March 14, 2024

Spotlight: Our Arts Learning Program

The Importance of Student Engagement

The longstanding goal of the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation's Arts Learning program has been to improve access to high-quality arts learning experiences for low-income youth in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Meeting this goal requires the Foundation to invest in improvements to both access and quality of arts programs. Access is defined by who receives high-quality arts learning. Quality is defined by how rigorous and engaging this arts instruction is for students.

While it is relatively easy to monitor demographics and count the students who participate in Fry Foundation supported arts learning programs, it can be more challenging to identify, describe or even agree on the foundations of a high-quality arts learning program. To help us, we look to our grantees and to researchers to articulate the conditions that support high-quality arts learning experiences. We see that the education sector and arts learning community agree on critical points. Specifically, that student engagement drives student learning in all subject areas including the arts. Students that experience high levels of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement are more likely to form a strong sense of connection with the subject matter, the learning environment, and their student and teacher collaborators. This engagement results in a positive sense of well-being and physical and emotional security and leads to a range of positive outcomes including persistence, achievement, and learning. To that end, we see many of our grantees prioritizing conditions that improve student engagement in arts learning. This article describes the learning conditions and approaches used by Fry Foundation grantees to promote student engagement and to offer high quality arts learning programs.

The University of Chicago and Stanford identified six learning conditions closely tied to student engagement and positive academic outcomes. The conditions include:

1. Affirming Identities: students feel more connected to and motivated in classes that recognize and affirm their backgrounds and identities.

2. Classroom Community: Students feel safe to engage when the classroom environment encourages a sense of belonging and community.

3. Feedback for Growth: Students learn more effectively when teachers communicate high expectations, recognize progress, and offer supportive feedback.

4. Meaningful Work: Students are more motivated to learn when the work in class feels interesting and relevant to them.

5. Student Voice: Students take ownership of their learning when they have choices, share their ideas, and feel heard.

6. Teacher Caring: Students engage more deeply in their work when they feel their teacher likes and cares about them.

The research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education specifically examined the attributes of high-quality arts learning and identified four elements of high-quality arts learning practices.

1. Learning: engagement, purposeful experiences creating or engaging with works of art, inquiry, and ownership;

2. Pedagogy: instructional method, making learning relevant and connected to prior knowledge, and intentionality;

3. Community: peer- and student-teacher relationships, communication, and collaboration; and

4. Environment: functional space and materials, and time for artistic work.

The research also notes that not all the elements are required to be present at one time, as l

earning is dynamic. But when several elements are evident, it suggests that students are more likely to have a high-quality art learning experience with high levels of student engagement.

Across the research and in our own observation of high-quality arts learning, we see that programs that promote student agency, creative decision-making, and the affirmation of individual student identities result in high levels of student engagement and arts learning. Intentionally promoting agency gives students ownership over the learning process and the artistic product. Respecting a student’s cultural and racial identity helps create personal connections that can be reflected in the artistic product. Fry Foundation grantee Intonation Music Workshop is an example of a program that promotes agency and choice in the learning process. It provides foundational music instruction and gives students opportunities to select their repertoire, their instruments, and to develop musical arrangements. An example of a program that centers student identity and culture is Young Chicago Authors. It encourages students to write poetry about what is meaningful to them, their lives, and their community. These are just two Fry Foundation grantees that offer student-centered arts-learning with high levels of student engagement and respect of cultural and racial identity.

Over the years, we have also observed our grantee partners incorporate these learning conditions into their broader approaches to their curriculum and teaching practices. These approaches include:

• Creative Youth Development (CYD) is a longstanding theory of practice that integrates creative skill-building, inquiry, and expression with positive youth development principles, fueling young people’s imaginations and building critical learning and life skills. CYD arts programs help students practice the skills of an artist and encourage them to think critically about what they want to communicate through their artistic work.
• Culturally Responsive Education recognizes the importance of including students’ cultural references and identities in all aspects of learning.
• Trauma-Informed Instruction and Healing-Centered Engagement is a non-clinical positive youth development approach that re-centers culture and identity as a central feature in personal well-being for young people, their families, and those who work with them. It is an approach that allows youth to focus on their strengths, not just on their challenges.
• Social-Emotional Learning helps students develop healthy identities, manage emotions, feel and show empathy, establish and maintain healthy relationships, and make responsible decisions. These skills impact a student’s capacity to learn across all subject areas.

