by Laura Reeder, Founding Executive Director, Partners for Arts Education, Syracuse, NY

The 21st century movement toward less didactic and more collaborative education for our next generation has been especially focused on the place of the arts in learning. As our schools and community partners work to redesign the classroom with more experiential opportunities, we are also redesigning the shape of leadership and resource delivery to serve these new environments.

As the director of a state-level service organization for arts education, I am trying to determine whether the changes are good or not.

It is good that with popular emphasis on the holistic, simultaneous, contextual, imagistic, and intuitive characteristics of artistic or right-brain function, the arts are seen as an ally to education. Historically, arts and education communities have been allies when they found themselves on the bottom of the funding ladder together. They shared an identity that appeared to take more from society than it could give. That was not so good.

To seize current opportunity and make use of our shared potential, schools, cultural organizations, policymakers, funders, and individuals are using consortia to surround arts education with leadership at all levels and through many perspectives. There is a strengthening of national, professional networks to do this.

There are moments where you sense things so intensely they have a texture and vibration all their own. One experiences joy and humility in the same breath and it brings a lump to your throat even though you are smiling broadly. I had many grateful moments like these over the course of Convention. To me, our Convention is a graduation experience of sorts (true confessions from a former high school teacher). It happens in June. It’s a culmination of a year’s worth of work. And, when it happens, you forget all the hard times in between and fall back in love with your work all over again. If we did a yearbook, this text would be on my senior page.