Why Not Football? The Politics of Youth Arts Programs in America

At a recent high-powered meeting of artists, cultural organizers and community development researchers in Washington, D.C., a researcher asked, "After all is said and done, I always come away from these discussions wondering the same thing: What is so special about the arts? Why should communities spend their hard-earned tax dollars on paying for somebody else’s kid to learn the piccolo? Why shouldn’t every community just focus their monies on having the best football team that they can?"

Never mind for the moment that the whole purpose of this meeting was to develop better ways for community-based arts and cultural organizations to articulate their community-building impact. Never mind that the speaker was playing at being "devil’s advocate" when he spoke.

Instead, focus on the fact that the researcher still felt it necessary to ask the question of the people assembled. Focus on the fact that no one among the 25 assumed experts was able to answer.

INTRODUCTION

This is a story about perceptions and how they affect people’s lives just as tangibly as any physical reality. In this case, I am referring to the relative unimportance of the arts as a community-development strategy in the minds of most people, including those who make public policy decisions for young people at the local, regional and national level in the United States.

As someone who has dedicated more than a decade of his work life to being an artist/educator, my first reaction to this anecdote was shock and outrage at the speaker: How dare he ask such a base question?! But the more I thought about it, the more concerned I became with the silence that he received. It dawned on me that his question has recurred in a number of discussions I have been in over the years, and each time it is arrived with a resounding "thud."

The individuals and organizations of the Community Arts Network know what I am talking about. Most of them are considered "pioneers," but they know better than anyone that theirs is not a new practice. The link between creative expression, young people and community-building is as old as civilization. In the last several years, though, the connection has begun to be recognized and talked about. This makes the question of "Why Not Football?" a defining one, and the asking of it should create an opportunity for expanding public dialogue on the subject.

I offer you, the reader, three practical answers for the next time this discussion comes up. If someone wonders aloud to you "Can the arts really play a significant role in the development of young people?" try one or more of these. Let me know how it goes.

ANSWER #1: "Researchers know it"

In 1999, several collaborating organizations called the Arts Education Partnership published a compilation of seven major studies entitled "Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning." The report is downloadable at http://aep-arts.org/Champions.html. It concludes:

When well taught, the arts provide young people with authentic learning experiences that engage their minds, hearts and bodies. The learning experiences are real and meaningful for them. While learning in other disciplines may often focus on development of a single skill or talent, the arts regularly engage multiple skills and abilities. Engagement in the arts — whether the visual arts, dance, music, theatre or other disciplines — nurtures the development of cognitive, social and personal competencies. Although the Champions of Change researchers conducted their investigations and presented their findings independently, a remarkable consensus exists among their findings.

This is the consensus they reached:

• The arts reach students who are not otherwise being reached. The researchers found that the arts provided a reason, and sometimes the only reason, for at-risk youth to remain engaged with school or other organizations.
• The arts reach students in ways that they are not otherwise being reached. "Problem" students often became the high-achievers in arts learning settings. Success in the arts became a bridge to learning and eventual success in other areas of learning.
• The arts connect students to themselves and each other. Creating an artwork is a personal experience. The student draws upon personal resources to generate the result. The student feels invested in ways that are deeper than simply "knowing the answer."
• The arts transform the environment for learning. When the arts become central to the learning environment, schools and other settings become places of discovery. Figurative walls between classrooms and disciplines are broken down. Teachers are renewed. Even the physical appearance of a school building is transformed through the representations of learning.
• The arts provide learning opportunities for the adults in the lives of young people. With adults participating in lifelong learning, young people gain an understanding that learning in any field is a never-ending process. The roles of the adults are also changed: In effective programs, the adults become coaches, active facilitators of learning.
• The arts provide new challenges for those students already considered successful. Boredom and complacency are barriers to success. For those young people who outgrow their regular learning environments, the arts can offer a chance for unlimited challenge.
• The arts connect learning experiences to the world of real work. The world of adult work has changed, and the arts learning experience shows remarkable consistency with the evolving workplace. Ideas are what matter, and the ability to generate ideas, to bring ideas to life and to communicate them is what matters to workplace success.

