Arts Education for Community Development

By Amar C. Bakshi

 

Aina Arts Mission Statement

Aina Arts is a not-for-profit organization whose aim is to provide the benefits of an arts education by promoting the use of local art forms, materials and methods with children in marginalized communities globally. In a rapidly interconnecting world, cultures run the risk of being subsumed by a dominant culture. We seek to promote local art forms through work with young people around the world, bringing together communities, using the arts to converse, and valuing the unique ideas behind all forms of artistic representation.[i]

 

Paper Overview

By extrapolating upon my experiences founding Aina Arts, I hope to situate the project within a larger discussion about the role of art in community empowerment.  This past summer, I brought 12 undergraduates to work with 200 children across 5 underprivileged schools in the visual and performing arts in Mussoorie, India.  To accomplish this end, I have split this paper into eight sections that describe relevant literature in the arts education and community cultural development fields, put forth tentative critiques on existing writings, and unite my own personal history with a future vision for Aina Arts.  I will discuss elementary education in India, cultural benefits of education, theories of the role of art in the life of the student and the citizen, and the future plans of Aina Arts.

Personal History

In America

Born to immigrant parents who vowed never to return to India, I was brought up in a home that stressed the need for total assimilation.  Despite their proclamations to the contrary, I was well aware of my parents’ struggle with the vestiges of their old customs on new soil. The periods just before bedtime were the most violent.  After my two scientist parents returned from two days at work, they would look at one house, bed, and child waiting for them. They had come to America with great expectations: my mother to escape the fate of becoming another Indian servant-spouse, my father to find spectacular success.

My mother found that the habits and requirements of the old country refused to submit easily to her new demands; my father found that the future he had envisioned for himself required more savvy and connections than he had come equipped with.  Regardless of their feuds, my parents were of a shared mind that I should not have to carry their immigrant bags. I was to study English, keep far from other Indian families, and avoid close contact with my grandparents and extended family.  These were “backward” influences, “sexist, narrow-minded and lazy” that I should not be misled by.

While cultural habits can fade after one generation, skin color cannot.  In high school I was the only brown-skinned boy in my grade, and over-time, I devoted more and more attention, consciously and unconsciously, toward the nature of the difference between my peers and I.  The arts provided me with a powerful tool for exploring this intercultural division.  In painting, I crafted intricate forms that mirrored the miniature tradition of the moguls while setting them against vast color swathes harkening to Rothko. Though perhaps I did not realize it then, I was searching for reconciliation between a desire to assimilate fully and a need to locate some distinct sense of self. When I discovered the stage, a new world of exploration opened before me.  Suddenly, I realized that I did not have to seek answers alone.  Embodying characters on stage from Romeo to Sakina allowed me to experience the complexity of others' lives, share my journey with my peers, and encourage laughter, empathy and introspection in an audience. I found that I could tell my schoolmates what I felt even as I discovered it for myself.

Through my engagement with the theater, I began to sense the role of art in education and community dialogue.  Starting in my junior year, I worked with the children of abused women in painting, sculpture and reading.  In college, I worked with juvenile sex offenders in unleashing the expressive potential of creative writing.  We read Ginsberg and I watched them adapt their appreciation of him into a profound rap.  At the end of my freshman year, I encountered a community of heroin abusers in Harvard Square and strove to give them voice through a collaborative video.  I was coming to see the many ways in which the arts affects meaningful, positive social change by cultivating individual understanding, confidence and sense of agency in others, and by fostering group dialogue, addressing pressing social issues, and developing the group-solidarity necessary for collective action.

To India

When I was fifteen years old, my mother developed a deep need to return to her hometown of Mussoorie to find an underprivileged girl to carry her through the best schooling possible.  My mother had left India so abruptly that some parts of her past still haunted her. She had traveled to India, to “exorcise her demons”, she claimed.  It was a quest for her to separate her personal suffering from the wider culture.  She wanted to selectively re-appropriate parts of her past – and she wanted me to join in this process.

