During the National Art Education Association’s 2021 conference, I attended a presentation by Dr. Stephanie Baer. She shared her experience at the National Arts Action Summit, an event organized by Americans for the Arts where students were led through workshops where they learned about issues and policy changes in art education, all of which culminated in speaking to actual lawmakers. This presentation, along with my conversations with art teachers, inspired the creation of this blog’s Podium tag.
The Americans for the Arts website provides many services, and as I’ve discovered while writing this post, it is a great place to read news articles and editorials regarding federal spending, reports from other organizations, like the National Endowment for the Arts, and advocacy events. One of these tools is a reading list for advocacy in art education; the Arts Education Action Kit. The kit is a reading list, with links to brief, to-the-point, and well-designed open access ebooks.
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| A couple of pages from the Getting Started ebook, as viewed on americansforthearts.org. |
The Getting Started ebook covers the why, when, where, and who of art education advocacy, explaining the reasoning behind their work, and providing a detailed timeline of important events in the history of the topic. You can read it on the Americans for the Arts webpage for free.
The Mobilizing Support ebook defines lobbying, advocacy, and the surrounding rules and regulations. Like Getting Started, it’s free to read here. Also available in the action kit is the Arts Education Field Guide, which delves into the “Ecosystem of partners, players, and policymakers in the field of arts education.” (Click here to read the PDF.)
While the purpose of this blog is to help art educators find resources, sometimes the art educators themselves are going to be the best resource available (High school art educator, June 2021). And in the arena of art education advocacy, I think that holds true. As Americans for the Arts would say, the voices of art teachers are invaluable, and the materials they’ve produced as part of the Art Education Action Kit provide good jumping on points for educators who are interested in advocating for themselves and their students.
