Building arts education policy using the tools of out-of-school time youth arts organizations

Abstract

With the rise of COVID-19 and growing awareness of racial injustice, the last few years have been exceptionally tumultuous for our systems of education and their stakeholders. But scholars critical of traditional paradigms of schooling and accountability have argued that these crises kindle opportunities for profound change. Gloria Ladson-Billings, who has long argued for an approach to education that embraces cultural and epistemological diversity, has called for a “hard re-set” in education and has urged stakeholders to fundamentally reconsider the kind of human beings we want to nurture. With a reset in mind, we have turned our attention to studying out-of-school-time (OST) arts learning environments. The arts—dance, theater, music, the visual arts, and the digital and design arts—offer us a way to reimagine what good learning and teaching look like and how to design learning environments that work for all young people, and perhaps particularly for our most vulnerable youth. In this article, we draw on findings from our national critical qualitative study of out-of-school time community youth arts organizations. We offer policy recommendations for arts education and school improvement in four major categories: (1) Focus on youth and community assets; (2) Expand beyond a program-centric model of funding and design; (3) Support creative professionals; (4) Rethink the design and implementation of assessment systems. Within each category, we make recommendations specific to the various stakeholders who affect arts education policy—arts education leadership, funders and policy makers, and researchers.

Keywords:

• Community youth arts
• informal arts education
• out-of-school time

Though there is a wealth of literature demonstrating positive outcomes and experiences that are made possible in and through arts learning (e.g., Bevan et al., 2019; Halverson, 2021), access to arts education has become significantly more inequitable over the past 30 years (Bowen & Kisida, 2017). Across the field of education, the current conversation about what young people need to lead a fulfilling life ignores the arts almost completely. Even though the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) describes the arts as a “core subject,” and the more recent Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) identifies the arts as part of a “well-rounded education,” the arts do not factor into documentation and assessment of students’ growth or educational equity. Arts education is considered auxiliary, a nice opportunity when it comes along, not an essential or “basic” part of young people’s learning lives (Eisner, 1987). However, without the arts “children and youth experience an educational injustice whereby their future abilities to participate equally in the economic, cultural, and civic life of society are undermined” (Kraehe et al., 2016, p. 222). And since out-of-school-time (OST) arts programs are often “choice in,” researchers and organizational leaders worry that the participation gap widens as certain young people self-select into programs and others are unable to participate as a result of structural barriers (Michalchik, 2017; Pinkard, 2019; Vossoughi, 2017).

Fortunately, the age of high-stakes accountability and myopic attention to academic achievement in schools is meeting fierce opposition (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; McKinney de Royston, 2021; McKinney de Royston & Sengupta-Irving, 2019; Nasir et al., 2020) and beginning to lose momentum. Scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings (2021), who critique traditional paradigms of schooling and accountability in favor of educational equity and justice, are calling for a “hard re-set”. A reset in education that prioritizes holistic youth development will likely benefit arts learning and other hands-on education that does not easily conform to a “teach to the test” approach; what’s more, we may consider turning to these models of education to determine how a reset might look. To explore teaching and learning practices that resist the status quo in education and offer alternatives to the currently accountability machine of schooling, we studied OST arts learning environments.

Defining out-of-school time arts

Arts learning outside of schools takes many forms, from acting in the spring musical of a youth theater company or walking the exhibits of an art museum with family, to participating in a virtual knitting club and taking piano lessons from a neighbor. There is no consensus on the defining features that separate formal arts education from OST arts education, likely because many arts learning practices span educational environments. Some argue that the distinction is place-based, suggesting that informal learning is recognizable by the environments in which it takes place (Peppler, 2017). Focusing only on learning experiences that happen when students are not in school, however, leaves out many OST arts programs that have direct connections to schooling and school time. Others take the stance that OST arts learning occurs in both formal and informal settings (e.g., an artist-in-residence program run by community artists that takes place in a formal classroom during the school day), defining informal learning instead by its purpose and how it is organized and supported (Callanan et al., 2011; Rogoff et al., 2016). For instance, Rogoff and colleagues (2016) describe informal learning as non-didactic, embedded in meaningful activity, drawing on learner interest and choice, and not relying on exogenous assessments as measures of student learning. Research that examines the arts across learning settings emphasizes the importance of understanding practices, roles, tools, and goals that move across spaces (Barron, 2006).

In our inquiry, we embraced the blurred line between learning environments. We used Bevan’s (2017) definition of OST, a term used in educational circles to describe “the hours, weeks, and months available for learning when young people are not in school,” (p. 561), and expanded it to include everyday, self-directed learning, and structured/supervised learning. In this piece, we offer recommendations that emerged from conversations with OST arts education stakeholders, which we argue have implications for arts education policy across the formal-informal divide and for general school improvement.

