By Dr. Kristen Paglia, Executive Director of Education & Programs
We have the freedom to imagine. We have the power to create
This is our motto at P.S. ARTS.
Our programs staff and faculty spent a day last spring developing this motto. We asked, “What matters about arts education?” We considered our mission – to improve the lives of children by providing arts education to underserved public schools and communities. We reflected on our collective belief that arts education is essential to building a creative, humane, prosperous society. It sounds like a lofty, and maybe even heated, conversation, but we quickly realized that there is abundant room at P.S. ARTS for a broad range of opinions about what matters – and that is what matters. It is this inclusive atmosphere and the celebration of a diversity of experiences and ideas that has shaped our program for over two decades. Through a theme-based curriculum model, P.S. ARTS invites professional artists to build their lessons around their varied artistic interests. They are empowered to develop curricula that are personally inspiring. By connecting unique artistic gifts to a unifying theme framed in the California arts education standards, the P.S. ARTS program honors both the individual and the collective. It is this core ideal that gave shape to our motto.
We have the freedom to imagine… P.S. ARTS students are encouraged to look carefully at the world around them and reflect on their place in it. Through creating and experiencing dance, music, theater, and visual arts, P.S. ARTS students are given a window to the universe. For example, in the 2012-2013 school year, we trained our Teaching Artists to integrate technology into their lessons and purchased a classroom set of iPads to broaden students’ universe even further. We live in a global society, and P.S. ARTS is dedicated to educating global citizens with the freedom to imagine beyond their daily lives. A recent program evaluation led by Dr. James Catterall with the Centers for Research on Creativity indicates that over the course of the year, P.S. ARTS students show significant gains in their creative capacity to “produce ideas, designs, and products that are novel and valuable.”
We have the power to create… The ability to realize dreams is as critical to improving one’s life and contributing to a thriving society as the ability to imagine it can be done. P.S. ARTS places enormous value on program rigor and sequential skills development. Our rubric-based student performance measure shows that the vast majority of P.S. ARTS students achieve grade-level proficiency or above in their art disciplines, as well as demonstrate increased ability to make connections between learning in the arts and other academic subjects, as well as their real lives.
We are thrilled we now have a P.S. ARTS motto that succinctly and artfully captures the significance of the work we do every day to improve the lives of over 15,000 children in Southern and Central California.
