Tag Archives | Scott Walters

What Values Matter In Arts Grad Training Programs?

By | on February 21, 2012 | Comments { 0 }

This weekend Scott Walters quoted an extensive comment made on another blog about the value of MFA acting programs. The gist is, students are ill served by the programs which need to focus on training students for 21st century opportunities.

This struck a chord with me because I had recently read a Fast Company article about how UC Berkeley’s Business School started to screen applicants based on whether they embodied the school’s core values. The school had decided to embrace these values in the interests of creating a “reduction of overconfidence and self-focus, which are perceived to be excessively present among the business graduates and leaders of the top business schools.”

At the time I read it, I was idly wondering if arts training programs at the master level might do something similar to address any perceived (and real) problems with those they graduate. It had been a long time since I was in grad school so I didn’t feel I knew enough about the state of things write a post about it. Having read Walter’s recent post, I am no more certain than before since it is the view of a single unidentified commenter. I do feel fairly confident in assuming that, as with most things, there is room for improvement.

I will readily admit that given my ignorance of the state of things, I don’t have any concrete suggestions about they might be done differently. I will say that one thing that stood out in the Fast Company piece was that Berkeley-Haas instituted significant changes in their program based on their stated values and then required their applicants to adhere to them.

Most remarkably, they are not simply communication tools but drive operations from the curriculum, research priorities to staff programs, and faculty hiring. The curriculum, for example, has been extensively revamped in order to introduce elements of creativity, innovation, collaboration, ethics, and social responsibility.

They made sure they embodied the values before they required the students to do the same. It would have been much easier for them to decide to implement the change by altering their admission criteria and assuming that choosing the right students would result in producing the right graduates. But that is less likely if the infrastructure surrounding the students doesn’t emulate and reinforce the values the school wishes to cultivate in its graduates.

Successful realization of any goal is easier for any entity if all members are aligned toward attaining it. Probably the most powerful thing an arts training program can do to convince applicants that it can prepare them to ply their craft in the current environment is to point to a major realignment of priorities to that end.

As the commenter that Walters quotes, SayItLoud, notes, theatre training programs often cite successful graduates and places their students have worked or can intern at. As impressive as that is, the reality is the path those graduates took to success may no longer be viable.

What training programs may really need to do is say to applicants, “We’ve changed ourselves from top to bottom and what success requires now is to push you off the conventional path. This is not the place to pursue training in becoming a triple-threat, actor/singer/dancer. You may have become a video editor/painter/acrobat or a ecologist/architect/percussionist or all six plus four things we aren’t mentioning. Do your interests, values and practices align with ours?”

At the very least, it will get everyone thinking about the whole training process. Given that the current conversation is that arts organizations need to change the way they operate and interact with audiences, you aren’t leading students astray by telling them they need to obtain a wider spectrum of skills. Like as not, they will be the ones helping to drive the change with the types of works they develop.

Read full story

Possible To Cultivate New Funders Motivated By New Mandates?

By | on October 11, 2011 | Comments { 0 }

You may have read about the report the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference noting the disparity in foundation support for arts organizations.

According to the report,

“the largest arts organizations with budgets exceeding $5 million represent only 2 percent of the nonprofit arts and culture sector. Yet those groups received 55 percent of foundation funding for the arts in 2009. Only 10 percent of arts funding was explicitly meant to benefit underserved populations.”

Most of this money is going to large organizations patronized by a shrinking wealthy white audience during a time when people are orienting toward community based arts groups.

As I read this, I recalled Scott Walters’ discussion of the difficulty his small arts organization had meeting the deadlines for the Our Town grant process and the questions he raised about the appropriateness of the criteria being employed. I suspect there is something of a feedback loop inherent to foundation grant programs in that they are structured to the needs of the organizations they serve and those they serve tend to be organizations with the resources to meet the criteria of the grant programs.

Foundations may have to expand the number and types of organizations they serve, as the report suggests. But I strongly suspect they will have to also institute changes in their process to better accommodate those with fewer resources than those with whom they currently deal. Otherwise, they probably won’t have very strong participation from a larger, more diverse group.

Of course, most foundations, whether they have an arts focus or not, were set up to serve the interests of their founders. It appears that this has been rather successful. The greatest success in securing support for under served populations may end up being best realized by cultivating/encouraging individuals and groups from those communities to develop their own funding structures whether it is foundations or cultural hui.