OST arts and policy

There are two main reasons we believe OST arts learning has something to offer arts education policy across learning environments and school improvement broadly. First, OST arts education tends to be designed in ways that emphasize youth-centered, hands-on learning, creative self-expression and play, and community-based care practices (e.g., Halverson, 2021), making them rich case studies for understanding how to facilitate holistic growth and development. Moreover, teachers and administrators have begun to recognize OST education as important for developing self-motivated, life-long learning and as a key element in a learning ecosystem (Barron et al., 2014). The growing connection between informal and formal learning environments suggests that lessons we draw from one might benefit the other. Scholars in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education have long sought to capture how OST spaces engage youth in authentic STEM learning and developing policy recommendations to support such learning (e.g., Bell et al., 2009). We have taken a similar approach with OST arts education.

Second, by virtue of being customizable to each students’ learning goals and processes, OST arts education has the potential to provide solutions for educational injustice. Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners in education are becoming increasingly aware of how arts learning outside of school provides life-giving opportunities for our most vulnerable young people through a focus on culturally sustaining pedagogical practices (Wong & Peña, 2017). We also know that when the arts are brought into teaching and learning practices, educators are actively encouraging young people to express things they care about, to make a change in the world, and to celebrate their own excellence and beauty (Halverson et al., 2023). In other words, OST youth arts programs can be crucial mechanisms for improving the learning experiences of young people who do not thrive in traditional, formal learning institutions. However, while discourse is growing around how OST arts learning can impact issues of equity in schools (e.g., Kraehe, Acuff, & Travis, 2016), there is a recognized and persistent need for more research (Gadsden, 2008; Kraehe et al., 2016; Zakaras & Lowell, 2008).

In our recent study, we talked with OST arts education experts across the United States to understand how their programs support and center youth in arts learning, particularly Black youth, Indigenous youth, and youth of color (BIPOC youth), youth from low-income backgrounds, and LGBTQIA + youth. Specially, we set out to answer two primary questions: (1) How do community youth arts organizational leaders, teaching artists, and participants describe the leading ideas and practices in OST youth arts programming? (2) How can OST youth arts work center the cultural, historical, and geographic resources that artists and arts organizations bring to arts programming? We looked to OST youth arts programs for direction around broader arts education policy because, in neglecting to focus on the powerful role the arts play in young peoples’ learning lives, the current policy climate has placed the burden of arts education directly in the hands of OST providers. As a result, the policy recommendations we gleaned from OST arts spaces can directly inform how we think about arts education broadly constructed, and how school reform can include the arts as a core part of what it means to educate differently. Our policy recommendations are organized into four categories: (1) Focus on youth and community assets; (2) Expand beyond a program-centric model of funding and design; (3) Support creative professionals; (4) Rethink the design and implementation of assessment systems.

Studying OST youth arts organizations across the U.S.: a brief methodological detour

Researchers have called for a shift from “damage-centered research” to “desire-based scholarship” (Tuck, 2009 as cited in Brayboy et al., 2012). Such an approach focuses on assets within communities of color that have been overwhelmingly framed in literature as depleted and hopeless and encourages collective interpretation. In this way, communities themselves say what matters in their lives and what should follow a research project. We embraced desire-based scholarship during our year-long, remote, participatory design research study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Calabrese Barton et al., 2021) and paired it with a critical qualitative perspective on inquiry (Denzin, 2017), which strives to reflect the lived experiences of participants by not only centering their voices but by valuing their expertise in defining the inquiry. Participants and researchers co-constructed research questions negotiated approaches to facilitating conversations and capturing qualitative data and honed ideas about successful practices in OST youth arts programs. We also built design features into the study (e.g., inviting organization leaders to facilitate focus groups) in order to center participant voices, build relationships, and foster trust to promote candid conversations (see Tunstall et al., 2022 for more on our methodological approach).

Data collection

In our study, we spoke to a wide variety of stakeholders (n = 72) including arts organization leaders (n = 28), educators/teaching artists (n = 17), researchers (n = 8), funders and policy makers (n = 9), and youth artists (n = 10). Organizational leaders and teaching artists that participated were from OST arts programs that take place in a range of different spaces: nonprofit and community arts organizations; museums; school-based programs either outside of school hours or during school hours with informal educators; government agencies; and philanthropic organizations. We also worked in four unique cultural-regional scenes, which we defined as cultural geographic areas where place, culture, history, and art-making converge. We purposefully selected four “scenes” for their focus on and success with young artists of color in their areas. The regions varied along a series of dimensions including geographic size, population density, racial, ethnic, and linguistic population, as well as organizational density and availability of funding.

