I got the chance to moderate a panel “Building a School Community” at the first Amplify Arts Summit on Saturday.
A few things generally before I talk about the session itself:
- The UChicago Arts Amplify concept is great — clearly delineating spaces for collaboration on the outreach/education engagement front, and making it easier for the UChicago Arts organizations to be coordinated in their education programming. Don’t underestimate the benefit to our community partners that this kind of coordinated referral network can have. The University’s organization barely makes any sense to folks inside the university, and is often entirely incomprehensible to folks not versed in the University’s administrative structure and history.
- The conference itself was wonderfully curated – a lively mix of partnerships, practice, research, and expression that ran the entire gamut of potential presenters and interlocutors. I’m always especially fond of programs that feature youth voice, and the Amplify conference had young people as presenters and participants in a number of session throughout the day.
- The keynote speaker — Robyne Walker Murphy (Cultural Access Program Director at Cool Culture) — shared a model of arts programming that had a social justice component that was deeply integrated and talked about how to create consistency through setting shared values, training, and an enculturing a set of expectations. I think the audience really appreciated the nuts & bolts parts of her talk that gave them some sort of model to think about.
Our session was:
Building a School Community. Panelists: Jacqueline Edelberg (author, How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance), Efrain Martinez (Principal Orozco Community Academy), Moderator: Shaz Rasul (UChicago Office of Civic Engagement)
Broadly speaking, and I say this increasingly often, schools aren’t designed to do all of the things that we need them to do. We ask for so much as a society and we resource them so inadequately. Given that the only way to get anywhere near the whole education experience out of a school – and I really mean any school, although this set of challenges is exacerbated in areas where schools face more dire challenges – is to figure out ways to activate Parents and Partnerships.
This panel brought together two examples of success, two proof points, for the idea that partnerships can have a transformative and sustained impact on schools. It’s too simple to say that Orozco is an “inside-out” model and Nettlehorst is an “outside-in” model, but that’s a convenient frame to start (and complicate) from.
Orozco Community Academy is in Pilsen, near the National Mexican Museum of Art and has developed a school culture that embeds the arts holistically across the grade levels and uses that philosophy to reach out to the community (a community that itself sees art as a virtue) to activate parents and build partnerships. It’s an exemplar of the idea that if you can succeed in integrating the community/world into the curriculum, you can keep things like the arts from seeming like an add-ons.
Nettlehorst, in Boys Town, is a story of the community reaching into a school – a group of mothers (of potential future nettlehorst students) walking into the school and working with the school to set an ambitious agenda (that the parents/future-parents largely led) to transform the school. Among other things, it’s an example of the importance of creating an environment in a school that can welcome and nurture a movement that can inspire others to attend/join.
Jacqueline and Efrain were great ambassadors for their schools and the projects that they’ve led/inspired, and while they themselves are quite remarkable, I’m convinced that there are plenty of remarkable people in schools all across the city who can get their school to where they want it to be through this concept of activating parents and building partnerships – whether through an inside-out, or outside-in approach.
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