Generative strategies, discussion prompts, and carefully curated cross-cultural links help teachers infuse the arts into their teaching.

For the past seven 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 21,000 anticipated users this school year (September 1, 2021–May 30, 2022). Referrals from classroom websites such as classroomgoogle.com continue to grow. This school year, referrals should drive 500 visits. Since these represent education market appeal, this metric is deemed significant. Next school year, with a full array of art-based games for students, it’s a feasible goal to increase site traffic to 30,000 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 10,000+ 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.  

Empowering Art’s impact goals revolve around building a community of educators who infuse the arts into underserved classrooms. Each year for five years Empowering Art hopes to:

• Increase teacher site traffic by 170%. This will require growing the library of art and lessons and responding the market trends.
• Increase student use by 250%. This will require growing the number of game-based resources and other interactive options.
• Grow classroom partnerships as a way to refine desired instructional options and establish qualitative and quantitative benchmarks that measure the efficacy of this approach. These benchmarks should monitor the growth of related behaviors and skills including apply visual literacy skills and strategies, feel greater empathy, be more observant, practice self-expression, communicate through non-verbal expression, and identify best ways to collaborate.
• Grow museum partnerships as a way to see if art-based instructions fosters school-museum relationships and enhances interest in museum exhibits.

The problem: Access to the arts and a high-quality arts education is not equitable. Students in schools that are serving the highest need student populations often have the fewest arts opportunities. To address this problem, teachers of marginalized students need professional support and resources to help them infuse the arts into their teaching. Marginalized students need to recognize how the arts can make their learning more engaging and empowering.

Business activity: Develop a collaborative platform that shares iconic art and customizable lessons and resources that helps teachers infuse the arts into their existing curricula. Create a range of teaching strategies and tools so arts integration is easily adaptable. Develop student resources that teach visual literacy skills and behaviors and encourage students to follow their interests into the art.

Output: A broad range of art-based games and lesson plans have been developed and promoted through social media. 15 art-based games and interactive experiences encourage students to follow their interests into the art. 22 cross-curricular lesson plans unpack landmark works of art, teach close reading skills, and build interdisciplinary connections. 8 inquiry studies combine art analysis and authentic research with online primary source documents to answer wonderings. 8 teach-writer lesson plans use mentor art to inspire, teach, and refine student writing while providing language learners with visual support. Steadily growing website traffic (21,000 visit during this past school year) reflect a growing community of users.  

Outcomes: While a passive community is growing, a more engaged interactive community and strategic partnerships are needed to establish meaningful outcomes. Partnerships with schools and art museums will be especially important to prove the concept works.  

Impact: Teachers cultivate the complex mix of content knowledge and artistic sensibilities required to effectively integrate the arts into their teaching. They recognize the value of teaching with the arts and how it helps them engage learners and personalize instruction. Students in turn, build cultural capital, recognize the behaviors and skills cultivated by the arts, and apply these learnings in life and in their school work.

The art-based game-based build on Articulate Storyline’s interactive software. This solution also relies on the power and democratic reach of the Internet. The games and lessons build on high-resolution art from museum collections. The student wonderings that grow out of the art analysis are answered through authentic research with primary source documents in prestigious online archives—Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution Archives, and Internet Archives. By transcending wealth and geography, this delivery system extends cultural assets to historically overlooked classrooms.

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 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—intellectually and emotionally—these priceless works of art.

I have been more focused on content development and proving the concept than raising funds and fine tuning a business plan, so this is more a sensibility than model. Echoing Empowering Art’s instructional sensibility, the business model should build on community-building and collaboration. The bank of art, lessons, professional development options need to keep growing and evolving to better serve teacher and student needs. To that end, an appropriate business model for Empowering Art might be a school-based subscription model with collaboration incentives. Because subscription models focus on customer retention, it is a model with market research and community building built in. User metrics and customer feedback encourage responsive resource development. For teachers and schools of marginalized students subscription fees are also more accessible than a higher one-time expense. The subscription models can also offer educators access to a bank of cultural assets and professional development options that grow with their experience. Tiered subscription pricing can incentivize collaboration and cultivate an environment that encourages sharing and low-risk experimentation.

I have been more focused on content development and proving the concept than raising funds and fine tuning a business model. Using open source content and keeping my expenses to a minimum allows me to remain financially sustainable.

While funding would allow me to dedicate more time and resources to this initiative, I have been more focused on content development and proving the concept than raising funds and fine tuning a business model.