The study consisted of a series of participatory conversations between September 2020 and June 2021. Participatory conversations that give authority to the people working with and in community youth arts are essential to advancing knowledge about what works, why, and where there are challenges (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Our participatory conversations were unapologetically centered on representation, identity, and collaboration (Paris & Winn, 2014), and focused on the experiences of BIPOC communities, particularly BIPOC youth, as opposed to a random or comprehensive sample. We engaged stakeholders in three different kinds of participatory conversations: 12 one-on-one conversations between a nationally recognized expert and a member of our research team; 7 regional conversations with groups of 3-6 arts leaders working within one of four cultural geographic regions, facilitated by two members of our team to explore themes through a place-based lens; 7 program-centered conversations that included 5-8 teaching artists and young people. Each conversation lasted about an hour and was semi-structured based on a protocol of questions and associated prompts querying themes around: context and community, organizational and personal goals for participation, important design and facilitation practices, problems of practice, and visions of success and methods of assessment. For program-centered conversations, arts leaders from the organizations recruited participants, adapted the questions, and sometimes led the conversation.

Data analysis

Data analysis for this project began as one-on-one conversations were collected, and it consisted of cleaning audio transcripts and applying emic, open coding strategies to them. Using descriptive, concept, and in vivo coding strategies (Saldaña, 2016), researchers were able to make sense of the overarching themes participants discussed as they related to the areas of interest queried in the protocol, as well as note themes outside of these areas.

Starting analysis early in the data collection phase allowed participants’ insights to influence the questions that were asked in the group conversations, and themes and codes that emerged from early analysis were applied to the focus group transcripts in conjunction with another round of emic coding. In addition to emic coding, the research team wrote analytic memos (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) for each group conversation, highlighting common themes that were then discussed until consensus was reached about their meaning. This iterative process afforded multiple opportunities to negotiate the meaning of the data and fostered co-construction of inquiry between researcher and participants. Exploring the themes that surfaced in the one-on- one and group conversations helped to triangulate our analysis across regions and stakeholder roles. Our study was not meant to be representative of all stakeholders of OST arts education; rather, it offers a deep dive into programs and perceptions from different cultural-regional communities across the country and paints a rich, saturated picture of how OST arts organizations can serve young people. In this piece we present four categories of policy recommendations we believe transcend cultural region and learning environment.¹

Four areas for policy recommendations across arts education and school improvement

In this article, we organize our collective interpretations into four categories of policy recommendations: (1) Focus on youth and community assets; (2) Expand beyond a program-centric model of funding and design; (3) Support creative professionals; (4) Rethink the design and implementation of assessment systems. For each, we offer specific recommendations for the range of stakeholders who influence policy and practice of arts education. These stakeholders include:

• Arts education leadership: Decision-makers for arts learning who set the vision for youth programs and arts education, establish priorities and ways of working, and determine how to get things done and where to find resources (e.g., school and district arts education coordinators, community outreach directors, program directors).

• Funders and policy makers: People in philanthropic foundation or government positions who determine how resources are allocated and influence what are considered exemplars and best practices through policy and distribution of funding.

• Researchers: Professionals in universities, think tanks, and nonprofits who pursue questions about learning and development in OST and school settings and issues of equity in youth arts education and practice.

Focus on youth and community assets

The OST programs in our study focused on designing and facilitating arts experiences that centered youth and community assets. Assets refers to everything young people bring to an OST arts program, including expertise with art forms, cultural histories, and popular culture knowledge and interest. It also includes the cultural, racial, and historical traumas young people carry with them as the topics and questions that matter for artmaking. The label “historically marginalized,” to which BIPOC youth or youth from low-income backgrounds are often referred, centers the status of marginality instead of the bright and brilliant potential of youth from so- called marginal groups (Martinez & Rury, 2012) and creates a deficit orientation to young people and the communities in which they live and make art. A focus on assets mirrors Paris and Alim’s call for a shift to a culturally sustaining pedagogy which “reposition[s] the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices of working-class communities—specifically, poor communities of color—as resources and assets to honor, explore, and extend in accessing White middle-class dominant cultural norms of acting and being that are demanded in schools” (2017, p. 4).

Participants from our study primarily worked with youth without either financial privilege or an abundance of sociopolitical capital; they often described their arts programs as sites for families’ first live arts experience, and as places where young people can learn about career opportunities that would otherwise not be available to them. The majority of stakeholders in our study followed an asset approach to arts learning, rejecting the concept that the young people they work with are “marginalized” or “disadvantaged.” Their objection to identifying young people as marginalized defies the underlying assumption that these youth are somehow broken and that the purpose of participating in OST arts education is to “fix” them. While study participants recognized the implications of historical systemic inequities on their programs—such as redlining resulting in segregated areas with fewer infrastructural supports, or young people who are less likely to encounter arts in school classes—the work they do does not focus on deficits. By viewing the assets young artists bring as opportunities for art-making, OST community arts programs produce great art, provide new ways of knowing, doing, and being for young people, and offer mechanisms for engaging young people in difficult work.

