Are You a Part of a Cyber Cultural Community?

The Cultural Alliance held a workshop last month on "Building High Tech and Cyber Cultural Communities."  Todays changing cultural environment presents challenges and important opportunities for the arts to contribute to the livelihood  of local communities.  We value the traditional audiences but we need to be looking beyond them to embrace their needs, interests, and spending habits. Shannon Bowman discussed the WHRO THE SCENE in Hampton Roads--truly a cyber community in the Hampton Roads area.  Tom Powell, founder and Creative Director of the Addison Group, Suffolk, covered basic points to increase our audiences and how to establish and support our company's brand.  Susan Branch Smith, Basecamp Productions, Williamsburg,  discussed the development of the web-page--for without an effective webpage, our cyber community will not grow!

I encourage you to check out their upcoming blogs.  They will give you some of the pointers that they gave us at that workshop. 

Benefits of Arts Education in Schools

Joan's arts blog. . . .

What Life Lessons do the Arts Teach?

The membership breakfast was a huge success on May 29.  I would like to keep the theme of the  benefit of an arts education going for a couple of additional blogs.  The speaker at that breakfast, r. Barbara Laws,  distributed a handout prepared by the National Art Education Association entitled “The Visual Arts”.  While it was labeled visual arts, the information was about all types of the arts.  It contained a section on “Ten Lessons the ARTS Teach!  Let’s look at five of these lessons!

“ The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships, unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problem can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.  

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.  ……..there are many ways to see the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.  Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fat that neither word in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can now.  The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

Those of us in the arts community can use these points to advocate for the arts and encourage schools and the local community to support the arts, support the schools and our children who show a care, a love and passion for the arts.  Read my next blog to learn additional lessons that the ARTS teach!

 

Can the Arts Really Save our Students?

Joan's Art Blog. . .

How Can The Arts Save our Students?

In the February 24, 2013 issue of the Washington Post magazine, the cover read “Can the Art Save Students?”   If you missed it, and you are in arts education you must read it online or order a copy.   The focus article,  written by Anne Midgette, discuss the arts programs in the elementary school in Anacostia, one of the eight schools in the country earmarked by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities as a “turnaround” school.  With three years of extra funding and the school being adopted by a well-known artist, Kerry Washington, it is believed that the power of the arts can motivate and engage the students, teach them skills in teamwork, innovative thinking, and generally raise their level  of education and test scores in these schools.  In this article, the school and students are awaiting the arrival of Yo-Yo Ma for an arts workshop (some of them will get to play with him!)

The Cultural Alliance is presenting Dr. Barbara Laws, the Art Coordinator for the Norfolk Public Schools as a speaker for the Alliance Membership Breakfast on May 29, 2013.  She believes that the arts can save our students and will discuss some of the changes  being made statewide and locally to enhance the art programs in our schools.  Hampton Roads has numerous programs that offer arts and cultural opportunities to children of all ages and in a future blog, I will talk about the numerous summer arts camps that are available for parents to send their kids.  You can see information about these camps on our website, www.culturalli.org.

Many of us do believe that the youth of today will be the arts leaders of tomorrow!