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You
are here: The Story of Arts Corps
I grew up an only child of a single mom in Baltimore, Maryland. When my father left when I was two, my mom turned a hobby of taking pictures into a profession. By the time I was 10, she was an established professional artist working for local schools, hospitals and other organizations who loved her ability to capture people interacting with each other. Her work now graces the covers of all Arts Corps materials.
She always said she couldn't imagine doing anything else, and indeed, she chose an extremely challenging path. For many years, bills got paid sometimes, and sometimes they did not. I worked at a local deli on Sundays from when I was 10 until I was 14, and gave mom all the money I made to buy groceries. And all the while, I said to myself, I don't want to live like this forever. I want more financial stability!
So I worked hard at school, got a degree in political science and set to work getting one stable job after the other, where a paycheck was assured, mostly in politics, first in DC, then in Seattle. My last job was as an aide to Mayor Paul Schell, working on environmental issues.
But a year after starting that job, I found out I had breast cancer. I was thirty-one. It was an aggressive tumor and they would have to do aggressive treatments. It sent my world into a tailspin. Because I was such a control freak, I went through all the treatments while still working and then finally left politics altogether two years into Paul's term.
For the next few months, I did a lot of nothing, or what seemed like nothing after the grind of the Mayor's Office. I had this seed of an idea that I wanted to focus on arts and kids. Yet at that moment, I must have been 'channeling,' or something, because there was no preface for my moving into the world of arts education. It would be a complete switch.
So I talked to everyone, all kinds of people across the city from the worlds of education, arts, youth development, fundraising, non-profits and on and on. And the landscape I looked out on was troubling.
- There was very little arts education in the Seattle public schools. What they did have was meager at best. At that point, fewer than 50% of the public schools have any arts program at all.
- In WA State, there was and still is a growing achievement gap between white and minority students and their performance on the standardized tests. Ben Soria of The Yakima School District is recently quoted as saying his most optimistic prediction for the % of seniors who graduate in his district for 2008, the big cut off for WASL, is 50% tops. (See http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002979506_yakima04m.html for more information.)
- There was a huge array of community assets, places where kids went to hang out after-school, but with very little happening besides recreation or tutoring in reading and homework catch-up.
- Through my research, I also knew the ranks of at-risk youth were growing. In fact, there are 27,000 youth in juvenile detention in any given day across this country, an increase of almost 100% since 1985.
- I also knew the greatest percentage of juvenile crime happened between the hours of 3 and 7pm. And from the reams of research already available, there was no disputing arts education's ability to build self-esteem, self-confidence, critical thinking and emotional intelligence, especially with harder to reach kids.
While pulling together all this research, there was this voice screaming inside me saying pay attention to this idea-- no matter how scary it may seem, as off your rocker many people in your life feel you are, or as unknown a territory you feel you are in.
Taking this idea on was like falling off a tree. Here I was sitting in these so-called positions of power and influence in the political realm (as you know, environmentalism has reached the very highest reaches of political influence here in Seattle), and I felt an undeniable urge to let it all go. I needed to follow my gut, which was saying there is something else very important to do. To be honest I did not know how important until I got into it.
Turns out, it became my way to heal after the breast cancer, but probably also after a lifetime of denial of the right side of my brain. Forcing myself to explore the less known side of my psyche--the one that is much more comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns--was very healing.
There's a line from a poem by Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Robert Bly, which reads, "Throw yourself like a seed, From your work you will be able to, one day, gather yourself." We find our unique gift and sometimes that gift is found through the wound.
And so, Arts Corps came into being. I wrote a business plan in the spring of 2000 for an organization that would hire teaching artists, pay them well, $40 for class time, and place them in these very underutilized after-school centers around the City, for classes that would meet twice a week for 8 weeks, for 4 quarters a year. Classes would always be free to students. That was the basic model.
In the fall of 2000, we offered 10 classes to 6 sites. We also held our first student showcase of student work (dance, drumming, visual art) at a small coffee shop in Seattle with a crowd of about 60 people. People were stunned, the work was hauntingly good, I remember the teen monologues as though they were yesterday-- the courage it took for them to do this was astonishing.
This fall, 6 years later, Arts Corps will have a staff of 9, most of whom are part-time, and will provide over 50 classes a quarter at over 30 sites through a faculty of 30 exceptional and diverse teaching artists. We now serve 800% more students, or 2,300 students a year. Our budget has grown from $150K in our first year, to almost a million this coming year.
