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April 29, 2005
"Arnold Aprill, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education"
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Arnold Aprill, Executive Director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE). Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, April 29. In addition to answering your questions, Aprill will discuss the importance of integrating arts into education. Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with Arnold Aprill, Executive Director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE). First we want to wish Arnie a happy birthday and thank him for joining us today.
Arnie, what motivated you to get involved in social justice work?
Arnold Aprill
How did I come to social justice work? I grew up in the suburb of Skokie, Illinois, a place where working class Jews and Catholics from ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago moved to in the early 50’s as evidence that they had entered the middle class. I grew up thinking that the whole world was populated by politically liberal Jews and politically conservative Catholics. I was in for a big surprise. Growing up in what was at the time an all white suburb, people of color only existed for me as flickering images on television, either as extras in Tarzan movies, victims of racist hatred, or Nat King Cole.
Nonetheless, I was inculcated with good liberal values at home and in school, and my mother introduced me as a teenager, through my synagogue, to an organization called Urban Gateways that fostered inter-racial understanding through the arts. I did my first research paper in junior high on the Holocaust, and decided then and there that if the German nation could have embraced Nazism as a credible ideology, anything can happen, no matter what lies public figures trumpet with conviction, and that it is incumbent on all citizens everywhere to be on constant watch for creeping fascist thought. I attended a progressive Jewish summer camp where we listened to lectures by Elie Weisel, studied under anti-apartheid camp counselors from South Africa, read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, and developed a moral code that spoke of social justice activism as central to ethical behavior. We also were exposed to the arts, reading “Waiting for Godot”, watching a production of Edward Albee’s “The American Dream” (that production alone inspired me to become a theater director), and performing excerpts from “Marat/Sade”. Pretty heady stuff for adolescents. I developed a moral compass, and the arts became permanently associated for me with a commitment to social justice. I am forever grateful.
Phoenix, AZ
How does your coalition of teachers, parents, and artists work? Any lessons you can share?
Arnold Aprill
The biggest thing in forming a coalition is that you have to have some shared work, some challenging and exciting activity that you’re working on and that you have to have a mix of people that aren’t obvious to work together. In other words, you need some differences in style. And then you have to have some sort of forum for making the work public so that we do annual curriculum fairs where the teachers and the artists present their collaborative work with students, and it’s actually the friction between the teachers and the artists, the differences in style, that allows everybody to challenge their own assumptions and to grow.
Bangor, ME
When you started CAPE, how did you know that the arts-based curriculum would work or show results like it has been?
Arnold Aprill
I had been an artist in residence in school for 20 years before CAPE started, working in schools. So I had had lots of experience in what works and what doesn’t. I had also done extensive reading in effective school reform strategies and partnered very early in CAPE’s history with successful school improvement organizations. And I profoundly believe in the power of the arts to transform and lead change based on my own experience as a learner.
Annapolis, MD
It seems that what you are advocating goes beyond just funding for arts classes, but an integration of art throughout all curricula. Is this a tougher sell? Do art-only classes help, or is it the integration with other subjects that helps students the most?
Arnold Aprill
I believe that you actually need both, and the idea that it’s art instruction or arts integration is a very problematic false dichotomy. In an information age, all subject areas need their own time and need time to be integrated with other subjects in the post-modern curriculum. It’s an easier sell to advocate just for arts integration because schools are under such heavy political pressure from government and from parents to improve literacy. Schools will cut arts programming and increase language arts programming at the drop of a hat. Arts integration advocates need to speak up for the importance of direct instruction in the arts, and arts specialists need to speak up for art integration. We need to unite several different strategies for whole-school improvement rather than compete for limited dollars and narrow policies
Waianae, Oahu
Are you Intergrating traditional Native American Art concepts in education? Yes or No
Could you Please share your views on the importance of intergrating traditional Native American Art concepts in education and the pro-effect it will have in the future of our American children and their advancements in education.
Arnold Aprill
I think it’s very important to integrate Native American art concepts into public education in the United States because all American students study “Indians” without any depth of context or culturally embedded meaning. One of the problems in integrating Native American art concepts into American curriculums is the lack of meaningful partnerships between curriculum designers and Native American leadership. It would be very valuable for Native American educators to form collaborations with non-Native curriculum designers to develop instruction that speaks from an authentic Native voice. At a time when American identities are contested in the political arena, it would be healing to reclaim the values and belief systems and cultural practices of original Americans. It would also be useful to educate all American children beyond images of Native Americans that are rooted solely in the past.
Seattle, WA
Why do you believe the arts are so critical to educational success and critical thinking?
Arnold Aprill
In an information age, the skills that are needed for educational success are the abilities to synthesize information from diverse sources, to represent knowledge in diverse forms, to imagine options in the mind, to understand multiple points of view, to engage critical judgment, and to work with diverse collaborators. Arts education is essential to the development of all these skills. Critical thinking skills are developed through learners translating information from one medium to another. When we translate a picture into words, or a three dimensional object into a two dimensional representation, we are compelled to analyze the critical features being re-represented. The arts are one of the most powerful ways of developing critical thought. And because art making is a gratifying activity in itself, critical thinking developed through the arts engages learners much more effectively than worksheets asking students to “compare and contrast” two items for no apparent reason
Memphis, TN
I loved your notion of "positive friction". How can I encourage that sort of tension on my organization?
