Advocacy is a Journey

 We share our journey to lay the groundwork for how we became arts advocates--this story may be familiar to you.

As new teachers, we thought that teaching students art was enough.  We had not realized that many of our colleagues, administrators and parents didn't value the arts as we did.  Though the students understood the importance of our class, we were still being viewed as babysitters or bulletin board decorators by our colleagues.  To change this attitude (and for our own well-being), we also realized that we needed to provide an art education to our colleagues, administrators and parents.  Some of the ways we did this was to invite them to our class, explain learning processess alongside displays and talk at PTA meetings.  This took place over a period of years and continues to be an ongoing process as these populations come and go.  Our actions, we later learned, were considered proactive advocacy.  Proactive advocacy allows for a more deliberate approach that can be done over a period of time to establish a supportive environment within one's community.  We now recognize these steps as part of the path we were taking to become arts advocates.

As we continued on our advocacy journey, however, we never thought art education in our schools would be in jeopardy.  Unfortunately, what we both have experienced, like many teachers throughout our state and nation, is the reduction or elimination of arts education programs. The increase in these cuts seems to correlate to the implementation of No Child Left Behind and other state-wide policies.  Personally, our school district recently proposed a reduction in our arts education programs to provide additional time for reading and math.  After learning of these threats to our students' education, we had to react quickly.  This led us on another advocacy path--reactive advocacy.  Reactive advocacy requires quick and immediate actions that are in response to a crisis situation.  Our own reactive experiences, we noted, proved to be extremely stressful since we were expected to teach in the same positive manner while still making time to organize supporters for our programs.

Shortly after our district proposed these cuts, we were appointed as PAEA's Advocacy Task Force Co-Chairs.  Along with the Task Force*, we learned arts teachers throughout Pennsylvania were experiencing similiar problems within their districts.  In response, we created some advocacy materials for our mambers.  The latest project, the Advocacy Toolkit, compiles much of the latest advocacy resources into a CD.  This Toolkit is available for all of our members.  The Toolkit establishes one collective voice that resonates with many educational communities and empowers our members to use this language to showcase the role of the art educator.  Materials on the Toolkit include reasearch, quotes, letters in support of art education programs, visuals, bibliographies and much more.  Our focus for the Toolkit was to have specific arts education information that can be used in both a proactive and reactive way.  We hope by using the information, school districts will find it more difficult--if not impossible--to make cuts to the arts.

We will continue to put current information on the website.  Please use the links on the left (Updates, Tips, Resources and Action) to help you navigate through the information.  In addition, please send us any information regarding advocacy that you feel needs to be shared. 

In a perfect world, being a great art teacher would be enough.  Our journey has taught us that art teachers must also be great art advocates.

Advocating for the future of arts education,

Heide Sheetz ( This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it )

and

Wendy Milne ( This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it )

*The Advocacy Task Force Team includes:  Heide Sheetz and Wendy Milne (Co-Chairs), Jennifer Rinkevich (Technology), Leslie Kunkel, Kris Troxel, Trish Gabreski and Kelly Armor