Arts Educators in the San Francisco Brown Bag Collaborative Think Outside the Box!

On Tuesday, May 22, 2012, over 30 arts educators representing major arts organizations, community arts organizations, after school and higher education gathered for their monthly self-organizing networking meeting at the San Francisco Library to consider the question “How can we collectively transform public education to create a better future for everyone?”

Where Are We Now:
• It is great to have community and a safe place to share ideas, such as the Arts Education Brown Bag where we share values, come together and learn from each other
• This blog is a hub we can use. What other online places are available to us?
• Organic nature of discussion important
• Good way to survey arts landscape
• Optimism with demise of No Child Left Behind – New Beginnings
• Here with people who are interested in doing good – idealism encouraged!

Where Do We Want to Go and Why:
• Stark difference between schools in different communities – how to address/bridge that?
• How do we un-silo arts orgs/schools?
• Figure out who we are serving now – how to serve everyone
• Mapping together would be useful
o Alliance for ALL can facilitate mapping at future meeting
o Clear language in map
o not just which schools are getting what, but what we have in the community to offer
o need to include school principals
• Coordination key in showing resources available
• We want to leverage our programs together
• We want to talk about arts as a core value
• Clarity in our language
• We want to talk from our heart about what we believe
• Let’s not make assumptions about what people value
• Step out of “roles” and have real conversation
• We want to work with the school district in this process. We need to know what they’re planning, to know how we can move forward
• We need to be present at community meetings, make people accountable and integrate our work
• We can support the process to create an arts supplement to the CCSESA Common Core toolkit
• We can help teachers in their practice so they deepen student learning
• Include foundation program officers/ funders in this conversation

How we will get there:
• Advocate within own organizations, have larger conversation about how we want to educate our children within our organizations
• Parents need to get in and use voice to PTA
• Develop common language to use with our (non-arts) community? That maps onto common values and Amplifies student voice
• Mapping piece exciting – knowledge leads to more opportunities and collaborations
• Appreciation that this process values all voices in the community
• Hurdle – until we overcome bubble tests we’re sisyhpus pushing the rock up the mountain – we must change attitudes about how schools are judged
• Afterschool: let’s remember them
• Pre service teachers need to be engaged in arts learning from the start
• Getting to bottom of what teachers really need
• What is our vision for better future for EVERYONE – challenge to consider this in our competitive culture/ this isn’t just about serving some – talking about politics here
• Being accountable and responsible for EVERY CHILD
• Grappling with Breadth vs Depth – should we reach every child in shallow engagement or work with 10 schools and work deeply
• Keep returning to pragmatic questions and stakeholders who need to be involved
• Working on ground level – volunteering to teach
• Commitment to educating ourselves about what’s happening and keep students in loop
• Resources sharing/ shared sense of vision – how does it manifest in our own organizations? Offering that back to other organizations
• Excited about places of collaboration instead of feeling competitive / finding shared vision without changing who you are reaching out to community
• Great to be in space where addressing equity – Bay Area districts compared to Dallas
• We will have a “Bigger” Thought in the Bay Area

Next steps:
• Invite Create CA to SF
• Talk about doing good work, talk about things we care about
• Community meetings
• Deepen instruction – learning – new assessments
• Mapping what this community can provide
• Leverage partnerships to meet bigger need/ can’t serve all students alone
• Communication amongst providers
• “Unsiloing” providers
• Interdisciplinary planning
• Start with mapping
• Map to brown bag, working tool
• Agreed on language/ direct language about program, coherence
• Equalization/ coordination/ equity

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