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Executive Director’s Column: Spring 2023

NAEA News Spring 2023

March 17, 2023

NAEA Values: Inclusivity and Ingenuity

Over the course of 2021–2022 school year, the NAEA Board, staff, and Delegates Assembly worked to articulate a set of organizational values for the Association. The values are described as a set of shared responsibilities that are embedded across our roles, leadership, and practice. Two of these five values are Inclusivity and Ingenuity.

Inclusivity

Fostering a welcoming community
NAEA is continuously working to cultivate an environment of acceptance and inclusion. This type of environment is sustained by a collective responsibility to lead through curiosity, learning, understanding, and empathy.

Ingenuity

We are all growing as leaders
NAEA at its core is a teaching and learning organization. Creative adaptation, research, and continuous growth are cornerstones of our work. As instructional leaders in the arts, we also recognize and celebrate the leadership skills we bring to our roles to foster robust visual arts, design, and media arts education programs, such as advocacy, collaboration, and establishing safe spaces for expression.

In a moment like the current one, where we are at a nexus of multiple paradigm shifts; assessing the effectiveness of our historic approaches; letting go of inherited barriers to participation; navigating both static and dynamic systems; and imagining future possibilities for visual arts, design, and media arts education, these values of inclusivity and ingenuity feel like necessary tools.

As I reflect upon both my own instructional practice in the arts classroom for the first half of my career and the leadership strategies I’ve employed in the second half, I’ve been enjoying an internal critique I’d like to share; perhaps it will spark some ideas for you as well. I think back to my favorite 4th-grade lesson, the multimonth-spanning “Puppet Music Video Project,” and with an eye for ingenuity and inclusive practices, I’ve arrived at the following inquiry questions:

  • How might the selection of collaborative student groupings provide for diversity of experience, knowledge/skills, and identity?
  • How could I have provided a broader and more diverse repertoire of artists and artwork for students to select from for their puppets’ personalities and backgrounds? What would that criteria for selection look like?
  • What are the developmentally appropriate approaches to discussing and exploring the diverse cultural and racial identities of the characters from the artwork? How could a homogenous group of students make artistic choices to represent these diverse characters respectfully?
  • What parameters could I have offered to guide students’ selection and pairing of songs with artwork in order to create the music videos? How could we consider classical to contemporary, juxtaposition, appropriation, and so on to improve our music selection process?
  • In what ways could current technology and media arts practices have transformed the music video recording and production process? (especially considering everything was shot in single takes on a 1990s camcorder)
  • How could social media have been a positive tool for sharing of the videos and storytelling with the community?

Every day, I hear our art educators grappling with similar questions in their planning, instruction, and work with students.

On the flip side, from a leadership lens I think about my experiences working in Chicago Public Schools with a large stakeholder group of arts educators, designing and facilitating professional learning as the district arts supervisor. Looking back, I think of the following inquiry questions.

  • How do you model inclusive practices for adult learners in professional development sessions that are most applicable to their student learners? How do you make this learning visible?
  • How could community agreements or norms best be created from scratch with the arts educators that include multiple voices and ideas?
  • What strategies might be most impactful for establishing brave spaces for arts educators to share, learn, and grow around charged or vulnerable topics? What safety measures might need to be in place?
  • At what point are arts educators ready to build outward from their classroom instruction to greater leadership roles in their buildings? What scaffolding is essential to support growth and success in teacher leadership?
  • In what ways could arts educators be supported in crafting effective advocacy messages and strategies to reach local, state, and/or national decision makers?

For each of our roles, inclusivity and ingenuity have a critical role to play. As you reflect upon your current role and responsibilities, what are your inquiry questions that would support your practice moving forward on a cycle of continuous improvement?

Please consider the following NAEA position statements related to these two values and my reflection above:

Column by:

Mario R. Rossero

Mario R. Rossero, NAEA Executive Director
NAEA, 901 Prince St., Alexandria, VA 22314. Email: mrossero@arteducators.org

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