what work or life skills require education in the arts

New evidence of the benefits of arts education

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, brian kisida and bk brian kisida assistant professor, truman school of public affairs - university of missouri @briankisida daniel h. bowen dhb daniel h. bowen assistant professor, college of education and human development - texas a&m university @_dhbowen.

February 12, 2019

Engaging with art is essential to the human experience. Almost as soon as motor skills are developed, children communicate through artistic expression. The arts challenge us with different points of view, compel us to empathize with “others,” and give us the opportunity to reflect on the human condition. Empirical evidence supports these claims: Among adults, arts participation is related to behaviors that contribute to the health of civil society , such as increased civic engagement, greater social tolerance, and reductions in other-regarding behavior. Yet, while we recognize art’s transformative impacts, its place in K-12 education has become increasingly tenuous.

A critical challenge for arts education has been a lack of empirical evidence that demonstrates its educational value. Though few would deny that the arts confer intrinsic benefits, advocating “art for art’s sake” has been insufficient for preserving the arts in schools—despite national surveys showing an overwhelming majority of the public agrees that the arts are a necessary part of a well-rounded education.

Over the last few decades, the proportion of students receiving arts education has shrunk drastically . This trend is primarily attributable to the expansion of standardized-test-based accountability, which has pressured schools to focus resources on tested subjects. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. These pressures have disproportionately affected access to the arts in a negative way for students from historically underserved communities. For example, a federal government report found that schools designated under No Child Left Behind as needing improvement and schools with higher percentages of minority students were more likely to experience decreases in time spent on arts education.

We recently conducted the first ever large-scale, randomized controlled trial study of a city’s collective efforts to restore arts education through community partnerships and investments. Building on our previous investigations of the impacts of enriching arts field trip experiences, this study examines the effects of a sustained reinvigoration of schoolwide arts education. Specifically, our study focuses on the initial two years of Houston’s Arts Access Initiative and includes 42 elementary and middle schools with over 10,000 third- through eighth-grade students. Our study was made possible by generous support of the Houston Endowment , the National Endowment for the Arts , and the Spencer Foundation .

Due to the program’s gradual rollout and oversubscription, we implemented a lottery to randomly assign which schools initially participated. Half of these schools received substantial influxes of funding earmarked to provide students with a vast array of arts educational experiences throughout the school year. Participating schools were required to commit a monetary match to provide arts experiences. Including matched funds from the Houston Endowment, schools in the treatment group had an average of $14.67 annually per student to facilitate and enhance partnerships with arts organizations and institutions. In addition to arts education professional development for school leaders and teachers, students at the 21 treatment schools received, on average, 10 enriching arts educational experiences across dance, music, theater, and visual arts disciplines. Schools partnered with cultural organizations and institutions that provided these arts learning opportunities through before- and after-school programs, field trips, in-school performances from professional artists, and teaching-artist residencies. Principals worked with the Arts Access Initiative director and staff to help guide arts program selections that aligned with their schools’ goals.

Our research efforts were part of a multisector collaboration that united district administrators, cultural organizations and institutions, philanthropists, government officials, and researchers. Collective efforts similar to Houston’s Arts Access Initiative have become increasingly common means for supplementing arts education opportunities through school-community partnerships. Other examples include Boston’s Arts Expansion Initiative , Chicago’s Creative Schools Initiative , and Seattle’s Creative Advantage .

Through our partnership with the Houston Education Research Consortium, we obtained access to student-level demographics, attendance and disciplinary records, and test score achievement, as well as the ability to collect original survey data from all 42 schools on students’ school engagement and social and emotional-related outcomes.

We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others. In terms of our measure of compassion for others, students who received more arts education experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly.

When we restrict our analysis to elementary schools, which comprised 86 percent of the sample and were the primary target of the program, we also find that increases in arts learning positively and significantly affect students’ school engagement, college aspirations, and their inclinations to draw upon works of art as a means for empathizing with others. In terms of school engagement, students in the treatment group were more likely to agree that school work is enjoyable, makes them think about things in new ways, and that their school offers programs, classes, and activities that keep them interested in school. We generally did not find evidence to suggest significant impacts on students’ math, reading, or science achievement, attendance, or our other survey outcomes, which we discuss in our full report .

As education policymakers increasingly rely on empirical evidence to guide and justify decisions, advocates struggle to make the case for the preservation and restoration of K-12 arts education. To date, there is a remarkable lack of large-scale experimental studies that investigate the educational impacts of the arts. One problem is that U.S. school systems rarely collect and report basic data that researchers could use to assess students’ access and participation in arts educational programs. Moreover, the most promising outcomes associated with arts education learning objectives extend beyond commonly reported outcomes such as math and reading test scores. There are strong reasons to suspect that engagement in arts education can improve school climate, empower students with a sense of purpose and ownership, and enhance mutual respect for their teachers and peers. Yet, as educators and policymakers have come to recognize the importance of expanding the measures we use to assess educational effectiveness, data measuring social and emotional benefits are not widely collected. Future efforts should continue to expand on the types of measures used to assess educational program and policy effectiveness.

These findings provide strong evidence that arts educational experiences can produce significant positive impacts on academic and social development. Because schools play a pivotal role in cultivating the next generation of citizens and leaders, it is imperative that we reflect on the fundamental purpose of a well-rounded education. This mission is critical in a time of heightened intolerance and pressing threats to our core democratic values. As policymakers begin to collect and value outcome measures beyond test scores, we are likely to further recognize the value of the arts in the fundamental mission of education.

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The Values of Arts Education

Arts education builds well-rounded individuals, arts education broadens our understanding of and appreciation for other cultures and histories, arts education supports social and emotional development, arts education builds empathy, reduces intolerance, and generates acceptance of others, arts education improves school engagement and culture, arts education develops valuable life and career skills, arts education strengthens community and civic engagement.

Arts education plays a vital role in the personal and professional development of citizens and, more broadly, the economic growth and social sustainability of communities. Its loss or diminution from the system would be incalculable. And yet, despite widespread support from parents and the general public, arts education still struggles to be prioritized by decision-makers. We believe one reason the arts are not prioritized stems from a disconnect between the perceived value of the arts and the real benefits experienced by students. We often heard in our outreach that the arts are misunderstood; one listening-session participant, a leader in arts education advocacy, noted that “decision-makers may have a flawed vision of what arts learning is in their heads, and they make decisions based on that vision.”

To remedy this, in this section we document the important attributes, values, and skills that come from arts education. We argue that arts education:

• Builds well-rounded individuals;
• Broadens our understanding and appreciation of other cultures and histories;
• Supports social and emotional development;
• Builds empathy, reduces intolerance, and generates acceptance of others;
• Improves school engagement and culture;
• Develops valuable life and career skills; and
• Strengthens community and civic engagement.

Many of these social and emotional benefits are intertwined with the priorities facing our school systems as we recover from the pandemic. These themes are enriched by a broad collection of voices—students, parents, arts educators, artists, and others—who told us about their experiences with arts education and how they have benefited.

“Though I personally have enjoyed and benefited tremendously from arts education, it is in my role as parent that I see most poignantly the power of arts education. I have seen my children think, feel, and connect through the arts in ways exponentially more powerful than they could without. When we moved to a community which did not support art education . . . I not only saw my own children struggle socially, emotionally, and academically; but also saw the devastating effects on the youth community. I am delighted now, in a new community, to see my children perform in musical and theatrical productions as well as to develop habits of inquiry, resourcefulness, and persistence through visual art. These experiences overshadow the toll that lack of arts opportunities took. Yet I grieve for those who do not have such access.”

—erin, parent, camdenton, missouri.

Similar to math, science, or history, the arts are a way of knowing and understanding the world and the complexity of human experience. Arts education builds an appreciation for the arts, and provides students with an introduction to artistic disciplines, techniques, and major movements that serves as a foundation for lifelong engagement. As such, the arts should not be viewed as a frill or subservient to other disciplines. Knowledge of the Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, pottery crafting techniques, or the fundamentals of perspective and design holds no less value than knowing the chemical formula for photosynthesis or how to calculate the circumference of a circle. And for many, it will mean much more. Indeed, research from the National Endowment for the Arts ( NEA ) found that childhood arts exposure is the number one predictor of arts participation as an adult. 37 Without that exposure, this window to the world remains hidden.

“I married a humanities professor, poet, and semiprofessional musician who had been saved by music as a child and had the opportunity to grow up playing in the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. This of course meant that our house has been filled with music and musicians forever. . . . When it came time for our children to play instruments, my husband steered them toward instruments that would complete his future jazz trio. He was still on the trumpet, my son emerged as the piano player, and my daughter was on the upright bass. When they were small, they would pretend or struggle through, but last year before my husband Greg died unexpectedly, there they were playing “All Blues” by Miles Davis in the trio he envisioned. When they are feeling down or need to remember him, they go back to their instruments without prompting and just play. . . . [Art] becomes a means to connect and remember.”

— dr. maria trent, physician-scientist, maryland.

• 37 Rabkin and Hedberg, Arts Education in America .

Alongside the deeper insights into the world that can come from the arts, they also provide a vital link to the past. Art spans time and space and opens a window into experiences distant from us. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to Hokusai’s The Great Wave to Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton , the arts document the richness of human history, preserved for future generations to contemplate and build upon. Arts education uniquely gives students the opportunity to engage with the past in a way that brings history to life and goes beyond textbooks. Expanding the curriculum beyond the Western-centric canon furthers these opportunities for deeper understanding and appreciation across cultures. Research shows that arts education not only increases historical knowledge but also historical empathy, opening up a deep understanding of what it was like to live in different times and places. 38

Art can also offer a way to preserve the cultural heritage of marginalized communities by engaging communities whose histories and culture have been suppressed or forgotten. Jamaica Osorio, an artist and scholar, told us that in her Hawaiian immersion school, arts were deeply integrated:

“So, when we studied literature, we studied these ancient mo‘olelo —these stories, histories, and literatures, and these songs of our kūpuna —of our ancestors—and that was the primary document. . . . I’ve devoted my life to the study of Hawaiian literature and, in particular, literature in Hawaiian, and have devoted my work to trying to represent these texts through poetry in a way that will be relevant and resonant with the people of my generation, who may feel—for whatever reason—distanced or disconnected from that archive.”

At every stage and in every school, the connections the arts open to the past can help deepen a child’s understanding of the world.

“The art classroom is a perfect place to introduce students to a world beyond their own. Through art-historical experiences, students can connect past and present events, realize that history is explored and experienced through art, and appreciate the struggles and triumphs of times they have not lived through.”

—jessica, visual arts educator, altoona, pa.

• 38 Brian Kisida, Laura Goodwin, and Daniel H. Bowen, “ Teaching History through Theater: The Effects of Arts Integration on Students’ Knowledge and Attitudes ,” AERA Open , January 2020; and Greene, Kisida, and Bowen, “Educational Value of Field Trips.”

Arts education is also a key ingredient in social and emotional learning, a growing priority for education policy-makers over the past decade. 39 The arts facilitate personal and emotional growth by providing opportunities for students to reflect on who they are and who they want to be. Artistic works expose students to deep personal perspectives and intimate experiences, and through these experiences students find new ways to see themselves and their role in the world. It is not surprising that many adults can reference key pieces of literature, poetry, and other artworks that have helped define who they are.

Similarly, the process of making art necessitates the formation of one’s own perspective. The need to then share that perspective gives students space to form and refine their own voice. Different arts disciplines provide distinct opportunities for students to learn to express themselves. For instance, Irishia Hubbard, a dance teacher with the Turnaround Arts Network in Santa Ana, California, works with middle school students (grades 6–8) on the dance team. After journaling and talking about experiences of immigration and borders, her students produce, rehearse, and perform a dance exploring those feelings. Ashley, an eighth-grade student, described the experience, observing that “this dance means a lot to me, because at one point in my life I was separated from my brother and my dad.” Stephanie Phillips, the Santa Ana superintendent, added, “they have absolutely blossomed, as performers, but also as expressive advocates of themselves; they are now talking about things that are of concern to them and learning to express them, not only artistically, but in simple terms of how to have collaborative and very constructive conversation.” Chiamaka, an eleventh-grader from North Carolina who shared her perspective with us, stated simply that art “has given me a voice.”

Carly, a twelfth-grader with cerebral palsy from New Mexico, told us that arts education helped her “step outside of my comfort zone.” Finding a place in theater gave her a place to be seen:

“I’ve had a lot of people tell me . . . that they wouldn’t cast me, that they wouldn’t do it, it would be too hard on me, and they basically didn’t want to risk it. And then I finally found a director who gave me my first lead role, and just being up there and realizing that everybody’s looking at me and they’re not just seeing a disability, they’re seeing me expressing myself in the way I loved. I just never wanted them to stop seeing me that way.”

“It is not an overstatement to say the arts saved my life. My arts education, particularly in high school, centered on vocal music, forensic theater, and traditional performance theater. Each of these inherently came with a community of people who—while all similar—taught one another to see the world through myriad eyes. I gained a siblinghood who provided creative and constructive outlets for the breadth of human emotion; I learned what it meant to be an ally; I gained the confidence to be myself and the assurance that ‘myself’ is exactly who the world needs me to be.”

—lynnea, arts administrator, suburban tennessee.

• 39 The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is one key instance of this. They define social and emotional learning as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions” ( https://casel.org/what-is-sel/ ).

The arts have long had a role in bending the arc of history toward justice. Just as the arts help us better understand ourselves, they also improve our ability to empathize with others. As Mary Anne Carter, the twelfth chair of the NEA recently noted, “The arts are a powerful antidote against bigotry and hate. The arts can build bridges, promote tolerance, and heal social divisions.” 40 We have all witnessed the power of the arts to promote understanding, from the ability of plays like Angels in America to challenge how audiences saw AIDS , to the unifying role that music played in the Civil Rights Movement.

Arts education exposes students to a greater diversity of opinions and ideas. This in turn can challenge preconceived notions of others and build greater empathy and acceptance. A growing body of research confirms the power of arts education to contribute to these prosocial behaviors. 41 For instance, research in California public schools revealed that drama activities prompted students to take on different perspectives through interpreting a character’s motivation. 42 Loie, an eighth-grade student from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told us that through her experiences with arts courses, “I’m able to express my opinions and be open to other people’s opinions. . . . I can look at their experience and learn from it. . . . There’s different ways of looking at things.”

“Effectively communicating that we understand what another person is feeling is one of the greatest gifts we can give to another human being . . . from listening to even just a single movement of music by a classical composer . . . abstract, wordless music can transcend time and ethnicity in its ability to communicate the full depth of human emotion.”

— george, teaching artist (music), bedminster, nj.

• 40 “#WednesdayMotivation,” June 24, 2020, #WednesdayMotivation: Mary Anne Carter on the Power of the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts.
• 41 Sara Konrath and Brian Kisida, “Does Arts Engagement Increase Empathy and Prosocial Behavior? A Review of the Literature,” in Engagement in the City: How Arts and Culture Impact Development in Urban Areas , ed. Leigh N. Hersey and Bryna Bobick (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2021).
• 42 Liane Brouillette, “ How the Arts Help Children to Create Healthy Social Scripts: Exploring the Perceptions of Elementary Teachers ,” Arts Education Policy Review 111 (1) (2009): 20–21.

In a perfect world, students would enthusiastically look forward to coming to school. Educators are continually searching for ways to excite students about learning, combat chronic absenteeism, and curb the dropout rate. Engaging students in their own learning process is not only important for the time they spend in school but is essential to inculcating a lifelong love of learning and discovery.

Arts education is particularly well-suited to combat complacent attitudes toward learning. Indeed, research finds that students enrolled in arts courses have improved attendance, and the effects are larger for students with a history of chronic absenteeism. 43 Related research finds that arts learning generates spaces “full of student passion and apprenticeship style learning.” 44 The arts provide students a sense of ownership and agency over their own education. Students who enroll in a theater class, for example, gain a sense of purpose as they work toward opening night, and they build a community with their peers and teachers as they work together toward a common goal. Alex, an arts educator from Chicago, illustrated it this way:

“I believe that it is imperative for students to have voice and choice in their learning . . . students are more invested and take more risks when they create from the point of what is personal or important to them. . . . When students discover an idea or medium that speaks to them, they become more invested in learning and creating.”

Arts education also improves school engagement by providing different ways of accessing educational content. In a nation with over 50 million K –12 students, schools need a broad set of entry points for students to discover what kinds of learning environments work best for them. Jessica, a visual arts educator from Altoona, Pennsylvania, told us, “Students who may be low achievers in the academic classroom are some of my highest functioning students in the art room. . . . Everyone has strengths and everyone has weaknesses.” Not all students learn the same way, and art offers students with different learning styles another mechanism by which to absorb content and ideas. Jensen, an eleventh-grader from Washington state, told us, “from taking art classes I learned that having a different pace or approach to things is okay, and everyone learns and makes things in their own way. And that really helped with my self-esteem in school and outside of school.”

