Informal Arts is a series of case studies on the little-researched topic of adult participation in informal arts. By following twelve groups ranging from a quilting guild to a hip-hop collective, this 431-page report delves into the social and artistic value created by people actually making art.

The study found that:

• The informal arts bridge differences. People from all walks of life participated, and people of different ages, genders, occupations, and incomes worked together artistically. The authors say that this was possible because the barriers to participation were so low.
• The informal arts build capacity for community building. Participants reported getting better at giving and receiving criticism through their artistic activity, and some became more involved in their communities.
• The informal arts benefit the formal arts, and vice-versa. Informal groups can be incubators for new artistic directions, and formal institutions provide training and inspiration.
• Informal arts groups are present in many areas of Chicago, including areas like the Southside that aren’t traditionally known for artistic activity. However, even within those communities, not many people know about those groups.

I think that this report is pretty amazing in detail, and eye-opening in revealing how and why people participate in the arts. It was particularly surprising that none of the case-study groups met in a formal arts institution; they met in churches, libraries, parks, or private homes. The demographics recorded in the report defy the stereotypes of who participates in amateur arts groups.

The lesson for the arts and policy sectors to take away are:

• The arts don’t just have an economic impact. Adults (not just children) creating art has an intrinsic value, too.
• Formal arts institutions are not the only sources for art.
• In a world of social media, the pro-am revolution, and “the long tail,” the number of people wanting to create art is not going to decrease, and the extent to which they want to participate will probably increase.
• Formal arts organizations should become more involved in the informal arts if they want to thrive in the future.  They can do this by:

1. Enabling informal arts groups to do what they do, or
2. Directly engaging in the informal arts through sponsorship and partnership.

An illustration of the formal-informal arts continuum from "Informal Arts," 2002.

Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places (Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, 2002) sheds light on the little-studied topic of adult participation in informal arts. The report was commissioned by the CAP in response to “The Arts & The Public Purpose” (American Assembly Consensus Report, 1997), the 1998 NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, and a 1998 study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project that identified a strong relationship between arts participation and other forms of community engagement.  Given the CAP’s focus on the interaction of the arts and democracy, they approached Dr. Alaka Wali, Director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change at Chicago’s Field Museum to research the subject in more depth. The report, led by Wali along with ethnographers Rebecca Severson and Mario Longoni,  follows participants in a dozen groups in the Chicago area, ranging from a drum circle to community theaters to a quilting guild. While there has been a lot of investigation into the economic impact of the arts and especially of those consuming it, this 431-page report delves into the social and artistic value created by people actually making art.

SUMMARY

Both the CAP and the Center for Cultural Understanding are centered around how the arts can be used for social change and engagement. Accordingly, the areas of inquiry set out at the start of the project revolved around community development. In the words of Dr. Wali, the areas were:

1. What, if anything, does participation in these kinds of activities lead to in terms of interaction across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and class?
2. What kind of civic skills, if any, do people acquire as a result of their participation in these kinds of activities?
3. What is the relationship between the informal and more formal arts?

Their research consisted of fieldwork (which involved joining each group as a student), review of media coverage, census records, published literature, and sending a survey to 310 participants (conducted via email and mail with 166 responses). Through these methods, authors found that the informal arts do help participants bridge differences with their peers and gain skills that are transferred to their work and civic life. Additionally, findings indicated that while the informal arts benefit from the formal arts in terms of training, inspiration, and (very occasionally) resources, the formal arts benefit from informal arts in that they serve as incubators and they create potential audience members.

However, the study also found that the informal arts are often “invisible” because they take place in unexpected spaces and don’t exactly have marketing budgets. The authors recommended that the informal arts be made more visible by being further studied, talked about by civic and arts leaders, advocated for, and used in community development.

What are the informal arts?

By now you may be wondering what exactly the “informal arts” are. The NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts calls them “unincorporated arts,” while many refer to them as amateur,  leisure-time, or community arts. (Participants of case study groups described themselves as anywhere between “not ready for prime time” to “just people not professional”). The report’s official definition is that the informal arts are “creative activities that fall outside traditional non-profit and commercial arts experiences,” going on to say that they usually have no permanent home, virtually no fund-raising activities or secure income, and no selective membership.

To get a better idea, these are the groups that were studied in the report:

Table of case study groups excerpted from "Informal Arts"

Benefits of the Informal Arts

1. Bridging Differences

Through a survey, the authors found that informal arts participants in the study were very representative of the US population as a whole across all groups in terms of income, ethnicity, age, occupation, and gender. Diversity within groups was also common, with the exception of ethnicity- groups tended to be primarily of one race.

Something significant that they had in common, though, was education—up to 80% had some college education (compared to 65.6% nationally). Another commonality was the love of or need to make art. There were more than 32 references in the field notes to artists saying they “have to” or “must” do their art, with the phrase “need to express” being used 72 times.

This common drive to make art provides a significant motivation to find other people with whom to make it, even if that means crossing social boundaries. The study devotes quite a bit of attention to how informal arts settings offer lowered barriers to participation that enable such boundaries to be overcome.

