Transforming School Culture Through the Arts

Excerpts from the article follow:

...Imagine artists of diverse races and ages leading a classroom of children in a tribal yell, or guiding the children in a human chain, as they weave through the room making music with ancient and handmade instruments. This is the everyday work of artists in the Tribal Rhythms® company, a program of the Cooperative Artists Institute (CAI).

CAI is a multicultural nonprofit in Boston that uses the performing and visual arts to help schools and communities solve problems, especially those relating to community and family fragmentation. CAI created the Partnership for Whole School Change (the Partnership), a collaboration of CAI; Troubador, Inc.; Lesley University's Center for Peaceable Schools; and three elementary schools in Boston...

The Partnership is based on the belief that to improve school performance, communities need to create a school culture that has a positive effect on their children's behavior. To help achieve this transformation, the Partnership uses a range of strategies grounded in cultural anthropology. Tribal Rhythms is one of the Partnership's core strategies.

Partnership artist-educators use Tribal Rhythms to support schools in developing and implementing their school climate strategy. The program uses the themes of tribe, group building, and the arts to create nurturing, socially inclusive learning environments or "learning tribes" in classrooms and schools. Partnership artist-educators introduce the program with the Tribal Rhythms celebration, a highly participatory experience in which children play drums and other handcrafted instruments and act in dramatic stories. The celebration peaks when children help the artist-educator describe a strange and scary sighting by performing the "Dance of the Mysterious Creature." Afterward, teachers and artist-educators implement a series of lessons that incorporate dance, drama, and visual arts activities that reinforce the learning tribe concept and foster self-control, inclusiveness, and the values of caring, cooperation, and respect.

The goal is for students to see themselves as creators of culture as they develop a shared sense of community through their tribal ceremonies (e.g., tribal yells, signs, and council circles). By placing human relationships at the center of the instructional strategy, learning tribes promote an environment where teachers can spend more time teaching and less time preparing students to learn.

The Partnership integrates many of its programs' concepts into its evaluation. The evaluation recognizes the importance of using a participatory and team-based approach, employing teachers, Partnership service providers, and evaluators in the design of evaluation instruments, data collection, and interpretation. To improve the evaluation's validity, the project has been assessed from multiple perspectives (e.g., children, teachers, and artist-educators), using multiple methods: interviews with children in their Tribal Rhythms council circles, interviews with school staff and artist-educators, school-staff questionnaires, and student surveys.

One key evaluation component is a school climate survey administered to children to assess their feelings about their school and classroom over time. The idea is to determine whether the students' perceptions of school climate are changing, how social and antisocial behaviors are changing, and the teachers and artist-educators' roles - or lack thereof - in promoting these changes.

Partnership artist-educators teamed with first through fifth grade teachers to administer pre and post surveys in 16 classrooms in all three schools. To increase the survey's validity, artist-educators first led the younger children in a movement activity designed to help them better understand gradations, a concept needed to answer the survey questions. In one activity, children were asked how much energy they had that day. Hands low to the floor meant low energy, hands at the waist meant moderate energy, and hands over their heads meant high energy.

Although the evaluation is still in progress, results to date...show that, over the course of the year, students generally felt positive about their classroom and school in the pre survey and negative in the post survey. However, their feelings about their learning tribe remained positive overall.

As the evaluation's purpose is both formative and summative, the evaluators are discussing the results with teachers and other school staff to gather their interpretations and to inspire future strategy. The goal is not just to create a learning culture in the three schools' classrooms, but also to have the evaluation contribute to a learning culture in the Partnership as a whole, where results can be discussed in an inclusive way, without apprehension, and decisions about their implications made through consensus.

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September 2005 update: In an email to The Communication Initiative on September 24 2005, J. Curtis Jones noted: "The Partnership For Whole-School Change is made up of Cooperative Artists Institute (CAI) and five schools. Four Boston Public Schools - the Louis Agassiz, Warren/Prescott, Oliver Perry, and the James Taylor Elementary Schools, and one Cambridge school, the Benjamin Banneker Charter School. The Center for Peaceable Schools at Lesley University, The Harvard Family Research Center, Boston Public School's Unified Student Services, and CAI provide programmatic support."

For more information and a full evaluation, contact:

J. Curtis Jones

Partnership Coordinator

Partnership for Whole School Change

311 Forest Hills Street

Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 USA

Tel.: (617) 524-6378

cai@tribal-rhythms.org

Source:

Excerpted from "The Evaluation Exchange," Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003/2004. Published by Harvard Family Research Project.