Participants described working with young peoples’ assets through artmaking, such as when they draw on cultural art forms that are deeply connected to the community’s cultural heritage and when they use young peoples’ collective and individual experiences as the inspiration for artmaking. Participants also focused on assets by including cultural history that is relevant both to the artform and to students, such as when the founder of one organization connected their drumming program to an historical lineage of African drumming:

So, when I’m showing the children a rhythm or something, I’m talking about what I learned from my teacher. And then I’m talking about how this relates to the Kingdom of old Mali and Sundiata Keita and you know, all this history. And that’s a powerful thing. … [young people] actually feel very powerfully, “Wow, it’s cool to be connected to all this stuff.”

Finally, students’ lived experiences were also honored and incorporated in the community practices established in OST arts programs. A teaching artist recalled how one student sharing grief during their regular circle ritual was given space to inform the entire classroom:

So now, the entire circle, every student now is remembering something… It became so big that they started literally crying. … And so what I did now with all this energy, we all hold hands, like, let’s all just remember that we are here for each other. … After that, when they stand up to dance, …they are like a miracle. So much power.

This example illustrates that even young people’s negative emotions and painful histories can be unequivocally embraced and treated as assets (Zipin, 2009). In fact, oftentimes, young people’s experiences, ideas, and values do not perfectly align with our idealized notions of young people, and arts leaders continue to find ways to honor. Participants aimed for a holistic and complex view of the young artists with whom they come into the community.

For arts education leaders

We offer two interrelated recommendations around how to take an asset-based approach on youth art-making to (1) enter the community prepared to acknowledge youth assets and (2) make space for these assets in the art-making process. For example, a program that aims to address the problem of a “news desert” in a rural community must be prepared for young people to want to make a film that tells a proud story of their politically conservative community. Or a dance program that features choreography with bright smiles and outstretched fingers must understand that some students may see dance as a more physically private and personal act. Acknowledging and managing those tensions is part of what it means to focus on assets in OST youth arts work. Paulo Blikstein (2020) calls this approach “cultural making,” a balance between respecting the local culture and context and the introduction of new elements that teachers or designers bring to the learning setting:

Cultural making should not be about romanticization of the local or simplistic incorporation of cultural elements into the production of objects…It should be about powerfully engaging youth with the political, human, and social challenges of subverting and transforming one’s reality through powerful tools and representations (p. 125).

This does not mean abdicating responsibility for setting learning goals as teaching artists in the space or as arts education leadership designing and offering programs; in fact, giving young people the opportunity to contribute meaningfully requires program providers to share their own expertise in intentional, productive, and collaborative ways (Vossoughi et al., 2020). It does, however, ask arts education leadership to reframe assumptions about who can be a teacher or learner in their space.

For funders and policy makers

A paradigm shift is required on the part of funders and policy makers to reconsider arts programming in and out of schools from the perspective of what young people bring to the practice, rather than the deficits funders and policy makers may assume exist and therefore make the central storyline about young people and their communities. It is not only important that arts education leadership avoid deficit language; funders and policy makers—whose language, funding priorities, and established policy create the field—must also be cognizant about how they communicate to other stakeholders about the young people they serve. Using deficit narratives about youth to allocate funds and shaping arts programs around the status of marginality situates arts as savior and is anchored by its value in a dominant neoliberal culture (Baldridge, 2017; Kraehe et al., 2018). An axiological shift must be made in the way young people’s needs are considered and discussed (Bang et al., 2016).

Specifically, we propose empowering “cultural-regional ambassadors” to designate resources to the organizations and projects that are most prepared to focus on assets as a core mechanism for working with young people. These ambassadors, who can be at any level of the system, should be embedded in the communities OST youth arts programs aim to serve and have intimate knowledge of the kinds of partnerships the communities might consider. Since they do not themselves provide programming, they can focus on brokering relationships by helping organizations to interact with communities in productive and ethical ways and supporting the extensive work necessary to build the connective tissue required (Pinkard, 2019). In our research, we encountered several different examples of ambassadors that could serve as models for other communities throughout the US: (1) The Arizona Arts Commission, a state agency that acts as a liaison between arts organizations in the state, (2) the Chicago Learning Exchange (CLX), a nonprofit which convenes time and space for citywide networking and shared opportunities based on local interests and assets, and (3) the Heinz Foundation (Pittsburgh, PA) a private foundation that identifies local organizations that have the bandwidth to take on community “stewardship” roles to help them fund in smarter, hyperlocal, and more equitable ways. While they represent different types of institutions, all serve as a bridge between communities and arts organizations through their capacity to a) understand the local landscape and needs, b) advocate for a focus on ethics and integrity in their programming with young people, c) inform assessment to focus on organizations’ values and, d) establish expectations that recognize the current inequities of the system and connect to community interests and values. A funding and policy leader described his organization’s work as:

trying to identify and build capacity for intermediary organizations who are working [in the community], calling them network anchors here in [my city], to try to figure out who’s got the capacity, who’s maybe not as directly involved as a program provider—not as busy with the kids, essentially—but who has this the time and the energy and the expertise to do the to do the research, to do the advocacy. And providing the professional learning opportunities that kind of things that knit those communities of practice together… So, in order to do that you do need some kind of stewardship and so that I think in our region has been positive.