• The spaces were accessible and felt accessible. Of all of the case studies, not one was held in a space dedicated to art. Through their interviews and survey of media, the researchers found that the places where informal arts take place are coffeehouses, police stations, office buildings, churches, social service agencies, the street, libraries, and parks. The report spoke of underlying preconceived notions of “[the space] is there for me”(public spaces) v. “[the space] is there for others” (formal arts places). Some participants learned of the activities at parks and libraries simply when they were passing through, or saw the group practicing their activity through a window or outside.
• The activities were accessible financially. Most of the activities were free or low cost, with some participants specifically stating that they did not take classes at formal arts institutions because they were too expensive.
• The groups exuded and fostered a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. Casual attendance policies prevailed—if someone had to skip a week, or even a few months, and it didn’t adversely affect the group, so it wasn’t a big deal. Older children would sometimes be brought along to avoid having to pay for a sitter. The atmosphere at group meetings was welcoming. Participants in the drum circle invited onlookers to join in, physically going up to them and handing them instruments. In the quilting guild, Asian music ensemble, and painting class, if a new member voiced concern over not doing the activity “right,” existing members would insist that they were doing fine and use self-deprecating humor to downplay their own ability.
• All talent levels were welcome in the groups. The painting class used the studio method in classes, in which the instructor goes from student to student, ensuring that everyone could work at their own pace. Participants could choose their own involvement level, and often the focus of their efforts—choosing which plays to produce was a group effort, and members of a painting class chose their own subjects and styles.  There were opportunities for everyone from beginners to highly skilled artists. Participants taught each other peer-to-peer by sharing tips and tricks. Finally, teachers and peers were gentle on criticism, especially at first.

2. Building Capacity

The authors found that informal arts participation built skills that are useful in community development, including consensus building, working collaboratively, and the ability to imagine and foment social change.

Although decision-making styles varied across disciplines, all involved some level of consensus building.  In the community theaters, decisions were made by the board or a director, but there was still discussion involved where everyone had their say, and eventually a majority developed.  In the South Asian music ensemble, disagreements would be voiced via email, and later key members of the group would mediate, keeping the group focused on their purpose and goals. Even the church choir director, though he had official control over the selection of songs, would frame the selection as a request, saying “Can we sing this on Sunday?”

The participants reported learning collaborative work habits in their artistic activities and carrying those skills over into their work lives and the public sphere. For example, an actor found that because he had learned not to “take over” as a result of receiving criticism in theater, he could now more effectively play the role of mediator at work. A drummer spoke of becoming more egalitarian and more willing to join community groups because of his role facilitating the group rhythm of the drum circle, in which he encouraged people who thought they couldn’t play while keeping advanced and master drummers engaged.

Researchers observed both groups and individuals advocating for causes they believed in. One member of the writing group told the group’s sponsors that the journal they published was too “heavy” and stereotypically “ghetto drama,” and she convinced them to change it. A kindergarten teacher in the drumming circle initiated efforts to help the homeless through her school and spoke up more to her supervisors after joining the group.  The authors of the study called this the ability to imagine and implement social change: a combination of the ability to form an opinion, to speak one’s point of view, and to be physically comfortable in the public sphere.

Informal arts participants frequently reported gaining other skills as well:

• 75% of respondents to the survey indicated that their ability to give and take criticism had improved since starting arts activities.
• 60% indicated that their problem-solving skills had improved; indeed, through their fieldwork, Wali et al. witnessed participants substituting materials, re-thinking strategies, and re-structuring roles in response to challenges that presented themselves.
• The authors recorded participants nurturing tolerance (especially regarding differing skill levels) and fostering mechanisms for inclusion using patience, humor, structuring of space (adding more chairs, etc), respect for people’s strengths even if their skills or experiences were less than one’s own, open-mindedness, and trust of strangers.

3. Strengthening the Entire Arts Sector

Despite the difficulty in defining terms and boundaries between the formal and informal arts—“amateur” and “professional” are words that describe employment status, but aren’t synonymous with talent level, for example—the authors found evidence of mutual benefit and reinforcement flowing in both directions. The formally trained teachers and group leaders often derived benefits from teaching such as new ways of thinking about techniques or ideas and  hands-on experience in organizing and administrating. The students and less skilled artists benefited from the formal training of their teachers and gained inspiration from performances and exhibitions at formal arts institutions (50.9% of survey respondents replied that attending artistic events inspired their own artistic activities “very much”, 39.5% “somewhat”).

The benefits that flow between the informal and formal arts aren’t only felt by individuals. Wali et al. use the case of the Hull House to illustrate how the informal arts serve as an incubator for new ideas for the formal sector. Viola Spolin, the originator of American improvisational theater (a practice that culminated with Spolin’s son co-founding the legendary Second City comedy enterprise) started her career by attending classes at the Hull House with Neva Boyd, a Northwestern University sociologist who used dramatics, folk dance, storytelling and games to stimulate creative expression and self-discovery in children and adults.  In addition, informal artists are frequently audiences for the formal arts. Some 45% of survey respondents indicated that they had seen displays or attended a performance at a college facility, 37% at a concert hall or opera house, 40% at a gallery, 58% at a museum, and 49% at a theater.

Invisibility of the Informal Arts

One of the most interesting findings of the report was that informal arts activities for the most part fly under the radar. Within their own neighborhoods, the groups were not well-known, and media coverage was uneven. Activities occurring in “artsy” neighborhoods were more visible in the media than activities occurring in neighborhoods where you wouldn’t expect it. The following two maps illustrate this dynamic. The first shows the informal arts activities reported in the print media during March 2001.

