Opinion: Imagining equity in arts education

What would we gain by valuing community-based traditions?

by Debora Kodish and Deborah Wei

In a nondescript building in the midst of Chinatown, the old wooden stairs rise steeply to a 3rd floor studio where men, women, boys and girls practice intricate moves, speaking in hushed tones as if in a library. Colorful paintings, Chinese calligraphy, and photos of teachers long past hang from the walls of Sifu Cheung's kung fu studio. Children here practice movements over and over, occasionally being corrected, and always knowing that the expectation is that the student is patient and diligent. The first lesson they learn is that nothing comes easy. Art is hard work; it requires practice and perseverance. These are critical life lessons rarely available in our schools.

While all arts face cutbacks and feel the pain of redirected priorities, folk arts and the masters who practice them have been kept on the margins in K-12 education. The music and art forms taught in our schools tend to derive from elite European traditions: European “classical” music and “contemporary” visual arts as taught in art schools and music conservatories (as if the cultures of the world don't boast their own classical and contemporary forms).

There is a common false assumption that folk and traditional arts are “easy” and that anyone can teach ethnic music, dance and culture. One reason people assume this is simply that we lack opportunities to see great artists in these traditions. Another reason is that legitimate masters of specific cultural traditions, artists who have spent lifetimes learning these arts, are often prevented from working in schools because tests and entrance criteria inevitably exclude those who have equally valid but different credentials than might be presented by specialists in European elite traditions.

But things could be different. We dream of a more deeply inclusive, democratic and pluralist notion of art: of arts education that truly reflects the diverse histories and cultures of Philadelphia public school students.

We dream that artists with expertise in world cultural traditions are in our classrooms, teaching a wide range of arts in their historical and cultural contexts. We imagine these artists teaching free classes after school and on weekends, offering real chances for young people to master some of the city's diverse, culturally significant folk traditions–from Philadelphia-style rhythm tap dance to Afro-Cuban bata drumming, jazz to klezmer, Trinidadian steel drums to Irish bodhran, Hmong paj ndaub to Chinese lion dance, and more. We dream of fair pay for artists from the city's neighborhoods–including locally-born artists who have been in the forefront of cultural heritage movements here and immigrant artists formerly in the national performance companies of their homelands.

In a city as diverse as ours, this dream shouldn't be so difficult to achieve.

Music, dance, crafts and oral traditions – the folk arts of diverse communities and cultures – have long been present in Philadelphia neighborhoods. Folk arts sustain peoples' alternative cultures and histories and provide a record of what culture and history feels like. And folk arts represent diverse forms of art-making, varied definitions of aesthetics and beauty.

But for many reasons – including the vise-grip of commercial media, meager public funding for arts, and public misconceptions that folk arts are trivial or exotic – these vital forms of community expression are rarely present in meaningful ways in our classrooms.