The article mentions that current funding practices originated in an 19th century need to prove America was on par with Europe culturally. That need has passed and a new set of practices based on different motivations are required. Existing foundations may end up doing a lot of good after shifting their priorities, but in attempting to overlay new priorities on their founding purpose they may never be as effective as organizations that structure their approach around a mandate to support the arts and culture of under serve communities from day one.

Cultivating a sustained culture of support in areas where it is not currently practiced won’t happen overnight, but aided by technology it may not require 100 years to take root either.

Read full story

Funding The In Between Places

By | on July 27, 2011 | Comments { 0 }

Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas has been looking at how the National Endowment for the Arts distributed funds for its “Our Town” grant program. In the last three posts on the topic, he has been critical of the way the granting process is structured and executed, perceiving a surprising bias against rural communities given that it takes its name from Thornton Wilder’s play set in a rural location.

Scott’s initial criticism sort of deflated my sails when, by his criteria, the award to the Wallkill River School, Inc. in Orange County, NY where I grew up was not being made to a rural arts organization given the population of the county. I was excited to see that their project whose purpose is “To support the development of economic strategies for long-term, sustainable partnerships between the arts and agriculture in Orange County,” was funded.

I have to concede that the population has increased quite a bit since I was growing up and its psychological distance from New York City has diminished since then. (Though it still qualifies as “way upstate” in minds of NYC residents.)

I was also happy to see that the Trey McIntyre Project (TMP), headquartered in Boise, ID had gotten a grant. (Full disclosure, we will be presenting the dance company in Spring 2012.) Though it isn’t rural per se, Boise qualifies as fly over country in many people’s minds. I have found Trey McIntyre’s decision to locate there rather than NY, Chicago or L.A. to be commendable—and so has the population of Boise who treat them like celebrities. The group has made great efforts to expand the concept of a dance company’s place in the community by appearing anywhere and everywhere from flash mob like performances to dancing at the local NBA farm team games to creating their own art installation in a hotel room (forward to 3:30 to hear McIntyre talk about the installation)

I was also very happy to see a local burgeoning effort in support of Hawaiian culture was funded as well. I can probably devote an entry explaining how valuable this award is going to be in planting seeds for greater things.

All this being said, I felt Walters did a credible job in his entry today arguing that many elements of the application and review process placed rural arts organizations at a disadvantage.

As Walters acknowledge in his analysis on Monday, the NEA did make an attempt to enlist the participation of arts centers in rural areas and didn’t receive a very strong response. However, in reviewing the comments on his failed grant application, Walter notes that the criteria being used to evaluate his application wasn’t appropriate for the project he was proposing.

“When I consulted the NEA as to why my own “Our Town” grant was not funded, the notes from the review committee focused on excellence: WHO is going to be providing the art, and what are their credentials? Notice that my proposal was for a participatory arts program, and so the artists would be members of the community, not imported “professionals” from outside the community. Participatory arts, as the NEA knows from having recently published it own studies on the subject, is about enhancing the creativity of the citizenry. Credentials and press coverage are irrelevant.”

He also notes that since rural arts organizations don’t have large staffs, the three weeks notice they were given between being invited to apply and the deadline was barely enough time to compose a proposal. When they made it past the first stage, they were given only a month to assemble a complete proposal, an immense task given the length of the application and the limited staff with which to do it. These small staffs may also lack the experience and advisers to guide them in infusing the grants with the polish that granters like the NEA have come to expect.

I actually faced a similar situation here. A grant program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities specifically focused on community colleges was announced in June with a deadline in August. One of the things they are looking for is involving up to 12 other colleges in a partnership. So not only do you need to try to assemble a work group of professors and administrators on your own campus during the summer after everyone has scattered to the winds, you have to get buy in from the same nearly non-existent groups on other campuses as well!

Via the citation of a comment by Ian David Moss, Walters wonders if the NEA is suited and equipt to directly pursue its mandate of geographically diverse funding. He discards Moss’ idea of directing more funding to trusted partners in rural states and letting them make decisions in favor of asking the NEA to become more accountable by cultivating stronger relationships with organization that work closely with rural arts groups and making a better effort to recruit people with an understanding of rural arts operations to serve on grant review panels.