Excerpted from "Informal Arts," 2002.

Now, here is a map of the three most frequently mentioned locations for informal arts, as described by participants at each of the case study sites. (In other words, this is a map of the informal arts as reported by word of mouth.)  The districts in yellow have activities as reported by word of mouth, but not in the media.

Excerpted from "Informal Arts," 2002, edited by Crystal Wallis to show highlighted areas, 2011.

As you can see from comparing the two, informal arts activities were actually happening in many areas of the city, not just primarily in affluent areas, as the map of media reports would have suggested. And it’s not just that informal arts activities are invisible to the public—they are invisible to each other, too. Researchers found no widespread recognition of informal arts practice as a concept within the informal arts world.

Recommendations
The study recommends several policy interventions to assist the informal arts in conveying their benefits to more individuals and institutions.

1. Integrate arts practice in community development.
   The researchers point out that most community development strategies revolve exclusively around physical infrastructure and economic development and ignore strategies that build on existing social structures. They say that informal arts groups are an important anchor in depressed communities, and suggest that incorporating these groups into an overall community development strategy that can foster creativity, problem-solving skills, civic-mindedness, and personal satisfaction.
2. Enhance access to informal participation.
   Public officials and urban planners should expand resources, facilitate access and provide opportunities for informal participation and make this information as widely available as possible.
3. Build arts advocacy coalitions across informal-formal divides.
   “If the arts are ever to be fully recognized for their contributions to the public interest, broader coalitions in support of the arts must coalesce across divides of professionalization and specialization.” Furthermore, within the study is an implied recommendation for formal arts organizations to initiate audience-building strategies and outreach efforts targeting the informal arts, for which they found no evidence at that time.
4. Make the informal arts more visible.
   Civic leaders and leaders of arts communities should publicly recognize and remark upon the value of informal arts practice.
5. Collect missing data on social impact of the arts.
   The study makes repeated calls for further study of informal arts and of social impact of all the arts to augment economic impact.

ANALYSIS

With its case study approach and in-depth qualitative research, this study was a landmark seven years ago and its findings are still startling and incredibly intriguing today.  The methodology of the report is primarily qualitative ethnographic research balanced by quantitative evidence from a survey. The ethnographic research style is “participant observation,” in which researchers actually become members of the groups they study. This method allows the observers to compare subjects’ words with their actions. Their written observations (which form part of a 90-page appendix to the study) combined with interview transcripts were entered into a qualitative database management system. This system allowed for an incredibly detailed look at the data, allowing researchers to find things such as that “the code ‘need to express’ was used 72 times to mark passages concerning the compulsion artists feel to create.” The authors chose they case study method because they wanted a “bottom-up” perspective rather than a top-down survey of all the informal arts activity in Chicago. By exploring in-depth the dynamics of a relatively small set of groups, they were able to reveal the complex relationships among different participants, study sites, and arts institutions.

As explained in the summary, Informal Arts started out with three areas of inquiry:

1. Did participation in the informal arts encourage people to interact with people different from them?
2. Did participation build any skills in the participants conducive to community building? and
3. What is the relationship between the informal and the formal arts?

Research and findings pertaining to the first two questions are susceptible to expectation bias: that is, researchers may expect a certain outcome (i.e., that participants do gain skills as a result of informal arts participation) and as a result may err in measuring the data toward that expected outcome. Certainly, this susceptibility to bias is why the researchers’ observations are balanced by interviews and the survey. But even those methods may suffer from response bias, which happens when a respondent provides the answers to questions that they think the questioner would find desirable. Observation is in turn meant to correct this bias by confirming what participants say with what they do. However, questions about past events (e.g., have your skills improved?) or motivations (e.g., how much has attendance at artistic events inspired your activities?), can’t be confirmed through observation.

In the text of the report, there is a lot of use of the words “seems to,” “apparently,” and “likely” when referring to causation. For example, “passion to create apparently leads people to search out and join groups regardless of their location or composition,” or “the mechanism for developing these skills [that build capacity] likely lies in the regular creation of art” (emphasis mine).  On first read, it seems like the researchers may be jumping to conclusions, although it’s possible that their firsthand experience from interviews and observations convinced them of a causal connection that just wasn’t possible to generalize beyond the case study group.

In general, proving causation (especially when dealing with personal motivations) is very difficult. However, proof is a little easier when you have a control group. The report states that informal arts participation imbues skills in the participants such as collaborative work habits, consensus building skills, and the ability to imagine and foment social change. Without a control group, however, Wali et al. can’t claim definitively that arts participation caused people to obtain these skills, or that participants having these skills is not a result of self-selection. The report also says that the informal arts are a rich ground for formal arts audiences, but it can’t say that they make people more likely to attend formal arts organizations than if they did not participate.  By comparing the results of the Informal Arts survey with the contemporary NEA SPPA data, we can start to get an idea about what that might look like. For example, 40% of informal arts participants reported seeing displays in the last 12 months at a gallery, and 58% at a museum. In contrast, only 27% of US Adults reported attending an art museum or gallery at least once in the same time period. This isn’t a true comparison, however, because this study asked people where they attended arts activities while the SPPA asked people what types of activities they attended.