“I really disliked school and thought it was an incredible waste of time and looked forward to turning sixteen so that I could drop out like my Dad had done. The one thing that kept me in school was that I really loved band. I couldn’t see myself leaving the band behind, and so I stayed in school and even went to college. Not as a music major, but I continued to play in the College Marching and Concert bands. Now I work in Arts Education and hope that the artists we send to perform in schools and teach workshops are finding the students who are bored and dislike school and are giving them a reason to stay.”

—donnajean, arts educator, kendall park, nj.

Finally, the collaborative nature of the arts can build strong bonds among students, teachers, and parents, thus contributing to a more positive school culture. Teachers in schools with higher levels of arts education report greater parental involvement. 45 Erin, the parent from Missouri, relayed this compelling story about her children:

“This year [2020] was, as was the case for most of us around the world, a particularly tough year. My children were uncharacteristically seized with anxiety and dread about returning to school. One child in particular, typically a bright and eager student, despaired the return. It was not her friends but her art teachers—and the experiences they collaboratively created—that completely turned her attitude around. For that, I am forever grateful; for in the midst of dread and despair, art helps us to meet and support one another.”

“I grew up in a dysfunctional family . . . and I wrote about all the loss and damage of growing up in a dysfunctional family—the abuse and the neglect. And when I was a senior in high school, the very last thing that happened before I graduated was someone turned in one of my poems, and it won the poetry contest for the [school’s literary magazine]. It was profound. I wasn’t this zero nothing, and my work had merit. And it planted a seed that really navigated the rest of my life. . . . That little measure of recognition really formed everything, and I’m so grateful for everybody that made that literary magazine exist in this enormous high school. There were lots of sports and lots of clubs and that tiny literary magazine was, I assume for other writers like me, a life raft—a lifesaving raft.”

—mary agnes antonopoulos, copywriter, monroe, ny.

• 43 Bowen and Kisida, The Arts Advantage .
• 44 Jal Mehta, “ Schools Already Have Good Learning, Just Not Where You Think ,” Education Week , February 8, 2017.
• 45 Bowen and Kisida, The Arts Advantage .

Arts education also imparts valuable skills that will serve students in their lives and careers: observation, problem-solving, innovation, and critical thinking. 46 Participating in the arts can also improve communication skills, generate self-esteem, teach collaboration, and increase confidence. Such skills are valuable to artists and non-artists alike. For those interested in careers in the arts, from musicians to music producers, fine artists to graphic designers, arts courses provide an opportunity for career exploration and a foundation for career choices.

“Arts education played an important role in developing my skills and preparing me for that dreadful thing we call ‘adulthood.’ This may be cliche, but it’s true when I say it’s taught me important life skills such as thinking outside the box, being able to adapt quickly to situations, developing that camaraderie with people, and being comfortable in my own skin. Improv is definitely something I benefited from in my arts education. The number one rule of improv is to never say no but always say, ‘Yes, and. . . .’ That’s proven to be key to my success in life—personally and professionally. My arts education taught me how to be confident . . . flexible, creative, how to be a team player, and when to listen and talk. I can’t say for certain if I’d be as successful in my personal or professional development without my arts education, and I certainly appreciate what it’s done for me and don’t take it for granted.”

—aaron kubey, director of artistic sign language, washington, d.c..

Moreover, specific skills covered through arts education directly affect a broad swath of careers outside the core arts careers. Stephanie, an arts educator in suburban California, told us that her main goal in teaching art is “developing creativity and innovation.” From the interior designer relying on color theory to the architect who uses 3 D software to the engineer who incorporates elements of design, the skills embodied in arts education have wide applications. Jensen, an eleventh-grader who had studied at a specialized arts school and wants to pursue a career in medicine, told us, “a lot of the things I learned are skills I would use interacting with people and the world around me, and not just a sheet of paper or something that’s on my computer.” The far-reaching benefits of arts education include work ethic and resilience. As Jade Elyssa A. Rivera, who works in arts education policy and advocacy in California, shared, “The arts were an essential part of my upbringing. It is where I learned the meaning of hard work. It is where I learned that, even in the face of systemic injustices, my dreams are achievable. It is where I learned that, if I just roll up my sleeves and do the work, anything is possible.”

“While I continued to love art and teaching, in 2015 I made a drastic career shift and left the field of education. I found myself working in the private sector for a large retailer doing ISD [instructional systems design] work . . . thinking this would be a new path. While it did end up being a new path, it wasn’t as far from my background as I thought it would be. It was only a few months into this work that I found myself applying for and being accepted for a role based on the fine arts and education background I had been pursuing previously. While it was applied in a corporate sense, I was given the opportunity to photograph, film, and design training for retail employees directly applying principles I had learned throughout my arts education and career for an entirely new and unique audience. Beyond aesthetics and design, I’ve been able to apply the critical thinking skills, view problems from multiple sides, draft ideas, and quickly revise or shift. Many of these were formed through learning about art. . . . Without art and its impact on my life, I would not have the perspective, experiences, or career I do today.”

—ian, former arts educator, arkansas.

• 46 NGA Center for Best Practices, The Impact of Arts Education on Workforce Preparation (Washington, D.C.: National Governors Association, May 2002).

Finally, arts education can lead to socially empowered and civically engaged youths and adults. Equipped with the knowledge, habits, values, and skills provided through arts education, students are well-prepared to promote democratic values and contribute to the health of our economy and culture. 47 Arts education experiences offer community and civic contributions with the potential for positive transformations. For example, Grace, an arts educator in Lake Arrowhead, California, described how, “Over the course of my 27 years of teaching art I have promoted community and civic engagement with schoolwide murals on and off campus.”

Strengthening and valuing communities through the arts also occurs through collaborations between schools and communities. Leslie Imse, a music educator and chair of the Farmington Public Schools K -12 music department, living in Simsbury, Connecticut, shared an example of her school’s engagement with seniors in their community: 48

“In addition to performing at our school concerts, student musicians perform regularly in their school and town community. After the 2008 recession, the music department realized that the population that was hurting the most were the senior citizens in our community. We created a new event for the senior citizens, bringing them to our school cafeteria for a free meal and ‘a show.’ It was so popular in town that we annually have one ‘Senior Citizen Cafe’ in the fall and one in the spring. The relationships that students have made with the senior citizens are meaningful, as our musicians not only prepare music for the older generation but also wait tables and converse with the seniors. . . . This is one of the many service activities that the music department connects with the community.”

Arts education also provides opportunities for students to engage with current events both close to the lives of students and far away. For instance, at Clarence Edwards Middle School in Boston, the eighth-grade visual arts class run by Shari Malgieri follows the news—international, national, and popular—over the entire year and then collaborates on a comprehensive mural about the year as seen by the students. 49

“As a person who facilitates arts-in-education residencies, I’ve watched people of all ages benefit from the arts. . . . I’ve seen teenagers weld beautiful fish from trash they cleaned from a stream to educate the public about the ways pollution threatens wildlife, and heard them say how meaningful it is to know that their work will make a difference. I’ve watched the joy on the faces of folks with intellectual disabilities as they crafted panels for a group quilt that would go on a city-wide tour. . . . Nearly every day of my working life is an encounter with the ways arts in education pulls people together, ignites change (both personal and social), and gives life to deep and lasting happiness.”

—marci, arts facilitator, lancaster, pa.

These aspects of community and civic engagement, in concert with the other benefits of arts education, prepare students to become effective citizens who are socially empowered and civilly engaged adults, equipped with the tools to contribute their own voices to the ever-evolving story of America. As Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first youth poet laureate, expressed, “All art is political. The decision to create, the artistic choice to have a voice, the choice to be heard, is the most political act of all.” 50 How we respond to the deficit in arts education in America—how we prepare our future leaders to refine and use their own voices—will help define our course for generations to come.  

• 47 Arts education can also serve as a prevention, intervention, transition, and healing experience for students in the juvenile justice system, where barriers to arts engagement often exist. The Education Commission of the States suggests expanding the arts for incarcerated youth, who disproportionately lack access when removed from their communities and schools. Education Commission of the States, Engaging the Arts across the Juvenile Justice System (Denver: Education Commission of the States, April 2020).
• 48 Many other types of intergenerational arts programs exist that provide opportunities for participants from different generations to develop positive reciprocal relationships. These interactions begin to break down existing stereotypes of ageism and offer a pathway to healthy aging and meaningful community relationships. Intergenerational public schools in Cleveland, Ohio, have been in operation since 2000 and emphasize the importance of experience and relationship-based learning. Adults and elders volunteer at schools, where they engage with young people through the arts and other learning opportunities. Examples of such intergenerational arts projects span multiple disciplines, including theatre (see, for example, Richard Chin, “ This ‘Peter Pan’ Production Truly Is Ageless ,” NextAvenue , April 8, 2016), visual art, and ecology (for example, “ Students’ Concerns for Nature Featured in Art Show ,” Sauk Trail Wolves , n.d.). Many other resources are located on the Generations United website , a national organization that fosters intergenerational learning relationships, linking schools with elders in a variety of sites across the country.
• 49 David Farbman, Dennie Palmer Wolf, and Diane Sherlock, Advancing Arts Education through an Expanded School Day: Lessons from Five Schools (Boston: National Center on Time and Learning, June 2013), 19–31.
• 50 Carren Jao, “ Poetry Is Political: Amanda Gorman’s America ,” KCET , January 20, 2021.

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Creativity and Academics: The Power of an Arts Education

The arts are as important as academics, and they should be treated that way in school curriculum. This is what we believe and practice at New Mexico School for the Arts (NMSA). While the positive impact of the arts on academic achievement is worthwhile in itself, it's also the tip of the iceberg when looking at the whole child. Learning art goes beyond creating more successful students. We believe that it creates more successful human beings.

NMSA is built upon a dual arts and academic curriculum. Our teachers, students, and families all hold the belief that both arts and academics are equally important. Our goal is to prepare students for professional careers in the arts, while also equipping them with the skills and content knowledge necessary to succeed in college. From our personal experience ( and research ), here are five benefits of an arts education:

1. Growth Mindset

Through the arts, students develop skills like resilience, grit, and a growth mindset to help them master their craft, do well academically, and succeed in life after high school. (See Embracing Failure: Building a Growth Mindset Through the Arts and Mastering Self-Assessment: Deepening Independent Learning Through the Arts .) Ideally, this progression will happen naturally, but often it can be aided by the teacher. By setting clear expectations and goals for students and then drawing the correlation between the work done and the results, students can begin to shift their motivation, resulting in a much healthier and more sustainable learning environment.

For students to truly grow and progress, there has to be a point when intrinsic motivation comes into balance with extrinsic motivation. In the early stages of learning an art form, students engage with the activity because it's fun (intrinsic motivation). However, this motivation will allow them to progress only so far, and then their development begins to slow -- or even stop. At this point, lean on extrinsic motivation to continue your students' growth. This can take the form of auditions, tests, or other assessments. Like the impact of early intrinsic motivation, this kind of engagement will help your students grow and progress. While both types of motivation are helpful and productive, a hybrid of the two is most successful. Your students will study or practice not only for the external rewards, but also because of the self-enjoyment or satisfaction this gives them.

2. Self-Confidence

A number of years ago, I had a student enter my band program who would not speak. When asked a question, she would simply look at me. She loved being in band, but she would not play. I wondered why she would choose to join an activity while refusing to actually do the activity. Slowly, through encouragement from her peers and myself, a wonderful young person came out from under her insecurities and began to play. And as she learned her instrument, I watched her transform into not only a self-confident young lady and an accomplished musician, but also a student leader. Through the act of making music, she overcame her insecurities and found her voice and place in life.

3. Improved Cognition

Research connects learning music to improved "verbal memory, second language pronunciation accuracy, reading ability, and executive functions" in youth ( Frontiers in Neuroscience ). By immersing students in arts education, you draw them into an incredibly complex and multifaceted endeavor that combines many subject matters (like mathematics, history, language, and science) while being uniquely tied to culture.

For example, in order for a student to play in tune, he must have a scientific understanding of sound waves and other musical acoustics principles. Likewise, for a student to give an inspired performance of Shakespeare, she must understand social, cultural, and historical events of the time. The arts are valuable not only as stand-alone subject matter, but also as the perfect link between all subject matters -- and a great delivery system for these concepts, as well. You can see this in the correlation between drawing and geometry, or between meter and time signatures and math concepts such as fractions .

4. Communication

One can make an argument that communication may be the single most important aspect of existence. Our world is built through communication. Students learn a multitude of communication skills by studying the arts. Through the very process of being in a music ensemble, they must learn to verbally, physically, and emotionally communicate with their peers, conductor, and audience. Likewise, a cast member must not only communicate the spoken word to an audience, but also the more intangible underlying emotions of the script. The arts are a mode of expression that transforms thoughts and emotions into a unique form of communication -- art itself.

5. Deepening Cultural and Self-Understanding

While many find the value of arts education to be the ways in which it impacts student learning, I feel the learning of art is itself a worthwhile endeavor. A culture without art isn’t possible. Art is at the very core of our identity as humans. I feel that the greatest gift we can give students -- and humanity -- is an understanding, appreciation, and ability to create art.

What are some of the benefits of an arts education that you have noticed with your students?

New Mexico School for the Arts

Per pupil expenditures, free / reduced lunch, demographics:.

The Benefits of Arts Education for K-12 Students

While arts programs often fall victim to budget cuts, they can be an important contributor to students' success at school.

Benefits of Arts Education

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Just like after-school sports programs allow students to learn skills not necessarily taught in the classroom, like teamwork and self-discipline, the arts provide students with broad opportunities for growth outside of strictly academic pursuits.

Your child’s art class involves a lot more than just the Crayola marker scribble-scrabble that will end up hanging on your refrigerator.

“Good arts education is not about the product,” says Jamie Kasper, director of the Arts Education Partnership and a former music teacher. “It is about the process of learning.”

Policymakers, school administrators and parents alike may overlook the significance of arts education, but these programs can be a crucial component of your child’s school life. Whether they're practicing lines for a school play or cutting up magazine scraps for a collage, children can use art to tap into their creative side and hone skills that might not be the focus of other content areas, including communication, fine motor skills and emotional intelligence.

“Sometimes folks who are not involved in the arts focus on the product without realizing that that is not the most important part of what we do,” Kasper says.

While arts programs often fall victim to budget cuts, they can be an important contributor to students' overall success at school. Arts education can help kids:

• Engage with school and reduce stress.
• Develop social-emotional and interpersonal skills.
• Enrich their experiences.
• Handle constructive criticism.
• Bolster academic achievement.
• Improve focus.

Engage With School and Reduce Stress

Kasper says she often hears from other educators that art programs are one of the main factors that motivate children to come to school.

"If they don't want to come to school, you're never going to get them," she says. "So why wouldn't you do that thing that makes them want to come to school, that also teaches them these really great skills?"

Michelle Schroeder, the president of the New York State Art Teachers Association and a high school animation teacher, seconds this. She says the arts allow students an opportunity to have fun throughout the day without having to worry so much about the stressors of other content areas. And this is backed by research, too – some studies have shown that the arts, from drama to dance , can have therapeutic effects.

"It's that part of their day where they can have fun and just play with materials, and really not have to worry about the answers on their tests," Schroeder says.

Develop Social-Emotional and Interpersonal Skills

Participating in arts programs – particularly those that focus on more collaborative forms like theater and music – is a good way for students to sharpen their communication and social-emotional skills, experts say.

Camille Farrington, managing director and senior research associate at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, says art classes offer students opportunities to interact with their fellow students in a constructive and creative manner, a process that fuels their social and emotional development. For example, one study published in the Journal of Primary Prevention found that students in low-income schools who participated in an after-school dance program tended to experience heightened self-esteem and social skills.

Building those skills is more important than ever after the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, says Denise Grail Brandenburg, arts education specialist and team lead at the National Endowment for the Arts. “Arts education can support the social and emotional learning needs of students," Brandenburg wrote in an email, "including helping students learn to manage their emotions and have compassion for others.”

Kasper also says that even with somewhat solitary artistic endeavors like painting or drawing, the act of perfecting one’s technique allows students to come up with creative ways to express and communicate their viewpoints.

“You teach the fundamentals of making the art ... – your instrument, your voice, your body in motion, painting, sculpture, whatever it is – so that students can then take those skills and use them to communicate more effectively,” she says.

Enrich Their Experiences

Human beings have practiced various art forms to express themselves since the dawn of their existence.

“Art immensely improves and enriches the lives of young people,” Farrington says. “It's a core part of being a human being and human history and culture.”

