Arts Education: The Need for More Arts Teachers in School

Arts in Education Week took place last month, and since then arts education has been on my mind and in the air. A recent blog post by Alan Yaffe that contended arts education advocacy should be focused more on art-making than art-viewing got me thinking. It is true, much energy goes into trying to get K-12 students to attend arts events, and that's wonderful and much-needed. We try to organize class trips, and bemoan the increasing challenges of getting access to buses, to getting the OK to leave school for an arts experience when the pressures of sticking to curriculum and "teaching to the test" are ever-present. And arts groups do all they can to provide "enrichment", to facilitate those out-of-school experiences and to also bring teaching artists or arts education programs into schools.

But ultimately, and I think virtually all arts groups and teaching artists engaged in this work would concur, the most important component is having qualified arts teachers in the school providing consistent day-in day-out arts instruction. And by arts instruction I don't mean just "appreciation" or preparation for an out of school experience, but the actual teaching of the practice of making art. And this is not just visual art and music — the two art forms most commonly offered in schools — but dance, theater, spoken word and media arts.