It looks like those who participate in the informal arts are more likely to attend formal arts institutions, but without identical questions and methodology for the two groups, we really can’t say for sure.

Even looking at this report with the most skeptical eye, however, there are findings that stand out.

1. Informal arts participants are surprisingly representative of the US population. In contrast to the skewed demographics typically seen among ticket-buyers to traditional arts events, the study found  that people of all ages, races, incomes, and occupations participate in creating art (although they are usually slightly more educated). The importance of this takeaway to arts advocacy, if it proves consistent beyond the study, can’t be overstated: artists aren’t only weird people who make weird art that no one understands (like many who oppose funding the arts claim). They are ordinary people from all walks of life—your neighbor, your coworker, your relative—who have a need to create and express themselves.
2. The informal arts don’t happen at arts institutions. Overwhelmingly (in Chicago at least) they occur in parks, libraries, and churches. This has some pretty big implications both for the non-profit arts sector and public policy (discussed below).
3. The relationship between the informal and the formal arts is complex and fluid. Artists move from one end of the spectrum to the other, sometimes switching roles in the process, both by choice and by necessity. The informal groups can serve as incubators for new initiatives later picked up by formal institutions, and formal institutions in turn provide training and inspiration.
4. The visibility of the informal arts is uneven at best and virtually nonexistent at worst. The maps indicate that there is a lot going on in economically depressed neighborhoods that isn’t noticed in the media.  Furthermore, the lack of study in this area and the dearth of formal arts institutions reaching out to these groups suggests that the informal arts are underestimated and overlooked by those in positions of leadership in the artistic and academic communities.

IMPLICATIONS

When Informal Arts was published in 2002, “amateur” participation in the arts was just beginning to gain more prominence. In 2004, Demos published “The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Economy and Society” describing people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards. Two years later, Chris Anderson came out with The Long Tail, about how the internet has increased consumer choice to the point that public interest is shifting to the long tail of niche interests. For pro-am artists, that means it’s easy to sell their art and find an audience online, through sites like CD Baby (c. 1999), Etsy (2005), FineArtAmerica (c.2008), ArtFire (c. 2010), or self-publishing with ebooks. Furthermore, the 2008 NEA SPPA found that 10% of all survey respondents reported performing or creating at least one of the art forms examined in the survey, up 2% from 2002. Recently, WolfBrown’s report “Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation” explored the new and unfolding relationships between art creation, art attendance, and media-based participation.

More and more, people are participating in the arts virtually instead of in person. The internet has become another public space in which people participate in arts activities. In this case, access to technology and the web becomes another barrier to be lowered in order to enable arts participation. It would be very interesting to follow up with these groups or even conduct an entirely new study to see what impacts, if any, this revolution has had on informal arts groups’ activities, recruitment, and structure, as well as if this trend has prompted more formal arts institutions to reach out to the informal groups.

The researchers make the argument (and I am inclined to agree with them) that the study of informal arts participation is beneficial to the sector as a whole because it illustrates how arts practice creates value in individual and civic contexts, not just economic impact. By now, economic impact is the rallying cry for arts advocates. But economic impact reports are at best incomplete and at worst misleading about art’s impact on society. The arts create many types of value, not all of them monetary, and to successfully advocate for the arts we must try to measure as many as we can. There has been some study on the intrinsic value of art to audiences (WolfBrown), and innumerable studies on how the arts help children, but not very many on the intrinsic value of adults creating art. Informal Arts not only conducted a survey, but took an ethnographic case study approach to the study of arts participation to uncover what adults get out of their participation. To my knowledge this report remains the only study on this topic to go so in-depth with qualitative research.

So what are the implications of Informal Arts for the role of the nonprofit arts institution? None of the case study activities took place at a formal arts institution. I think that suggests that the majority of our arts institutions are viewed as places to consume art rather than to create it. Should they seek to change that perception to become viewed as places to create as well? The answer to this question will vary from organization to organization depending upon the resources and mission of each. But to ensure the future of any art form, there must be practitioners and consumers. And since practitioners often become consumers (and bring their friends with them), I believe it is in the long-term interest of arts organizations—large and small, presenting and producing, of all disciplines, including service organizations and arts councils—to encourage adult creation of art at the informal level. I see two primary ways for the arts sector to do this.

The first way is to enable existing informal arts groups in doing what they already do fairly well. The most common obstacle they face is a space to meet, which is available at any arts organization with a physical space. Sometimes groups need theaters, stages, or other specialized spaces (like community theaters and perhaps a choir or orchestra), but sometimes all they need is a room.  And although many of the groups in the study weren’t hurting for members, participants themselves reported having trouble finding the groups in the first place.  It wouldn’t cost much money for arts organizations to make it easy for patrons to find out about opportunities to create art in their specific discipline by calling the organization or visiting its website. In addition, if that institution were to partner artistically with informal arts organizations, it would recognize and validate that activity, encouraging the participants to continue and grow.

The second way is for the organization to directly engage in informal arts. This could mean having artists on staff give lessons, teach classes or facilitate groups (keeping in mind the financial barriers mentioned above). It could also involve reaching out to groups already meeting in libraries, parks, and churches and offering direct assistance in the form of teaching artists, funding, administration, or partnership.