For kids in low-income neighborhoods, where residents may have less access to art and cultural resources that can improve quality of life , school arts programs are especially important. An analysis from the National Endowment for the Arts, drawing on data from four longitudinal studies, found that students with high levels of arts involvement had more positive outcomes in a variety of areas, from high school graduation rates to civic participation.

Just like after-school sports programs allow students to learn skills not necessarily taught in the classroom, like teamwork and self-discipline, Farrington says the arts provide students with broad opportunities for growth outside of strictly academic pursuits.

"One of the things that's really critical to young people of all ages ... is the opportunity to explore a wide variety of different kinds of activities," Farrington says. "Some of them are going to gravitate to one thing, and some are going to gravitate to another thing, but they can't gravitate to them if they've never experienced them."

Handle Constructive Criticism

Unlike many other school subjects, in which questions often have one specific answer, the arts allow for students to come up with a nearly unlimited variety of final products. This means that art teachers often give feedback a little bit differently, particularly with older students.

“They're teaching something and then immediately asking students to demonstrate that skill in a really authentic way, which is different from going to teach something and three months later giving students a test,” Kasper says.

Schroeder says that art teachers typically provide their students with highly individualized, constructive criticism. This allows students to learn how to gracefully receive a critique and respond to it, she says, explaining how and why they developed the artwork that they did.

“In so much of their careers and their future, people are either going to criticize or they're going to suggest improvements, and our students need to become comfortable with receiving feedback from other people,” she says. “So many experiences that they’ll have in an art classroom give them the opportunity to feel what it’s like to have someone question them. There's so much dialogue that happens in the classroom.”

Bolster Academic Achievement

While Farrington says that making art for art’s sake ought to be sufficient justification for school arts programs, research has also shown that arts education can lead to academic gains.

For example, a 2005 study on the impact of a comprehensive arts curriculum in Columbus, Ohio, public schools found that students with the arts program scored higher on statewide tests in math, science and citizenship than students from control schools. This effect was even greater for students from low-income schools. In the NEA analysis, socially and economically disadvantaged children with significant arts education had better academic outcomes – including higher grades and test scores and higher rates of graduation and college enrollment – than their peers without arts involvement.

Different disciplines also provide their own specific cognitive benefits – for example, participating in dance has been shown to sharpen young children's spatial awareness , while making music can help students develop their working memory .

Improve Focus

In addition to the specific benefits of each individual art practice, Kasper says that across the board, the arts are a good way for students to learn impulse control.

Intuitively, it makes sense that the act of concentrating in order to perfect one's craft can help an individual develop the ability to focus closely on other things as well. Research has shown that training in the arts also helps students hone their ability to pay closer attention and practice self-control. In 2009, researchers at the Dana Foundation , which funds neuroscience research and programming, posited based on multiple studies that training in the arts stimulates and strengthens the brain's attention system.

"That's something that I think we forget that kids have to learn," Kasper says.

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Author: Getty Education Institute for the Arts

Publication Year: 1996

Media Type: Report

How do we teach chiildren about a subject as fluid as art - a discipline that reflects every cultural change, from wars to fashion, ethnicity, and technology? To be meaningful to children, art that is old must connect with the art that makes up their world. When we recognize that art tells the story of humankind, the connection is easily made. Clothing, video games, and MTV, the galleries familiar to young people today, have their historical counterparts.

Art predates writing and provides a visual history that tells us how people dressed, what they ate, how they celebrated life, who their enemies were, what kind of governments they had, and how they buried their dead. Art is the tangible, visible evidence of all peoples around the globe. It can be carbon tested and scientifically documented.

In the long history of humankind, the art-making process has been an integral part of all societies, not a stand-alone enterprise. Given its universality to all learning, we may wonder how art came to be viewed as peripheral to education and a stepchild of public school curricula. The answer lies in the all-too-common view that art is nonfunctional, secular, and separate from society. Of course, it became irrelevant to the mainstream.

Above all else, learning about art from a global perspective will provide a basis for valuing difference. This is a critical issue for our times. Art provides a basis for international understanding like no other subject. Art is the story of humankind, and we are all participants in it.

CONTENTS Arts education for a changing world:      An arts education can build students' competencies for life and for work in the 21st      century.

Educating for tomorrow's jobs and life skills:      Elliot Eisner, Professor of Education and Art, Stanford University, shares his      perspective on the values and skills fostered by arts education.

The Arts: Dynamic partner in building strong schools:      Ramon Cortines, Executive Director of the Pew Network for Standards-based      reform, Stanford University, builds the case for quality arts education as      fundamental to school reform.

Perspective: Arts Education for a lifetime of wonder:       Dr. Gordon Gee and Dr. Constance Bumgarner Gee.

What kind of jobs? What kind of skills?      James S. Houghton, Chairman of the National Skills Standards Board, and Delaine      Eastin, California's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, examine the issues      facing schools in equipping students with skills for tomorrow's workplace.

What's standard about arts education?      Colorado Governor Roy Romer believes arts education is fundamental to      producing graduates who meet the high standards demanded by today's world      marketplace.

What are they saying about arts education and effective school reform?      Leaders of education policy, school administration, and communities from across      the nation comment on the critical role of arts education in improving schools.

The future of imagination:      Historian, author and host of the PBS series The American Experience , David      McCullough provides evidence and reasoning for arts education as key to      America's progress.

Perspective: Learning about art from a global perspective:      Jaune Quick-to-see Smith.

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Arts Education

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Series Title:

PUBLISHER INFORMATION

Name: Getty Education Institute for the Arts (GEI) (defunct)

Website URL:

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• Arts Integration

Arts in the 21st Century Classroom 5 ways the arts connect to 21st century skills.

Lesson content.

Skills for the Future! The 21st century skills our students need—technology, communication, global awareness, critical thinking, problem-solving—can be readily integrated into arts lessons, and vice versa.

• Get real. Working artists of all kinds use computer technology and collaboration. Our students can do the same, using graphics programs to illustrate their works, creating digital videos, or sharing ideas about dance online.
• Work in the cloud. Use Web 2.0 tools like classroom wikis and shared documents in your arts teaching to encourage collaboration and technology literacy.
• Bring the world into the classroom. The Internet is an amazing source of performance and graphic arts information. Illustrate lessons and lectures with examples of art from around the world to increase global awareness.
• Stay open. Assign open-ended projects that encourage problem-solving, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Art projects are perfect for this. Let students figure out how to paint a mural about electricity, choreograph a dance about chemical bonds, or stage an operetta of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Embrace interdisciplinary approaches. Jobs from the 20th century often involved doing the same thing all day, each worker doing a separate piece of the job alone. Today, collaboration and interdisciplinary work are the norm. They should be in the classroom, too. Art instruction belongs in the main classroom with reading, writing, and arithmetic to increase creativity throughout the entire school day.

Arts are Essential!

Current brain research confirms that rich context and multisensory instruction make even simple facts easier to learn and remember. When we’re trying to teach creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration, we can’t expect to succeed with multiple choice quizzes. The arts are more essential than ever in education.

Rebecca Haden

Joanna McKee

October 18, 2019

Article The Key to a Strong Workforce

How to help students learn skills essential to the 21st century workforce in and through arts learning.

• Life Skills

Article Get Wired for Learning

Are you stumped about how to integrate technology into your arts teaching? Check out these 8 tips to put you on the road to tech-savvy arts learning.

Article Growing from STEM to STEAM

Find tips to blend arts, sciences, math and technology by learning how one school district experimented with adding STEAM to their classrooms.

Article Inspired Classrooms

Need to battle off those creativity killers? Here are 7 simple steps for educators to create a classroom environment that is friendly to creativity.

Lesson Creating Comic Strips

In this 3-5 lesson, students will examine comic strips as a form of fiction and nonfiction communication. Students will create original comic strips to convey mathematical concepts.

• Visual Arts
• Drawing & Painting

Lesson Multimedia Hero Analysis

In this 9-12 lesson, students will analyze the positive character traits of heroes as depicted in music, art, and literature. They will gain an understanding of how cultures and societies have produced folk, military, religious, political, and artistic heroes. Students will create original multimedia representations of heroes.

• Literary Arts
• Grades 9-12
• Myths, Legends, & Folktales

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5 Skills That Students Gain Through Arts Education

Learn more about the five skills arts education can bring students!

Engaging in art is essential to students and humans alike. As soon as children develop motor skills, they communicate through artistic expression. Today, most schools put the majority of their focus on standardized testing and some negate the arts altogether. Arts education and arts integration has been shown to make school work more enjoyable and makes students think about things in a new way. Giving students the materials for artistic expression can lower stress, improve their memory, and make students feel more socially connected.

Here are five skills students can gain through arts education:

1. Self-Confidence

For many people, stage fright and public speaking are a big fear. Just the thought of standing in front of a group of people can be overwhelming. The skills developed in a theatre class will help many students conquer their fear of public speaking. Arts education will give them the tools and confidence they need to feel prepared to walk on stage.

2. Growth Mindset

Through the arts, students develop a growth mindset to help them master their craft. Students develop the need to continuously grow and do well academically to be able to participate in the arts. Students will study or practice not only for the ability to participate in the arts but also because of the self-enjoyment or satisfaction it gives them.

3. Problem Solving

Artistic projects are created by problem-solving. Students and performers are faced with many questions. How do I portray this character's emotion to the audience? How do I sing this note? What kind of sculpture can I make with this clay? The arts teach students to approach these questions/problems head-on and find a solution and ultimately, in the end, create something beautiful.

4. Risk-Taking

Participation in any art form requires risk. It requires students to step outside of their comfort zone at times. The ability to put yourself out there and perform or be part of something different is a skill that students will need well into adulthood.

5. Communication

Our world is built on communication. Great communication is required in any relationship, personal or business. Students learn a multitude of communication skills by studying the arts. Arts participation requires students to verbally, physically, and emotionally communicate. Not just with each other, but with an audience.

An education that includes the arts is essential to a student's success in developing a fulfilling life. Skills developed through participation in the arts are increasingly important in the workplace and therefore, key to a successful career.

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Creativity, the Arts, and the Future of Work

• Open Access
• First Online: 18 September 2018

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• Linda F. Nathan 2 , 3  

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Those who study the future tend to imagine worlds where burdens are eased and pleasure and personal freedom are elevated. While the concept of work has not disappeared from their predictions, changing technological and global realities have caused a re-imagining of that world. This chapter explores how to educate young students for work environments in a very different future. Specifically, I demonstrate how creativity and arts learning strengthen students’ ability to manage and navigate that new world and contribute to a sustainable society. I offer an educational case study of a highly successful urban public high school for the arts and argue that its intensive arts education model prepares passionate students who can engage with an uncertain future, even if they are less advantaged.

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• creativityCreativity
• Design thinkingDesign Thinking
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Introduction

As long as there have been futurists and science fiction writers, there have been predictions that the future would deliver a world without the drudgery of work and with more leisure time and personal freedom for all. Whether the “age of technology and the machine” (Burton 2015 ) will ever be realized is unclear. Nevertheless, society faces a central challenge of how to better prepare young people for an uncertain future where progress and opportunity—social, economic, and environmental—cannot be assumed.

Education, on some level, contributes to “the common good, enhances national prosperity and supports stable families, neighborhoods and communities” (Pellegrino and Hilton 2012 ). However, this statement assumes there to be a linearity between the present and the future. I believe that in order to prepare students for the future that is unfolding now, an educational approach that incorporates creativity and arts-based learning is critical to developing resilient, adaptive citizens that can build the stable families and communities of the future.

This chapter asks a central question about the role of creativity and arts education: how can this emphasis contribute to a more sustainable society and even the future of work (Hellstrom et al. 2015 )? How do artists think about creativity and how might schools do the same? I consider an educational case study of the Boston Arts Academy and describe teaching and learning at this one institution. I explain how an intensive education in the arts prepares students with passion to engage an uncertain future, even if they have fewer advantages than most American students. My concluding remarks emphasize the essential qualities of persistence, passion, and practice for success in life and work.

The Future of Work

A growing body of literature by philosophers, economists, social scientists, and technologists foretell futures of work that crowd around two distinct outcomes: a dystopia of extreme polarization or an Eden of creativity and cultural production (Brynjolfssonand McAfee 2016 ; Thompson 2015 ; Sundararajan 2015 ).

The practice of work happening in a single place for a fixed period of time has entirely eroded for many professionals today. The workplace can span states, continents, and time zones. With new technologies and digital collaboration tools, co-workers can meet both synchronously or asynchronously no matter where they are located or there preferred working hours. These realities reflect both a demand for more work flexibility and a broader transformation of how we work. Today’s entrepreneurs want to decide how “they should define and tackle specific problems and tasks, and when and where work should be done” (Ake Ouye 2011 ). Couple this with the pressure for greater sustainability, companies now manage workplace design, commuting patterns, air travel practices, greenhouse gas emissions, and food service as part of their operations portfolio. And this trend seems to be increasing as younger workers demand more flexibility in work schedules and alternative workplaces (Hellstrom et al. 2015 ).

With these trends in the workplace, what are the implications for the future of work and the skills needed for future workers? Clearly, workplaces need to distribute the settings where work is conducted. The notion of a Central Office must evolve and respond to the diversity of needs and include ways to support collaboration. As the workplace has become more diffuse, the challenge of keeping workers engaged, focused, and connected to mission and vision becomes more problematic. With less daily face time, how do people stay connected? If workers are spread out geographically, work practices need to adapt. Even though workplaces and work itself may be changing, social skills such as empathy, cooperation, communication, and flexibility remain in high demand. Employers want a workforce that understands how to persist with tasks and learns to communicate both up and down hierarchies, as well as laterally with colleagues. Finally, every employer wants workers who understand how to problem-solve.

As these developments disrupt the workplace, public education systems have largely not kept pace, or have even been included as part of the conversation. Post-secondary education is nearly unaffordable for large segments of the population in the United States. Yet the mantra “College and Career Readiness” was a rallying cry and effectively federal policy during the Obama Administration. Nevertheless, career readiness was a muted tagline as doubts increase that a college degree will prepare graduates for their future careers, or more fundamentally, that they will be as prosperous as their parents. With respect to the uncertain and ambiguous future of work, coherence and direction is lacking in educational policy.

Looking to the Future Through Creativity

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills posits that The 4Cs : Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity are the central skills and dispositions that all students must master to be successful in our increasingly complex world (Partnership 2010 ). An education centered in creativity and the arts may hold promise for such a twenty-first Century approach to teaching and learning.

In their seminal book, Hetland et al. ( 2013 ) describe a series of eight studio habits of mind that they observed in various schools and programs with strong visual arts curricula. They identify the habits that artists—and arts teachers—tend to employ as:

Develop Craft : Learning tools, materials, and artist’s practices.

Engage and Persist : Learning to pursue topics of personal interest; develop focus, ways of thinking to persevere.

Envision : Picturing, imagining what cannot be observed.

Express : Creating works that convey ideas, meaning, or emotions.

Observe : Learning to view visual, audio, and written resources more critically.

Reflect : Learning to think and converse about one’s work and processes of making.

Stretch and Explore : Learning to stretch beyond perceived limitations, explore, and learning from errors or accidents.

Understand Art World : Learning about art history and artistic practices and engaging the arts community.

The habits provide insight into the ways arts teachers teach and art students learn, and are not necessarily linear or hierarchical. The first habit, development of craft, involves learning about technique, understanding artistic conventions and the use, practice, and care of materials as well as the organization of studio space. Another habit refers to learning about art worlds beyond the classroom such as art history and artistic communities of practice such as galleries, curators, and critics. The six remaining habits, which are seen in serious and high quality visual arts classes, involve general cognitive and attitudinal dispositions towards learning. These six habits are also used in many daily activities as well as various academic pursuits. Causal research about success in the arts and the relationship to success in academic endeavors is still needed, yet current research suggests that the development of artistic habits of mind supports students’ interests in innovation (Winner et al. 2013 ).

The Hetland et al. research is further supported with studies by Eliot Eisner ( 2002 ). These scholars demonstrate how the arts help students develop flexibility, expression, and the ability to shift direction (Hetland et al. 2013 , p. 7). There is clear evidence that arts learning is not just an “emotive” discipline but one that requires deep reflection and intellectual rigor. In my own work (Nathan 2009 ), I describe how we teach the arts not so that students will get better at other subjects such as math (the now debunked “Mozart effect”), rather we teach the arts because they are necessary for enabling their maximum personal development. The arts are a critical part of a young person’s education because they are vehicles for instruction about tolerance, diversity, and the importance of human understanding. In my experience, as our students develop these studio habits of mind, they tend to achieve more success in school and in life outside of school—a finding which will be demonstrated with a case study later in this chapter.