Arnold Aprill
If you want to encourage positive friction, you need to find interesting difficulties. You need to find some problem that your organization is working on that is genuinely intriguing and matters to a broad base of your constituency. For example, one of the questions in my organization is how do you bring new teachers and new artists into the practice. Then, once you have an interesting problem, then you need to identify an interesting mix of concerned stakeholders who define the problem slightly differently. And then you need to pay them to spend time together working on the problem together. And you have to give them good food. That is important because people need to be rewarded and comforted for assuming the challenge of working beyond their assumptions and their comfort level. This approach ends up being self-perpetuating because once the divergent parties that initially rub each other the wrong way get used to the sparks that come from friction, they become addicted to those sparks and look forward to challenging collaboration as a means to growth and problem-solving. It is important to have some caring facilitators who listen to a little whining during the initial frustrations that come from new collaborations, but who cut off the whining fairly quickly. We have found that teaching our partners to document their process, including doubts, contradictions and failures, creates a positive atmosphere around collaborative problem-solving.
St. Louis, MO
While people often see that arts is important it is often cut in the beginning when there are budget cuts. How do you fund your work? What have been the obstacles in funding?
Arnold Aprill
This is a complex question. CAPE’s work has largely been funded by private philanthropy and government grants. The problem with that source of funding is that the purpose of initiatives like CAPE is to change sustained public policy. We need to treat powerful successful and creative initiatives that are often called “pilots” as real pilots – experiments where we try out new approaches, collect data from those approaches, and use the data to permanently change public policy. Most “pilots” are treated as short-term grant-supported projects that are admired and ignored. So CAPE has received significant public and private support and has developed collaborations with colleagues nationally and internationally and has worked to contribute to the research and the literature about education through the arts as can be seen on the CAPE Web site, but our primary challenge now is to leverage those hard-earned understandings from innovative practice into sustained policies at the district level. So anyone attempting to develop an inititive similar to CAPE needs to not only consider where the dollars will come from, but where the policy leverage will be developed.
Rockville, Maryland
I work for a large non-profit that serve people with disabilities and disadvanting conditions - mainly poor people. Our focus is on getting individuals trained and place in jobs. My question is can your approach be used with youth at-risk, or youth that have dropped out of high school. How can the arts be incorporated into workforce development programs.
Arnold Aprill
There has actually been a lot of research done on the effectiveness of the arts in addressing the needs of disenfranchised youth and of learners with disabilities. I encourage readers of this document to look at the research of Shirley Brice Heath and the programs of VSA Arts. The research has shown that youth “at risk” benefit the most from arts-integrated programming. Young people living in challenging circumstances tend to be high creatives because they need so much flexibility, creativity, and improvisation to survive challenging circumstances. Their assets are typically enormous and underrecognized. The arts can be life-saving and life-affirming for young people who have been discarded by the culture.
Birmingham, AL
Due to the cuts in Arts Educations, would we find that children who are exposed to art education through afterschool programs have the same rise in their SAT scores?
Arnold Aprill
The problem we need to solve in answering this question is how can in-school education be as powerful and engaging and successful after-school arts education programs. After-school programs have demonstrated their capacity in the research to help raise test scores, but one has to assume that that power would be magnified geometrically if the arts were available to young people both in school and after school. CAPE is experimenting with an initiative funded by the Illinois State Board of Education to develop after-school arts education programs as a curriculum laboratory for teachers to improve their in-school instruction and for students to assess their own learning. We are very proud of this model. I think it is a big mistake to move arts education solely into after-school; this is a very attractive option for many innovators because of the incredible competition over instructional time during the school day. However, marginalizing the arts into an after-school option only makes the program directors complicit with the segregation of the arts from “real” curriculum. Again, we need to recognize that often the programs on the margins of school planning such as extracurricular activities, after-school programs, clubs, etc., are often where the most exciting educational action is taking place in the school. I believe we need to resist the separation of exciting programming from “rigorous” academic instruction
San Fran, CA
How can the arts serve as, in your words, a "potent force for activating participation democracy"?
Arnold Aprill
Different people express themselves in different ways. Democracy depends upon all citizens contributing to the larger social fabric. The multiple languages of the arts give voice to everyone in all their diverse styles of communication. Democratic access to opportunities to make art allows everyone to understand themselves as more than consumers of culture and passive audiences to history’s passing. Engaged citizens in democratic cultures understand themselves as creators of culture and actors in history. To be more concrete, collaborative art-making requires the kind of negotiation between diverse citizens, the respect for differences of opinion, the belief that we can take action and make a difference, and the shared problem-solving that are at the heart of democracy.
orange county, ca
In what ways have you helped develped the youth that are in your programs-have they taken leadership roles within CAPE or it's projects?