__________________________________________________________

Although the field of arts research has barely begun to scratch the surface of the role that informal arts play and the ways they might impact the arts sector as a whole, it is clear is that the topic deserves more attention. Reading this report from the perspective of the formal arts sector, it’s a bit humbling to realize that the entire field plays only one part in the artistic life of the general public and our audiences. However, examining the benefits of informal arts participation as well as people’s motivations for doing it tell us a lot about the impact the arts have on society outside our walls. Given the constantly evolving patterns and definitions of participation (not to mention art), a better understanding of the informal arts will be increasingly valuable to both the arts and policy sectors now and in the future.

Further Reading:

• There’s Nothing Informal About It: Participatory Arts Within the Cultural Ecology of Silicon Valley. Maribel Alvarez, Ph. D. 2005
• Newsmakers: Alaka Wali, Director, Center for Cultural Understanding and Change, Field Museum: The Cultural Benefits of the ‘Informal Arts’. Philanthropy News Digest, 2004.
• Inside the President’s Studio: Alaka Wali (audio file). American Anthropological Association, 2010.
• Building Bridges at Chicago’s Field Museum.  Art Works, the official blog of the NEA, 2010.
• National Endowment for the Arts Announces Research on Informal Arts Participation in Rural and Urban Areas. 2010.
• Culture and Urban Revitalization:  A Harvest Document. Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert, 2007.
• 2010 Cultural Engagement Index. Conducted by WolfBrown for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.
• Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions. Conducted by WolfBrown, commissioned by the James Irvine Foundation, 2008.

• “Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development” is a literature review featuring 62 arts education research studies, summarized and analyzed by leading experts across the disciplines of dance, drama, “multi-arts,” music, and visual arts.
• “Critical Links” has two ambitious goals: first, to identify strong arts education research that explores transference (“instances in which learning in one context assists learning in a different context”); and second, to inform curricular designs and practices that will enhance the quality and impact of student learning in the arts.
• The review examines studies by discipline (dance, drama, “multi-arts,” music, and visual arts) and found a broad range of correlations between the arts and various skills in diverse contexts. Particular attention was paid to reading and language skills, and of note were findings that appeared specifically related to a discipline, such as music linking to spatial-temporal reasoning (“the ability to visualize spatial patterns and mentally manipulate them over a time-ordered sequence of spatial transformations,” Wikipedia, modified as of June 30, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial-temporal_reasoning).
• The studies cover a wide range of different types of research methodology, including qualitative research (which takes a number of variables into consideration, and emphasizes looking at those variables in the environments where they’re found) and meta-analysis, a high-level process that compares the results of multiple studies addressing a set of related research hypotheses.
• Regardless of the methodology, most of the studies revealed correlations between learning in the arts and academic and cognitive development.
• However, throughout the Compendium, reviewers emphasized a need for further research to reveal the qualities of learning so that we can be better informed with how to move forward with future program design. In other words, we may see a link between engagement in the arts and improved SAT scores in a meta-analysis study, but we do not know exactly what the students were learning in their arts experiences that may have led to academic achievement.
• To better understand what is being learned and transferred to other skill-sets suggests a need to focus on more rigorous qualitative research that asks rich inquiry questions that may point to the nature of the learning. Meta-analysis has already corroborated some of the broader claims for why the arts are important in educational settings by showing links between learning in the arts among a myriad of students to academic and cognitive development. With the knowledge of vast previous research, we can begin to look more closely at the nuances of what is being learned in the arts, and how what is being learned transfers to other areas of learning.

SUMMARY

The story of “Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development,” an extraordinarily ambitious collection of research on arts education, begins in 1997, when a report published by the Arts Education Partnership’s Task Force on Research emphasized a need for a review of up-to-date research to help inform program design and policy. The National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education commissioned “Critical Links” – eventually published in 2002 – to address this need.

The Compendium is a literature review featuring 62 arts education research studies, summarized and analyzed by leading experts across the disciplines of dance, drama, “multi-arts,” music, and visual arts. To develop criteria for inclusion in the Compendium, James S. Catterall, Lois Hetland, and Ellen Winner were chosen as “researchers” by Arts Education Partnership (AEP) through a competitive selection process. They are joined by 11 other reviewers who summarize the studies, provide initial and secondary inquiry questions, and analyze each study, with recommendations for future research. While each study is presented individually in one to two pages, the original texts of the studies are not included. After each arts section (e.g., drama or dance), a reviewer delves into deeper inquiries revealed from links among the findings in the studies.

The Compendium sets out to achieve two ambitious goals:

1. Identify strong arts education research that includes the academic and social effects of arts learning, beyond the arts learning experiences themselves. In brief, the Compendium sets out to explore transference, which “denotes instances where learning in one context assists learning in a different context.”  The foreword by AEP explains that the purpose of this Compendium is “to make a contribution to the national debate over such issues as how to enable all students to reach high levels of academic achievement, how to improve overall school performance, and how to create the contexts and climates in schools that are most conducive to learning.”
2. “Giv[e] insight into curriculum designs and practices that will enhance the quality and impact of student learning in the arts.” Through the examined research studies, the Compendium reviewers hope to pave the way for more informed educational program design.