The literature on imagination also supports the importance of creativity and the arts in education. In socio-emotional studies, imagination involves the ability to envision a productive future, and take steps to become the person you want to be in that future (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010 ). Young people who are immersed in an education system that values and promotes creative and critical thinking will rise to demand what even they did not think possible. Over my many years, as a faculty, school leader, and teacher, my colleagues and I debated how to define creativity and imagination. In the end, we knew both mattered and we experimented with many different curricular innovations with our students to expand the opportunities for creative and critical thinking through the arts. Yet the question persists: what is creativity and how do artists and designers understand its significance to their work?

What Is Creativity and Why It Matters

Architect and author Kyna Leski describes creativity as “…a storm that slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes you—if you are willing to let it” (Leski 2015 ). And later, “…the quality of making, inventing, or producing—rather than imitating—and it’s characterized by originality and imagination” (Leski 2015 , p. 29). In this way, Leski depicts creativity as a form of problem solving.

Philosopher and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi characterizes creative processes as a state of flow —which he describes as a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity and situation at hand. Flow is another term for the sense of being in the zone or in the groove. Incidentally, people tend to be most happy in this flow state where they are neither too challenged (a source of anxiety) nor too bored.

Csikszentmihalyi described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990 , 2004 ). While Csíkszentmihalyi doesn’t use the precise word creativity, I believe his definitions echo Leski’s description of creativity. He describes how when “a person’s mind or body is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” wonderful moments and outcomes can occur.

Playwright and actor Melinda Lopez described how she achieves flow in a keynote for the National Artist Teacher Fellowship in 2015:

I have always made plays. I started writing because I wanted to know what I had to say. It is a process of intense isolation in writing and intense collaboration when in rehearsal. I see it like preparing to run a marathon. I have to do a little bit every day. Then, I will get there. I can’t find equilibrium if I don’t write.

For Lopez, writing requires large chunks of unstructured time to move fluidly between thinking and writing. She writes that during this time, she won’t be available for others, she may not eat regularly, and that she tries to take a walk because the physical activity helps her focus. Indeed, many artists talk about how ideas come to them when they are in the shower, or taking a walk, or even right after waking up. But during this time, she is typically not very good company for her family: “And they understand that. They know this is my profession.” She also described the power of giving her writing away; losing control of something she worked so hard to perfect. That is what a playwright does and is common in so many creative pursuits. Someone else will direct her work and act in her play. Her words, therefore, must stand on their own.

Lopez defines creativity in much the same way as the others: “Creativity is a muscle that responds to training and practice and discipline.” I would argue that this is precisely the view the should be commonly held in school systems (i.e., the opportunity for creativity must not be a special event, but a common practice—a condition).

Lopez added one more insight: “I believe we can be creative in microscopic particles.” The meaning of this statement is not immediately obvious. However, I take it to suggest that creativity is often thought of as trait only some people possess. And that if they do, it is overwhelming, virtually constituting their entire identity. Lopez is proposing the opposite: that all people have access to creativity, even if it is only fleeting.

As a school leader, I have worked to imbue the power of art making as a strength that can be translated into other arenas. Once a student has done one thing well and successfully, we have seen that the student’s ability to achieve more is increased. We teach that success begets more success. Our arts-based curriculum enables students to effectively communicate with others and understand or empathize with events or social issues of our time. As a result, we see our students continually willing to take on new and more difficult challenges. Artists, perhaps more than others, can embrace mistakes. As Ornette Coleman, the jazz musician said, “When I found out I could make mistakes, that’s when I knew I was on to something.” Traditionally, schools have eschewed mistakes; students learn only to find the one right answer. But this approach not only limits a student’s access to creativity and imagination, it can limit learning.

Creative Arts at Work

In Boston, Massachusetts, Mayor Martin Walsh has initiated a city-funded program called Boston AIR (artists in residence) to integrate artists in residence into City departments. The goals are two-fold: first, to support the creation of great art and second, to explore urban challenges in new and innovative ways. The program is based on the assertion that creativity and the arts can help bring new perspectives to solve seemingly intractable urban problems of violence, racism, substance abuse, and blight. Five City departments: Boston Police Department, Neighborhood Development, Parks and Recreation Department, the Office of Women’s Advancement, and the Office of Recovery Services will have the opportunity to learn and grow alongside their own artists in residence. In 2016, ten artists were selected and funded from a large pool of applicants. The resulting process of artists and city departments learning together to expand their own civic and social activities has transformative potential. As Mayor Walsh explained, “Boston AIR (Artist in Residence) is just one of the many ways we’re working to invigorate Boston’s cultural scene and support local artists whose innovation and creativity can benefit the people of Boston.”

One selected artists from the first cohort (2015) was violinist Shaw Pong Liu. Her proposal, Time to Listen , experimented with ways that collaborative music-making can create a different kind of time, connection, and space for healing and dialogue about the difficult topics of gun violence, race, and law enforcement practices. She worked with the Boston Police Department as well as two local not-for-profit youth organizations to model innovative approaches to police-to-community dialogue on gun violence and race.

The notion of embedding artists into various city departments in order to elucidate social issues has precedent. Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the first artist in residence in New York City’s Department of Sanitation in the 1970s. The impetus for her performance art work was New York City’s sanitation workers who were largely invisible to the rest of the city’s population. The City’s residents expected clean and uncluttered sidewalks, but had little idea about who was actually doing that work. Ukeles’ art focused on sanitation workers and how they lived in order to challenge the negative stereotypes associated with sanitation as a process and the workers who carry out the challenging work. A brochure, advertising her unpaid employment in the department from 1979, states “Public Art with Public Workers in Public Spaces for the Whole Public.” In her first year in residence, Ukeles shook hands with each of the 8500 sanitation workers across the five boroughs and thanked them for the work they did keeping New York City clean. She also interviewed many and recorded her conversations in order to create an exhibition called “Touch Sanitation” (Kastner 2002 ). Ukeles could, through art, express some of the frustration felt by sanitation workers who believed that the public perceived them to be part of the garbage. Her work began to change public perceptions by revealing the nexus of waste, culture, visibility, and power. “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” she asked.

What is new in Boston’s AIR program is a commitment to integrate people with diverse perspectives and skill sets into one City department and to provide a $22,500 stipend to each artist. By allocating funds for this work, the city acknowledges the important role that creative endeavors can have in working to solve society’s most difficult challenges. The prospect of a musician, visual artist, and quilt maker as well as a video artist charged with helping to solve problems, both large, and small, can appear unorthodox. Yet supporters of these programs believe that this way of working holds the secret to a sustainable future. As Ukeles said, “Public art can create permeable membranes between the inside and outside of systems, spaces, and even the souls of citizens. Public artists need more breathing space to experiment and do R&D. They need to be brought in at the very inception of projects, so they can do their first work as a certain kind of thinker” (Kastner 2002 ). By embedding the Boston artists early on in departmental projects, the results may be as stunning and surprising as Ukeles’ enduring work.

Creativity and the Future of Work

David and Tom Kelley, the founders of IDEO, an international design and innovation firm, insist that creativity is not limited to artists and designers. As with Lopez and others, they stress that creativity is like a muscle that must be continually exercised or it will atrophy.

The Kelleys describe phases of creativity they have observed in the workplace; the first phase being most important: one must choose creativity (Kelley and Kelley 2013 ). This involves tolerating ambiguity when you are not certain you are on the right path. A creative orientation means one will take risks and accept failure as part of an innovation process. One must confront obstacles when they arise and redefine problems in new ways in order to seek innovative solutions. They suggest ideas such as “think like a traveler” which may allow you to adopt a mindset of seeing things as novel, or from a child’s eye. “Think like a traveler” acknowledges the importance of learning from different cultures or organizations and from people quite different from those you are accustomed to. They also stress the importance of “engaging in relaxed attention.”

Daydreaming, or being at relaxed attention, runs antithetical to much of the current educational literature about “grit” (Duckworth 2016 ; Perkins-Gough 2013 ) and much of the re-emerging “no-excuses” movement in education reform. As educational psychologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues wrote, “rest is not idleness” (Immordino-Yang et al. 2012 ). We must help young people (and educators) realize that often our brains can make the largest cognitive leaps when we are not obsessed with solving a challenge, but we are resting or allowing our thoughts to meander. Since we engage in imaginative daydreaming for many of our waking hours, it’s important to understand the connection between imagination and creativity (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010 ). That is when we can generate new ideas and solutions. Creativity does not exist without imagination (Davis et al. 2004 ). Cognition is associated with attempts to empathize: how do we imagine the perspective of another. If we agree that a critical twenty-first Century skill or global competence involves the ability to generate questions and seek answers about the world, take others’ perspectives, communicate with different people, and address societal issues, then we must develop deeper understanding of the connections between imagination and creativity (Boix Mansilla and Jackson 2013 ).

The Kelleys helped to introduce an approach called Design Thinking, which is both a practical and creative approach to problem solving and product development. Design Thinking emphasizes a series of iterative steps beginning with empathy or seeing the experience through the end-user’s perspective. The next phases have to do with generating a proposal and refining a product: define, ideate, refine, test, and prototype. Unlike other problem solving approaches, Design Thinking, through its emphasis on empathy as well as divergent thinking, strives to generate more future-oriented, human-centered solutions. Although the future of work may demand creativity, it is the most under-developed and ignored skill in most of our schools.

Within respect to schools, an understanding and application of Design Thinking could greatly enhance our approaches to teaching and learning. Without empathy, students cannot deeply understand a new context or issue or begin to think through how to make sense of new information. If we want schooling to prepare young people for the ambiguities and uncertainties of the future of work, putting arts learning and creativity at the center of education may be just the approach we need. Arts-based learning enables students to develop the very skills that futurists say we need most: persistence (learning how to practice and commit to something through many revisions), collaboration (working together on a play, a music ensemble, curating a gallery show, choreographing and performing a dance), communication (making sure everyone in the ensemble or cast knows what’s going on, at what time, and how the action or event will flow), critique (being able to distill what one likes/doesn’t like in a piece of work, helping others grow from criticism, connecting the work to those that came before—in other words, on whose shoulders do you stand?), and resilience (the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or even toughness).

Learning with the Arts: A Case Study of Boston Arts Academy

Boston Arts Academy (BAA), a school that I founded in 1998, is Boston’s only visual and performing arts public high school. There are 440 students in grades nine through twelve (secondary school). Over 65% of students receive free and reduced lunch, which is the federal government’s indicator for families living at or below the poverty level (about $44,000 for a family of four). The school is about 40% African American, 44% Latino or Hispanic, and 13% Caucasian and about 3% Asian American. About 16% of the students are considered in need of special education services and have an Individualized Education Plan. Many are also considered English Language Learners (they speak a language other than English at home). While these demographics reflect the city of Boston, most Boston Public high schools are often much poorer and with fewer Caucasian students than BAA. One of the hallmarks of BAA is its socio-economic and racial diversity. Another remarkable characteristic is its high college acceptance rate at 94%. In a recent study, 63% of our graduates had either finished college within six years or the more recent were still pursuing higher education. The national rate for college graduation in the United States hovers around 56% and is much lower for students of color or from low socio-economic backgrounds.

Auditions are required for enrollment at BAA and no academic tests are considered for admissions decisions. In other words, students are accepted based on their passion for the arts. Since they will spend a minimum of two hours per day learning a specific arts discipline (music, dance, theatre, or visual), it is critical that they want to be there. While not all schools can select students based on passion, I have long argued that we would better serve our young people entering secondary school if we required that they begin to articulate what they want to learn and why (Nathan 2009 , 2017 ; Robinson 2015 ). This is often called career and technical education, but it need not be that specific. If students had to think and write and reflect upon their dispositions towards learning, and their passions, before entering secondary school, I believe much of their first year would be an exploration into possibilities rather than feeling like a cog in a big wheel over which they have no control. Similarly, if all students were given multiple opportunities to ask and examine what they wanted to learn, attitudes towards schooling might improve, especially for students who feel disconnected from and alienated by school.

BAA is part of a movement of schools called Coalition of Essential Schools ( www.essentialschools.org ) that developed in the late 1980s based on the work of Theodore Sizer (Sizer 1984 , 1992 , 1996 ). More recently these ideas have been renamed “deeper learning” (Martinez and McGrath 2014 ). The premise and research to support these approaches suggest that when students are given opportunities to engage in projects over time, to take risks, to fail, and recover, significant improvements occur in critical thinking and communication skills. These skills have strong correlation to cognition and thus, achievement in school. Increasingly, research points to schools that teach students to adopt a “growth mindset,” will also lead to stronger academic success. This mindset is a belief that intelligence is not fixed but something that can grow and change over time (Dweck 2006 ). I will discuss this more below.

BAA specifically teaches a set of four dispositions towards learning. These habits of mind we call the Habits of the Graduate. They are: Refine, Invent, Connect, and Own. The terms, and the way they are taught and used, mirror much of the deeper learning literature and also reflect theories underlying a growth mindset. The habits are not taught or used in a particular order, yet the power of these dispositions allows students to become more independent, self-aware, and confident learners. These habits coordinate easily with the dispositions that futurists say we most need for work success and in an uncertain future. In order to Refine a piece of academic or artistic work, you must possess both resiliency and persistence. Students ask: “have I conveyed my message? What are my strengths and weaknesses?” Although sometimes the process of Invent happens alone, it is often an outgrowth of collaboration. Through working deeply with others, new ideas can emerge. Students ask: “what makes this work inventive? Do I take risks and push myself?” Connect and Own link to the ability to communicate and to both give critiques and be critiqued. To better understand Connect students ask: “who is the audience and how does the work connect? What is the context?” And for Own : “am I proud of the work I am doing? What do I need to be successful?” These habits align easily with the same habits required of the twenty-first Century workforce.

Certainly, more schools today emphasize collaboration and group projects, but the very “grammar of schooling” (Tyack and Cuban 1995 ), or the way the day and classes are structured has not changed much in 100 years. For the most part, students are not exposed to the kind of thinking and ways of working that they will use just four or eight years later. Fortunately, this is not the case at BAA. While emphasizing the attainment of academic skills, students must complete lengthy and long-term academic and creative projects.

The most remarkable part of a BAA education is the Senior Grant Project, which students begin in their junior year (11th grade). They must define a project, which benefits a community, and then bring their artistic and academic skills to bear to constructively address that problem with a project design. They must first show empathy and understanding. Some examples include: how to help young cancer survivors through music; working with homeless teens through developing short plays that reflect their challenges; developing engaging marketing materials for after-school programs that would raise awareness and hopefully more funds. Some students have worked with community policing to develop programs that better engage young people in resisting gang involvement. The list of projects is long, and the requirements are specific and stringent. Students must complete a letter of intent that demonstrates that they understand the challenges involved with addressing the particular problem they want to influence. They must develop a feasible budget, and they must get buy-in from the organization they will work with. Finally, they must demonstrate how both their academic and artistic skills are put to use in working on their challenge. I believe most adults would struggle with projects of this nature.

The requirements of the project position students to think and act like entrepreneurs, but also as artists and collaborators. They need to deeply understand the organization for which they plan to provide services. They begin to learn about philanthropy through practicing grant writing. In creating a budget, they also learn about asking for in-kind resources. Most importantly, students learn how to convince others of value they can provide. And, of course, given the fact that the project evolves over a couple of semesters, students practice sustaining interest and attention. These are all skills that are essential for the future.

At the end of the project, community partners, alongside teachers, are invited to judge both the written work and the quality of the presentations. This creates a level of engagement and authenticity rarely available with papers or tests. The opportunity to have one’s work exhibited in this public manner, often in front of people who are decision makers in the community, raises the stakes to demonstrate a high level of mastery. In addition, students work to develop persuasive and creative presentation skills—all skills that are critical to an entrepreneurial approach to work. All students must receive a passing score on their grant project to graduate. About 25% of students receive actual funding to complete their project.

Raul’s Senior Grant Project

Raul was a percussionist at BAA who proposed teaching drumming to homeless men for his Senior Grant Project. Raul wrote, “There are many innocent people who are left on the streets with no money and no chance of work. I have chosen to work with this community of people because I have many ties to people in this situation….” He went on to describe how, after his sessions teaching drumming at a local homeless shelter, he would perform a street drumming concert at a public park with his adult students so they could collect money.

During his final review with outside judges, Raul was asked if he felt that drumming could help alleviate homelessness. His answer was thoughtful. “I’m not trying to get rid of homelessness. That has to do with poverty and lots of other things. I want to teach community drumming so that these men do not have to resort to begging for change.” He went on:

Drumming comes from the heart, and I believe if you connect to your heart in honest ways, that could help you get off the street. I grew up with drumming and it helped me get here and get to this school. I think I can show other people that drumming can bring you peace and a sense of control. I always feel in control when I’m drumming and then I’m not depressed.

When asked about his connection to the homeless community, Raul looked down at the floor, and spoke softly, “My uncle was homeless and also my first teacher. He gave me something that no one can ever take away. I want to give something back to him, even if he never can know what I’m doing.” While the clients from the shelter would keep their own donations, Raul would give the money they raised back to the shelter—which was the same place that had helped Raul’s uncle. He died while Raul was working on his project.