The primary objective of incorporating these various instructional approaches into curriculum is to increase the level of student engagement. All Arts Learning grantee partners incorporate at least one of these instructional approaches into their curriculum. The Fry Foundation does not require grantees to utilize these approaches, but these approaches are consistently seen in the strongest programs within the portfolio. These approaches can easily be aligned with the learning conditions for high student engagement. The table below shows a comparison of principles of each of the instructional approaches.

Upon comparison, we can see how each approach considers each of the learning conditions that help increase student engagement in learning. How does this look in practice? Below are examples of grantees utilizing each approach:

Grantee Spotlight: CREATIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT
Albany Park Theater Project is known for producing original, high-quality artistic work written and created by its student ensemble. APTP teaching artists work with students to create original works while simultaneously developing their skills in writing, developing, and acting in a stage production. This past year, APTP premiered its latest work, Port of Entry, which was an immersive theater experience in which students wrote, created, and performed vignettes of real-life stories of immigrants and refugees living in a single apartment building in the Albany Park neighborhood. The stories were in part collected by the students and incorporated their own lived experiences in the community.

Grantee Spotlight: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING
Uniting Voices Chicago (formerly the Chicago Childrens Choir) provides students with choral instruction within their schools and within their communities through its Neighborhood Choir program. The program uses repertoire from various cultures, often reflecting the cultures to which the students belong. It goes beyond picking musical pieces that come from cultures around the world by engaging students in discussions about the historical significance of the piece, how it relates to their community and world, and their own lives. The program champions culturally responsive teaching and will host a summit in summer 2024 for music educators and students focusing on strengthening culturally responsive curricula and music repertoire.

Grantee Spotlight: TRAUMA-INFORMED INSTRUCTION/HEALING-CENTERED ENGAGEMENT
Forward Momentum is dedicated to bringing dance education to CPS students in low-income neighborhoods. With the help of the Fry Foundation, the program provided its teaching artists with professional learning in both trauma-informed and Healing-Centered Engagement practices. The training helped teaching artists determine when to slow-down, check-in with students, and gently probe students who are struggling to participate. These steps can foster higher student engagement in the art-making process. The curriculum seeks to increase dance skills, foster creativity, and helps their critical thinking skills. Students self-assess their learning experience to understand their own development. Forward Momentum develops a student’s ability to make creative decisions by supporting students original choreographed work based on the student’s practice. This allows the students to demonstrate their understanding of dance fundamentals and tap into their creative expression to make art.

Grantee Spotlight: SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Ravinia continues to increase access to and the quality of music instruction within Chicago Public Schools. Through support by the Fry Foundation, Ravinia provides teacher professional learning programming for teachers to develop arts-integrated instructional units to better incorporate music into lessons in other subjects. Over the years, it has incorporated social-emotional learning into its curriculum to help students better engage with music lessons and help teachers identify barriers to learning experienced by the students. The curriculum focuses on providing teachers the tools to help students manage emotions, feel and show empathy, establish and maintain healthy relationships, and make responsible decisions. Each year of the program focuses on a different theme to ensure that teachers and students are exposed to a range of music topics and music education methods to integrate into their core curriculum. This year, it is piloting a new thematic strand for veteran fourth-year teachers focusing on incorporating social and emotional learning tools to increase student engagement with music.

For More Reading on Learning Conditions that Improve Student Engagement in the Arts
Allensworth, E.M., Farrington, C.A., Gordon, M.F., Johnson, D.W., Klein, K., McDaniel, B., & Nagaoka, J. (2018). "Supporting social, emotional, & academic development: Research implications for educators." Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

S. Seidal, et al. “The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education.” Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. 2009

Denise Montgomery, “The Rise of Creative Youth Development.” Arts Education Policy Review. 2017

Madeline Will & Ileana Najarro, “What is Culturally Responsive Teaching?” EducationWeek. April 18, 2022

Dr. Shawn Ginwright, “Black Youth Rising: Activism and Healing in Urban America.” 2009

CASEL, “Fundamentals of SEL.” Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) 2024