High-impact educational practices in the arts and post-college community engagement

ABSTRACT

This study explores how the arts alumni’s high-impact educational practices (HIEPs) during college and the local arts infrastructure affect post-college community engagement outcomes. We hypothesized that arts alumni’s participation in the HIEPs such as service-learning and community arts resources is crucial for promoting arts alumni’s continued community engagement actions. The logistic regression analysis results combine data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project data. The Local Arts Index highlights the significant positive effects of the HIEPs on post-college volunteering. Furthermore, the effect of HIEPs did not vary by the level of community arts resources. Thus, we conclude that arts alumni’s community engagement can be significantly increased through HIEPs, particularly from service-learning or work with a local artist during college.

KEYWORDS:

• High-Impact Educational Practices
• nonprofit arts organizations
• Arts establishment Community Engagement
• Arts Alumni

Disclosure statement

This work was supported by the SNAAP Fellowship award of $5,000 from the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research. We thank the SNAAP team, Angela Miller, Sally Gaskill, and others, to provide us with the SNAAP data and support our research project.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Arts Establishments include businesses and artists serving the community, and are defined by 44 North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) codes representative of arts and culture. Data are from the United States Census Bureau County Business Patterns series.

2. In LAI, the nonprofit arts organizations were classified using the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), which includes about 400 different organizational types. The examples include organizations for music, theater, visual arts, dance, museums, and media, fairs, festivals, libraries, botanical gardens and arboreta, and zoos and aquariums (NTEE B70, C41, D50, and N52). https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/NADAC/studies/36984/variables?q=organizations.