Even though Raul personally connected to his project, he had to refine his proposal more than once to get his writing up to the required standard for acceptance. His persistence was evident as he developed his ideas and thought through some of the critique.

For most of Raul’s career at BAA, he just managed to pass. He was a good drummer, and grew a lot over the four years. However, academically he always did the bare minimum, until he had to do the writing and research for Senior Grant Project. He wanted that project to reflect his respect and love for his uncle, and he cared about the issue he was trying to address. How often in students’ school lives can they use their passions and skills to solve a problem they care about? This level of engagement should exist in more schools.

If all high school students had the chance to perform or exhibit work that reflected their deep interests and passions, school would be a place that matters deeply. School could be a place that values creativity.

Creativity Is Not Magic

Teaching creativity, or at least ensuring multiple and varied creative opportunities in the school day, may hold a key to the future of education, schools, and work. We know that creativity is central to twenty-first Century competencies. Creativity shares the stage with flexibility, critical thinking, collaboration, cross-disciplinary thinking, and even the development of courage. These are skills, along with content knowledge, that many have agreed must be incorporated into all classrooms. However, day-to-day practice tends to favor the attainment of content knowledge and push to the background the development of creativity in most classroom settings. Creativity cannot be mastered without content knowledge. In other words, one cannot be creative about nothing . Students (and a twenty-first Century workforce) must learn to incorporate a both/and approach to learning and working. Creativity must take center stage alongside facts and figures. Although that does not mean developing a test for creativity, education systems must do a better job ensuring that teachers and students have more creative experiences in their PK-12 education. At BAA, creativity is a discipline taught daily, both in arts and academic classes. It is a muscle that is consistently exercised. Students constantly reflect on their own abilities to create. BAA’s dance curriculum is a prime example:

As part of the curriculum, dance faculty member, William McLaughlin, teaches an approach he calls “ embodied research. ” McLaughlin described the term as:

An inquiry-based process, involving the physical response to stimuli. Stimuli might be in the form of text, music, visuals or movement. Participants respond to the stimuli through gestures, which then become movement studies or phrases and finally a fully choreographed dance. (Notes from workshop of Coalition of Essential Schools in Portland, ME, November 6, 2015)

McLaughlin has worked with his dance students to develop a piece called “Speak.” This dance grew from an exploration of themes that cast members, mostly young men of color, faced growing up in urban America. The student dancers spent early rehearsals sharing stories and experiences about difficult or important moments in their lives such as: the death of a relative, being assaulted by a gang member, a tumultuous break-up of a relationship, or becoming homeless. As students recounted these stories, other dancers responded through gestures. These movement phrases became the basis of the longer piece. The production is set to excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as well as the music of Daniel Bernard Roumain. The instrumentation, which is both lyrical and haunting, is a counterpoint to the emotional speeches of the two famous leaders. The percussive action on stage is tense, wildly chaotic, and then symmetrical. The dancers’ athletic movements are often in sharp juxtaposition with the text of the speeches. The result is a riveting experience that is both familiar and current since the original stories are universal, yet the piece also carries historical memory and inquiry given the biographies of the two authors. The audience is asked to hold dualities of present day and history, which creates a certain discomfort and level of inquiry: has anything changed in our world ?

I recount the nature of the dance “Speak” not as a dance critic but to provide an example of the ways in which young people can work to tackle content knowledge through their passions and talents. In speaking with the young participants, whether they were current students or alumni returning to participate in the piece, they revealed how this way of training—as a dancer—had such meaning. A dancer must both own material and connect that material to self and others. The process prepared them for a life of work, creativity, and problem solving. Furthermore, the training in this particular piece, and others like it, allows young people to comment on the realities of today’s world and, through movement and suggest how to make changes. The entire cast has committed to dance as a way to keep violence at bay and to bring beauty into the lives of their communities. As young people, they have developed assets that they know are appreciated by others. The experience gives them a special sense of confidence and agency in their worlds. They perform the piece often for others. They talk about their stories of sadness and violence that are reflected in the piece and also through the texts of King and Kennedy. The dancers speak about how learning skills such as dance have opened doors and opportunities for all of them, and also has given them tools of resilience against despair. For these young people, dance is a way of both understanding the world and contributing to its improvement. Agency, as an education outcome, especially for these at-risk youths is a significant and lasting achievement given the social and economic challenges they will face as young adults.

One of the student dancers reflected poignantly about his skills and disposition learned through dance at BAA:

I work as a driver for the elderly with the bus service. I know how to listen. I know how to be compassionate. Of course, that’s the kind of person I am, too. But it’s also what I learned as a dancer. You have to listen to others. You have to understand what the choreographer wants you to feel. It’s not just a movement. It’s also a feeling. I bring that to my work with the disabled and the elderly. I love what I do. And I’m good at it. Maybe you’d call it empathy.

Another BAA dance student spoke about his ability to confront racism and violence, and how, as a dancer he can contribute to the long and ongoing struggle in America for racial justice:

As an African American male, every time I hear those words that [RFK] says about Martin Luther King being shot, I just freeze inside. This is today. That is why #blacklivesmatter is so important. We haven’t come so far really. I’m at risk just being a black male. That’s why I want to keep doing this piece. I want people to understand that racism and violence will destroy us. We have to make changes. I can start.

Another BAA graduate talks about how his education in dance, and more broadly in the arts (he also studied music at BAA), prepared him for both college and for his current job as a civil engineer:

Being an artist means lots of practice and lots of risk-taking. I have to always put myself out there. It has never been easy. That’s the same way I approached my major and my job search. Civil engineering, my major, is all about sitting down and working out problems. I knew how to buckle down from being an artist.

This student then goes on to explain his emerging theory of art and success, which clearly anticipates a future of work very different than the one most students are educated for:

Since art is constantly changing, it makes artists well-adaptable to different situations. As an artist, you never know what can be thrown at you… and in my field and in my job, it’s the same thing. You have to believe you can keep learning and doing new things.

In his own words, this graduate is essentially describing a “growth mindset,” referenced earlier in this chapter. The student expands this notion and describes how often solutions come from what he called “going off the grid,” which he reconnected to dance as well:

Often, we can’t solve the problem in dance just by doing the same movements. Sometimes we have to find a different movement or orientation to express what we are trying to do. That’s the same in engineering. It’s not always linear. Being able to adapt is key!

McLaughlin, the BAA choreographer and teacher, understands the conditions necessary to developing an adaptive, growth mindset to be inherent in dance, and embodied research:

So much of our daily lives just uses one small part of our brain—usually that part that we call the rationale part—but in dance, as in most art, we are accessing something else. Of course, we have to have beautiful technique. But we are accessing emotion and finding ways to bring people—the audience—to inquire with us—and not just through thinking, but through emotion. The piece is both deeply emotive and an intellectual journey. We have to do both together.

I believe that connecting to others through emotion and allowing an audience to be swept off its feet holds promise for solving intractable problems—a position that admittedly challenges the past century or more of science-based evolution of social and political systems. It is time for teachers and students to harness and respect the power of movement, art, and creativity to help us all better understand complex issues. Perhaps by going “off the grid,” as the student said, these young men will grapple with issues at a deeper level and have more creative solutions. That is the hope that art inspires. Art helps us solve problems both big and small, and in ways that other disciplines fall short. Art, too, gives these young men, who didn’t come from communities with abundant resources, opportunities to experience and influence the world in unique ways. I have witnessed how their artistic skills translate into a world where work and economic stability is inherently uncertain especially for marginalized populations, and increasingly, for the rest of us.

One could argue that work has become more like pre-school; learning and working together at the forefront of knowledge. And clearly, these young dancers and now graduates embody skills paramount for success in today’s world, including sharing and negotiating. According to educator Michael Horn, “Machines are automating a whole bunch of these things so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement the technology is critical, and our education system is not set up for that” (Miller 2015 ). I dislike the paradigm of soft and hard skills because I think it misses the central idea: we all need both skills of analysis and skills of collaboration. But we have strayed too far from this notion, embracing and valuing analytic skills over all else. We have forgotten that without the head-heart-hand connection, as education philosopher John Dewey wrote, we are much more diminished as human beings.

A great deal of debate in the educational literature focuses on the role of so called non - cognitive skills in learning and in success in life. The notion of living a dignified life, or having a sense of subjective well-being, is often attributed to how schools, and also community and home life, can teach these softer skills. Researcher and psychologist Carol Dweck has contributed to this discussion of non-cognitive skills through the development of a concept she calls “fixed” and “growth” mindset. Within the construct of a “fixed mindset,” individuals believe that intelligence is static. This means that, although one can learn new things, you cannot change how intelligent you are. You are either smart or not smart. People with fixed mindsets do not believe that effort can change intelligence and so they have a very deterministic view of the world. “I’m not a good reader no matter how much I try.” Or “Math is always hard for me. I’m no good in math.” In contrast, an individual with a “growth mindset” believes that she can always increase her intelligence. As introduced earlier, someone with a growth mindset, sees “effort as the path to mastery,” and is willing to learn through criticism and persist in the face of challenges.

It seems to be a simple concept—mindset is not fixed—but the impact of the alternative narrative has been profound. The notion that anyone can have a growth mindset must be a central tenant of education. An education in and through the arts can have strong positive effects on developing a growth mindset as we saw in the description of the dancers’ abilities to persevere and imagine alternative possibilities to their lives.

STEAM: Preparing Students for the Future of Work

One of the ways BAA pursued a long-term commitment to creativity and collaboration was by developing a maker-space. We called it a STEAM Lab. For BAA, the term STEAM emerged from the growing emphasis on STEM fields, but we insisted that Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, without the Arts, was missing a central organ for survival. In addition, students wanted to explore academic and artistic questions in new ways. Students and faculty questioned how their design skills could evolve with new tools. And how might engineering class expand to include issues students were facing in their lighting or costume design classes? The questions seemed endless.

For example, dancers wanted costumes that would light up on the dance floor. Visual artists wanted to paint with gloves on the walls and have each finger exude a different kind of paint. They also wanted to paint with light emanating from each finger. Their authentic need to solve a technical and artistic problem led them into scientific inquiries that explored new territories, domains, and new uses of technology. They learned about Arduino boards, coding, programming, and a host of other technological innovations that allowed them to solve or explore problems in new and innovative ways. They were equally as interested in the science as they were the art.

In science class, curriculum focused on the Human Microbiome Project has included artistic as well as scientific explorations. The project is called Expansive Meanings and Makings in ArtScience, and is funded by the National Science Foundation. A collaborative group of Chèche Konnen Center learning scientists, from TERC, an educational research organization, in Cambridge, BAA faculty, BAA students and alumni, local independent artists, and the Broad Institute at M.I.T., scientists are exploring the potential of an ArtScience repertoire—transdisciplinary practices of cultivating attention, making, and critiquing together with a final, exhibition, performance, and communication—to support high school students in creatively responding to cutting edge phenomena. In this project, students investigate the emerging science of the Human Microbiome through both artistic and scientific models. For instance, to explore their skin microbiome, students are culturing bacteria from their palms, and then building sculptural narratives about the skin microbiome. They explore their emerging understanding of skin microbiome through movement, music, theatre/filmmaking, and painting. Throughout the inquiry, by working with science and art faculty, artists, and research scientists, students are learning to integrate artistic and scientific materials, concerns, and processes to create ArtScience stories relating to aspects of the human microbiome they find intriguing, puzzling, significant, or even troubling.

For example, one student, a visual artist, who struggled academically, socially, and emotionally in class, truly excelled in her human microbiome project. She was completely captivated by the idea that she could create an artistic drawing of a scientific phenomenon that she deeply understood. In her project, she used stage makeup to create a representation of how her microbiome looked to her. “When you look at bacteria in the microscope many people are disgusted, but I saw beautiful designs and intersecting parts with potential for many colors.” When asked what she wanted people to take away from her art, she said, “I want people to understand the drastic difference between what people think and what it actually is.” She felt that she had previously learned science as discrete facts for a test with no real connection to her love of aesthetics or beauty. In this instance, for her, the study of science was both an academic exercise to understand scientific principles and an artistic challenge to present a visual representation that communicated both beauty and her depth of scientific knowledge. The ability to link and explore two disciplines was both gratifying and important to her as a learner. Her final presentation demonstrated just how much she learned both about herself, art, and science.

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, BAA’s STEAM director, offers three recommendations (Gaskins 2016 ) when thinking about implementing a STEAM program in schools. The parallels between her suggestions and the workplace strike me as both obvious and important. One suggestion is “teach culturally relevant narratives to inspire students from underrepresented minority groups to learn and master tools in innovative ways.” Specifically, Gaskins explains that she helps students “produce inventions by merging aesthetic and technical production methods through redeployment, re-creation, and re-conception.” One example is how students learn that DJ Grandmaster Flash created a “cross-fader device to mix different audio sources.” Since people who do not look like BAA students dominate so much of the field of engineering and design, we must develop materials and examples that reflect their racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. Gaskins also emphasizes the importance of providing “choice, autonomy and time for collaboration.” These are the very skills developed by the dancers in “SPEAK,” and they are the skills employers insist they most need and want. When students are given time to collaborate with peers, what emerges is more powerful and far-reaching than working alone. In a recent survey of BAA students about their STEAM lab activities, Gaskins reports that “70% report increased attention, defined as curiosity and interest and 68% report an increase sense of relevance [which they] defined as linking learner needs, interests and motives.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, “67% felt increased levels of confidence defined as developing positive expectations for success.” Experimentation, risk taking, making mistakes, learning how to explore unfamiliar equipment, or problems are all key components to successful artistry and work.

Has Education Kept Up with Future of Work Trends?

Teachers, principals, and education policy makers have always grappled with the tensions inherent in questions about the purpose of schooling and education (Dworkin 1959 ; Sizer 1984 , 1992 , 1996 ; Bowles and Gintis 2002 ; Tyack and Cuban 1995 ). Is education meant to develop a life of the mind and help young people enter college? Or is it to develop the skills needed for an ever-changing workforce and the economy? Depending on your perspective or role in society, you might have a very different answer. Many argue that by attaining a high level of education, people will live a life of dignity with a sense of purpose, commitment, and excitement about being a member of a community within a larger society. For others, the sole purpose of PK-12 education is either to attend college or attain a worthwhile career. Many would argue that our public school system is for all of these purposes.

In the United States, the current discourse in education reform circles is narrowly focused on the adoption of Common Core national standards. Although national standards have been popular in many other countries, the history of decentralized schooling in the U.S. elicits a fear that Common Core standards may result in more standardized testing. With increasing frequency, a score on a multiple-choice test determines decisions about a student’s future and many U.S. students are now tested for up to three weeks per school year. The anti-testing movement has criticized the federal role in mandating tests. However, a Common Core national approach to what students should know and be able to learn has garnered more support. Many argue for common agreement on the skills that all students should attain, but not a common set of national standards that adhere to the new mantra of “college and career readiness.” Without a significant infusion of career and technical courses and schools, our new federal policies are not likely to bring more equity and access to our most vulnerable students.

In U.S. schools, in this era of high-stakes testing, few schools, whether charter or public, have shown innovative examples of new directions, particularly for urban students. BAA, however, continues to forge advances in teaching and learning with its commitment to high quality arts education and creativity. Perhaps, more remarkable than its high college graduation rate is the number of alumni with their own small performing arts companies. Hardly a month goes by in which I don’t notice an announcement in the local paper or on Facebook for a theatre or dance performance involving BAA graduates. The same is true with music and visual arts events: alumni work pops up all over the region. Of course, some of the alumni are now world famous. Kirven Boyd just retired as a principal dancer with Alvin Ailey. Diane Guerrero won the SAG award for best Latina actress and just published her memoir (Guerrero 2016 ). Most of the graduates are making work in their communities and are finding their ways as artists and scholars. As one graduate recently told me, in reference to her own emerging company, “You taught us to both value and tell our stories. And that’s what I’ve been doing every day.”

Another graduate, describing her years at BAA said:

I have lived in a community in which everyone breathed the same air. This air was called art. This school has demonstrated to me the importance of being not only artistically distinguished but also intellectually proficient…. I learned that knowledge is a powerful weapon that could be used to help and change humanity, but that it must be analyzed and owned first. This school developed artists and scholars that now have the power to stand as individuals and support their own perspectives and beliefs. We learned the vitality of appreciating and studying the evolution of man along with the evolution of art through time and history. (BAA Graduation Speech 2012)

Her BAA education helped her to,

…raise and answer questions such as ‘How do I use my art to educate society and to effect change in humanity?’ or ‘How can I use my craft to eliminate issues such as ignorance hunger, poverty?’ I realized that those are questions that can take an entire life to answer. Art is the most effective and humane weapon to fight injustice and corruption. Art is the true expression of the human being. Art is the key that unlocks the world of the artist, and the artist’s response unlocks a world that mirrors society.