And we are now moving into the second year of a $400,000 multi-year grant supported by the Allen and Gates Foundations. The grants support our work with six other arts education groups to elevate the standard of everyone's evaluation work, develop a observation tool we can all use to measure creativity across programs, and develop a year-long professional development program for all our teaching artists to raise the quality of the work overall.
At this point in the story, I usually try to assess how this all happened--the funding and communication strategies, the community involvement, the demand from facilities, the success of our evaluation work. But this time, I'm ready to reflect on the experience overall--what I have learned about the work--and pull out some meta statements that have real meaning for me now.
The experiences I draw from are watching classrooms of students of every age group year after year, from attending a dozen student showcases, from reviewing our own evaluation data, that of others, reading reams of national research, attending conferences on the subject, picking the brains of very smart people in the field like Eric Booth from Julliard and the Lincoln Center, and recently reading piles of psychological focused on creativity, especially some of the great earlier work from the 60s and 70s (researchers like Erik Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Ellis Torrance).
All of these experiences, new knowledge and insights confirm what I now believe comprehensively (and might not have in the beginning) and which is stated so well, by Abraham Maslow, in his 1971 book, The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature, which is:
If we hope for our children that they become full human beings, and that they will move toward actualizing the potentialities that they have, then, as nearly as I can make out, that the only kind of education in existence today that has any faint inkling of such goals is arts education.
Arts education does what very few disciplines attempt to do which is to delve into the inner world of ourselves. To find the voice that is often overwhelmed by other people, lots of facts, the environment, and can be very often difficult to hear. My latest mantra is "knowing oneself is as important as learning the rules." Education today seems to be focused almost exclusively on learning the rules, and our inner life is completely disregarded, except where there is neurosis and it impacts other people.
And I would take it one step further to say, if we don't figure out how to "become" who we are meant to be for ourselves, not for our employer, our parent, our teacher, we will never know how to become who we are meant to be for the world. And this whole system of education designed to develop people will fail.
Just listen to these quotes from some of our students and partners. You've heard hundreds of these from your students. And here are just a few that encapsulate this idea so well.
"I saw the inner me and saw where I can go." -- Teenager, Seattle Urban Academy
"I will be taking art classes, so I can be better than what I was." -- Middle schooler, Zion Preparatory School
"I've seen a dramatic change in all the kids. They've begun to figure out, or at least ask, the questions of who they are and where they are going. And for some, they're beginning to get a clearer picture. That's just tremendous." -- one of our Facility partners
And my favorite one of all:
"I am starting to be more confident in myself because I get to be a giraffe." –elementary school student from Bailey Gatzert
Pretty powerful stuff. Because she gets to be whatever she wants to be. Not who everyone else thinks she should be, expects her to be. She gets to define who she is and what her boundaries are. Isn't this one of the surest signs of a healthy and psychologically sounds human being? It's what we already know and what the research tells us.
So why did Abraham Maslow say what he did almost 35 years ago about what we can learn from arts education? Here's a man who, earlier in his career, produced A Theory of Human Motivation, and the well known "hierarchy of needs," explaining how people need their basic physiological needs met first before they can go on reach higher levels of development. And yet later on, when talking about the reform in education, this academic claims arts education holds the best promise for blossoming the whole human. And could be the tool around which all of education could be designed.
I don't know what happened in those intervening years, or even whether these two claims are in contradiction, but his later work gives us significant legs to stand on, especially if we are talking about arts education with a focus on creativity.
Maslow was convinced that the rate of change in the world would increase even faster and that bodies of knowledge would quickly become obsolete. As soon as you learned one body of facts, they would change. What we needed was people who could face tomorrow not knowing what is going to happen, with confidence, with an ability to improvise, with a high degree of adaptability-- what was needed most was creativity in people. That would be the most powerful determinant for success. He said that, "the societies that cannot turn out such people will not survive."
But his focus really seems to be on something else. He talks about how a grad student of his pulled a personality characteristics table from Dr. E. Paul Torrance (godfather of creativity research) and his book Guiding Creative Talent--where he summarized all the personality characteristics that have been demonstrated to correlate with creativity. Then he lined these up with Maslow's characteristics of self-actualizing people (also the same as defined by Rogers' "Fully Functioning Person" and "Jung's "Individuated Person" or Fromm's "Autonomous Person")
The overlap was almost perfect! Which is why I believe Maslow keyed in so intensely to the "education through the arts" idea. Since it got to what he wanted--a self-actualized person--and the feasibility of getting every person through 2-3 years of individual therapy may have seemed as unlikely then as it does now.