For researchers

We encourage the use of a cultural-regional perspective as a critical qualitative inquiry model that honors and is shaped by local expertise. We see our methodological approach as itself a contribution to the field of OST youth arts work. In changing our collective methodological approach, we can remake the “God’s eye view” of research in favor of a more constructionist approach (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Denzin, 2017). This is especially important in the study of arts education as arts practices are themselves representations of truths that are imbued with emotions and feelings, as well as cultures, histories, and identities (Tunstall et al., 2022).

Expand beyond a program-centric model of funding and design

A prevalent theme across our data was a misalignment between the way that arts organizational leaders and other stakeholders see the work of arts education organizations. Funders and policy makers tend to focus on “the program” level of OST arts work and organizational leaders feel this misses out on much of the work that their organizations do. Across our data, there was almost universal agreement that we need to adopt a more expansive model of funding that goes beyond “the program” as the operational unit. We heard many reasons why the standard practice of funding programs is especially problematic for OST arts organizations that focus on serving communities of color, especially communities that have not historically had access to formal arts programming. Calls for proposals often include specific language that limits the types of programs that are and are not eligible for funding. These pre-determinations can exclude important populations and experiences that do not fit into such narrowly defined descriptors, such as particular tribal communities or definitions of what counts as “youth programs.” Even when there is alignment between an OST program and available funding, the funding model does not account for the extensive work required to do the work necessary to ensure and deliver sustained quality opportunities, such as establishing relationships and value within communities. In terms of evaluating these programs, the pressure to “fix” systemic issues of racial and economic inequality, sets programs up to promise much more than they can reasonably deliver.

As one youth program director who works with isolated rural communities described:

COVID hit and all of a sudden…we can’t even physically get there [and grants are] like, “you need wifi and the kids need Chromebooks,” and all these things where you’re like, “yeah but I know this community of kids and like they don’t have mailboxes on the front of their houses.” Like how do I even deliver stuff down to that. And then these grants come through and they’re like, “go to the moon” and you’re like, “I’m teaching out of a cardboard box, how am I going to go to the moon for you?”

By comparison, another program director working in a dense, urban area identified a similar issue:

That was the problem with like 90% of the Maker and STEM-based grants we have worked on in the last 10 years is they were so focused on the thing that we would buy and how we would airdrop it into a community. And the problem with that is, these kids can smell a rat and they know that I’m gone as soon as the funding is gone. And so, why the hell am I going to show up with a 3D printer, showing them the thing that I can’t teach them in two weeks and then take it right back away from them. It’s completely flawed.

Additionally, funders and policy makers often draw a bright line between school-based and OST youth arts programming that does not account for the ways in which so many youth arts organizations actively collaborate with schools. On reservations and pueblos, for example, the school is the site for arts programming and more, functioning as a community center, and distinguishing between school and non-school time is an irrelevant distinction. OST arts organizations are often working across locations, often thinking about connections between them; separations between school and OST time or between physical spaces where artmaking happens are often not useful for organizational leaders.

The hyper focus on specific programs as the salve for larger social inequities is an example of the lack of attention paid to “finding and attending to problems” that cognitive scientists have described plagues organizational leaders of all kinds. While we often have a good handle on executing a solution to a problem, it is in fact the framing of what the problem is and which problems we ought to be putting our efforts into that require the most intellectual energy and time (Simon, 1993). OST community arts organizational leaders and programmers described about two-thirds of their work as problem setting, “a cognitive activity in which actors select relevant situational features as worthy of notice, action, or contemplation” (Halverson, 2004, p. 95). In other words, the challenge of OST youth arts work is not program delivery but rather figuring out what kind of program might be impactful in a particular community.

Problem setting can take the form of years-long community partnerships, showing up in communities to understand what kinds of arts practice they are interested in and how artists might engage with them. Or, as some arts leaders describe, a DIY ethos of providing resources to communities to demonstrate commitment to working together prior to the launch of a formal program. Many organizations provide programming without funding to maintain much-needed connections between OST arts organizations and communities despite a program funding cycle that does not match the lived reality of youth arts work. By the time an organization gets to program delivery, most of the time and effort has already been expended. As Halverson describes, “most of problem solving is problem setting” (2004, p. 95).

For all stakeholders

We need to explicitly incorporate problem setting into the work of OST youth arts organizations. This includes an acknowledgement of the people and time required to build relationships and to engage in collaborative design. Funding to support infrastructure building and work time outside of the hours spent delivering programs is essential. These changes in funding structures require a change in how OST youth arts organizations report the impact of their work. Since we argue that programs alone do not appropriately capture the work of organizations, measures of program impact also do not appropriately capture the impact of organizations’ work. This may look like tracking individual youth participants over extended periods of time beyond the scope of a particular program, reporting unexpected outcomes, looking at units of analysis that represent organizational or community metrics, and generating data that is used for program improvement and redesign.