In an increasingly complex and uncertain world, BAA graduates have learned to walk in one another’s shoes, to sing in a new language, to explore movement that might be totally foreign from their own culture and perspective. They can appreciate the dissonance that comes from discovering differences without fear or disdain. Our alumni can express important life connections through drawing, painting, sculpting and building, and prevent those differences from becoming impediments to change.

Eliot Eisner, American philosopher and professor, made popular the “Ten Lessons the Arts Teach Us” (Eisner 2002 ). I invite educators and policy makers to study all ten lessons in efforts to create schools that our young people deserve. For now, I highlight three key lessons to embrace in providing our young people with opportunities for a successful future. The arts teach children the following:

To make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum where correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, judgment—not rules—prevails.

The problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

In complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds (Eisner 2002 ). (Adapted from the National Arts Education Association at www.naea-reston.org .)

Young people need to be able to collaborate and communicate well, and often across differences of language, culture, economic means, gender, and race. An education that stresses creativity and entrepreneurship can positively impact a young person’s ability to attain meaningful work. An increasing number of jobs require social skills like patience, persistence, and the ability to practice and pay attention in a changing environment. In many urban communities, especially those ravaged by high unemployment and violence, students are missing positive examples of work and beauty. An education in the arts can provide profound examples of beauty and give students the opportunity to write a new script for their lives—literally and figuratively. Our students often come from environments where poverty and lack of access to opportunities are the norm. Their arts education offers a way to enter the world more energetically, flexibly, and confidently. Whether a focus on the arts or any other form of learning, as we think about sustainability in education, may we invest more closely and carefully in the role creativity can and should play.

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Nathan, L.F. (2019). Creativity, the Arts, and the Future of Work. In: Cook, J.W. (eds) Sustainability, Human Well-Being, and the Future of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78580-6_9

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Art Careers: What You Need to Succeed in Any Career Option

Art and design have significant implications in many art careers. A wide array of industries are now in need of professionals who have a background in art. If you have a knack for creativity and impressive design skills, then maybe an art career is right for you. Read on to discover what education, skills, and knowledge you need to pursue an art career.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the growth rate in arts and design occupations has declined slightly due to the outbreak of COVID-19 this year. However, this has only been a slight drop since art professionals are still essential in the booming industries of animation, multimedia artistry, and graphic design.

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Moreover, the median annual wage in art and design occupations was $48,130 in May 2019, which was higher than the median annual wage across all occupations, which stood at $39,810 at the time.

In this article, we’ll tell you about the best career paths in art and the top featured programs and schools that will help you work toward a degree in art. These are the academic and professional tools that you need to succeed in any art career.

Which Arts Degree Should I Get?

Since there are a plethora of different career paths available to art majors, your educational goals will depend on your interests. Though earning a graduate degree is a fine option, a bachelor’s degree in this field is also sufficient to secure a high-paying job. Certain arts jobs may even require only a high school diploma or associate degree. 

With an associate degree, you will be prepared for entry-level art and design positions. This degree will give you a solid foundation of applicable skills and concepts in your field of choice, which can be useful for further study. 

Although this degree seldom leads to advanced positions, it will allow you to seek employment in a wide array of fields like fashion, photography, and graphic design. 

There are numerous associate degrees available in the arts. The two main options include an associate of applied business (AAB) and an associate of applied science (AAS). With an AAB, you can pursue a job in fashion design, graphic design, and interior design. With an AAS, you may prefer to seek employment in areas such as illustration, multimedia technology, or recording arts technology. 

The main advantage of an associate degree is its minimal cost and relatively quick completion time. An associate degree is the first step in many professional and academic journeys and can help you decide if you want to commit to a career in the field. Many schools also offer associate programs that are available entirely online, which allows for greater flexibility. 

Below are some of the best affordable online associate programs in art:

• Gateway Technical College – Kenosha, WI
• Community College of Vermont – Winooski, VT

Bachelor’s Degree

With a four-year bachelor’s degree in hand, you will become a highly sought-after candidate for many jobs. A bachelor’s degree is the minimum education requirement for most design-related careers. 

If you pursue this degree, you will learn the skills needed to gain a position that will offer you the potential for career advancement. It can also function as the next step toward a graduate degree, such as a master’s degree or doctorate.

A bachelor’s degree curriculum will provide you with extensive knowledge in your field of study. Though a master’s degree may be ideal for higher-level jobs, you may still acquire a lucrative role in a managerial capacity with a bachelor’s degree.

Many colleges offer bachelor’s programs that are taught partially or fully online, which means you will have the option to continue working while pursuing a degree. Some schools also offer special tuition discounts for students who choose to complete their degree online. Remember that earning a bachelor’s degree is also an essential step for those who later want to earn a master’s degree.

At the bachelor level, you can expect to earn a salary of $50,000 to $100,000 per year, with many opportunities to advance your career. You may choose to pursue a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science in Art and Design.

The former option is offered in fields such as art history and with the latter, you may specialize in fields such as web design and development. Some of the jobs you can secure with a bachelor’s degree include industrial design, architecture, multimedia artistry, and many more.

Below are some of the best online bachelor’s programs in art available:

Southern New Hampshire University Online – Manchester, NH

Lindenwood University – Saint Charles, MO

Central Michigan University – Mount Pleasant, MI

Master’s Degree

Master’s degrees come highly recommended as they are a great way to enhance your chances of being hired in an exciting and lucrative role. These degrees are recommended for those who want to break into a high-level art or design career, as they offer advanced knowledge and skills training in several areas. 

For instance, if you wish to fill an executive role, like an art director, animation supervisor, or executive producer, then a master’s degree is the way to go. 

Most master’s programs require two years of full-time study, though they may be completed faster in an accelerated format. Many programs emphasize leadership skills and build on the skills learned in a bachelor’s program. 

Some master’s programs are offered partly or fully online and offer a flexible, high-quality education. As mentioned above, accelerated programs are also available for students who wish to obtain their degrees quickly. 

Master’s programs usually provide practical, professional experience in your area of interest. For example, you might intern at an art museum as part of an art history program or at an animation studio as part of an animation program.

An MA (master of arts) can be obtained in many concentrations, including integrative design, fine arts, and graphic design.

Below are some of the best online master’s programs in art:

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Venus, Software Engineer at Rockbot

Northwestern State University of Louisiana – Natchitoches, LA

Minneapolis College of Art and Design – Minneapolis, MN

Azusa Pacific University – Azusa, CA

What Skills Do I Need to Pursue a Career in Art?

Apart from education and training, almost every industry requires professionals to possess an impressive skill set that makes them a good fit for their desired role. This is especially true for art careers since artists rely more on creativity and personality traits than scientific knowledge. 

When considering an art career, you should consider improving the following skills.

Creativity and Passion

Creativity is a foundational skill when it comes to art and design. The field extends beyond just traditional art and blends concepts of technology, marketing, and even psychology. Knowing how to integrate these topics into a captivating product requires immense creativity. 

Having a sincere passion and curiosity for art is a big help. If you love what you do, it won’t seem like work. With that in mind, you should always seek to improve and increase your knowledge in your area of expertise, as this will undoubtedly help further your career.

Communication and Teamwork

It’s important to be able to articulate what you’re trying to create, whether artistically or interpersonally. Being a good communicator is essential whether you’re working with your peers or trying to attract patrons. The most important soft skills in the field of art and design are networking, time management, and listening. 

Most of the best inventions and breakthroughs in science have been achieved through collaboration and teamwork. The same is true for art and design. Being in a room with creative, open-minded people is seldom a bad thing, and it can help you immensely as you learn more about product/service design.

Technical Knowledge

As an artist, having transferable skills such as those mentioned above is important, but the foundation of your career will rest on your technical knowledge. Whether it’s art history, design principles, or computer-aided artistry, being well-versed in all concepts within the field will dictate your success. Not only will you be able to expand your job prospects, but you’ll also be able to impress others with your knowledge.

You should also remember to stay curious and learn as much as you can about the job you want. Try reading books, taking extra classes, or watching films or videos that excitingly discuss art. Reach out to professionals involved in the field. Furthermore, you should ask instructors for tips that will help you succeed. 

Business Savvy

An important yet overlooked facet of many artists is their keen business sense. Artists create enticing products, but they also need an audience that is accepting of their work. This is why it is essential to advertise your talent to the world. You should network with popular artists and promote your content through social media and in person.

For instance, Instagram and Facebook have become increasingly popular tools for promoting businesses and content. If you prefer to promote your art traditionally, you can hang flyers, host social events, and communicate face-to-face with potential clients.

Attention to Detail 

One last important skill that you should hone is your attention to detail. This applies not only to the art you create but also to the way you promote it. Being a critical thinker will help you investigate problems and setbacks that are holding you back from a successful career. 

If you think your content is not good enough, ask for opinions to try to break down the nature of the issue. If you feel your product is excellent but not taking off like it should, ask yourself what you can do to enhance your success. Being a meticulous thinker will be very beneficial in a field as unpredictable and exciting as art and design.

Most Popular Art Careers

The following list of the most popular art careers is based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Art Directors 

Median Pay in 2019 : $94,220

Number of Jobs in 2019: 99,100

Art directors are responsible for the visual style and images seen in magazines and newspapers, on product packaging, and in movie and television productions.

Fashion Designers

Median Pay in 2019: $73,790

Number of Jobs in 2019: 28,300

Fashion designers create clothing, accessories, and footwear.

Graphic Designers 

Median Pay in 2019: $52,110

Number of Jobs in 2019: 281,500

Graphic designers create visual concepts, using computer software or by hand, to communicate ideas that inspire, inform, and captivate consumers.

Multimedia Artists and Animators 

Median Pay in 2019: $75,270

Number of Jobs in 2019: 67,500

Multimedia artists and animators create images that appear to move, as well as visual effects for various forms of media and entertainment.

Median Pay in 2019: $80,750

Number of Jobs in 2019: 129,900

Architects plan and design houses, factories, office buildings, and other structures.

FAQs About Art Careers

I’m Not Sure What Career I Want in Art. What Should I Do?

It is common to be perplexed about exactly what career path you should pursue, especially in a field as vast as art. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when looking for the right career:

• What am I looking for out of a career – monetary gain, or fulfilling work?
• What type of work environment do I thrive in?
• How far am I willing to push myself to achieve my goals?

How Should I Start My Career as an Artist?

Though there are no rules, here are some tips that may help you get your career off the ground:

• Develop your artistic knowledge and skills: Take courses or consider going to art school; practice and hone your craft; learn from your mentors or idols; seek advice from experienced artists.
• Promote yourself and your work: Develop a social media network; make friends with artists and seek mentorship; enter art competitions and go to galleries.
• Learn how to monetize your product: Consider taking business-related courses in conjunction with your art courses; budget your time and money efficiently; explore new ideas and modalities on how to create and sell your art.

Are There Other Resources Available to Help Me Make a Decision?  At Career Karma, we provide academic and professional advice to help you make informed choices. If you want to learn more, here is an article that discusses the best careers in technology and design , and another that talks about the top tech design careers . If you’re passionate about art, these articles will help your decision-making.

About us: Career Karma is a platform designed to help job seekers find, research, and connect with job training programs to advance their careers. Learn about the CK publication .

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The Mind-Expanding Value of Arts Education

As funding for arts education declines worldwide, experts ponder what students — and the world at large — are losing in the process.

By Ginanne Brownell

This article is part of our special report on the Art for Tomorrow conference that was held in Florence, Italy.

Awuor Onguru says that if it were not for her continued exposure to arts education as a child, she never would have gotten into Yale University.

Growing up in a lower-middle-class family in Nairobi, Kenya, Ms. Onguru, now a 20-year-old junior majoring in English and French, started taking music lessons at the age of four. By 12, she was playing violin in the string quartet at her primary school, where every student was required to play an instrument. As a high school student on scholarship at the International School of Kenya, she was not only being taught Bach concertos, she also became part of Nairobi’s music scene, playing first violin in a number of local orchestras.

During her high school summer breaks, Ms. Onguru — who also has a strong interest in creative writing and poetry — went to the United States, attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts ’ creative writing camp, in Michigan, and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio . Ms. Onguru, who recently returned to campus after helping organize Yale Glee Club’s spring tour in Kenya, hopes to become a journalist after graduation. She has already made progress toward that goal, serving as the opinion editor for the Yale Daily News, and getting her work published in Teen Vogue and the literary journal Menacing Hedge.

“Whether you’re in sports, whether you end up in STEM, whether you end up in government, seeing my peers — who had different interests in arts — not everyone wanted to be an artist,” she said in a video interview. “But they found places to express themselves, found places to be creative, found places to say things that they didn’t know how else to say them.”

Ms. Onguru’s path shows what a pivotal role arts education can play in a young person’s development. Yet, while the arts and culture space accounts for a significant amount of gross domestic product across the globe — in the United Kingdom in 2021, the arts contributed £109 billion to the economy , while in the U.S., it brought in over $1 trillion that year — arts education budgets in schools continue to get slashed. (In 2021, for instance, the spending on arts education in the U.K. came to an average of just £9.40 per pupil for the year .)

While experts have long espoused the idea that exposure to the arts plays a critical role in primary and secondary schooling, education systems globally have continually failed to hold it in high regard. As Eric Booth, a U.S.-based arts educator and a co-author of “Playing for Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change Through Music,” said: “There are a whole lot of countries in the world that don’t have the arts in the school, it just isn’t a thing, and it never has been.”

That has led to the arts education trajectory heading in a “dark downward spiral,” said Jelena Trkulja, senior adviser for academic and cultural affairs at Qatar Museums , who moderated a panel entitled “When Arts Education is a Luxury: New Ecosystems” at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Florence, Italy, organized by the Democracy & Culture Foundation, with panels moderated by New York Times journalists.

Part of why that is happening, she said, is that societies still don’t have a sufficient and nuanced understanding of the benefits arts education can bring, in terms of young people’s development. “Arts education is still perceived as an add-on, rather than an essential field creating essential 21st-century skills that are defined as the four C’s of collaboration, creativity, communication and critical thinking,” Dr. Trkulja said in a video interview, “and those skills are being developed in arts education.”

Dennie Palmer Wolf, principal researcher at the U.S.-based arts research consultancy WolfBrown , agreed. “We have to learn to make a much broader argument about arts education,” she said. “It isn’t only playing the cello.”

It is largely through the arts that we as humans understand our own history, from a cave painting in Indonesia thought to be 45,000 years old to “The Tale of Genji,” a book that’s often called the world’s first novel , written by an 11th-century Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu; from the art of Michelangelo and Picasso to the music of Mozart and Miriam Makeba and Taylor Swift.

“The arts are one of the fundamental ways that we try to make sense of the world,” said Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Public Affairs and a co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored Arts, Humanities & Civic Engagement Lab . “People use the arts to offer a critical perspective of their exploration of the human condition, and that’s what the root of education is in some ways.”

And yet, the arts don’t lend themselves well to hard data, something educators and policymakers need to justify classes in those disciplines in their budgets. “Arts is this visceral thing, this thing inside you, the collective moment of a crescendo,” said Heddy Lahmann , an assistant professor of international education at New York University, who is conducting a global study examining arts education in public schools for the Community Arts Network. “But it’s really hard to qualify what that is.”

Dr. Lahmann’s early research into the decrease in spending by public schools in arts education points to everything from the lack of trained teachers in the arts — partly because those educators are worried about their own job security — to the challenges of teaching arts remotely in the early days of the Covid pandemic. And, of course, standardized tests like the Program for International Student Assessment, which covers reading, math and science, where countries compete on outcomes. “There’s a race to get those indicators,” Dr. Lahmann said, “and arts don’t readily fit into that.” In part, that is because standardized tests don’t cover arts education .

“It’s that unattractive truth that what gets measured gets attended to,” said Mr. Booth, the arts educator who co-authored “Playing for Their Lives.”

While studies over the years have underscored the ways that arts education can lead to better student achievement — in the way that musical skills support literacy, say, and arts activities lead to improved vocabulary, what have traditionally been lacking are large-scale randomized control studies. But a recent research project done in 42 elementary and middle schools in Houston, which was co-directed by Dr. Kisida and Daniel H. Bowen, a professor who teaches education policy at Texas A&M, is the first of its kind to do just that. Their research found that students who had increased arts education experiences saw improvements in writing achievement, emotional and cognitive empathy, school engagement and higher education aspirations, while they had a lower incidence of disciplinary infractions.

As young people are now, more than ever, inundated with images on social media and businesses are increasingly using A.I., it has become even more relevant for students these days to learn how to think more critically and creatively. “Because what is required of us in this coming century is an imaginative capacity that goes far beyond what we have deliberately cultivated in the schooling environment over the last 25 years,” said Mariko Silver, the chief executive of the Henry Luce Foundation, “and that requires truly deep arts education for everyone.”

