The Community Arts Education Green Paper states: “Increasing lifelong learning opportunities in the arts requires that we animate and foster Americans’ desire to get involved with activities that provide them with a sense of personal fulfillment and community connection.”

I know of a very interesting quilt making class that is held all day, once a week. The quilt class regularly has about ten students enrolled in each session. The class is usually made up of about eight or nine Caucasian women and one or two Japanese women. There is little conversation between the Caucasian students and the Japanese students but there is an indescribable connection in how they work together. Occasionally they will take a break a wander to see each other’s work across the room. Sometimes they’ll just sit in silence and watch each other stitch. The best part of the class is lunch time. Every time the class meets, everyone brings a dish to share with each other. There is nothing like a soba noodle salad for lunch followed by banana pudding for dessert. After lunch the dishes are quickly cleared away and everyone goes back to work, sewing and watching.

We can wonder why these adult students enroll in this class session after session. At this point the students basically teach each other and the teacher facilitates the process. When a new student enrolls there is introduction to quilting but mainly the process is to watch and learn. It is interesting to see the variety in colors and patterns in the fabrics the different students choose; you can tell the difference between the Japanese quilts and the American quilts. But the process is the same, the way the students learn is the same. And I imagine the benefits of the class are the same whether you are from Smyrna, Tennessee or Tokyo, Japan.

Community arts providers are giving people of all ages an opportunity to learn a skill and to achieve personal and educational growth through the arts. If we go back and look at the green paper statement the students have created a sense of community in the class and they each get personal fulfillment by creating their work and by connecting to each other. As we develop community arts education programming we should create activities that not only teach an art but promote the idea of personal fulfillment and community connection.

My earliest memory of a community arts experience was when my parents enrolled my sister and me in a community theatre program in League City, Texas when we were in elementary school.  I brought home a flyer from school from the local playhouse and I thought the black and white drawing of a mime and stage lights looked very exciting. We went to theatre class for several weeks and then we ‘put on a play.’  The unforgettable smell of wet paint and cut lumber as the set was being constructed, the hours of memorizing lines, the heat of the stage lights, and the excitement of our first opening night are all things that I’ve never forgotten. Although it was years before I would return to the world of theatre, I was hooked.

The Nationals Guild’s Green Paper beautifully describes the diverse field of community arts education with “more than 5,000 nonprofit, arts organizations and government agencies are providing professionally-led, direct instruction in the arts to people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities in community settings “ Whether it be community music schools in Chicago, Illinois or Whitefish, Montana, civic ballet organizations like the Greenville Civic Ballet in North Carolina, visual arts centers such as Inner-City Arts in the heart of Skid Row in Los Angeles, or a playhouse in a small Texas town, community arts providers throughout the nation are providing opportunities in the arts that are “essential to individual fulfillment and community life.”

Throughout this year we will dive into some deep conversation about the future of community arts education but first I invite you to participate in a bit of a roll call. Tell us a little bit about what community arts education means to you. Please share with us one of the following:

a. Your first memory of a community arts education experience
b. What does community arts education mean to you and your community
c. What is your organization’s mission and how do you deliver community arts education to your constituency

Thanks for your time and I look forward to your responses!