Before we headed up to Mussoorie from New Delhi, we stopped at the Indian National Gallery of Art, as I had requested. The gallery carried only about thirty contemporary works, but I was immediately struck by the similarity of their works to mine.  Those characteristics that made my work distinct in my home in Washington DC including the wide color ranges and the co-inhabitation of intricate forms and massive brushstrokes were evident in nearly all of these Indian works.  I noted, or perhaps felt, that we were all painting – this community of artists and I – with a different method than the standard Western practice.  We were striving toward core idea, subtlety and resolution by embracing hybridity, by casting a wide net out onto human experiences and examining what we had pulled in.  We were appealing to a core idea by pushing at form's outer limits, letting an idea well-up within an elaborate shell.

I was already amazed by how much of myself, in some inexplicable way, was connected with this foreign country, and how close art-making had brought me to realizing these links. As we traveled for several weeks between the old haunts of my mother, I watched as she re-engaged the country she had spent years struggling to free herself. We sought after her young caretaker now living in the Ajmulcar slums, found the store of her rich auntie who helped her family through difficult times, and the park where, as a child, she had suffered from abuse.

            It was both an inspirational and troubling period for me.  Imagining her childhood was shocking for me; as young girl, she was mistreated or forgotten by much of her society.  More troublingly still, the suffering she endured still persists today in social mores that discriminate against women and in an overburdened educational system that does not teach them adequately.

 

Primary Education in India, especially in Mussoorie

When I first saw the Kozi Government School in Mussoorie, India, my impulse was to throw money at the painful situation, to turn away.  But my mother’s example showed me that personal engagement affects positive change best.  Yet the difficulties confronting teachers and children alike in many primary Indian schools are immense and often heartbreaking. In the Kozi Government School, an exhausted teacher with only several books to reference resorts to a stick to punish miscreants rather than chalk to elaborate lesson plans. Kids read in near silence in poorly lit rooms for four or five hours a day.  When speaking is encouraged by a teacher, girls tend to be painfully reticent.  Similarly, many children from lower socio-economic stations scarcely speak in class at all and are more likely to skip school altogether.[ii] 

Occasionally, hired monitors check up on underpaid teachers to make sure they do not sell the children’s government allotted food to passer-bys.  The teachers often sell it to the monitors instead.  Local NGOs and other teachers are fighting to fill this void. All-girls’ schools with citizen boards of overseers such as the Mussoorie Government School provided women with a more attentive education and a greater awareness of specific needs.¹  Similarly, rural communities with partnerships with local NGOs are able to recruit several volunteers from the organization to occasionally provide needed assistance in the classroom.  These community efforts showed that what was lacking in these schools was certainly not intelligence but engaged, personal attention, inspiration and community involvement.

National Statistics

India has the largest number of out-of-school children of any country in the world, amounting to 22% of the global total. One third of children aged 6-14 are out of school.  Likewise, one third of adults are illiterate.  Of these illiterate adults, 36% are men, while 61% are women. Girls and members of the untouchable caste run a far higher chance of being out of school.[iii]  The disparity in educational attainment mirrors and perpetuates broader social inequities that have plagued India since at least the Brahmanical Age. To make matters worse, there is a striking correlation between low school enrolment, low pupil retention, high illiteracy, high gender disparity, and high fertility.[iv]

Regional Variation

            There is wide variation across India in the severity of these social ills.  In parts of Rajasthan, only 8% of women are literate while in the Kottayam district of Kerala, 94% of women can read.  These vast variations in educational attainment correlate with variation in district funding of education.  Much like America’s state-centered education policy, most planning, testing and monitoring of educational quality happens at the district (state-size) level, not at the national level.  Just as in Alabama $3000 USD is spent per pupil versus New Jersey’s $10,000, variations of this ratio exist across India as well, reflecting varying priorities and resources. On average, the teacher-student ratio of an Indian classroom is 1-51, but in the rural villages, it can run as low as 1-168.  India’s rural schools rarely have more than two teachers; only 72% of them have them have pucca (“certain”) buildings and classrooms.  Many rural schools exist in name only.³

