Topics

Arts Education

Comprising a variety of disciplines—visual arts, music, theatre and dance— and settings, arts education expands kids’ knowledge of the world and their ability to express their own ideas and feelings. Technology has created opportunities to scale arts programming and to connect experts and children across distances; however, such opportunities presents a host of new design and implementation issues to arts educators that need to be addressed to do this well. In addition, growing demand for standards and evidence has placed arts education under increasing pressure to demonstrate “effectiveness,” which requires research approaches that few in the arts community are prepared to undertake. CCT staff who have played prominent roles in this domain include Bill Tally, and John Parris. Select a snapshot below to learn more about the kinds of work we do in this area.

• Snapshot 1
  The Art of Teaching the Arts is a workshop video series that describes how arts educators and teachers in core content disciplines can collaborate on common educational goals or projects. To accompany the series, which was developed by the Lavine Production Group, we constructed a website and series of guides and instructional materials corresponding with each video segment.
• Snapshot 2
  New York City Partnerships for Arts and Education (NYCPAE) needed to better understand the many projects and programs it supports and recognize any promising practices developed by these groups. To aid NYCPAE, we assessed more than 80 arts education programs identifying successful partnerships and best practices—as well as providing technical assistance to project participants. This work helped shed light on how reintroducing the arts into core curriculum can impact student learning.
• Snapshot 3
  Working with the Manhattan Theatre Club, we helped support the design a Web-based education program that leads students in schools across the country together in theatre study and creation. We described our design research approach, an outgrowth of past formative research efforts in a paper for AERA on contextual arts education assessment.