telling our stories
It might be modest, it might be a fragment or a bit of process, but learners are encouraged to express themselves through doing or making something of their own. podium at Carnegie Hall was Leonard Bernstein, who led the Young People’s Concerts of the New York Philharmonic in the 1950s and 1960s. But more recently, teaching artists have gained a reputation for working in schools and communities, working for cultural organizations and grassroots groups. They can also be entrepreneurs, creating their own programs and partnerships. However teaching artists engage in the world, some core principles unite their practice: • Parallel play. Teaching artists keep up their own artistic lives alongside their teaching. Though they may often be asked to teach a particular lesson or curriculum, they infuse their work with their own particular talents and abilities. Teaching artists often use their own artistic practice as a model for how to engage other learners. • Engagement before information. Teaching artists believe in experiential, participatory education, and they value hands-on engagement more highly than information that is delivered through lecture or direct instruction. Teaching artists are more likely to get you playing or singing or drawing or acting before they talk about the year that a work of art was created. They try to create motivated learners whose curiosity will increase as a result of the artistic experiences they are offered.
PHOTO BY CHRIS LEE
• Project-based. Teaching artists tend to favor work that leads to immersion in the art form. More often than not, it will be a project that involves creating something new. It might be modest, it might be a fragment or a bit of process, but learners are encouraged to express themselves through doing or making something of their own. • Collaborative work. Increasingly, teaching artists engage with learners through direct collaboration – writing a song together, performing a piece together, contributing to a large-scale work through a group process.
• Reflective practice. Along with an emphasis on experiential learning, teaching artists value reflection: the act of “bending back” to think and talk about the experience of immersion in the art form. Teaching artists try to weave reflection throughout their workshops and creative sessions because it corresponds to their own artistic practice. It is another way that teaching artists try to empower participants to take control of their own learning experience.
Emeline Michel works with a student during a songwriting project at the Harlem NeON.
• Social justice lens. Much of the work of teaching artists is designed to rebalance inequities and offer opportunities to underserved populations. Teaching artists are increasingly being asked to examine their own preconceptions about the audiences with whom they collaborate, and to view their work through both an artistic and a social justice lens. At the Weill Music Institute (WMI), teaching artists work at all levels of programming – whether they are administrators, production staff, performers, or composers. Everyone brings a teaching artist’s core principles to bear on the work they do. And like teaching artists, WMI constantly reinvents and refines its practices, with a deep love and respect for what the arts can do to transform lives. c
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