So what are some of the things we do in an arts classroom consistently that support creativity? What do we do to stimulate what Maslow referred to as 'peak experiences?'
These tools, which are elements of a pedagogy, we see in our classes very often are:
• Creating time for complete silence and meditation
• Withholding judgment, attend for the longest time possible to an observation and perceive what is, before determining its merit or value, before selecting, rejecting, etc. Staying open to the experience.
• Releasing all preconceptions (I am bad at this, I can't do this, a finished product should look this way, I should do this) to create a kind of innocence.
• Encouraging us to delve into the unconscious to mine the great poetic, metaphorical, archetypal symbols and information available there.
• Supporting our fullest spontaneity as in improv classes where we are intensely focused on the moment and letting our fullest capacities flow forth unobstructed.
• Allowing moments for performance, drawing forth the courage required to stand in front of people alone to read a poem, to share one's ideas, without regard for popularity and alignment with other people's views.
These events, these moments, happen all the time in our classrooms and they are required if we are to teach the arts well. It's great stuff yet still the arts get so marginalized. We have so much trouble just getting people to experience an arts class, kids alone, not to mention adults.
My suggestion is that we compile all the best tools and attributes of an arts classroom, like these above, and target them for everyday use, nurture them in every moment with ourselves, our friends, our children. Get people to live more frequently with these "peak experiences" and then point out how prominent they are in the arts, that they are just the standard fare.
In fact, I think that's the secret to getting people to finally embrace arts education rather than keep it on the sidelines. One idea we have is to convene researchers around the country who are studying what makes creativity happen in work settings, school, after-school, home life and we map these events over a time/space continuum and my guess is, eventually we can show that all the best stuff happens most potently and fluidly in an arts classroom and then there will be no escaping its crucial role now and for the long term.
And yet, as determined as I am to make all this stuff happen, to keep Arts Corps alive and well, to be able to offer all these rich learning experiences to kids, I know I must not let my goals in the external world overwhelm the ones I nurture in my internal world.
God knows we are a productive lot with too many accomplishments to list, but we also have found even more ways to distract ourselves from ourselves: meetings, initiatives, social functions, itunes, ipod, ieverything, media and technology.
The pleasures and the demands are endless, and yet there is some part of us that knows there is too much noise in the atmosphere and we are losing something, losing a connection to a much quieter part of ourselves, the most powerful part of ourselves to affect real change. Because,
• When we are quiet, our intuition, our deeper wisdom, has space to breathe and develop and the best decisions are made with the right balance of numeric analysis AND intuition.
• When we are quiet, we can hear our own voice, the voice that is not layered over by friends, family, society. Our own voice contains the real nuggets of truth for us, and this in turn is truth for all of us.
• When we are quiet, we remember our dreams. And our dreams are what unites us all. Remember Joseph Campbell and the journey he took us on to show how all of the world's cultures are united through a shared mythology. They can be transformative on a personal level and, as we have seen with the most powerful agents of social change, transformative on a community level.
• When we are quiet, we remember that we are all one and the same. Each of us contains the same brilliant light, and the external differences are just that, external and superficial.
Kenji Miyazawa, a Japanese poet and storyteller from the early part of the last century, said: "Everyone should be free to let his or her inner mind speak to her. And everyone is an artist when she does this."
So my call to all of us, the us in a position to influence the health of our community for the next half century and more, is to let the artist in each of us out, free this creative spirit, this being that may be more willing to step outside of the boxes, speak from their heart and who models the highest ideals of humanity.
It is the most rewarding path we can take and it could indeed change the world.
Lisa Fitzhugh is founder and Executive Director of Arts Corps, an arts education program targeted at underserved communities in King County. Arts Corps received an award from Mayor Nickels at Bumbershoot in 2003 for its "Outstanding Contribution to Arts Education." Lisa Fitzhugh was recently selected as one of Redbook Magazine's 2005 "Mothers and Shakers." Redbook's award recognizes individuals who have created extraordinary grassroots community efforts that have the potential to create national and international models for change. Lisa graduated from Duke University in 1989 with a degree in political science. She is a mother, and her mother is a professional photographer whose influence on her pursuit of this work runs long and deep.
Email Lisa at: lisa@artscorps.org
©July 2006 New Horizons for Learning
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