The Links: What Was Studied, What They Found
The studies in “Critical Links” are organized meticulously by discipline. The drama, multi-arts, and music sections examine 19, 17, and 15 studies respectively, with concluding essays by James Catterall, Rob Horowitz and Jaci Webb-Dempsey, and Larry Scripp. Notably, the dance section features only 7 studies and the visual arts section contains only four, with final essays by Karen Kohn Bradley and Terry L. Baker respectively. A final essay by Catterall called “Overview” discusses the issue of transference and makes recommendations about “where to go from here.”

Drama
The bulk of drama research examines the connection between arts education and linguistic skills, with an emphasis on reading and writing comprehension. Overall, the studies found that drama – and in particular, role-playing activities – did have a positive effect on linguistic development in the focus groups as compared with the control groups. Some of the other overarching findings from the drama research include:

• Drama education has an impact on improving concentrated thought
• Formal reflection on experiences in drama elicits/fosters interpersonal relations
• Drama improves story comprehension

Example: A study by Ann Podlozny exemplifies the link between dramatic arts and verbal skills. Entitled “Strengthening Verbal Skills Through the Use of Classroom Drama: A Clear Link,” the research study focuses on whether classroom drama helps students develop verbal ability. This is a meta-analysis combining the results of 200 studies since 1950 that address story understanding (oral and written measures), reading achievement and readiness, oral language development, vocabulary, and writing. Catterall explains that “positive effects are shown in… written and oral measures of story recall, reading achievement, reading readiness, oral language development, and writing,” and hopes that “the report will encourage teachers, teaching artists, and school administrators to include drama in their classroom practice.”

Dance
The dance research included in the Compendium focuses on, and strongly suggests, the impact of dance on creative problem-solving, reading skills, creative thinking skills, self-reflection and self confidence.

Example: In a study by Dale Rose called “The Impact of Whirlwind’s Basic Reading Through Dance Program on First Grade Student’s Basic Reading Skills: Study II,” first-graders were studied for three months to determine whether their reading abilities could be improved through a dance program in which the students used their bodies to physically represent letters. These students were studied against a control group. The experimental group improved compared to the control group, especially in their ability to relate written consonants and vowels to their sounds.

Multi-arts
The multi-arts programs in the Compendium focus on the correlation between arts experiences and academic achievement. These studies suggested connections between arts programs and improved reading skills, verbal skills, math skills, and creative thinking.

Example: James Catterall’s study from 1998 called “Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School” shows a clear link between arts involvement and improved academic achievement. The data came from 25,000 students from eighth to tenth grade who were participating in the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. The outcomes demonstrated that the students who were highly engaged in artistic experiences in middle school and high school performed better in academics than their non-arts-involved peers, regardless of socio-economic status. “High arts students… earned better grades and scores, were less likely to drop out of school… had a more positive self concept, and were more involved in community service.” Nevertheless, the results do not prove causation and underscore a need for further research to unpack the nature of the association between arts and academics.

Music
The research studies on music reveal correlations between musical study and cognitive development, language development, reading, self-efficacy (the degree to which a person believes that he can attain a goal or succeed in a certain situation), math proficiency, and spatial-temporal reasoning (“the ability to visualize spatial patterns and mentally manipulate them over a time-ordered sequence of spatial transformations”). Spatial-temporal reasoning is an important skill for solving problems in math, science, and everyday life.

Example: For “Learning to Make Music Enhances Spatial Reasoning,” Lois Hetland selected fifteen studies for a meta-analysis to explore whether active instruction in music enhances preschool and elementary students’ performance on spatial tasks. The data across the fifteen studies are so consistent in determining that music-making leads to spatial reasoning skills that differences in the type of musical instruction hardly change the results. The meta-analysis suggests that “offering a wide range of music programs in preschools and elementary schools similar to the ones reviewed… will predict that nearly 70 percent of young children will ‘show spatial improvement as a result of the music program.’”

Visual Arts
With only four studies examined, the visual arts are the least-represented discipline in the Compendium. The studies had different variables and goals, and as such, very different outcomes. As Catterall explains in his book summary, “[In the visual arts studies] we see only preliminary indications of impacts: that drawing is an effective communicator of learning in history and contributes to organization and persistence in writing — training in visualization contributes to reading skills — reasoning about visual art seems to transfer to reasoning about science — and instruction in visual art increases reading-readiness among preschoolers.”

Example: Jeffrey D. Wilhelm’s ethnographic case study, “Reading Is Seeing: Using Visual Response to Improve the Literary Reading of Reluctant Readers,” examines whether the visual arts can be used to help reluctant and learning-disabled readers to become better readers. Over the course of nine weeks, he studies two seventh-grade boys who were asked to make arts and crafts that represented characters in the stories they were reading and draw pictures of visual impressions they had. By the end of the nine weeks, the boys “took a more active role in reading, and began to interpret the text rather than just passively read it.”

Among the 84 effects that the researchers found the arts to have on student participants, a few emerged across all of the disciplines, including reading and math skills, and social interaction. Moreover, it is suggested that the findings in these studies may be of most importance to developing social and cognitive skills in impoverished children who may not have access to gaining such skills in other environments. (See James Catterall’s book summary for a concise overview of the findings and implications of “Critical Links.”)