Federal Policy

            Policy statements at the national level emphasize the important role of education in promoting social equity for girls and harijans (untouchables).  These statements set broad national goals but vest significant authority for local goal-making and implementation in regional districts which in turn pass the responsibility on, especially in rural settings, to local punchiyats (village councils). The quality of the schools that these local councils help to establish varies greatly depending on the resources of the community and the commitment of the punchiyat to education.[v]

 

General Cultural Benefits of Education

            When evaluating education, two broad questions arise: 1) what good does it do for the future economic productivity of a student, 2) what good does it do for the civic, moral and inner growth of a student. How does a student prepare a girl or boy for both the workforce and the town hall, or local punchiyat meeting?

While education clearly improves the efficiency of labor (for example, in India, four years of primary schooling raises a farmer’s output by 7%), perhaps the greatest benefits of education come through personal change seen on the macro level in certain cultural shifts.  A South Asian woman with a secondary education is three times more likely to attend a political meeting than her uneducated counterpart.  In Gujarat, controlling for income, regions of higher average educational attainment suffer a marked one-sixth less violent crime.[vi] 

These cultural shifts are too often passed off as the consequence of economic advance. Yet scholars like Amartya Sen in his Nobel Prize winning book have repeatedly pointed out how increased communications can reduce political corruption thereby counteracting wide-scale famine.  Indeed, food is not in shortage in India, the distribution lines manned by bureaucrats are fraught with roadblocks.  I contend that arts education is the way to open communicative channels and cultivate the group-oriented action necessary to achieve real-world change.

 

Arts Education Policy and Practice in India

            At the national level, arts education is treated as an important part of the curriculum.  The Indian education ministry recommends 10% of weekly school time be allotted to promoting the performing and visual arts.  Moreover, the government emphasizes the importance of drawing on local traditions to do so.  Yet the execution of this training is left entirely up to the inspiration of local teachers as there are few statewide curricular recommendations for carrying out this work.  In poorer, understaffed schools, art education is often ignored along with other vital subject areas. 

In elite, private schools, the artistic training carried out is usually in preparation for a national board exam in arts.  Ironically, these exams do not accord with the policy laid out by the national ministry. The national art board exams are based on the vestiges of colonialism that evaluate art-making only in three fields: 1) portraiture, 2) landscape painting and 3) figure drawing.  This standardized arts testing, though reserved only for a wealthy few, is potentially damaging in its influence on arts education in the rest of the country as it relies on outdated, culturally insensitive evaluative criteria.

            The policy of the national government laid out in 1986, though it is yet to be instituted and consistently monitored, has overthrown many of the narrow-mindedness vestigial colonial sensibilities. In the National Policy on Education of 1986, the Indian government set forth the following priorities:

The existing schism between the formal system of education and the country's rich and varied cultural traditions need to be bridged. The preoccupation with modern technologies cannot be allowed to sever our new generations from the roots in India's history and culture.  De-culturization, de-humanization and alienation must be avoided at all costs. Education can and must bring about the fine synthesis between change-oriented technologies and the country's continuity of cultural tradition.

The curricula and processes of education will be enriched by cultural content in as many manifestations as possible. Children will be enabled to develop sensitivity to beauty, harmony and refinement. Resource persons in the community, irrespective of their formal educational qualifications, will be invited to contribute to the cultural enrichment of education, employing both the literate and oral traditions of communication. To sustain and carry forward the cultural tradition, the role of old masters, who train pupils through traditional modes will be supported and recognized. [Italics: mine]

Though I found this policy statement well after Aina had finished its first year, I find these words to elegantly encapsulate many of the goals of Aina Arts.

 

The Genesis of Aina Arts

As my mother set about from school to school in search of the talented girl who could best use her support, I met a vast array of teachers and social workers who told me about their lives and asked me about mine.  I told them about my childhood in America, and the important role of art in mediating an intercultural divide as I grew. Repeatedly, I encountered shock when I defined “art” as one of my interests.  Teachers and kids alike would ask, “what do you mean by that?”, “do you learn that in school?”  I tried to explain what art making had meant to me.  I did not realize at that time the immense differences between my own and their conceptions of the role of art in life.