Arnold Aprill
CAPE’s work is primarily focused on changing teacher and artist attitudes toward their teaching. We place a high value on youth leadership, but support our teachers and artists as the primary intervening actors into schools and arts organizations to open up space for youth leadership. We have a young staff, and we work closely with young interns, but the primary place for youth leadership development comes from the arts organizations in our network. For example, Young Chicago Authors is one of our partners, and to my mind, is one of the exemplars in our nation of effective youth leadership.
St. Louis, Missouri
You're a white guy working primarily in communities of color. What makes anyone give you the time of day, let alone a say in their children's education?
Arnold Aprill
My job as the executive director of CAPE is to convene a network of local leaders; Black, Latino, Asian and white teachers and artists provide the direct leadership for programming at the community level. These leaders have credibility because they are of and from the communities they are working in.
San Antonio
How does a successful local organization start to train other programs around the country?
Arnold Aprill
The CAPE model is not a franchise of specific deliverable curriculum units or program widgets. The entire approach is predicated on local education assets and local arts resources that are already present in the community entering into new collaborations to serve the needs of schools and young people. CAPE has skills in assisting local sites with their planning and collaborative process, but the initiative has to represent the political will of locally embedded change agents. There is a fair amount of information and planning forms available on the CAPE Web site, but CAPE has had a lot of success jump-starting new initiatives in other geographies by meeting with a diverse group of local activists. If you are trying to start a new initiative in your own community, identify innovative leaders in your local arts community, your local school system, your local business community, and your local university, and convene them, again, with very good food to forge a vision of collective change. The good ideas are more important than money. Good ideas will find financial resources. Good ideas attract resources. Money without vision is worthless. The right people are already in your community; you know who they are. It would be useful to review the article “Rules for Arts Education Radicals” on the CAPE Web site.
Jacksonville, FL
What can you tell us about the history of arts in public education, and how we got to this point?
Arnold Aprill
There are descriptions of the history of the arts in American publication in CAPE’s books “Renaissance in the Classroom” and in “Putting Arts in the Picture.” The history primarily swings back and forth between a vision of American education as a way to build equity and community collaboration on the one hand, and a focus on “excellence” and individual accomplishments on the other. The role of the arts in American education depends on how the arts are perceived to fit into these two “opposing” agendas at a particular moment in history. It is CAPE’s position that arts integration and arts education partnerships resolve this false polarity.
Omaha
How have you measured your program's success? What is the evidence that it works?
Arnold Aprill
We have always engaged outside researchers and evaluators. The most famous study of our program is in the prestigious research compendium “Champions of Change”, which studied seven different arts education initiatives, and found consistent compelling evidence of the impact of the arts on learning in all seven programs. The study on CAPE revealed that while most Chicago public schools were slowly improving their test scores in mathematics and readings, CAPE schools were improving at twice the rate of the rest of the system. CAPE high schools were performing at grade level, placing them a year ahead of the rest of the system. All of CAPE’s research studies are available on line in the research section of the CAPE website (www.capeweb.org).
But more important than a history of outside research is CAPE’s new focus on practitioner research. CAPE teachers and artists ask compelling questions about their own practice, and document their work in progress to improve the work as it unfolds. This rich evidence of effective teaching and learning is also posted on the CAPE website. CAPE’s book, “Renaissance in the Classroom” was also a research project. The “practice based theories” put forth in the book are the result of 285 interviews with teachers, artists, students, administrators, and parents. CAPE’s work has also been richly documented in the important new book on education and the arts: “Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century”, edited by Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond and published by Columbia College Chicago.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thanks again for a great discussion. We have time for one more question that we like to ask all of our guests.
Arnie, how do you sustain yourself and your staff to prevent burnout?
Arnold Aprill
The Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education is built on a distributed leadership model. CAPE is a network of partnerships in which teams of teachers and artists and schools and arts organizations make their own local program design decisions, oversee their own implementation, and with the assistance of the CAPE office staff, assess and document their own progress. My staff coordinates the network, but the partners themselves do the heavy lifting. It is not that my staff doesn’t work hard- we work very hard- but all we need to do to revitalize ourselves is to visit our partners at work to be inspired by the exhilarating sight of democracy in action. The work just gets better over time. What more can you ask for from a job? We also forge meaningful collaborations with exciting colleagues from all over the country and the world. This constantly expands our horizons and keeps our eyes on the prize. It is easy to get distracted by the day-to-day struggles for social justice. Conscious strategies for reminding ourselves of our larger purposes and our on-the-ground successes are not self-indulgent fluff. They are pragmatic necessities.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with Arnold Aprill. For more information on Arnie and CAPE:
Arnold Aprill
Executive Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
203 N. Wabash, Suite 1720
Chicago, IL 60601-2417
Phone: 312-870-6140 x141
Fax: 312-870-6147
Email: aaprill@capeweb.org
Web: www.capeweb.org
Arnold Aprill
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