Chicago Trip

The Sistema Fellows hit our first conference in the Fellowship in Chicago last week. The National Guild for Community Arts Education conference ran for three days, with half of us being Work Study Volunteers. http://communityartsed.nationalguild.org/Home.aspx

Highlights of the conference for me were:

• Discussing evaluation models of an arts program's impact on students and communities. This was a refreshing look on assessment and evaluation outside of my experience using the British National Curriculum Standards & Levels, using logic models to structure the curriculum to produce outcome-based evaluations. Sounds heavy, but this seems to me to be a much more personal way of assessing with the focus on the impact on the attitudes and behaviours of the students, and not just the levels of the skills acquired. The impact on the community is also not something usually taken into account in conventional educational assessments. 
•  Smart Education Systems A keynote speech on the national narrative of the US Public School Education system - the focus on raising standards, mostly by investing in new assessment models and curriculum, very similar to the trends in the British system. The speaker, Warren Simmons, was suggesting that community arts programs are able to change that narrative by modelling collaborations between different organisations at the local level to provide students with a more holistic range of learning opportunities - 'community-centred education reform'. http://annenberginstitute.org/about/smart-education-systems
• Brand Essence This was a challenge to choose two words that really summed up the focus and mission of an organisation, and its competitive edge in the field. The process helped defined for me what impact I am hoping to make and why. Your chosen 'brand' would also determine how you publicise and market the organisation. My two words are not about what the organisation itself would look like, but what the youth involved would be like - Confident Initiators.

Looking forward to the Take A Stand conference in LA in February....

There were also some opportunities to check out some El Sistema programming in Chicago - I was able to visit El Sistema Ravinia (a program facilitated by an arts festival) and Hibbard Elementary School, one of the nucleos of the People's Music School Youth Orchestras. http://www.peoplesmusicschool.org/

http://www.ravinia.org/

A couple of great videos about the People's Music School and their Youth Orchestras - two of my fellow fellows were previously employed by this organisation and another fellow, Albert Oppenheimer, is the director of the Youth Orchestras.
http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2012/06/11/yours-project

http://video.pbs.org/video/1901408265/

And of course, we couldn't leave Chicago without a visit to the Symphony! Emmanuel Ax playing Mozart - bliss...

 http://cso.org/TicketsAndEvents/EventDetails.aspx?eid=5677

Also of great interest is that Chicago Symphony and their training orchestra, the Civic Symphony, have launched a two-year Citizen Musician Fellowship. It sounds awesome and Yo-Yo Ma is heavily involved as well. Great to hear of more musicians being trained to use their music for the community: http://citizenmusician.org/