I kept in close correspondence with the educators and community leaders I had met on that first trip over the following three years.  I returned frequently with my mother or father to Mussoorie.  Gradually, through many conversations, an idea emerged for an arts program for children in underprivileged schools in Mussoorie. I had proposed to make two community art pieces: a public mural and a public theater piece made by and performed by the children.  This would be good for many reasons, I argued: it would bring parents into the folds of neglected school communities, it would give a chance for children to show off their education, it would empower those without a voice through wok in a communicative, non-judgemental medium.

 

First Experiences and Lessons Learned

            Having organized enough funding, significant Harvard support, and whittled down over 100 prospective volunteers to 12, I traveled to India in March 2004 to make final arrangements, organize on-the-ground logistics, and start gathering support from local Indian artists and art educators.  The first artist I spoke to stopped me dead in my tracks.

Shakti Maira, the best friend of one of my professors at Harvard, sat me down in his studio in one of the few quiet corners of a Delhi neighborhood block and asked me: “Do they make murals in Mussoorie? Do they need art in this form to engage social meaning?”  This question spiraled me into deep re-evaluations and re-considerations.  Indeed, I was overlooking the critical importance that local materials and habits hold in art.  The very fact that I paint in oils while Mussoorie natives might instead embroider is too significant to overlook.

Shakti said to me something then that he wrote in India’s major national paper, The Times of India, five months later as he reflected on the Aina Project:

...in Indian art culture there had been no division  between fine arts and crafts for the longest time. Only in the last 200 years had this division arrived with European colonization. In Indian culture one  finds a range and depth of art in everyday things: saris, shawls, utensils, household tools, decorations, floor and wall paintings, road shrines and toys, and that art in India is a way of knowing, learning, teaching and transmitting  values. So to find Indian art and its visual languages we must look for it in this broader context, in everyday things and customs.

Four months after my first visit with him, Shakti was fully on board with Aina, excited by the results, and rallying his friends to this work.  In the context of the article, the paragraph said, Aina got something right.

 

The Project

Theoretical Questions

         In our first week in Mussoorie working with the children, we asked them to draw anything they wanted. They all made precisely the same image of a house, river and mountain (Fig.1). We were puzzled: where did this uniform image come from? About nine days into the project a group member noticed the same image on mass-produced tapestries hanging in every storefront. We were determined to break the children out of drawing this mass-produced image.  But with this conviction, we were forced to consider the value we placed on individual creativity.  Teachers and artists alike urged us not to fall in the trap of valuing “originality” so much that we overlook the creativity of the individual who prizes himself or herself for his role/function/position within a social whole.

         We found that nearly all work we assigned was done by groups of children. Moreover, these groups were very likely to copy images, words or ideas directly from another source and had no qualms about saying "this is mine".  By our standards, this was false, but because they placed foremost value in the process of making, even in the act of re-creating, we learned to temper our criticism. Gradually we opened our eyes to more and more artistic practices of Mussoorie’s past and present by attending festivals, visiting temples, entering homes and even researching in libraries.

         As we learned about the community’s rich artistic past and constantly confronted the mass-production that village elders claimed was “threatening their culture”, we were very concerned about how to encourage indigenous art-making without imposing a “backwards imposition dilemma”.  By seeking to promote local art forms with only external knowledge, we worried that we might be reviving dead artistic traditions and causing a social retrogression. We were there to engage in art-making as tradition, synthesis and discovery.  In that vein, we also wondered if we ought to introduce foreign technologies or if that caused yet another problem of imposition: giving means that weren’t sustainable.