What is Art Education: Exploring its Purpose and Impact

Time to Read:

What is Art Education

Are you curious about the power of art education? Have you ever wondered why it’s so important to have art in the classroom?

In this article, we will explore what is art education. From its benefits on individual growth and development to its ability to prepare students for life and work, we will dive into the fascinating world of art education .

Join us on this journey as we discover the true value of art education and how it can make a difference in students’ lives everywhere. Get ready to be inspired and amazed!

Key Takeaways

• Art education covers a wide range of visual and performing arts disciplines.
• The main goal is to teach students the creation, production, and appreciation of various art forms.
• Art education promotes creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

Table of contents

The Disciplines in Art Education

Art education encompasses a variety of disciplines that involve learning, instruction, and programming based on visual and tangible arts.

It includes performing arts such as dance, music, theatre, and visual arts like drawing, painting, sculpture, and design.

Art education aims to teach students how to create, produce, and appreciate various art forms, as well as to understand and evaluate the work of others.

Through art education, students are exposed to diverse artistic practices, where they can develop their creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

Furthermore, it provides opportunities to explore cultural heritage and appreciate the importance of creativity in society.

Integrating arts into education allows learners to express themselves and discover their talents.

Understanding Art Education

Art education is a vital educational experience that fosters creativity and artistic expression and offers various cognitive and emotional benefits.

It prepares students for the challenges in life by enhancing their problem-solving skills, visual-spatial abilities, and collaboration capabilities.

Incorporating arts in education allows you to explore your creative potential while providing a foundation for understanding various art forms.

Whether it is music, dance, visual arts, or theatre, arts education is crucial in broadening your perspective and nurturing your imagination.

As you delve deeper into the art world, you will learn that it is a powerful medium to express emotions, thoughts, and ideas, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers.

The essence of arts learning lies in its ability to facilitate the acquisition of artistic skills and instil a sense of appreciation for diverse art forms.

This helps you better understand various cultures, traditions, and histories, fostering empathy and respect for others.

Moreover, exploring, creating, and appreciating art can be therapeutic, enabling you to manage stress and emotional turmoil effectively.

To sum up, understanding art education is vital for holistic personal growth, encompassing cognitive, emotional, and social development.

So, embrace the world of arts, experience art education’s benefits , and appreciate the richness it brings to your life.

Importance of Art Education

Art education is crucial in fostering creativity and promoting a well-rounded learning experience.

As you explore the importance of art education , you will find numerous benefits that contribute to the overall development of every student.

One of the primary reasons art education is essential is because it helps students engage with school and reduce stress.

Participating in various art forms, you can experience a sense of accomplishment, personal growth, and a deeper connection with your emotions.

This engagement enhances your learning experience and helps you better manage stress.

Incorporating art education into your curriculum aids in developing social-emotional and interpersonal skills .

Through artistic expression, you learn to communicate effectively, work collaboratively with others, and build empathy toward diverse perspectives.

These skills are essential for success in both personal and professional life.

A robust arts-learning environment enriches your educational experience by stimulating critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Art education challenges you to view the world differently and develop innovative solutions to complex problems.

This exposure to diverse art forms fosters cognitive flexibility and adaptability, which are highly valued in today’s fast-paced world.

Partaking in art education equips you to handle constructive criticism. In the creative process, receiving feedback and refining your work is integral.

By embracing constructive criticism, you develop resilience and learn to persevere in facing challenges.

In conclusion, art education is vital to creating a well-rounded academic experience.

With numerous benefits, ranging from stress reduction to the development of interpersonal skills, it is clear that art education plays an essential role in every student’s overall growth.

Pedagogy in Art Education

As an art educator, your primary role is to foster the development of creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in students.

Pedagogy in art education is vital to this role, as it outlines the methods and techniques used to teach art in a K-12 setting.

Choice-based pedagogy is a popular approach in art education, where you, as the art teacher, design learning activities that support students as artists and provide them with authentic choices to respond to their ideas and interests through art-making  [1] .

This approach encourages student autonomy, allowing them to explore various materials and techniques and their artistic visions.

Another critical aspect to consider in your pedagogy is culturally responsive teaching. As an art teacher, you must acknowledge and respect the diverse backgrounds of your students.

By incorporating their unique cultural experiences into your teaching and adapting your methods to ensure that all students can connect with the material, you are contributing to an inclusive art education environment.

This can be done by showcasing diverse artists, discussing various art forms from different cultures, and incorporating culturally relevant themes into projects  [2] .

You should also strongly understand discipline-specific knowledge and techniques to teach art effectively.

Your coursework and professional development should emphasize art history , contemporary artistic practices, and various media and materials.

This helps you introduce students to a wide range of artists and movements, enabling them to critically engage with the world of art.

As a teaching artist, you may also work in community settings, collaborating with schools, museums, or other organizations to bring art education experiences to various age groups and populations.

Your pedagogy might need to be flexible while working as a teaching artist, adapting to the unique needs and goals of each project or setting.

Collaboration and community engagement become essential elements of your teaching approach in these contexts.

Remember, your pedagogy in art education should be confident, knowledgeable, and clear, reflecting your dedication to fostering creative growth in your students while remaining attentive to their needs and backgrounds.

Doing so contributes to developing a new generation of artists and creative thinkers.

The Role of Art Educators

As an art educator, your primary responsibility is to provide students with a well-rounded understanding of the visual and tangible arts.

This includes teaching various art forms such as drawing, painting, sculpture, and design works and performing arts like dance, music, and theatre  [3] .

Your role goes beyond teaching the techniques and skills required to create art. It would help if you also instilled in your students an appreciation for and understanding of the cultural , historical , and social contexts in which different art forms have evolved.

This helps students develop critical thinking abilities and better comprehend the significance of art in society.

In addition to being knowledgeable in your subject matter, as an art educator, you should cultivate a creative and supportive learning environment for your students.

This includes encouraging experimentation, curiosity, and self-expression while providing constructive feedback to help students grow as artists.

Actively engaging in arts advocacy is another crucial aspect of your role as an art educator.

You can promote the value of art education by communicating its benefits to parents, school administrators, and community stakeholders, highlighting how it contributes to students’ overall engagement and achievement in school  National Art Education Association .

In summary, as an art educator, your role encompasses teaching a variety of art forms , nurturing creativity , fostering critical thinking , and advocating for the importance of an arts education in students’ lives.

Visual and Performing Arts

You’ll explore various disciplines in art education, including visual, performing, media , and  contemporary art .

These fields allow you to understand creative expression better and develop your artistic abilities.

Visual art encompasses traditional fine arts such as drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture.

You’ll also delve into media arts involving film, graphic communications, animation, and emerging technologies.

The curriculum includes architectural, environmental, and industrial skills like urban, interior, and product design [5] .

On the other hand, performing arts consist of disciplines like theatre, dance, and music. These fields emphasize movement, expression, and storytelling, often utilizing the human body as the primary instrument.

Similarly, media arts focus on the fusion of technology and artistic mediums, like film, sound, and digital art .

Contemporary art is a vital aspect of art education as it helps you examine the current trends and societal issues shaping today’s art world.

This can involve exploring the works of present-day artists, situating them within a broader cultural context, and critically analyzing their messages and methodologies.

Ultimately, by studying visual and performing arts, you will foster your critical thinking and creative skills, preparing you to contribute to the global art community.

Art Education Programs

Art education programs play a crucial role in developing well-rounded students.

As a part of these programs, you’ll find courses encompassing various disciplines such as dance, music, theatre, and visual arts like drawing, painting, sculpture, and design works.

A  Master of Arts  degree in art education can help you advance your career and acquire expertise in art theory, practice, and pedagogy, enabling you to transform learning through creative engagement.

An art education program can give you the knowledge and skills to become an effective teacher and advocate for arts education in K-12 schools, community arts organizations, and other educational settings.

Many  art education programs  focus on building stronger communities and fostering strategic alliances that propel the arts forward as a solution.

As the demand for art education rises, it is essential to understand the benefits it offers to students.

When considering the different art education programs available, some focus on community arts, while others prioritize education in specific disciplines.

In  community arts programs , participants often collaborate on art projects, emphasizing community involvement and social change. These programs aim to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Art education often plays a vital role in graduation programs, with many states having arts requirements for high school graduation.

This ensures that students are exposed to various art forms during their education, helping them appreciate diverse perspectives and enhance their creativity.

Enrolling in a reputed  art school  can help you access top-notch facilities, dedicated faculty members experienced in various art forms, and networks of fellow artists and creative professionals.

In summary, art education programs provide comprehensive exposure to the arts, building a solid foundation for creativity and critical thinking.

Participating in these programs contributes to developing your artistic skills and overall personal and intellectual growth.

Arts Integration in Education

Arts integration is a teaching approach where content standards are taught and assessed equitably in and through the arts.

Through this interdisciplinary method, you can effectively incorporate multiple disciplines into your learning environments, enriching the core curriculum and enhancing students’ overall educational experience.

In an arts-integrated classroom, students construct and demonstrate understanding through various art forms.

This creative process connects an art form with another subject area, meeting evolving objectives and fostering a well-rounded educational experience.

For instance, you could combine visual arts with mathematics, helping students grasp geometric concepts in a hands-on, engaging way.

As a teacher looking to implement arts integration, collaboration is critical. Start by meeting with other educators to plan lessons using backward design.

This method focuses on the desired outcome, like your culminating event, exhibition, or final artwork , and builds the curriculum to achieve that goal.

This approach ensures all subject areas are effectively woven together and essential content is included in the learning process.

Implementing arts integration in your classroom has several benefits. It offers an innovative way to engage students and provides opportunities for differentiated instruction, reaching students with varying learning styles and abilities.

Connecting subject areas through the arts can create a more inclusive, diverse, and stimulating learning environment for all students.

So, as you strive to create a more dynamic and comprehensive educational experience for your students, consider exploring arts integration in your curriculum.

By merging multiple disciplines and fostering creativity, you can empower students and make learning more engaging, diverse, and meaningful.

Student Outcomes in Art Education

In art education, students experience various improvements in their learning outcomes.

By participating in arts programs, students can develop their ability to think creatively and critically, solve problems, and work effectively in teams.

When students engage in art education, they can nurture their creative thinking. Creative thinking is essential for creating innovative solutions to problems and uniquely expressing one’s ideas.

By honing their creative skills, students become more capable of generating new ideas and adapting to different situations.

Art education also fosters critical thinking abilities. As students analyze and interpret works of art, they learn to evaluate different perspectives, assess the quality of arguments, and make informed decisions.

This more profound understanding of artistic meaning helps students develop a more nuanced approach to interpreting the world around them.

Problem-solving is another critical learning outcome associated with art education. Students who engage in art projects often face complex challenges that require them to find solutions by experimenting with various techniques and materials.

Through this process, students become comfortable tackling complex problems, which can benefit them in other areas of their education and life.

Lastly, art education enhances teamwork skills. Many art projects require students to collaborate with others, either by working on a joint project or by critiquing each other’s work.

Students learn to communicate effectively , listen to others, and contribute to a larger goal by engaging in these collaborative activities.

Students can experience growth in these essential skills by participating in art education.

Creative thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork are all crucial outcomes of a well-rounded art education, providing students with a strong foundation for future success.

Art Practice and Learning Opportunities

Studio Practice

In art education, studio practice is a crucial component that enables you to develop your technical skills and artistic abilities.

Engaging in hands-on experiences within a studio allows you to explore various materials, techniques, and creative processes.

This active participation not only refines your skills but also fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation of the visual arts.

Practical Experiences

Practical experiences in art education provide invaluable opportunities to apply your artistic knowledge in real-life situations.

These experiences can range from collaborating on group projects, participating in workshops, or attending masterclasses led by experienced artists.

Through these engagements, you gain insights into different perspectives, expand your creative horizons, and enhance your interpersonal skills.

Art Making and Creativity

Art-making and creativity go hand-in-hand in the realm of art education. By actively participating in creative activities, you develop a stronger sense of self-expression and expand your ability to generate innovative ideas.

Engaging in imaginative and artistic practice also promotes critical thinking, problem-solving, and visual communication skills, which can benefit you in various aspects of life.

Embracing art-making and creativity fosters a lifelong love of learning and enriches your educational experience.

The Impact of Art Education on Early Childhood Development

In early childhood education, the integration of art plays a significant role in the development of young artists.

Art education can be especially beneficial in the early years, as it helps to develop a strong foundation for future learning and overall growth.

When you introduce young children to the art world, you help foster their social and emotional development .

Various studies have demonstrated the value of incorporating artistic practices into early childhood education programs  [6] .

Encouraging young learners to engage in imaginative activities can improve social interaction, self-expression, and emotional regulation skills.

It is essential to believe that art education provides a unique opportunity for children to explore their creativity and learn to appreciate the beauty in their surroundings.

Children develop a sense of curiosity and wonder that translates into a lifelong love of learning by participating in diverse artistic experiences, such as painting, drawing, sculpture, and music.

As you support your child’s artistic journey, consider providing various materials and opportunities for them to engage in creative exploration.

By offering a safe and nurturing environment where children can experiment and express themselves freely, you can develop critical skills such as problem-solving, spatial awareness, and fine motor coordination  [7] .

In conclusion, as an advocate for your child’s education, it is essential to consider the impact of art education on their early childhood development .

By embracing the power of creativity and artistic expression, you can ensure that your child experiences a well-rounded and enriching educational journey with a solid foundation for future success.

Art Education Beyond the Classroom

Art education is not confined to the walls of a classroom. Many opportunities for growth and development exist beyond traditional art education settings, such as museum education, arts organizations, and community arts programs.

Museums are a great place to expose yourself to various art forms and expand your understanding of different artistic styles and periods.

By participating in  museum education , you can enhance your appreciation for these masterpieces and gain a deeper connection to the cultures they represent.

While in-person art classes offer a distinct experience, joining art organizations can provide valuable knowledge and opportunities to network with other artists and professionals .

These groups often provide workshops, events, and resources to help you grow as an artist.

Community arts programs are another excellent way to pursue your artistic passions. Engaging in  community arts  helps bridge the gap between formal art education and everyday creative expression.

It is a chance for people of all ages and skill levels to collaborate, learn from each other, and make an impact in their local neighbourhoods.

Art education can also benefit non-arts fields by fostering creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration skills.

Brainstorming techniques, like collaborative sketching and mind-mapping, can be used across various industries to generate new ideas and improve decision-making.

Remember, art education is not just about painting and drawing; it is a flexible, powerful tool to help you develop your unique creative voice and become a better problem solver.

Take advantage of the opportunities available, explore new avenues, and let your art flourish beyond the classroom.

Future Perspectives in Art Education

Art education plays a vital role in shaping the creative minds of the future.

With upcoming trends and advancements,  arts-based  methods are being integrated into various aspects of learning, ensuring a more comprehensive and innovative approach to education.

One key aspect of future perspectives in art education is how it prepares students for the evolving world.

Including artistic practices in curriculums allows them to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Engaging in creative arts fosters a deep understanding of different perspectives, promoting empathy and tolerance.

Moreover, the integration of new concepts and innovations in the field of art education will provide unique opportunities for students to thrive.

For instance, using digital technologies and online platforms can open doors to new methods of exploration and collaboration, enabling learners to connect with experts from various disciplines and backgrounds.

The embrace of technology in art education will significantly enhance how you approach creative projects, equipping you with the necessary tools to master emerging forms of artistic expression.

Furthermore, the future of art education aims to focus on the importance of art in addressing social and emotional well-being.

Research  indicates  that engaging in creative endeavours helps students express themselves safely and positively, ultimately benefiting their mental health.

In conclusion, as you embrace the future perspectives in art education, you stand to benefit from integrating arts-based methods, new concepts, and a focus on holistic development.

By being involved in this ever-evolving field, you will be better prepared for the challenges ahead, fostering creativity and innovation that can significantly impact the world.

Final Thoughts on What is Art Education

As we conclude our exploration of art education, we are left with a deep appreciation for the power of creativity and self-expression.

Art education is not just about learning how to draw or paint; it’s about developing critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and empathy.

It’s about preparing students for a future where innovation and creativity are more crucial than ever before.

Art education can change the world by giving students the tools and skills they need to succeed in life and work.

So let us continue to support and advocate for art education, and let us never forget the profound impact it can have on individuals, communities, and society.

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Ready to take the next step in your career? Visit the career center closest to you. Learn more .

Why is arts education important in workforce development?

March 5, 2018

Arts education refers to education in the disciplines of music, dance, theatre and visual arts and there is ample evidence that an arts education improves performance in other areas.

In Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning , Edward B. Fiske shares that by analyzing 25,000 students, renowned UCLA researcher James Catterall “found clear evidence that sustained involvement in particular art forms—music and theater—are highly correlated with success in mathematics and reading.”