While I disagree with Walters’ criteria about what constitutes rural, I am generally with him about the need to make the grant process more accessible to arts organizations in small communities. A decade ago, heck, even 5 years ago, I would have said the NEA faced an immense task trying to identify and reach out to rural organizations. But with email and social media, it is fairly easy to create focused email lists and Twitter feeds with which to deliver information to these groups.

It is just a matter of enlisting the rural arts service organizations that provide support to these groups to assist them in making them aware of the channels the NEA will be using to communicate with them. As Walters suggests, a time table and structure that recognizes both the limitations and different array of opportunities specific to rural arts organizations. Given how few organizations applied, even an increase of participation by a handful of groups will allow the NEA to claim a many fold percent growth in rural program support.

Read full story

Importance of the Personal “Why”

By | on March 8, 2011 | Comments { 1 }

Scott Walters has a couple of entries on Theatre Ideas worth reading if you have a career in the arts or are considering having a career in the arts or if you think an arts degree is useless. (My assumption is there aren’t a lot of the latter in my audience, but if there are, read on.) If you haven’t read his blog before, Walters is a theatre professor who is eminently concerned that higher education theatre arts training programs, are not adequately preparing their students for the the real world upon graduation. This includes reinforcing some unrealistic expectations in the students. Some of his entries have been about how training programs and the system that surrounds them are failing the students, others have been about that and how students can fail themselves.

Given this context, I was interested in reading about how he would answer a theatre major who expressed some trepidation as she was about to graduate. (Part Two appeared today.) While the state of things does weigh heavily on his mind, Walters shows his wisdom by urging his student not to define herself primarily by her theatre degree, but to also make her degree meaningful to herself.

Let’s start with what you have going for you. This has nothing to do with theatre:

1. You’re smart.
2. You’re articulate.
3. You’re likable.
4. You’re educated. (you have a BA)
5. You can work as part of a team. (that’s what shows are based on)
6. You are self-disciplined. (or else you wouldn’t learn your lines and show up for rehearsal when scheduled)
7. You can present yourself in front of people. (acting)
8. You can manage people. (directing)

So you have all the tools to be successful in whatever you do. Remember that — the conventional wisdom that a degree in theatre isn’t useful in “real life” is stupid. Don’t accept the fallacious idea that your options are waiting tables or working temp.

This may sound a lot like one of those rationalizations about how your degree in an apparently less than marketable field really gives you skills applicable in any industry, but he tells her there is some additional work she will have to do to discover what place her degree in theatre will have in her life. He urges her to do some thinking/journaling/talking to discover what her “Why” is. This is related to the post I did on the ““why” that drives big companies, only on a personal level. Again, he urges her not to define her why specifically in relation to theatre. In today’s sequel entry he says:

“Also, beware of this phrase: “Theatre is the only way I know…” To put it bluntly, theatre isn’t the only way to do anything. If that’s the only way you know how to do something, then you need to use your imagination a bit more, because there are lots of ways to accomplish a “why.” So you say ” Theatre is the only way I know to throw what I think I know and believe out there- to bounce it off someone else’s life, their perspective, their beliefs- and get an immediate response.” Really? What about more direct, less mediated ways like, say, having a conversation or writing an email or giving a speech on a street corner? Wouldn’t those options also involve saying what you believe and getting an immediate response? Wouldn’t it be more direct to become a minister or a politician rather than an actor? And are you really saying that, as an actress, you will always be speaking about what you think you know and believe? When you do that industrial, or TV commercial, or get that gig in Jersey Boys, will you be speaking your truths? Or will you, instead, be providing the mouthpiece to speak somebody else’s truths?”

It occurred to me as I read this that there should be an expectation of a type of two way street. If we want people to value their activities watching movies, singing in the church choir, dancing, writing, etc as arts participation, it is only reasonable that we encourage people with arts training to values their general abilities and activities in a non-arts context. After all, if we want to advance the value of arts education and creativity to business and industry, it would seem appropriate that we advocate employment/involvement in non-arts business and industry to those with arts training. The burden for making a case for creativity can’t be borne by the accountant who was in high school band alone. There have to be some exemplars from the arts world standing up too. What Walters says about arts people not selling themselves short by defining this as being a temp or waitress is right on the money.

Read full story