         The omnipresence of photographic images and Bollywood film were impossible to overlook.  These helped us to conclude that if there are mediums and materials that the kids are influenced by but have no control over like photography and film, providing these materials becomes a matter of developing agency over life influences.  We could not ignore this need. Aina’s goal was and is to help adapt these new technologies to fit the role of arts as determined by Mussoorie society and culture. We decided to steer clear of recreating a specific type of art that only inhabited Mussoorie’s past, instead discussing it in relation to the present.  While form might change rapidly we realized, process and intention are more deeply ingrained.  Therein lay the import of our attention to local traditions.

         We had to question our ideas of the importance of product at all.  We wondered: could it be that the ritual and repetitive process of creation is a form of art-making even if the product is a recreation of a previous product, or if it is summarily destroyed?  We concluded that products are not the only manifestations of art; many ceremonies and celebrations that perform carefully prescribed rituals are rich in aesthetic beauty and social meaning; Buddhist mandala artists spend ages on a sand image that the wind sweeps away in a moment.

Process Plans

To record our work across different mediums, we developed “process plans” off of each project we developed.  First we researched the different artistic forms, broadly defined, in the community.  Then, we provided the materials necessary for these artworks to children, letting them create anything they wanted with them.  They would change the lyrics of an old song, or add Bollywood dance to a traditional play. Christian children would use materials that for years had been employed in making conventional miniature Hindu shrines to create nativity scenes. By always asking why the kids chose different approaches, being very clear that we were seeking not to criticize but to come to understand, we engaged the process of their art-making directly and developed a replicable method for engaging social issues through art. 

Successes

            Aina’s method yielded some great results. Teachers in the community said that they had never seen the children so energized; they had never seen them “think outside the box like that”.  By the end of our time with the Kozi school the young children were not just sitting in a silent room and reading, but actually enacting lessons from their texts, using rangolis to celebrate their school, and Gharwali traditional song to address equity in education. 

            One group of thirty children in the Mussoorie Public Girls School (aged 14-16) used theater and sari costumes to explore issues of gender discrimination in their school environment, putting their show on before their whole school and the wider Mussoorie community.  Hindu, Muslim and Christian children reclaimed a vacant post-partition Muslim home using symbols in painting to open the building to all religious faiths. Aina collaborated with a local ecological NGO in a rural village school community of children ranging in age from 14-18.  Using clay and cow-dung, we made sculptures with the children about deforestation in their subsistence community.  The kids have since formed a social action group called Prakrati ("Nature") using arts to confront social issues and develop practical means of action.  Their model is being emulated by neighboring villages. With each group, for their final projects, we brought parents, teachers, NGO heads and community leaders to watch their work.

 

 

John Dewey and the Development of a Foundational Theory

Now that Aina Arts’ initial effort is complete and I am back in Cambridge, reading and reflecting, I am constantly coming across practitioners and philosophers who situate Aina within a broader theoretical framework and provide some direction for its future.  

            Shakti Maira’s writings on the role of art in Indian life could easily be mistaken for John Dewey’s words in his work Art as Experience.  Dewey refuses to define art-making as a purely aesthetic exploration divorced from daily life and practical considerations.  He defines art broadly as “a quality that permeates experience”(326). Within Dewey’s definition, the idea of art for art’s sake is scarcely possible for any activity that engages the expressive potential of a subject and strives to communicate individual needs or aspirations through action in the material world is art-making.  Communication through action is art.[vii]

Dewey cites historic Athens as a place when art most explicitly united the practical, the social and the educative in an integrated whole having aesthetic form.  He argues that in Athens, which many regard “as the home par excellence of epic and lyric poetry, of the arts of drama, architecture and sculpture, the idea of art for art’s sake would not have been understood.”  Indeed, theater was performed only on holy days and attendance was, as Dewey sees it, “of the nature of an act of civic worship”. Dewey argues that Plato’s rebuke of Homer and Hesoid is a “tribute to the social and even political influence exercised by those arts [in Athens]”.  Dewey even goes so far as to state that the decay of art, its degeneration into imitation of archaic models, is a sign of “the general loss of civic consciousness”.  When communities cease to imbue their work with artistry and no longer communicate with other citizens via art-making, civic life decays.

