How today’s Teaching Artists work

In the late 20th century, Teaching Artistry emerged as a discipline born at the intersection between arts and education. The innovation at the time was the discovery of artistry’s unique potential as a pedagogical tool. Arts-based learning gave audiences an engaging way to learn while participating in a creative journey. 

Soon, many organizations dedicated to the public welcomed Teaching Artists. Orchestras included teaching artistry in the outreach programs to make musical works accessible and fun to wider audiences. Museums brought in teaching artists to bring the art to life for visitors and cultivate fidelity in surrounding communities. Schools turned to teaching artists to activate a passion for learning by adopting a new academic approach. The list goes on.

Today, Teaching Artistry recruits practicing professional artists and professional educators who use the combined power of both disciplines in their professional lives. But Teaching Artistry remains an emerging field, the reason being that it has outgrown the fields of arts and education. The current generation of teaching artists articulates arts-based learning in pursuing sustainable social impact, combining art and education as change instruments. 

The understanding sustaining this quest for social change is that artistry lies innate in all of us, and activating it opens us up to alternative ways of life and wellness. Sustained artistic practice awakens people’s sense of agency and possibility worldwide. It also gives surrounding communities opportunities and reasons to celebrate this creative journey of change through crowning moments such as concerts, visual art exhibits, poetry readings, theatrical programs, dance recitals, and much more. 

Here are four traits of today’s Teaching Artists — 

1. Teaching Artists transcend barriers.

Teaching artists embody all artistic fields, integrating their work everywhere, not just where the public expects art and education.

Looking at established organizations like Carnegie Hall, for example, one can see how its social impact transcends the concert venue. The Musical Connections program at Sing Sing correctional facility aims not to create artists but to activate artistry in inmates to gain more significant opportunities for containment and reinsertion in society. Distinguished artists like mezzosoprano Joyce Di Donato have also contributed to the correctional facility.

2. Teaching Artists communicate through their medium.

Artistry can propose a means of self-expression, but it can also provide an example of the gratification that hard work and dedication can bring. 

Most youth orchestras dedicated to democratizing access to music education study the long-term effects of music instruction in underprivileged communities. The results are astounding: sustained musical education brings increased high school graduation rates and more significant incursions in university enrollments. Sustaining a craft encourages people to achieve in other spheres of life. 

3. Teaching Artists attend to the needs of their communities.

Some Teaching Artists implement change in a full-time position; others experience a variety through contracts. Organizations of all kinds welcome collaborations with practicing educators and artists to supercharge their impact in a community.

The Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University collaborates with schools and public institutions worldwide to activate literacy through artistry. Its Pre-Texts program creates workshops that teach educators the power of constructing meaning collectively by engaging in creative text approximations that draw children nearer to the complex works of Carl Sagan and Jorge Luis Borges, among other authors. Notice The Cultural Agents Initiative is not composed primarily of artists but of educators using art as a pedagogical tool.

4.  Teaching Artists use artistry as an instrument of change.

Artistry has intrinsic qualities that accompany, awaken, activate, and empower communities.

As Teaching Artists keep raising the bar for social change, they require training to accompany their target communities appropriately. Most professionals graduate unprepared to face and contain communities under stress. This reality has led to the networking and creation of unique organizations, such as the Teaching Artists Training Institute (TATI), to help these professionals acquire abilities far beyond their pedagogical and artistic capacities.