As stated in the New Jersey September Ready Arts Report:

As arts educators prepare to make instructional choices that will support the social and emotional needs of students, it will be paramount that they invoke the philosophical foundation, common language, essential questions, and enduring understandings articulated throughout the Arts Education and Social and Emotional Learning Framework. SEL is not a box to be checked or another item for educators to squeeze into instructional time with students. When done well, transformative SEL through arts education bears the indicators of great teaching. For SEL to be effective in teaching students the life skills needed to navigate their world after they leave the arts classroom, it must be embedded into curricular content as embodied by dance, music, theatre and visual art.

• Purposeful integration of SEL into arts education will enrich the students’ personal connection to the arts.

• The relationship built between arts teacher and students over multiple years of instruction fosters the caring environment necessary to help build school connectedness and foster empathy.

• The perseverance needed to dedicate oneself to artistic excellence fosters resilience both in and out of the arts classroom.

• Artistic creation fosters self-awareness and allows students to develop a greater sense of autonomy and emotional vocabulary.

• The collaborative community developed in the arts classroom welcomes discussions and an awareness of acceptance and embracing diversity.

• Through the arts students learn the necessity of personal goal-setting, self-assessment, & accountability as they develop high standards for their artist endeavors and themselves. Arts education provides developmental experiences that actively allow students to practice and hone social emotional competencies.

• Learn and discuss how to use arts (visual, music, theatre, dance) to process the experiences of prolonged isolation, loss, fear, and racial injustice in classrooms, community spaces and after school programs

• The arts can be an outlet for becoming an ally and co-conspirator for those who are living through these experiences

How can the arts be a lever for Equity?

The arts helps establish a coherent, research-based vision of instruction and related competencies that, when implemented across BPS, are likely to eliminate opportunity and achievement gaps through the following Four Essentials of Instructional Equity:

• Create and Maintain Healthy Learning Environments: Creative practices are essential for teaching and learning in the arts. The fundamental creative practices of imagination, investigation, construction, and reflection, which are essential in the arts, are cognitive processes by which students not only learn within an individual discipline but also transfer their knowledge, skill, and habits to other contexts and settings. As a pathway to learning in arts education, creative practices include such attributes as flexible thinking, creative problem-solving, inquisitiveness, and perseverance. Creative and innovative strategies build students' ability in problem formulation, research, interpretation, communication, precision and accuracy. Learn more here.

• Design Learning Experiences for Access and Agency: Artistic literacy is the knowledge and understanding required to participate authentically in the arts. Fluency in the language(s) of the arts includes the ability to engage in the practice of performing/presenting/producing. While individuals can learn about dance, media, music, theatre, and visual arts through reading print texts, artistic literacy requires that they engage in artistic creation processes directly through the use of appropriate materials (such as charcoal or paint or clay, musical instruments and scores, digital and mechanical apparatuses, light boards, and the actual human body) and in appropriate spaces (concert halls, stages, dance rehearsal spaces, arts studios and computer labs). Learn more here.

• Facilitate Cognitively Demanding Tasks and Instruction: Understanding and evaluating how the arts convey meaning, the Responding/reflection practice is intended to engage students in applying knowledge and skills in authentic and relevant contexts. Our core arts standards include enduring understandings and essential questions to help both educators and students organize the information, skills and experiences within artistic processes. Enduring understandings summarize important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom. They synthesize what students should come to understand as a result of studying a particular content area. Learn more here.

• Assess for Learning: Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context. Arts literacy fosters connections among the arts and between the arts and other disciplines, thereby providing opportunities to access, develop, express, and integrate meaning across a variety of content areas. An arts-literate individual recognizes the value of the arts as a place of free expression and the importance of observing and participating in the social, political, spiritual, financial, and aesthetic aspects of their communities (both local and global, in person and virtually) and works to introduce the arts into those settings. Learn more here.