ANALYSIS

Thankfully for the benefit of readers, the Compendium already contains a great deal of independent analysis to aid interpretation of the study results. Each study summary is followed by a thoughtful and informed commentary section, and each larger essay on the specific arts areas explores broader themes such as transference from the arts to other subject areas, implications for future research, and implications for policy. The Compendium seems to leave no stone unturned (or in this case, no inquiry forgotten). Any time I had an analysis that I felt was original, a researcher said it a few pages later with far more eloquence than I ever could.

What I can offer instead is an overview of what seemed to be the most significant takeaways from the body of research investigated here. In the spirit of “links,” I’ve tried to address common issues that arose throughout the Compendium as a whole, and to highlight some of the thought-provoking findings and questions that emerged from the studies. I’ll also examine some of the potential weaknesses in the research cited in the report.

Understanding who is being studied
Many research studies used experimental designs involving control groups of students. While the students are often at the same grade level, we don’t always know if they’re at the same emotional or behavioral levels. Do the sample groups tell us what we want to know about the research, or does it tell us about the demographic/age of the participants? One study that highlights this issue is Jennifer Ross Goodman’s “A Naturalistic Study of the Relationship Between Literacy Development and Dramatic Play in Five-Year-Old Children.” The study examines how literacy is developed within dramatic play by integrating daily dramatic play into a preschool classroom of 17 children. Reviewer Bruce Wilson points out that despite the detailed observations and findings in the study, “the biggest shortcoming of this type of research is the lack of generalizability to other settings… [T]he sample included a preponderance of females… Might the relationships look different in a predominantly male or balanced-gender context?” To further investigate the external validity of these findings, it would be helpful to compare this study with others that explore literacy development in preschool-age children, in order to ensure that demographics are not overly skewing the results.

Understanding the mechanisms of learning
In every arts section, one question appeared repeatedly: what exactly is being learned in an artistic experience that transfers to development in another area? For example, a student may have been taught a movement class, which resulted in her achieving better test scores. But what we don’t know is exactly what element of the dance class led to her developing certain academic skills. This information is essential to inform how we develop better arts education programs going forward.

One study that shows a specific relationship between an “arts” activity and reading ability is Dale Rose’s “The Impact of Whirlwind’s Basic Reading Through Dance Program on First Grade Students’ Basic Reading Skills: Study II.” Over the course of three months, a group of 174 children improved their basic reading skills by learning to put their bodies in the shapes of letters. They were compared with a control group of 198 children. While this finding indicates that first graders may improve their basic reading skills through movement, Ellen Winner observes that “this study does not allow the conclusion that dance leads to reading, but rather that putting one’s body in the shape of letters improves basic reading skills in young children. Whether or not this activity is ‘dance’ (a matter dancers could debate), we can conclude that this activity is an innovative and enactive way of helping children master sound-symbol relationships.”

In other studies, however, the correlation between artistic learning and developed skill is not as clear. For example, Kathryn Vaughn’s and Ellen Winner’s study “SAT Scores of Students Who Study the Arts: What We Can and Cannot Conclude about the Association” is a meta-analysis exploring the relationship between SAT scores and student involvement in the arts. Vaughn and Winner seem to have found significant relationships between involvement in the arts and higher math and verbal scores, but as reviewer Robert Horowitz points out, “the correlation between participation in high school arts programs and SAT scores is not sufficient in itself to claim that arts study leads to improvement in academic performance.”

The SAT study is one of a few studies that reveal a possible issue with meta-analysis research itself. Meta-analysis is a high-level process that compares the results of multiple studies addressing a set of related research hypotheses. The Vaughn/Winner study asked students taking the SAT to voluntarily fill out a questionnaire about the number of years they participated in arts classes. While meta-analysis allows for broad observations – in this case, that students who took four or more years of arts classes had the strongest SAT scores – it tends to gloss over the specific qualities of the arts programs or the learning experiences, due to the necessary heterogeneity involved in the process of combining disparate studies. What did those students do in their art classes that led to better test scores? Which activities triggered the cognitive development to improve math and verbal test-taking skills? To paraphrase reviewer Bruce Wilson’s commentary about the meta-analysis study “Mute Those Claims: No Evidence (Yet) for a Causal Link between Arts Study and Academic Achievement,” meta-analysis oftentimes takes a very limited range of factors into consideration, and excludes unanticipated outcomes.

One way to address this issue is to look at the findings of the qualitative and ethnographic research methodology. As indicated in the Martha C. Mentzer/Boni B. Boswell study “Effects of a Movement Poetry Program on Creativity of Children with Behavioral Disorders,” qualitative methods of reporting on research can be helpful in understanding the nature of the learning that is happening. Such methods include anecdotal records, observational checklists from videos of the sessions, questionnaires and interviews, and student work. In the study, the use of this methodology helped reveal the learning styles and creative thinking (defined here as “originality, fluency, and flexibility”) of two boys, aged 7 and 10. With meticulous documentation and citations from earlier studies, this study captured the rather nuanced development of behavior changes. As reviewer Karen K. Bradley comments, “… since one boy improved in social behavior and the other in motor coordination, the union of creative movement and poetry writing provided a ‘stronger fabric’ for development, especially for children of different and challenging learning styles.” She continues that “the most useful data for understanding the outcomes the boys achieved came from anecdotal records. The field needs to recognize that movement analysis may offer the clearest depiction of what cognitive or behavioral changes occur through involvement in dance.”