For funders and policy makers

Rethinking funding structures requires that public and private funders and policy makers take a more expansive and inclusive approach to OST youth arts organizations and practices. The concept of expansion and inclusion should stretch from application to evaluation. At the application stage, a call for proposals should require budgets that pay artists and organizational leaders for their problem-setting time. This time includes creating new partnerships, developing relationships with collaborators, professional development and training, and time for community support. We know that doing OST arts work cheaply or free is not in service of the quality or sustainability of the program, so budgets should reflect this value. Funding needs to remove unnecessary barriers like divisions between in-school and OST, or youth-focused and community-focused programming. Additionally, funding that looks to understand how programs evolve and strengthen over time or how ongoing practice connects to emergent pedagogies and frameworks is of great interest, as opposed to only calls looking for new programs exhibiting the latest topics in youth arts education.

For researchers

More attention from learning scientists in inquiry and design at the network and community level has the potential for advancing knowledge for the field and reflecting the complexity of the organizational, infrastructural, and foundational work of problem setting. While we know that organizations are doing this work, we have much to learn about what works and why. Organizations seek to reflect the needs of their communities, but what does the process of understanding communities actually look like? What are best practices and what infrastructure is needed for initial landscape mapping and continued shared understanding? How can systems-level actors change their practices to support deep community engagement? Is youth arts intervention and design possible at the community level and can this strengthen communities of practice and encourage movement across boundaries? This recommendation is in line with recent calls for ecosystem-level focus (Akiva et al., 2019; Hecht & Crowley, 2019), and leveraging information infrastructure to explore some of these questions (Pinkard 2019, 2021).

Support creative professionals

The heart and soul of OST youth arts organizations is the team of teaching artists who provide collaborative design expertise, mentorship, real-time arts practice, and community building. While there is repeated recognition of the value of teaching artists, there is also increasing attention to the limited professional support available for adults in these positions (e.g., low pay, lack of job security, lack of recognition as an educator) and the fact that these highly valued but under-supported positions are often filled by younger people of color (Baldridge 2020, Akiva et al., 2019; Yahner et al., 2015). One organizational leader describes the “precarious gig economy” of teaching artists, a result of the project-based funding structures described above, with little stability and low paying positions, makes that intermediary role unattractive or impossible for many:

So much funding is project-based but that creates a precarious gig economy for people working with young people. … Expertise is not just about the teaching or the facilitation. It’s about knowing who’s in a community, knowing whose grandma is whose and who’s whose cousin, and like those are the kinds of things that create really strong community network around young people.

Universally, arts leaders see the need for more robust recruitment, development, and advancement of their teaching artist corps. As a method of illustrating their importance, we provide a story told to us by one of the teaching artists we spoke with in a focus group. Of his work as a dance teaching artist, he says:

I was apprenticing at the time, so I was under a lead teacher, and she did a boys versus girls competition and I saw this one student that was just like, super uncomfortable. … So I had a little conversation with her just kind of gauging her comfort level. And she kind of hinted at non-binary status, and was just dropping little words, as a third grader! … And after that I had such a long conversation with the teacher about why we need to not do that, why we need to say, “hey, anyone can be anything. You can be anything.”

How can policies support the recruitment and professional support of teaching artists like this? And how do we get beyond what we have heard as the “unicorn” model of a teaching artist: the person who is the magical, perfect fit with exactly the right mix of arts knowledge, passion, and belief in young people.

This teaching artist is himself a product of an OST youth arts program; many organizational leaders talk about “building a bench” of teaching artists from their youth participants who stick with them over an extended period of time. One of the challenges for recruitment is a lack of visible pathways for continued participation in OST youth arts work. Even young people who grow up in organizations are taught to leave for greener pastures, to seek more lucrative career paths. Organizations described offering administrative work to their teaching artists in an effort to provide more stable working conditions. Otherwise, leaders say, their best teaching artists are forced to leave the community. Organizations and local arts leaders in civic and policy positions want their creative community to stay, grow, and thrive, seeing it as mutually beneficial not only for the special interest community but for the community at large.

OST arts leaders talked about the importance of advancement opportunities for their teaching artists. The most successful mentors and teaching artists quickly hit a ceiling for their own careers. This often leads them to explore opportunities outside of their home communities, leaving the organizations to constantly start over with new teaching artists. We recognize that this is a pervasive challenge across youth workers and in the teaching profession more broadly (Baldridge 2020). However, teaching artists have the added benefit of engaging in their own arts practice alongside their lives as teaching artists as in programs like the Native Arts & Cultures Mentor Artist Fellowship Program where professional artists were paid to produce their own art and mentor emerging artists (nativeartsandcultures.org/past-programs). This model offers productive opportunities for individual artists to develop successful career paths and affords paths to organizational longevity that can be difficult to achieve.