Dewey laments that in a world in which mass production on one extreme and the gallery-based fetishization of art-making on the other, American society is becoming separated from its inherent artistry, alienated from a basic quality of all experience, to engage one’s own expressive potential and pull others in by it.  Dewey quotes Lippman approvingly when he says “the modern gallery is idiosyncratic, chaotic and unimportant”(340).  Dewey calls not for a democratization of high art, but for the grassroots re-appropriation of the artistic experience.  This distinction is essential to Aina’s philosophy as well.

As an educator, Dewey saw himself as a social agent helping to construct a healthier future society.  In The School and Society, Dewey argues that contemporary education breeds a generation lacking the agency and imagination necessary to forge positive social change.  Just as art-making has been divorced from daily activity by production en-masse and unfettered market pressures, the education of children has similarly been mass-delivered.  Desks squeezed tightly together provide no room to experiment or create, only enough to write notes and read in silence.  Dewey expresses great concern that the child is given no reason to “demand education”, no clear need for school; furthermore, he or she is never given the opportunity to make the ideas discussed in the classroom real.

Dewey argues that schools must engage children’s four instincts to communicate with one another, to construct objects for use, to investigate and critically examine questions, and to create art.  The fourth art-making instinct he explains is a refinement of impulses to make objects and to communicate.  If done properly, Dewey suggests that arts education can make the educative experience more relevant and engaging for the child.  It can also help to democratize the classroom, breaking down oppressive dependency of the pupil’s mind upon the teacher’s.

But art education, Dewey clarifies, cannot be carried out carelessly.  If one just indulges a child’s every whim as he or she makes art, then the accidental might be all the teacher will draw out. This is not sufficient.  The educator must let the child express his or her creative impulses but it is only through criticism, questions, and suggestion that the teacher can bring the child to a consciousness of what he or she has done.  After seeing this standard work, Dewey gives an example of a seven-year-old child drawing the “conventional tree of childhood” with a vertical line cross-hatched by horizontal branches.  Dewey tells the child to look closely at real trees outside, to compare those seen with the one drawn, and to examine closely and consciously the conditions of his work.  The child next attempted to draw trees from observation several times until he once again drew a tree but now combining observation, memory and imagination (fig.2).  With this new formulation in which the standard tree-symbol has been personalized and enriched through concentrated experience directing the artistic impulse, Dewey sees the poetic feeling of an adult work, important for the artist and the viewer.  This means of putting forms and tools in the service of experience is essential for Dewey.  We do not live for the schoolroom, but the schoolroom for us.  Dewey urges communities to reclaim education in the service of social life through dialogue between students, constructions in schools, investigative lessons, and expression through art-making.  Dewey closes his chapter with the claim, “culture shall be the democratic password”.[viii]

Indeed, art-making is integrally involved with the type of communication that defines civil society in a democratic polity.  Different interest groups communicate with one another in order to reach compromise and social cohesion, sacrificing some wants for some successes.  In order to avoid a tyranny of the educated (or at least, politically educated), from turning a democracy into a knowledge-based technocracy, it is of vital importance that the values of civic engagement and the tools of communication be instituted early on in life. Dewey does away with the distinction between emotional communication through art and rational debate through politics.  Yet while art may infuse politically motivated actions, Dewey does not explicitly define the act of creating as a manifestation of democratic participation.  Here, Aina differs with Dewey and argues that it should be considered as such.

            Art is a universal language.  It does not require of its speaker to change himself or herself in order to employ it.  We all have it, from our society, our upbringing, the images, mores and values that surround us.  It is important that what has happened to art: the genesis of the idea of “art for art’s sake” not plague broader culture.  “Culture for culture’s sake” does not make sense!  We must not preserve tribal communities like anthropological exhibits. That is not why culture is valuable in the modern world (if we argue for it on those lines, it will fall the fate of many endangered species: first exoticization, then esotericization, then extinction). We must see the manner in which art helps everyone to realize the value his or her own thoughts.  If one were to ask many of the young girls’ we worked with some form of the question: “Do you have anything worth saying? Anything you want others to hear?” the answer, I predict, would be a quiet “no”.  This quiet “no” underlies gender discrimination in rural India, underlies caste and religious intolerance and subordination.  Yes, economic support helps, but more is needed.