In fact, this last sentence could be applied to every arts discipline. Analysis of what exactly is being learned can reveal what changes happen cognitively in all of the artistic disciplines.

IMPLICATIONS

The research included in “Critical Links” is so diverse, from the methodology used to the discovered outcomes, that it is difficult to make a statement about the merits of one study over another. Taken as a whole, the Compendium offers strong evidence of correlation between arts study and academic and cognitive development.

Despite the comprehensiveness of the commentary sections, two questions seemed to be missing from the conversation:

1. If visual arts, music, multi-arts, dance, and drama all possibly impact a similar skill set (e.g. reading), how do we know which arts programs are most effective at promoting these skills?

Before we even go there, it should be reiterated that the dance and visual arts studies in this Compendium are vastly outnumbered by the other studies (7 and 4, respectively, compared with at least 15). This tells us that if and when we suggest which of the arts to focus on to develop specific cognitive abilities, we first need further research in the visual arts and dance arts.

Yet there is a need to not only develop arts research within specific disciplines, but among the disciplines as well as across academic learning, as suggested in the second of Paul DiMaggio’s three fallacies in identifying the effects of the arts on communities. As described in DiMaggio’s prospectus for the “Taking the Measure of Culture” symposium at Princeton University in June 2002, the second fallacy is that of homogeneity of effects. “We …often speak as if the arts …have undifferentiated effects on people and communities, whatever these effects may be. So we ask, ‘does art education improve math learning?’ or ‘do communities with lots of artistic resources have stronger economies?’ It is unlikely that there are general answers to these questions. Effects may be heterogeneous due to interactions with other factors, so that benign effects of artistic resources or experiences are visible only in the presence of other factors that facilitate the expression of those benign effects…. [D]ecisive effects of specific kinds of arts programs on a relatively small proportion of communities will be hidden unless we know where to look for them.

In other words, we need to look at multiple and potentially confounding factors when determining the impact that any given arts activity has on an unrelated skill. We could certainly use more longitudinal studies across different academic disciplines if we are to determine how the skills that are emerging through research are being used in other contexts.

2. What is research methodology telling us about the quality of outcomes?

While it may seem that arts involvement is desirable, it isn’t usually clear how rich or textured student involvement is in other subject areas as a result of their engagement with the arts.

The most compelling studies in “Critical Links” – at least for me – were those that explored the nuances of learning that took place.  One particularly resonated with me both in terms of methodology and in terms of outcome: “’Stand and Unfold Yourself,’ A Monologue on the Shakespeare & Company Research Study,” by Steve Seidel. In it, a team of research staff looked closely at the Shakespeare & Company’s National Shakespeare Institute to identify what made the program so successful and which elements of it could be transferable. (Note that there is already an assumption that the program is successful.) The program includes a one-month teacher training, followed by two months in which teaching artists guide about 400 students in 10 schools through the study and performance of Shakespeare plays.

What struck me at first was the ambiguity of the inquiry question: “How do participants [in the Shakespeare & Company program] identify the value of their participation for themselves?” The second question seemed even more elusive: “What elements of the program seemed most critical to creating those benefits?” I wondered how the study could possibly measure these things.

This is where the unique methodology of the study shone through. Unlike other studies, this one had the resources to assess two of the four years of students’ and staff participation. By the standards of the Compendium, this is a very long time. In addition, researchers held meetings with participants throughout the year and organized yearly retreats to extract what was being observed and learned; developed rich inquiry questions “around authenticity, academic rigor, applied learning, active exploration, adult relationships, and assessment practices,” and included teacher and student responses to these questions as evidence of the impacts and success of the program.

Along with these elements, Seidel focuses “on learning in … the language itself, acting, working in creative communities, and learning about oneself and linking that to social and intellectual development.” The findings were numerous, but most importantly, the study revealed that the complexity of studying Shakespeare plays allowed participants to delve into their own feelings and emotions. As Catterall comments, “the complexity of issues and emotions in the plays promotes word-by-word, emotion-by-emotion, thought-by-thought investigation of meaning. This step-by-step approach invites those who study Shakespeare to go deeply into their own experience, a process that is linked to all types of learning.”

So, do we all need to study more Shakespeare? Maybe. But I came away from this study thinking that, while it may not be realistic to replicate this kind of work extensively, it may nevertheless be prudent to invest in more in-depth qualitative research like this: research that asks more ambiguous inquiry questions and systematically measures both expected and unanticipated outcomes.

Building on the field’s existing and expansive arts education research, we have an opportunity to unlock the deeper inquiries about how the arts shape human development. If we can use what already exists (such as the wealth of findings from studies like those included in the Compendium), and take a step-by-step approach at looking at the nuances of learning, perhaps we’ll begin to form stronger links within and beyond arts education to develop rich, holistic learning experiences that can help shape future generations of critical thinkers, and creative learners and leaders.

Further reading:

• James S. Catterall, Book Summary
• Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner, Beyond the Evidence Given: A Critical Commentary on Critical Links (in this essay, Hetland and Winner take Catterall and editor Richard Deasy to task for inflating, in their opening and concluding essays, the degree to which causal interpretations can be drawn from the studies contained within the volume)
• Summary/synthesis by Americans for the Arts