For all stakeholders

The key role of the teaching artists who bring their professional expertise, networks, and experiences into community youth arts programs cannot be emphasized enough. We recommend that funders and policy makers prioritize creative workers by offering financial incentives for teaching artist work. We also recommend that OST youth arts organizations engage in active branding campaigns to better communicate the value of their work to families and communities; without this form of clear and illustrative communication and examples of what young people are doing with their arts experiences, organizations can struggle to convince families and communities to support their young artists in becoming teaching artists and mentors.

Training and continued professional development of teaching artists is also a persistent problem of practice for OST youth arts programs. The knowledge of what makes a good facilitator is often passed down from a single dynamic leader to a small group of acolytes. This knowledge is very rarely written down and calls for research on what makes a good teaching artist often go unanswered (Winkler & Denmead, 2016). Organizations almost always struggle to build a deep bench of qualified teaching artists. We recommend uplifting organizations that engage in teaching artist training as a regular part of their practice and to work with OST arts organizations to develop additional training opportunities, including anti-racism training. This kind of training also requires additional financial support, as most program-centric funding models do not include professional training. The field needs a model of OST youth arts workers that supports their engagement in increasingly complex tasks and allows for time and space to practice their own art.

For researchers

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are becoming a popular model for collaborative, reciprocal changes to research and practice (Bevan & Penuel, 2017; Coburn & Penuel, 2016). The youth work field has already benefited from the RPP model as a mechanism for change (Denner et al., 2019; Mendoza et al., 2018). Based on the issues that are important to our collaborators, we recommend working with OST youth arts organizations to create partnerships that focus on the work of teaching artists and organizational leaders as creative professionals. This includes working directly with teaching artists and program administrators who support the conditions for youth artmaking and translate ideas into practical steps (e.g., Barron, et al., 2014).

Rethink the design and implementation of assessment systems

Talking with arts organizational leaders about assessment of youth learning and program evaluation revealed that they rely on an expansive assessment tool kit and sometimes develop creative ways to understand the impact their programs have on young people. However, we also identified a range of practical challenges to policy-level assessment structures: lack of time and resources, assessment tools that do not match with an organization’s cultural ethos, and a lack of interest in the questions that funders pose to arts organizations. Additionally, we found that conceptions of assessment have consequences for how OST arts organizations do their work. The majority of organization leaders and teaching artists believed funders and policy makers hold strict perceptions about what it means to engage in assessment, how assessment must be practiced, and what counts as evidence of success—perceptions that are often in conflict with what organization leaders value in arts learning (Saplan, Norman, & Probst, 2022). A participant who oversees the arts and culture sector of an entire city illustrated the disconnect between stakeholders’ expectations for assessment when she noted,

One of the greatest things we could do, or try to train this next generation to do, is to change the evaluation process of what people think is supposed to happen or what we’re supposed to measure. The way I measure is to have a victory every day. And that’s what I teach the young people in the programs that I set up and that’s what I’m trying to teach funders and [Detroit] City Hall folks who want a list they can check off…If we don’t measure differently, people will think we’re not doing all the work that we’re doing. And we’re doing a lot.

To better align assessment practices with an organization’s stated goals and values, we offer four recommendations: build an assessment culture, interrogate underlying values present in assessment approaches, develop assessments that move beyond a meso-level of analysis, and design and study alternative forms of assessment.

For arts education leaders

Unsurprisingly, it can be difficult for arts educators to carry out meaningful assessment while also meeting program needs and learning goals, especially without sufficient time, professional support, or compensation to do so. Arts education leadership can help mitigate these issues by viewing assessment as a central component of learning that provides young people feedback about their products and processes and enables them to continue making progress. When assessment is treated as an integral part of arts learning, the arts organization or classroom can develop a strong culture of assessment. Based on conversations with participants and literature on educational assessment, we see how building an assessment culture requires arts education leadership to encourage and help arts educators create space for assessment in their lessons, and to compensate appropriately for time spent assessing in the case of OST organizations (i.e., do not treat assessment as a separate activity teaching artists must do outside of their working hours).

Additionally, building a culture of assessment means engaging in assessment practices that complement the theory of learning and teaching practices already employed. For schools and organizations who do emphasize assessment, it is important to remember that not all assessment practices align with and promote arts learning goals. In a group conversation, one arts organization admitted that they struggled to routinely assess youth and their programs; they had established a shared online document for teaching artists to record stories and experiences that illustrated success, but it went unused. However, members of the organization also described a sense of community and camaraderie that existed between teaching artists and organization leaders that often led to casual, impromptu discussions about their lessons and the growth youth demonstrated. Building an assessment culture for that organization might look like formalizing opportunities for teaching artists to connect with each other on a regular basis to share food, swap stories, and collectively record qualitative evidence that the organization has had a positive impact on young people. In our estimation, building an assessment culture means lowering barriers to assessment and finding creative ways to align learning and teaching with assessing.

