José Ochoa

Community Arts Education

Posted by José Ochoa, Mar 05, 2010 1 comment


José Ochoa

Thank you for visiting this blog. Over the next few months I look forward to an exciting dialogue from many diverse voices about the future of community arts education.  I hope you will subscribe to the feed so you can keep up with this important discussion.

My earliest memory of a community arts experience was when my parents enrolled my sister and me in a community theatre program in League City, Texas when we were in elementary school.  I brought home a flyer from school from the local playhouse and I thought the black and white drawing of a mime and stage lights looked very exciting. We went to theatre class for several weeks and then we ‘put on a play.’  The unforgettable smell of wet paint and cut lumber as the set was being constructed, the hours of memorizing lines, the heat of the stage lights, and the excitement of our first opening night are all things that I’ve never forgotten. Although it was years before I would return to the world of theatre, I was hooked.

The Nationals Guild’s Green Paper beautifully describes the diverse field of community arts education with “more than 5,000 nonprofit, arts organizations and government agencies are providing professionally-led, direct instruction in the arts to people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities in community settings “ Whether it be community music schools in Chicago, Illinois or Whitefish, Montana, civic ballet organizations like the Greenville Civic Ballet in North Carolina, visual arts centers such as Inner-City Arts in the heart of Skid Row in Los Angeles, or a playhouse in a small Texas town, community arts providers throughout the nation are providing opportunities in the arts that are “essential to individual fulfillment and community life.”

Throughout this year we will dive into some deep conversation about the future of community arts education but first I invite you to participate in a bit of a roll call. Tell us a little bit about what community arts education means to you. Please share with us one of the following:

a. Your first memory of a community arts education experience
b. What does community arts education mean to you and your community
c. What is your organization’s mission and how do you deliver community arts education to your constituency

Thanks for your time and I look forward to your responses!

 

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1 responses for Community Arts Education

Comments

Carol Ross says
March 31, 2010 at 1:59 pm

Thanks so much for promoting this discussion, Jose. Like you, my first foray into the arts world was directed by my parents. I grew up in Massachusetts in a family that celebrated Roosevelt's New Deal and embraced the opportunities for music, dance, art, and theater that it provided. My parents held to two basic truths: that the arts give children skills that last forever and that children involved in arts education are learning about things far beyond the art that they study. They were right. Piano lessons, museum trips, drawing classes, ballroom dancing sessions were all part of my childhood and I learned from them the value of practicing, of listening, of observing, and of following directions. The arts were not a frivolous curiosity but were a part of my total education, as important as calculus and English and biology. The arts provided me with a landscape and a path upon which I have trod ever since as I have wandered around the country. Fortunately, in each city and state to which I moved, I found an institution that offered arts education and was open to the entire spectrum of the population. As a dedicated piano and recorder student, a parent who carpooled three times a week to our local community music school, an advocate for arts education, I understand the joys of arts education and have experienced its rewards -- some of which are concrete (my recent mastery of Debussy's 'Arabesque', for example), some of which are not.

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