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Home > Voices of Innovation > Interview with Una McAlinden
Interview with Una McAlinden
Executive Director, ArtsEd Washington
 Under Una's leadership, ArtsEd Washington has accomplished a lot, including securing more than 10 state-level proclamations and resolutions in support of Arts Education Month. Una is also the recipient of two state leadership awards. Her interview includes some amazing food for thought regarding success in local advocacy and keeping arts in schools.
- Talk about ArtsEd Washington's role in education reform across the state and how you address this issue.
- How have the country's economic challenges impacted the efforts of ArtsEd Washington?
- How did you decide to create your own Arts Education month?
- What did you do to develop the Arts Education month? Who were your most important partners and how did you work with them?
- What types of advocacy and community engagement actions did ArtsEd Washington and its supporters take, and what were the outcomes?
- Do you have plans for year 2? If so, what are you changing, adding, etc. What did you learn from your first year?
- Describe a challenge in engaging parents and how you dealt with the challenge
- What does leadership mean to your work with ArtsEd Washington?
- What advice can you give to other programs who are interested in following your lead?
1. What is ArtsEd Washington's role in education reform across the state and how do you address equity?
Quality education for our young people is the "paramount duty" of the state. But the data here in Washington confirms what we see everywhere – learning in and through the arts is not available to all and often least available to the students that need it most – those who are struggling with traditionally taught reading and math. We're working to reframe the arts as a way to achieve equitable access to creative teaching and learning in the context of the whole child so that all kids get what they need to fulfill their potential. We take on these issues in what I call a David vs. Goliath way!
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Hear how ArtsEd Washington's been doing this over the last few years
In 2005, the Governor created a task force, Washington Learns, to report on the education system and propose reforms. We got involved by reaching out to those on the task force with whom we had a connection to start a collaborative dialogue. The result was that one of the five guiding principles of the report to the Governor was "Bringing Creativity into the Classroom".
Since then we've remained present and engaged, building relationships with policymakers, gaining their respect, and offering our support, while seeking the ongoing inclusion of the arts and creativity in their forums and policy decisions.
My personal approach is to infiltrate the mainstream education conversation and directly ask our leaders to include the arts in their education discussions.
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2. How have the country's economic challenges impacted the efforts of ArtsEd Washington?
Schools and districts here are having as tough a time as any. The key thing for us, as for any non-profit in this financial climate, is to be relevant and responsive. We've always operated very frugally, and have focused program design on systems-change and sustainability, so ArtsEd Washington itself is currently fairly strong.
The work we have done to develop local leaders as arts education supporters is paying dividends –schools and districts with these leaders are respecting the importance of their arts programs in making budget choices, and not gouging out complete programs just to make a budget balance.
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Hear more on how ArtsEd Washington is developing local leaders
We have also been able to provide centralized support and messaging for parents and other advocates at the community level. We've heard sad stories, though, about short-term, short sighted decisions. There's always going to be more that we wish we could have done but I've learned a lot about how to build community ownership and leadership of these issues, and we feel ready to help communities rebuild from where they are when the dust settles.
With everything the country faces, some people feel this is not the time to advocate for the arts, but we'll lose more ground if we don't. Going back to my comment about being relevant – it's important to look at what issues are priorities for our schools right now (drop out, achievement gap, early learning, community engagement, whatever it might be) and step forward with the arts as a solution.
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3. How did you decide to create your own Arts Education month?
We started with an Arts Education Week in partnership with a retail bookstore chain to draw attention to our annual meeting in 2006. Then, working with our State Arts Agency, the idea emerged to ask the Governor to officially proclaim the week. We did the one week effort for three years and found that in some ways, it was defeating the purpose. Too many activities were being crammed into one week when the real issue we wanted to highlight was the need for arts education all year round. This year, we decided to ask the Governor to proclaim a "month" and really focus on activating communities to ask their leaders to say that the arts are important, and to do this via a local school board resolution or a city council proclamation. We modeled the process for local communities by seeking the resolutions and proclamations from state level entities, such as the state Senate and House, the State Board of Education, and the "mainstream" education entities such as the Association of School Board Directors.
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4. What did you do to develop the Arts Education month? Who were your most important partners and how did you work with them?
The concept began with a calendar of activities and has evolved with the development of tools and structures to support local leadership speaking up (and asking others to speak up) for the arts in schools. This year we provided templates for requesting proclamations locally, press materials, talking points and curtain speeches. We adapted excellent tools from our sister organization, California Alliance for Arts Education, to help bring local policymakers into the schools to attend Arts Education Month events.
From the start, our key partners have been the state arts agency (WSAC) and the state education agency (OSPI). This year, we enlisted many other partners including State PTA, Washington Education Association, and all the arts educator groups. For example, we provided ready-to-send paragraphs with links to our website for their electronic newsletters, and reached over 200,000 people this way. This was amazing -- our own direct subscriber list is only 2000! And our website had a 500% increase in unique visitors from spring of last year, mainly because of the tools and concerted promotional work.
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5. What types of advocacy and community engagement actions did ArtsEd Washington and its supporters take, and what were the outcomes?