For arts education leadership, funders, and policy makers

Arts education leadership often feels stuck between wanting to serve youth and wanting to satisfy stakeholders (i.e., funders and policy makers) who have influence over whether and how a program or classroom subject are perpetuated. This challenge is even more pronounced when the models of success and values that funders and policy makers have do not align with those that program providers hold. For instance, where a funder may measure success through the number of young people that participated in a program, arts education leadership might see their impact demonstrated when youth recognize themselves and their work as creative, agentic, and valuable. Identifying shared values around assessment between system-level actors such as policy makers and funders and arts education leaders is a mechanism for aligning needs across stakeholders. Where shared values do not already exist, it is imperative for stakeholders to negotiate and discuss their values until they come to a consensus, starting with a deep interrogation of what they value in relation to learning and youth development and whether those values are supported by their assumptions about assessment.

Funders and OST arts education leadership specifically may also find alignment through the mutual recognition that while most assessment takes place at a meso-level (e.g., collecting cursory evidence about how all young people participate in a program to make generic claims regarding the success of an organization), certain models of success are better captured and understood at the micro- and macro-level. Micro-level assessment consists of collecting more comprehensive data about youth and taking note of their moment-to-moment progress to understand their immediate experience. Macro-level assessment follows the holistic journey of young people over an extended period of time, across several programs or several years. In other words, when the goal or an arts organization is to “serve everyone,” it is fitting that criteria for success and assessment exist at a meso-level, focused on the overall experience of youth. But if programs do not aim to serve everyone, if instead they aim for the kind of deep engagement that results in individual change over extended periods of time, a different approach to assessment tools is necessary. The concepts of micro-level and meso-level assessment connect to current conversations about formative and summative assessments in schools (National Academy of Education, 2021). However, the inclusion of macro-level assessment encourages the arts education field to reconsider the sense of finality and high stakes often associated with summative assessment, and truly recognize learning as non-linear, constant, and ever evolving.

For researchers

In our study, participants demonstrated a narrow understanding of what “counts” as assessment in OST youth arts programs, despite the myriad assessment tools—formal and informal—they employed. In schools, too, there seems to be a limited selection of assessment tools circulating that can provoke uncertainty and resentment when paired with arts education (Omasta et al., 2021). Although quantitative data and psychometrics are often used to measure student learning and achievement, these are far from the only successful approaches to assessment (Gipps & Stobart, 2003; Kim & Rosenheck, 2020; Michalchik & Gallagher, 2010). It is crucial that researchers study, develop, and share alternative forms of assessment that can appropriately capture the diverse examples of success that are possible in arts education.

Moreover, researchers must also identify (and help arts education leadership identify) non-deficit measures of success that can be used to communicate the impact arts education can have on young people and on communities. Expanding what counts as success in arts education, how success can be demonstrated, and by whom are important considerations that reinforce the earlier recommendation about asset-based pedagogy. Embracing “failure” not only as an important step in a long learning journey, but as the space between successes where learning and growth actually happens can both support diverse learners and better align arts practice with assessment. One OST organization leader in our study mentioned a young person who dropped out of a program and “basically said ‘F’ you,” only to return to the program one year later and then again five years after that. Using traditional metrics that focus on program attendance within a fiscal year or as long as the life of a grant, this young person might be considered an example of failure; but with a longer scale for assessment and with the expectation that “some of our greatest successes [can be] our greatest failures,” this person returning could be recognized as a measure of success. We recognize that traditional assessment is more entrenched in schools, but we argue that it is more important than ever for researchers to push against neoliberal expectations about academic achievement by studying alternative methods of assessment and expanded concepts of success, and by advancing their findings (e.g., Kim & Miklasz, 2021).

Next steps

So how do we make this happen? How can we realize the commitments of Gloria Ladson-Billings and others to achieve a reset on our educational system in order to better serve all students? If we accept that arts-based practices are one clear method for reimagining teaching and learning for equity (e.g., Halverson, 2021; Hanley, 2011; Paris & Alim, 2017), then some of this work begins by drawing lessons from the OST arts organizations that serve young people who have consistently been labeled as “marginalized” and “minoritized.” We see the recommendations in this article and the broader conversation happening in this special issue as a conversation for how the network of actors involved in arts education can make progress toward meaningfully making arts practice a part of young peoples’ learning lives. We urge arts education leaders, funders, policy makers, and researchers alike to consider the recommendations that emerged from studying OST arts organizations, not only to advocate for informal arts learning, but in pursuit of educational justice in schools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Wallace Foundation.

Notes

1 For details on the full study including data collection and analysis protocols and findings, see Halverson, Martin et al., 2023.