Promising practices and innovative responses for high-quality arts programming in OST

Welcome to the second part of our series unpacking The Wallace Foundation’s recent report, “Setting the Stage: Practical Ideas for Implementing High-Quality Afterschool Arts Programs.” In this blog post, we will discuss the Youth Arts Initiative’s efforts to connect youth from families with low incomes to arts instruction and describe their outcomes and lessons learned. Read the first blog post.

Best Approaches

To address the three critical program infrastructure aspects of staffing, materials and equipment, and space, this report features approaches used by multipurpose OST programs, separated into the three different types of findings:

• Promising approaches, where at least two cities adopted an approach and early data suggests the approach helped improve quality of programming and engagement.
   
• Innovative responses, where one city adopted an approach that early data suggest aided in creating high-quality programming.
   
• Approaches that did not appear to work, where the approach used in one or more cities appears to undermine program quality or engagement from youth participants.

Staffing approaches

OST programs saw employing teaching artists to lead arts programming as a non-negotiable component when building the infrastructure. However, with limitations on how to offer competitive compensation in a resource-constrained setting, organizations found a few promising approaches to employing teaching artists sustainably.

First, organizations can hire teaching artists as “content specialists,'' a common role in OST organizations that allows for individuals to be compensated at higher rates than other frontline staff. Another promising approach was to employ both experienced professional artists and early career teaching artists. Finally, programs could hire individuals for narrowly focused programming roles and rely on organizational leaders who can help engage youth and community members outside of formal program time.

Community arts partners can be potential resources for hiring teaching artists but need to accommodate for youth interests and skill development, including spending time on-site learning the context of programming and forming relationships with youth.

Materials and equipment

The second crucial element when building quality arts programming infrastructure highlighted in this research is providing high-quality equipment and materials to youth participants. For some art forms, specifically digital and visual arts, this requires significant both initial investments and consistent upgrades and replenishment of materials. With this resource-constrained setting, the OST organizations identified three approaches to offer high-quality materials and equipment sustainably.

First, organizations could intentionally seek out and obtain donations of high-quality materials and equipment from community art partners. Another successful approach to providing high-quality equipment to youth participants is purchasing one full set of equipment and rotating the equipment from site to site for programming.

In some cases, OST organizations can also purchase a small amount of high-quality materials for each site and ask youth to share during programming. Program observations showed that there were many ways to keep youth engaged, such as creating different stations within a lesson to give each youth an individual responsibility and an active role in the creative process.

Space

Creating high-quality space for arts programming, the third crucial element in developing infrastructure for high-quality programs, was the “greatest challenge for organizations.” Many multipurpose OST programs share their physical spaces with partners, while other programs do have independent control over their spaces but do not have the capacity to designate rooms for specific programs. In this constrained setting, this report identified three promising approaches to creating high-quality arts programming spaces for students that felt sustainable.

1. Three organizations featured in this report created high-quality studios in specific sites, and then allowed youth from other sites in the area to access these spaces.
    
2. By taking advantage of local partners’ or schools’ arts spaces, youth can access high-quality art studios close to the OST program site without organizations needed to create entirely new studios on-site.
    
3. OST organizations can also make small changes and modifications to existing spaces to welcome creativity and artistic expression in youth participants— for instance, displaying student artwork on the walls.

In conclusion

Aiming to expand access to high-quality arts programming for youth who have historically not had access, this research suggests that OST organizations can create infrastructure and sustain high-quality arts programming by drawing on the lessons learned by these featured organizations. These investments will result in young people developing their creative voice, receiving recognition for their artistic work, spark an interest in the world of art, and create strong mentor relationships with teaching artists. There are a few different ways OST programs can expand access to high-quality arts programs, as outlined in the report.

• To create a strong and sustainable infrastructure for arts programming, multipurpose OST programs could prioritize employing teaching artists as “specialists” to lead programming, providing high-quality materials and equipment to youth participants, and creating welcoming art studio spaces where students feel safe.
   
• Teaching artists are a necessary part of high quality arts programming but need organization support in order to successfully connect with students. Compensation for these individuals also needs to be improved, as many teaching artists in this research were not satisfied with their wages (which is also characteristic of larger sentiments about compensation in the OST field generally).
   
• Digital arts, visual arts, and performing arts all have significantly different needs, in terms of initial and ongoing investments. OST organizations need to recognize the amount of resources that should be allocated to each art form, in order to ensure youth are engaged creatively and are protected in terms of their emotional and physical safety.
   
• Strong partnerships between OST organizations and community art organizations can be leveraged to greatly expand access for youth, if the partnerships are cultivated in a way that is responsive to the interests of youth participants and meets them where they are.
   
• OST organizations need to recognize the most significant obstacle in expanding access to high-quality art programming- accessing high-quality arts studio space within a resource-strained context.

We encourage you to visit the Wallace Foundation's website to read the report and the supplementary materials.