Recently, I spoke with Shirley Brice Heath, author of "Imaginative Actuality: Learning in the Arts During Nonschool Hours," one of the most influential Champions of Change reports. She became (as she puts it) a "full-time cheerleader for the arts" only after years of studying a wide range of youth-development program strategies, particularly athletics programs. "I am by nature an extremely cautious researcher," she told me, "but also an extremely curious one."

There is powerful learning going on in sport-based programs. Through my work I have met many of the leading youth developers in the country, and I can tell you many of them are coaches. They are tough and they are terrific. I must have visited hundreds, maybe a thousand sports-based programs.

But then I began spending time at community-based organizations and some of them had arts programs for young people. What began as a story here and there evolved into an undeniable pattern: There was learning going on here that shouldn’t be happening, that couldn’t happen in any other type of program that I’d seen.

Brice Heath’s approach is to listen in on young people and their use of language as an indicator of youth development. She records discussions, sentence structures and the thinking that goes on behind them — what is called "progression in complex task achievement." In effect, Brice Heath’s work maps the growth process linguistically:

I became aware of an enormous amount of sophisticated learning that was going on in places where it shouldn’t be. This learning was not prized by anyone other than those involved, but it was clearly going on, and it was not from a fixed curriculum. Furthermore, it was not direct, and this, of course, piqued my curiosity all the more.

When I pulled back and began looking for what was different about these arts-based learning environments, it became clear. Athletics programs are built on a fixed set of rules and a limited set of actions. In these environments, someone older is always going to be the authority.

In arts-based environments, young people draw upon many sources of authority. They bring in television, their family, their teachers, their opinions, anything, and they are able to do so as authorities themselves. Many youth programs talk about helping young people "find their voice," but it’s really only the arts that delivers on that promise.

For more excerpts from my interview with Shirley Brice Heath, click here, or scroll to the end of this story.

ANSWER #2: "Practitioners know it"

There are hundreds of stories of individual lives being changed through art; they motivate thousands of community-based artists and educators to do their work every day. Still, these stories are in and of themselves rarely enough to gets arts-based youth-development programs the resources they need and deserve. Funding agencies demand more definitive, more countable types of proof, leaving many practitioners to wonder whether or not public support for arts-based approaches will ever be more than a marginal or exotic fad.

Rather than waiting for more arts funding to "trickle down" from official policymaking circles, some practitioners are starting to do their own research and develop new evaluative standards. From 1998 to 2001, a "collaborative inquiry group" of 25 artists and youth educators in the San Francisco Bay Area met a total of 18 times over the course of two-and-a-half years to share stories and discuss the community-building impact of their programs. This research was done on behalf of the Arts & Cultural Indicators Project of the Urban Institute. I was facilitator for this project.

Every member of the group had inspirational stories to tell about the impact their programs had had. One group taught nonviolence through a combination of martial arts and hip-hop. Another group taught leadership and communication skills through a nationally-syndicated youth radio program. And still another had brought hundreds of disadvantaged young people to other countries as singing ambassadors of the inner city. Yet their stories did not seem adequate when it came to communicating the impact of their work to foundations and policymakers in control of their funding. As one participant put it, "people want us to prove that we single-handedly enable young people to get good grades, transform their self-image and walk on water."

One participating organization actually began as an athletics program (founded by a former pro football player) but was transforming itself into an arts program. Designed around a basketball team "because that’s how we could best get youth in the door," they began to add things like desktop publishing and video production workshops. Over the course of several years, program staff realized "sport may bring them in, but the arts were the only way to keep them."

In the middle of the group’s research process, an editorial by columnist William Wong appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle (3/19/01). Entitled "Taking the Measure of Our Children," it described his efforts to come to grips with the narrow standards being used to judge his son’s applications to college. Wong wrote:

Grades and SAT scores remain the key criteria for college acceptance, even though many institutions say they want the "whole person." We shall see. I am concerned his grades and test scores, while good, won’t be enough for many colleges.

