Family Arts and Creativity

Overview

Family Arts and Creativity brings together parents, students, teachers, and artists to participate in fun-filled arts activities, to exchange ideas and to learn together. We believe that participation in the arts provides important experiences for people of all ages -- giving relevance, context and a sense of identity to individuals as they interact and communicate with others. The arts are a powerful tool for learning, often under utilized in school settings. The arts provide many opportunities to bring diverse populations together; accommodate different learning styles; and allow a group of people to come together to explore and share ideas through the unique languages of diverse art forms-visual arts, movement, music, theater, and creative writing.

Research shows that family involvement in education is critical to the success of students. Students whose families are involved in their education show more positive attitudes toward school and learning. The arts are an ideal subject area for families to enjoy together in school settings and at home. The arts can build stronger relationships within a school and between a school and the surrounding community. It is IAHE's goal to develop our family involvement program, Family Arts and Creativity (FAC), to meet these critical needs and create a bridge that connects families, students and schools.

Family Arts and Creativity, begun in 1998 in partnership with the Center for Family Involvement in Schools at Rutgers, is a two-pronged program, both a professional development program for artists and teachers and a family involvement program for parents and children from the school community. Family Arts and Creativity brings artists and teachers together to exchange their expertise and expand their understanding of the arts as a powerful tool for learning and for creating community. FAC offers a series of professional development workshops for school-based teams; each team is comprised of a classroom teacher, an arts specialist, and a teaching artist provided by the Institute for Arts and Humanities Education. Teams participate in and learn to facilitate FAC family workshops.

Each FAC team brings a series of these evening arts workshops to families at their school. The program has been designed for families of third or fourth grade students but many of the workshops could easily be adapted up or down a grade level. Through FAC workshops, parents, children, teachers, and artists work cooperatively, participating in hands-on arts activities that give them an opportunity to have fun and share ideas and discoveries while learning to think critically and focus on the process of creativity and problem solving.

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FAC Goals

The goals of FAC are:

To create an arts-based family involvement program with high artistic integrity that can be successfully implemented in diverse school settings;

To provide high quality teacher and artist professional development training for arts-based family involvement programs;

To provide a meaningful, educationally sound, and fun family workshop series;

To increase understandings of the value of the arts in our lives for students, parents, teachers and school administrators.

Phase I: Teacher Training

Participating schools apply to be part of FAC. They identify two teachers committed to the goals of the program, ideally one classroom teacher and one arts specialist. IAHE completes the team by matching them with an experienced teaching artist. With similar teams from other schools they participate in a series of six day-long professional development workshops. Teams learn to develop, critique and facilitate activities that are artistically and educationally engaging, developmentally appropriate, and that support the State art standards. While the FAC teams are learning to implement the program, they have the opportunity to participate in model FAC workshops and to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the other artists and teachers and with Institute staff about the important ways that the arts can support teaching and learning.

Each school team will receive a FAC manual which includes more than twenty workshops developed by artists and teachers during the first three pilot years of the program. These workshops become the menu from which teams can select, adapt, or invent workshops for their evening family workshops ar their schools.

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Phase II: Evening Workshops

When the FAC teams return to their schools, they begin the task of recruiting families to participate in four evening workshops throughout the fall. Teams vary in their recruiting strategies. Teams visit classrooms to introduce the program to students, and send flyers home to parents. Teams also reach out to families who they feel are especially well matched to the program goals. They might invite the family of an underachieving student for whom the arts could provide a venue for success in a school setting. They might reach out to families who are not often involved in school sponsored events, providing a supportive entry into the school community. Or to a first-generation student and their parent who are learning English. Teams encourage fathers as well as mothers to participate with their child.

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Working Together

Institute staff and FAC school teams worked together to develop and pilot exciting new workshops. For example:

  • Not Just Sound Effects:

  • Guides participants in an exploration of sound and the power of sound effects to set the scene, create a mood, or tell a story.

  • Getting to Know You:

  • A journal making workshop, invites families to paint to music as they explore the variations in appearance and expression of the painted line. Their explorations become the cover of a personal memory book where they record in words and images, family memories as well as workshop memories.

  • Interpretive Story Telling:

  • Engages families in the creation and performance of a story inspired by a series of photographs and words. The stories created are then shared with the larger group either as a series of "still shots" - group body poses, or as an "audio play," a simple dialogue script as might be heard on a radio production.

All of the workshops are designed to break down the school-home barrier and create a comfortable, fun atmosphere. From the moment the families enter the door, they are immersed in exploratory activities. Each evening is structured to help families explore a central idea through the arts. During the evening they have the opportunity to work as a family pair and in small groups with other families. As a large group they have the opportunity to exchange ideas and share discoveries and creations. Vocabulary words related to the activity are discussed and at the conclusion of the evening, participants are given a packet of materials that allow them to continue exploring the topic at home with the rest of their family. Sometime during the four sessions, families are introduced to the Arts Standards and brainstorm together careers that rely on the kinds of skills and inventive thinking they have been putting to use during the FAC workshops.

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Program Benefits

The Family arts and Creativity program is a beacon for collaborations and partnerships on many artistic and educational levels.

Parents have the opportunity to learn and create with their children. They have the chance to see their children interacting with peers, and gain a better understanding of their child's unique learning process. They are introduced to the arts standards and learn activities that extend the learning process at home. Parents have the opportunity to interact with and get to know teachers and neighbors in a new way. They participate in a school arts program that reinforces their own and their child's creativity, and learn firsthand the importance of the arts in human development.

Students are actively engaged in arts activities and a challenging process of artistic inquiry that is set forth in a meaningful and personal context. They each enjoy personal one-on-one time with their parent and see new talents and ways of interacting with their family member. They have the opportunity to work closely with professional artists and to interact with teachers in an informal setting.