“The fine arts also provide learners with non-academic benefits such as promoting self-esteem, motivation, aesthetic awareness, cultural exposure, creativity, improved emotional expression, as well as social harmony and appreciation of diversity.”

The arts also foster teamwork and collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, public speaking, tolerance, flexibility and attention to detail—essential skills that employers often share they have trouble finding in candidates. These skills are crucial to any “innovation economy.” According to an IBM poll , for-profit CEOs rank creativity at the top of their lists of important leadership qualities.

In another report co-written by Catterall, researchers found that socially and economically disadvantaged children and teenagers who have high levels of arts engagement or arts learning show more positive outcomes in a variety of areas than their low-arts-engaged peers: “In middle school, high school, and beyond, they tend to do better on a host of academic and civic behavioral measures than do at-risk youth who lack deep arts backgrounds. To varying degrees, those outcomes extend to school grades, test scores, honors society membership, high school graduation, college enrollment and achievement, volunteering, and engagement in school or local politics.”

In addition, “at-risk” teenagers or young adults with a history of intensive arts experiences show achievement levels closer to, and in some cases exceeding, the levels shown by the general population studied.

Not only can the arts change outcomes for young people, creative industries make up a significant percentage of the nation’s GDP.

In Arts in the Workforce , Felipe Buitrago Restrepo writes, “Artists and creatives will become a key driver of the digital age.”

On April 12, at the San Diego Workforce Partnership’s (SDWP) Opportunity Summit 2018: Initiate , young adults, employers, workforce professionals, service providers, educators, funders, parents, community members, elected leaders and more will continue looking at ways to cut the rate of disconnected youth in San Diego County and halve the gap between the areas with the highest and lowest rates of opportunity youth.

To that end, SDWP has invited a number of local arts organizations to participate, including A Reason to Survive, The AjA Project , The Blue Heart Foundation , Movement BE and Urban Beats. The goal is to awaken the senses and introduce evidence-based strategies and tactics from the arts to workforce development.

Not only are the arts important for economic and workforce development, it has an important role in youth development and reconnecting opportunity youth. Join us on April 12 to meet these organizations and learn more.

Further reading:

Arts and Cultural Production Contributed $704.2 Billion to the U.S. Economy in 2013 Arts Programs for At-Risk Youth: How U.S. Communities are Using the Arts to Rescue Their Youth and Deter Crime The Importance of Arts Education The Importance of Arts Education in Workforce Preparation The Role of Youth Arts: Providing Opportunity and Intervention for At-Risk Populations NEA: Arts Data Profile Series (interactive infographics) What Kind of Arts Education Does Workforce Development Require?

The Workforce Partnership is dedicated to providing San Diego Residents with the most up-to-date resources for finding a career.

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Five Important Life Skills That Art Classes Teach

As I was working to create an art lesson for kids recently, making sure that concepts like

• repeating motifs, and

were clearly presented, I couldn’t help but remind myself that

an art lesson is about much more than creating a satisfying piece of art. 

After all, art students probably won’t become artists, but they WILL learn valuable life skills.

Underneath all the art skills that an art class teaches, there lies another set of skills - LIFE SKILLS. For me, it’s these LIFE SKILLS that make teaching art so exciting. The list of life skills kids can learn in an art class is long, but here are three skills for a starting list:

Art Classes Teach Kids to be Makers

I got my college education learning to analyze things: Shakespeare’s plays, the cells in plant tissue, and the philosophy behind a proposition. I was learning to think critically, to take things apart in order to understand them.

But there is another kind of thinking.

Call it design thinking, or maker thinking, or creative thinking, it’s all pretty much the same thing. It’s the thinking that builds things, that creates new things. It’s inventive thinking. Art teaches this second kind of thinking very well.

Art Classes Teach Kids to be Handy

Having spent most of my life doing design work for the theater, I’ve learned to weld, create faux finishes, draft construction drawings, build things, and do some electrical wiring. I’ve learned that it’s fun to take broken things - tools, furniture, toys, whatever - and fix them. Learning the joy of using our hands is a valuable skill. One of my scenic design students, now a lawyer, paints to relax. Another is asking for a table saw for his wedding; he loves to build things. In addition, art students quickly learn that there are “tricks” to doing things more easily.

A 6th grade teacher called one day to say that it was “such a gift” for her students to learn to use their left index finger to stop their pencil when doing pencil shading with their right hand. “It made things SO much easier!” she said. Her students had made a step in learning to be handy.

Art Classes Teach Persistence

Art classes teach us to persist when we draw a line or paint a stroke that we don’t like. ArtAchieve art lessons remind kids that “if you draw a line you don’t like, draw another one you DO like. In this way “mistakes” become new and interesting problems to solve.

I was reminded of recently this while painting a flower as an example for an art lesson. I had just added a background wash to the the picture, and something seemed wrong. The wash seemed flat, the picture looked garish, and it lacked unity. All the red was in the flower, and all the green was in the surrounding areas.

What to do?  The easy solution would have been to quit. But art classes teach us to persist, and in this case, as usual, the persistence paid off. After a few experiments, I decided to add orange to the wash, and suddenly the picture had unity and the green was warm and vibrant.

Learning to think creatively, learning to be handy, and learning to persist are life skills that art classes teach kids whether we intend them to be taught or not. However,

• If we remind our students that an art activity is an experiment, not merely a time to copy, and that it’s okay if the outcome surprises us,
• If we model the joy of finding new ways to do things, and
• If we remind students that they need to finish a project completely before they can decide whether they like it,

Then we begin to make the teaching and learning of these skills more intentional.

 As I was thinking about the many life skills that art classes teach,I was reminded of a comment that a homeschooling parent recently posted about ArtAchieve art lessons . In bold letters, she wrote, “ He makes mistakes! ” She meant it as a compliment. What she meant was that ArtAchieve lessons show me, the author, making “mistakes” like:

• a poor color choice, or
• a line that wandered off in some unintended direction, etc.,

and then dealing with the mistakes. This mom’s child found my mistakes really exciting. If I could make a mistake and find a way to deal with them, so could she!

A classroom teacher had a similar experience with her students. When her students learned that there were alternate routes to solving an art problem - that there was not one “right” way - they found that their “mistakes” were no longer disasters, but that they could actually be exciting opportunities for a problem-solving adventure.

After all, one of the important life skills that art classes teach us is problem solving.

Every art project , if presented properly, is part experiment and part problem-waiting-to-be-solved. The lessons might begin with a limitation, for example, “Shade this object with only hatch lines, cross-hatches, and dots.”

The limitation in this case presents its own set of problems to be solved:

• How will all these hatch marks and dots interact with the other lines that show details one might want to put on the object ? Will the details disappear when I start making all the shading lines?
• Do I need to use a predominance of hatch lines or dots?
• What parts need the most shading?
• Where will the light seem to come from?

The exciting thing is that there are no prescribed answers . To finish the drawing, we need to become problem solvers.

Another mom who is using ArtAchieve art lessons wrote that she simply can NOT draw; she has no art talent. None at all.

But that didn’t stop her from doing art lessons along side her children . Like many parents who have done art with their students, this mom discovered that not only did she learn that she COULD make art; she also learned from her own child. In fact, they became a kind of learning team.

Art classes teach us to collaborate

In other words, one of the things we learn in an art class is the skill of being able to learn from others. We see how the person beside us is solving an art problem, and we find ways to incorporate their approach into our own art project.

By collaborating -

• Either as individuals working along side each other, 
• Or as members of a group working on a large group project, 

we learn that

• we don’t need to have all the answer s, and that 
• it’s ok to admit that others know more that we do .

Seeing mistakes as opportunities and seeing other’s (sometimes superior) skills as inspiration rather than threats are important life skills. Art classes give kids an opportunity to learn these skills by practicing them.

Learn some life skills: Enjoy an art lesson today!

Get started with some free art lessons for kids here ..

Advice for a Strong Start in Art Education as a Second Career

We know that being an art teacher is the most incredibly inspiring, fun, creative, and exhaustingly awesome career around. And word is getting out. Many people have switched from other fields or content areas to join us in art education. Now, you are in your art room or pushing your cart down the hall. Reality has kicked in— you are an art teacher . Now what?

Know that you are not alone. Take the following advice from other art educators who once stood where you are now.

1. Ask yourself, “Why art education?”

It may have all started because of a need for supplemental income. This is how it started for Sarah Gillmor Babione . Working as a graphic designer, Sarah began to substitute teach and fell in love. “I walked into the school’s art room and a feeling like no other came over me. And I knew at that moment I wanted to teach art!” Now, she is starting her first year in a second career. After twenty years as a graphic designer, Sarah became an elementary and middle school art teacher.

Regardless of your age, experience, or context, it is essential to focus on your why . Why did you choose to join the art education field? With all of your daily responsibilities, it can be easy to lose sight of the inspiration that brought you to this point. Take a moment and write out a short narrative with your reasons for becoming an art teacher. Distill your words down to a brief statement, mantra, or quote. Keep this with you, or hang it above your computer. This visual reminder will be waiting for you when you need it the most.

So, why art education?

2. Honor your lived experience.

Dr. Jason Cox started his professional career as a puppeteer in western New York before making the career change to art education. He reflects, “Teaching is an art form. And every artist’s work is shaped by their experiences.” Now an assistant professor of Art Education at The University of Toledo, Jason’s performative start prepared him for a life in front of students. A previous career is part of your identity . Honor your story by sharing it with others. You never know what connections you will make or when an opportunity arises for your hidden talent to shine. Your students and colleagues won’t have the chance to make those connections if you don’t share your story.

Some art educators join the field after time spent with young children at home. Late nights with tiny humans require patience and might be a shared experience with colleagues. Michelle Sodano, an elementary art teacher in Ohio, acknowledges that late nights with her kids and her time as a BFA student helped her develop into the learner and teacher she is, including the ability to send emails late into the evening.

Who have you shared your personal teaching story with? 

How has your story fostered new connections and opportunities for your coworkers and students?

3. Acknowledge your transferable skills.

Regardless of your previous position(s), there are transferable skills you need to identify as strengths coming into art education. You might be ankle-deep in papier-mâché before you realize that you know exactly how to handle the situation. Or perhaps the PTA is willing to fund a major art project, and you need to take the lead. You are equipped with transferable skills that you learned long before you became an art teacher.

Suzanne Mitolo worked as an arts administrator for Dayton, Ohio, before becoming an art educator at the age of 40. She had extensive on-the-job training with organizational skills, project management, and grant-writing. These skills have served her well in her role as an art teacher, advocating for arts funding for her students and their large-scale projects.

Dr. Jason Cox learned how to solve problems with relatively few materials through his puppeteer experience. Sound familiar? Your budget may be tight. You may have walked into an art room outfitted with ancient powdered tempera paint and yellowing paper. In these moments, remember that you have been here before. It was a different context, but you know it is time to roll up your sleeves, and you are confident that you can figure it out.

Almost every profession relies on clear, purposeful communication. For Michelle Sodano, her time as a BFA metalsmithing student taught her the importance of providing feedback. “I learned to analyze and respond to my classmates’ artwork in a positive and constructive way. I learned how to listen to others and appreciate their process while understanding my classmate’s attachment to their body of work.” It is not a stretch to see how pursuing a BFA can lead to meaningful formative assessment strategies in the art room.

What specialized skills do you have that are transferable to your new career in art education?

4. Accept that there will be mistakes.

You work with your students, showing them how to acknowledge their mistakes and turn their “oops” into art. You need to take that same advice. Regardless of if you are right out of college or joining the education task force after years in another field, there are the same jitters, tears, and mistakes. Recognize that you are not invincible—as much as you want to think you are—but you are learning and growing. Suzanne Mitolo shares, “The first year is full of mistakes and recovery. The second year, not as many, and your confidence and skills improve. And then the third year… You got this!” Honestly, there will always be mistakes. You are a human working with other unpredictable humans. Prepare yourself for many more years of learning and growing.

How have you learned to process your mistakes?

5. Be vulnerable and seek support.

There are challenging moments in our classrooms that we don’t want to admit are a struggle. And, if you are in your second career, acknowledging your missteps or need for help can feel especially daunting and embarrassing. You may think you should have all the answers because you have more life experience than the teacher next door. Remember, our profession requires we learn from one another. To do so, you have to take the first step and ask for help.

Sarah Babione believes in her core that her career change is the best decision she has ever made. Despite that, there are still challenges. She acknowledges that classroom management with her block-scheduled eighth-graders puts her to the test. When you are vulnerable and seek support from fellow educators, especially art educators, you gain innovative tried-and-true ways to support your students. Sarah has her eighth-graders for one and a half hours at a time. She knows this is a long time to be in the art room, so she sought out instructional practices from her colleagues. Instead of pretending everything is running smoothly when it is not, Sarah’s colleagues have helped her modify her approach to be more sustainable in the long run.

Get involved with a network of art educators. You may be the only art teacher in your building or district, but there are still like-minded art teachers waiting for you to join them. These teachers can validate your concerns, process your challenges, and celebrate your successes in a way that only other art educators can. They get you. Consider a membership in your state art education association . These art teachers may come from different contexts, but they know your standards and state educational processes.

Who is an art educator you can be vulnerable with and ask for help?

6. Make a plan to self-regulate.

We can discuss self-care all day long. However, you may have already noticed a need to regulate your emotions and responses during the school day. Maybe you start by saying, “This is nothing. At my last job…” This can be a fine mindset for a while, but it can be detrimental in the long run. This is why it is essential to practice strategies to process frustration and disappointment. For more resources, check out these seven tips for meaningful regulation practices .

What is one self-regulation strategy that you will commit to for the rest of this year?

7. Have fun!

It’s easy to forget to prioritize joy. If you are like Sarah Babione, recall the way you felt the first time you stepped into the art room and knew this was the path for you. Paperwork, evaluations, mistakes, and classroom management can feel discouraging. Find time to be goofy with your students and to laugh with them. On your way home, think about the moments that made you smile that day.

And if something you are teaching is not bringing you joy, change it into something that does. Take control and read the room. If you aren’t enthused about the lesson or experience you provide students, it is a safe bet the students aren’t enjoying themselves either.

What was one spontaneous and fun moment from your classroom this week?

You are here. You took part in a journey to join the world of art education, and that journey is now part of your identity. Delight in your new career choice in the art room while also acknowledging the life experiences that have prepared you for this. Your unique training and perspective are an asset to your school, students, and the overall field. But no one will know about your path and your abilities unless you share them with others. Remember, “Teaching is an art form. And every artist’s work is shaped by their experiences.”

Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.

Jonathan Juravich

Jonathan Juravich, an elementary school art educator, is a former AOEU Writer. He is a social-emotional learning enthusiast and explores this essential concept with his students and fellow art educators.

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Do You Need a Degree to Become a Artist?

Educational backgrounds of artists, a glimpse into the educational canvas of artists, emerging patterns and the value of diverse educational experiences, essential education for aspiring artists: is there a blueprint.

• Formal Arts Education: Provides structured training in techniques and art history, which can be beneficial for foundational knowledge.
• Interdisciplinary Studies: Encourages the blending of mediums and ideas, often leading to innovative artistic expressions.
• Business Skills: Useful for artists who plan to sell their work or manage their own galleries, these can be learned through business courses or real-world experience.

Charting Your Own Artistic Journey: Education and Beyond

• Developing a Portfolio: Building a strong body of work that showcases your skills and vision is crucial.
• Community Engagement: Participating in art shows, residencies, and local art communities can provide valuable exposure and feedback.
• Lifelong Learning: The art world is dynamic, and staying informed about new techniques, materials, and trends is essential.

The Bottom Line: A Spectrum of Educational Palettes

Most common degrees for artists, art history, graphic design, animation or illustration, art education, popular majors for artists, animation and digital arts, photography, illustration, popular minors for artists, business or arts management, marketing or communications, computer science or digital media, cultural studies, why pursue a degree for a artist career, networking and professional development in art programs, facilitating career transition and advancement, what can you do with a degree in the arts, degree alternatives for a artist, apprenticeships with established artists, community workshops and art classes, online tutorials and courses, art residencies and retreats, building an online presence, participating in art competitions and exhibitions, self-directed projects, navigating a artist career without a degree, develop your craft, create a compelling portfolio, network within the art community, utilize social media and online platforms, seek out alternative education, understand the business of art, embrace feedback and critique, education faqs for artist, do you need to go to college to become a artist, is it worth it to get a degree for a artist role, how important is continuous learning for a artist.

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Transforming ideas into captivating visuals, shaping perceptions through artistry

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Creating compelling visuals that communicate ideas, inspire audiences, and drive brand identity

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Shaping visual concepts that captivate audiences, driving brand identity and innovation

Shaping visual concepts that captivate audiences and drive brand storytelling