But did I mention his out-of-school life — martial-arts training, teaching and youth leadership work, and membership in a youth performance group? These sucked up many hours he might have spent preparing for the SAT. Or the splendid summer when he took a master class in hip-hop in Philadelphia, visited the Tule Lake internment camp site and joined street protesters at the Los Angeles Democratic Convention, using art and performance pieces?

Those are the kinds of activities the SAT can’t measure, but they are a greater reflection of who our son is and will be.

To the collaborative inquiry group, the appearance of this editorial indicated the timeliness of their work together. As one member put it, "as the education of young people becomes a top national priority, the potential for us to make our case only grows." But members of the group were generally not optimistic about the receptivity of policymakers. One said,

I know the type of people who make these decisions and the pressurized situations they make them in. They are not interested in new ideas; they are looking to see who is raising the loudest noise. We need to have a way to communicate our impact that is so new, so different and so untouchable that we can shake our data in the air and demand that the work be supported.

Ultimately, this was the charge the group took on itself: the development of a new type of "indicator" to help community-based youth arts programs convey the unique impact of their efforts more effectively. "This will enable us," one participant said, "to turn the question of ‘Why’ into the question of ‘How many’ — dollars, that is."

For more information on the collaborative inquiry group’s report, visit the Arts & Cultural Indicators Website.

ANSWER #3: "You know it"

Beyond the researchers and professionals, I would venture to guess that every adult knows someone whose life has been saved by art at a young age. Whether it is playing music, painting, writing, dancing, acting, doodling or dressing up, we all grow up with people whose capacity and willingness to express themselves artistically is what enables them to make sense of the world.

Why is this? In "Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young," Paul Willis puts it this way: "The teenage and early adult years are, at least in the first-world western cultures, where people are formed most self-consciously through their own symbolic and other activities." Unfortunately, these everyday types of activities are not often viewed as "artistic" because they are either not "high art" or not professional enough.

Most young people’s lives are not involved with "the arts" and yet are actually full of expressions, signs and symbols through which individuals and groups seek creatively to establish their presence, identity and meaning. Young people are all the time expressing or attempting to express something about their actual or potential cultural significance. This is the realm of living common culture.

Those of us who want to expand the role of the arts in youth development need better terms. We need to expand our conceptual reach far beyond the "art world" to the true heart of the matter: individual and social transformation.

CONCLUSION:

There is a revolution taking place in the United States across a wide range of community-based fields. Art (or what Paul Willis calls "symbolic creativity") is beginning to be appreciated for what it is: a powerful way to get people connected to one another, to get them to care about one another and to access what many call their "higher selves," regardless of their age, class, gender, ethnicity, religion or physical status. In a larger sense, education and youth development are just two of a number of community-based fields experiencing this trend (economic development, social work and organizing are three more examples). The emergence of the Community Arts Network is itself an indication of community-based arts having "arrived."

While our country remains unjust in many ways and towards many people, it is nonetheless an exciting time for many who have been laboring on the margins to consider changing things. If there is a window of opportunity to expand the community-based arts movement and the movement of people generally towards a more creative, democratic social vision, we have to jam a stick in the window and keep it open as long and as wide as possible.

Beyond a certain point the question "Why Art?" becomes as ridiculous as "Why Not Football?" The two are distinct developmental practices and meet different developmental needs. We need both. Besides, the day people become truly convinced our society must choose between art and football we are in deeper trouble than can be fixed by a snappy answer to a stupid question.

But stick with me one more moment. What if we looked at it the other way around? What would happen, as David Jackson, one of the members of the Oakland collaborative inquiry group once asked, "if communities starting treating youth arts program like the Little League?"

Now this is a question I believe we can get to work on!

Mat Schwarzman is Program Director of the National Performance Network. He was facilitator for the Oakland, Calif., component of Urban Institute’s Arts & Cultural Indicators Project from 1998 to 2001. He is currently conducting research for a book for young people entitled "Building the Code: Understanding Community-Based Arts in America."

Thanks to MK Wegmann for providing me with the titular anecdote. —MS

Original CAN/API publication: May 2002