Teachers have the opportunity to re-energize themselves by participating as students in the arts. They gain new strategies and experiences to develop standards based arts activities that help them expand their own creative teaching repertoire and internalize the concept of student-centered learning. The strategies modeled in the training sessions enable participants to develop and implement FAC workshops. Participating teachers work as collaborators with colleagues, both teachers and artists. They increase their knowledge about the fine and performing arts and build positive relationships with parents, students and artists.

Artists learn valuable skills in developing lessons and team teaching and learn new strategies as arts advocates in school and community settings. They have the opportunity to work closely with teachers and a school community. They get to participate as students in other arts disciplines and to work collaboratively with artists and teachers of diverse backgrounds.

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Expansion

Since 2000, the information we have collected from our participants and evaluators illustrates the importance of the program in many other areas as well.

Teachers report that they learn new curricular ideas and teaching strategies to adapt for their school day classrooms and are rejuvenated by the arts activities they develop and teach.

Artists report that they learn more about how to collaborate with teachers, develop lessons, and work in school settings.

Administrators report that they are able to offer high-quality family involvement programs in their schools that parents want repeated.

Family participants consistently report that they have fun, explore new activities, gain insight into family members' learning styles and talents and become excited by their own creativity.

By the second year, FAC teams expand the impact of the program by adding other events - a reunion workshop for families or adding hands-on activities to an existing school event. Some teams have included FAC activities at Back-to-School night or the annual school arts festival, or the town-wide arts fair. Bu involving FAC alumni families in these programs teams also begin to build a community of families who understand the importance the arts in education.

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Quotes: What are participants saying about Family Arts and Creativity?

Parents:

How much fun it is to think, plan, create together -- mother and daughter, making up stories, sharing laughter, how much fun!

I learned that my child is very creative and loves to share. [The leaders] were very good at loosening up a diverse group of parents and children and getting us into the spirit to create and have fun. I got to know my neighbors in a new way.

Teachers and artists were enthusiastic and very helpful. I love the hands on creativity and the way it made my thoughts flow. It's a great experience to have fun and be silly with your child while creating something meaningful at the same time.

I enjoyed collaborative art projects with my daughter on things that we like to do together. This is a rare opportunity to reflect‚ [I learned that] she likes to interact with other children, and share insights on a project as it is in progress.

My daughter and I had a chance to bond while working on a creative project where we were equals.

Very creative; a great opportunity to use individual and collective imagination. A chance to make sound effects from scratch to tell a story. It reinforced my belief that [my daughter] can learn best by doing and interacting.

This program was just wonderful. I learned so much about art and music and theater‚These workshops helped me to shed some inhibitions and get over stage fright, and perhaps show my child how to do the same. We also enjoyed meeting and interacting with other families, and getting to see the fun side of our teachers. Thanks for a great experience!

My daughter and I truly enjoyed the four evenings we spent together. We look forward to coming. The teachers did a great job in preparing the lessons and integrating the information we learned in previous workshops. The activities were interesting, playful and fun. It was a wonderful way for my daughter and I to spend time together. Thank you!

Students:

A cool awesome experience! It is fun and you do arts that express your feelings.

I've never done anything like this before.

I especially had fun sharing memories.

It was a lot of fun activities that make you wake up! Exciting, sticky, messy, and thinking.

I learned how differently people can move‚I learned to move in different ways.

I learned how easy it is to create something if you think it through.

I learned to create with other people.

We painted to music. There were lots of different kinds of music. We said how we feel painting. We made journals. We wrote how colors make us feel. Wherever the sound took over you, you drew it.

I really hope our family can do this again and even if our family can't do it I'd hope other families and other grades would be able to enjoy this fascinating arts program. I sure hope that they will enjoy it as much as I did!

Teachers:

FAC has taught me to expand my thinking in ways that can help the children to "empower" their own creative thought.

The use of warm-ups within lessons [is a good way] to introduce ideas, topics, and activities by fostering discovery learning. The FAC workshops also affected my teaching to incorporate more critiquing and group reflection after a lesson.

This has been an extremely enjoyable yet challenging experience. I had no idea the work would so detailed but you find such pride in producing a wonderful product that you hope and believe will empower and bring joy to the families in your school‚ It was so obvious where the hearts of the "planners" of this program lay -- as always, it is how to reach children, and now, their families.

It was new for me to have the opportunity of looking through an artist's kaleidoscope of talent and experiences. The dress rehearsals of the activities helped me learn more about the process of reflection and supportive questioning. (We got) great ideas and excellent suggestions for improvement of our lessons.

Artists:

What I found most useful about the Family Arts and Creativity workshops were the different perspectives the artist and teachers brought to the program. The activities were very interesting, not only the activities themselves but understanding the concepts behind each activity.

It allowed creativity, diversity and structure all rolled into one lesson that spanned the curriculum and other cultures. It helped me focus on the key successful components of the lesson. (Dance specialist)

[I am ready] to be arts inclusive and to open doors to collaborate with other school arts specialists to: team-teach; look at block scheduling; and work with classroom teachers' curricula. (Arts specialist)

I usually work in one discipline at a time and FAC gave me the opportunity to mix [arts] disciplines toward one goal. And its more fun than I anticipated. (FAC artist)

I am more aware of the demands on teachers. I feel more confident in facilitating reflection activities. (FAC artist)

Everything I've learned about developing curricula I've learned here‚The emphasis on reflection, sharing, focused dialogue and supportive questing is most helpful in relationship to the activities we ended up writing. (FAC artist)

I have been working at engaging kids in arts activities for years, but have never analyzed my (or any other artist) performance‚ Hearing what the teachers found useful was so helpful. I've tried to make learning impossible to avoid; to be specific and directive but still flexible and creative. (FAC artist)

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