The main thing that ArtsEd Washington did was ask leaders to speak up for arts education. More than 20 local, regional and state-level entities made Board resolutions and municipal proclamations in support of Arts Education Month and a range of strategic partners helped increase public awareness through e-newsletters, blogs, and Web sites.
We saw a major increase in activity in several locations beyond the immediate Seattle/Puget Sound. In one island community, the County Council and the School Board each passed proclamations recognizing May as Arts Education Month. The community arts center Board of Directors also passed a resolution and associated all of their May education programs with Arts Education Month and the local paper published three stories about the Month.
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Hear about other community actions and outcomes
In another community in the eastern part of the state where we've developed strong relationships and convened local leaders, the Educational Service District stepped up with enthusiasm, funding a series of advertisements about Arts Education Month in several local papers.
Arts Education Month proclamations were often read aloud at public meetings - School Boards, City and County Council, which are often televised. Local arts organizations also used their unique communication outlets to increase public awareness of Arts Education Month, including promotions in their programs or playbills, and information about the Month in their student program press releases.
In the Fall, when school reconvenes we’ll be encouraging people to appear before the same boards again and say…"Remember the resolution when you said the arts were essential to every child's education? Well, since that's how you feel, we're asking you to….. put the arts on the Board's agenda at future meetings, or create a policy to this effect, or allocate resources, etc" In other words, the parents and advocates needs to ensure that this is more than lip service by following up.
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6. Do you have plans for year 2? If so, what are you changing, adding, etc. What did you learn from your first year?
It's clear to me that the area we need to deepen is community engagement and the catalyzing of local leaders. So, here's the challenge: how do we empower parents (and the larger community but primarily parents), to demand arts education for their kids? I read something in the Dana publication, "Arts Education in the News" that gave me pause. Janet Eilber said that the parents we are seeking to mobilize now were the kids who suffered from the lack of arts in schools in the 70s and 80s. So, we have a double hill to climb. First we have to help them realize why it’s important and then we have to get them to act!
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7. Describe a challenge in engaging parents and how you dealt with the challenge
In some communities, parents get involved to "teach" the arts – providing a docent program of some sort. Now, it's always wonderful to have parents help in schools, but we need to think about the message we're sending by taking on this role. We're saying: "we know you don’t have time to do this, so don’t worry, we'll let you off the hook…" Never mind the state standards, requirements for highly qualified teachers, and the fact that this is a core subject. One principal that we work with has started to say: "Why are we delegating the arts to the parents? What other core subject should we do that with? What if we ask the parents to come in once a month and teach the math curriculum?" He's catalyzing leadership with this because he's making them think about the implications.
What I'm wrestling with is how to help other parents see that they need to get involved by asking schools and districts to take the lead and own this responsibility. That's the emphasis I'd like us to take next year but I don’t know what it looks like yet.
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8. What does leadership mean to your work with ArtsEd Washington?
Leadership, to me, is the realization that you have a voice, that your voice has power, and then finding the courage to use it. I try to model that, and catalyze it at ArtsEd Washington both with how we operate and with the creation of the tools to help others speak up also. I also seek to nurture it in my daughters, now 12 and 15. They have been sending messages with me on my visits to Congress for several years and were overjoyed one year to get signed photos back from Senator Cantwell! We go to Olympia (our state capitol) on school holidays during session, so they can talk to legislators about the things that are important to them.
As citizens, we chose the people who represent us at federal, state and school board levels when we voted for them. But it doesn't end there. We have a duty to remind them what we want for our kids, and provide them with appropriate information so they make good decisions, where these pertain to arts learning.
But to do that, we have to be informed ourselves. I knew very little about this issue ten years ago. In fact, I would say I took the arts for granted. But my older daughter started kindergarten, and I quickly discovered that I couldn't assume she’d get arts in school. So I set out to learn the system and find out about the arts: were there standards? Yes. Were there assessments? The timeline was in place for implementation, so yes. What was our school and district doing to help kids reach the standards in the arts? The answer there was not much. So that's where I started…. And it just snowballed.
It's both that easy – and that difficult – to get involved. You have to choose: do you want to make a difference?
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9. What advice can you give to other programs who are interested in following your lead?
- First of all - "Catch them doing good" - thank state and local leaders every time they do anything that benefits arts learning. It's a basic parenting skill too -- high praise for the right choices will do more to prevent a future poor choice that a scolding ever will!
- Secondly - Stay informed about what's happening in other parts of the country. Too often, we neglect that crucial piece of professional development, reading the latest news.
- Third - If possible, attend Arts Education Partnership forums and connect to others doing similar work. This was one of the most important things I did.
- Number four - Learn from others – don't reinvent the wheel. We based some of the Arts Education Month tools on the CAAE's Arts Learning in Action toolkit, with their permission. When I encounter something, it helps to see how my sister organizations in the Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network might be addressing a similar issue.
- Lastly - See what other fields are doing in community and grassroots engagement. It's a given that any five-year-old can talk about how we need to do our part to save the earth. But 10 years ago, it was a different story for the environmental movement, so how did they get there? We need to make the arts a "given" for every single child, and we can't do that by only talking to ourselves. So let's get out there!
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