            It is important for America, if we wish to advance democracy abroad, that we translate the word both in literary and practical terms.  We must empower people to communicate without enforcing an entirely new mode of using language (for there are many forms of expression), and without implicitly calling for a new way of life.  Furthermore, even if we were to say debate is the best way for a functioning democracy, immediately implementing the wide-scale educational programs necessary to achieve that end would be infeasible, and most likely a misguided use of scarce resources. The tools for civic engagement are embedded in community culture. When one asks a child in Mussoorie “what is beautiful?”, answers include: trees, flowers, red, mother and education.  They do not include: Picasso, Tagore, chandeliers and minimalist sculpture.  This is not to say one and not the other form of art engages social meanings.  It is rather to suggest that social meanings are more or less explicit in different works.  In India, community arts are poised to engage widespread social meanings.  Of course, Picasso’s Guernica, Tagore’s poetry and minimalist sculpture speak to wide senses of senseless violence, atomization, the victory of form etc. 

Art is both appeal to ideas, emotions and aspirations, and practical, rational guides to action. In the recent disastrous Tsunami, a tribe in the Maldives sang an age-old song that warned them to run to the mountains when rumblings were felt in the earth.  The whole community survived.  A clear, practical, rational lesson was embedded in the content of song. Less explicit moral, practical and social advice lies in both form and content of artistic work.  Those stories that tell of police corruption or urge for loving one’s enemy guide life in very real ways and are constantly “debated” through re-interpretations, and even re-writings, of old songs.  The debate rages as a community seeks to re-vise or re-write cultural heritages. 

This process is ongoing, incorporating new technologies, new ideas, new material conditions, but also exerting a through-line, a story-board, or an “over-medium” in which all community participants implicitly know how to engage.  It is as if a community, rather than speaking, chose to paint to convey lessons, meanings and requests.  Of course no one medium ever dominates a culture, but there are selective weights, implicit valuations and means of understanding that unite all those who strive to speak within it.  These voices are valuable and can affect real world change at the community and national political level if our ears are open

           

Future Plans

Near Future

            Aina will continue its work in India, and will expand its reaches as an Aina alum leads a new team to Zimbabwe.  We stand to learn a great deal about how arts education can effect change among communities in dictatorship, how radically different cultural forces can be engaged, and how this model can be expanded to even more locales in the future.  In this effort, it is important that we identify areas of future research in the field, and that we forge as many on-the-ground partnerships as possible. For the near future, Aina needs to solidify its philosophical position and converse with similar groups to isolate its core competency.   We will also use video and written materials to elaborate our “process plan” methodology for other art educators and community cultural development workers.

Farther Future

One day, I propose an international social service/study initiative be established within the “History, Culture and Education” division of the US Department of State to send American students interested in art education to do cooperative fieldwork in India.

Uniting Aina’s work with the US government would help to foster cultural diplomacy, and quantitatively evaluating the benefits of arts education in Indian primary schools.  Though Aina Arts relied only on the approval of individual town governments, if this model is one day replicated across India, we would undertake a more cumbersome national approval process.⁴ This would require significant managerial resources and US government support.  One day, it would be thrilling to see Aina collaborate with UNESCO, UNICEF or UNDP, India’s Ministry of Education and the US government to implement arts education initiatives on a national level and keep US students involved in performing needed social service work abroad.

            One day, Aina arts could even run projects internationally in Sri Lanka, Israel, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Iraq that would help communities realize that they can effect change with a pen, a brush, a voice and a movement to help better the world.  This sense of agency, of empowerment through local art forms is desperately needed as peoples connect across borders and old ways of life are forced to face new challenges. Respectful dialogue, compromise and understanding are at a premium.  Art education is an essential international strategy for the modern world and Aina will lead the way in developing it.

Bibliography