♪ opening music ♪ >> Hello and welcome to Carolina Classrooms.

I'm Laura Ybarra.

On this episode we're focusing on the A in the education term STEAM.

Learning through the arts encourages students to think creatively.

I think the A in STEAM is important just because students need to know that they don't have to be analytical or creative.

It doesn't have to be either or they can be both, and they can be both simultaneously.

Most state STEAM projects in school and in the professional world require some type of design element, some type of discussion that goes along with the arts, something always has to be built, something always has to be made, something has to be explained.

In one way or the other.

It's usually with the arts, like making a chart or making a visual things like that, I think it's the creative element.

I think it puts the creative element into...that whole process.

and students learn to, you know, a lot, a lot of the arts, especially theater, there's a lot of problem solving that goes on, and a lot of creativity that goes in as well.

And I think that's the element that students get out of the arts, that again...it can translate into real life, you know, these are skills that they can carry on and...it goes back to imagination, creativity, being able to see things and then create what you see.

>> Marcus Ammaker is the poet laureate for the City of Charleston.

He is also an artist in residence at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, where he conducts writing workshops for students.

<Marcus Ammaker> As a poet laureate, I am a voice for the arts in the community.

I'm privileged to have access to a lot of different spaces in the city as well to put on events.

And also I'm privileged to be able to have access to resources to pay other poets and artists to perform in the city.

I also visit a lot of schools, do a lot of workshops in classrooms, and travel and have connections with other poets in the country.

So it's been a wonderful, wonderful job.

I've really enjoyed it.

School workshops are a lot of fun.

I do a lot of different types of workshops depending on whatever the students need, or and their age and things like that.

But I really enjoy doing workshops that are reflective, so workshops that talk about a student, as far as like a self portrait lesson.

So, a lot of students will write about themselves sort of look at their lives, look at their world.

And whenever I do these workshops, it seems like they're they are surprised at how open they are.

Or they can be through the art form of poetry.

For younger students, it's a lot of focusing on figurative language.

So things like alliteration, personification, things like that, which in my mind are bit of fun things to learn about when you realize just all of the things that you can do with language, there's so many ways that we can use language to make it more creative to write really creative things.

So I just do my best to bring that out in them.

And I think students teach me or they remind me of why I got into this in the first place I started creating when I was in the fifth grade, and called myself an artist...when I was in the fifth grade.

And it was simply for the pure joy of just making something.

It wasn't obviously about likes, or getting published or things like that.

It was just to create something and express myself.

So when I'm around students, particularly younger students, and I see them creating and sharing, it really reminds me of myself when I was younger.

S, it's nice to have that reminder as we are in a world that really almost sort of relies on feedback.

It's nice to just say, I created it and it's good because it has been created.

So that's been a thing that I really enjoy.

And also when I'm with older students say high school on just the openness and the honesty of a lot of their work seeps into my work as well.

I think there's a self consciousness that happens.

Maybe the older you get, so I really appreciate just how open and honest a lot of these students are and that inspires my work and helps me to go back and edit things that I've written and go a little bit deeper.

Earlier this year, I released a kid's book called B lack Music Is.

Music is very important to me.

...I wanted to write a book that was all about some...of my favorite black musicians who have made an impact on music, so global music.

but it might be musicians that you might not have heard of, or are familiar with.

So I mentioned Max Roach, as far as jazz goes, I mentioned Alice Coltrane, as well.

There's a really great punk inspired band, Big, Big Joni is their name, and they are relatively new, but they are already inspiring a lot of other bands.

So I just think that it's important that we learn about black musicians, ...and the impact that they've had, but also celebrate just music in general.

So in the book, this cat listens to vinyl.

And every record takes the cat to a different sort of Sonic World.

And that's how I am when I listen to records like I listen to it front to back on headphones.

So, I decided to give 150 copies of those out to different schools.

in the area...I'm able to do that with the support of the Academy of American poets.

I won a fellowship from them to do some really fun, poetic things.

So that's been a fun process.

And it's my first kids book, too.

So it's fun.

Yeah, in my opinion, the arts are important because for students, because it helps them realize the power of creative freedom.

I think, in school, at least for me, when I was in school, everything that I learned was from memory.

And I didn't really apply a lot of it after school, but I was learning things and committing it to memory.

So I can pass a test when it comes to the arts, and when it comes to creating, it's wild to really think that you can do anything that you want, you know, if you have a piece of paper in front of you.

That paper can turn into a drawing.

That paper can turn into a poem, you can use that paper.

You can ball it up and...make it a drumstick, you know, like there's anything that you can do, you are free to do that.

So I just think that the arts reminds us that we are free to create what we want.

And as long as we approach the world like that, approach art like that.

I think a lot of impactful things will come if we approach things from that mindset.

>> The South Carolina Arts Commission and the South Carolina Department of Education announced a partnership to develop creative programs that offer arts learning opportunities and workforce development.

>> The partnership with the State Department of Education came about as a result of really an opportunity through some funding that the Department of Education received through ARP funds, federal funds that came directly to states in order to provide opportunities for students to have a recovery of learning loss.

Our state superintendent Molly Spearman is a former music teacher so she understands the strength that an arts program can bring to an overall education for students.

So, we began to have discussions with the South Carolina Arts Commission of how could we enhance and support and expand arts education in South Carolina, to improve arts programs but also to address that unfinished learning in the content areas, especially around literacy, and math.

<David Platts> The arts can actually become a part of the curriculum within a classroom.

For example, a student may be learning about a particular war, or a particular time in history in their social studies class, students can create theater vignettes or short plays that actually support explaining maybe something that happened during that time period.

Or they're trying to learn something in reading, maybe it's some concepts around stories, for example, conflict, or setting or character development.

All of those things.

can be incorporated through theater, maybe through movement and dance, maybe representing it in a visual art form.

We know that the more students sort of practice that idea and illustrate those ideas and get those ideas out in a very engaging way, the more they understand it, and the more they retain it.

So the arts are really a great vehicle for learning about other areas, but at the same time, they are important... in and of themselves.

So you learn things, when you're studying theatre, about what it's like to be in a play, perhaps or when you're when you're learning to draw about something you might be learning concepts and elements of visual art along the way.

So both curriculum areas are really important.

...they both advance together.

<Kim Wilson> In the Arts Crow, South Carolina plan, we're really, the Department of Education is leaning on their investment in Arts and Basic Curriculum in that 30 years of investment in specific schools.

These schools have been making exceptional commitments to offer comprehensive arts education, not just music and visual art, but they may have theater programs in their elementary schools.

They have a dance education.

So we're leaning to those schools to help to be a model for other schools and saying, how have you used the arts to keep students engaged and contribute to their growth?

Help them achieve in those ways?

How have you used arts integration, to help struggling learners make those connections in the non art subjects so that they can achieve at the same level.

So that's really where ABC project specifically intersects and into the Arts Grow South Carolina plan over these next three years is leaning into the schools who've been doing it a long time to help encourage those schools who may not, and see that as a path to help their students accelerate that learning.

<David Mathis> We realized in the pandemic, also that there was a significant gap in resources in our state, especially in our underserved areas.

I was the former superintendent in a rural district, and we didn't have a lot of resources, I could provide the very basic in arts.

But my money had to go for other things, to support the district and to run the district.

And I think a lot of districts are in that same situation.

So, this opportunity with Arts Commission, through the ESSER funding, will provide, can help fill that resource gap.

And provide those schools and districts in the most underserved areas, the opportunities to have robust arts programs, that it's a once in a lifetime opportunity literally for them to have that with this money and the expertise that the Arts Commission will bring to it.

We are going to build out through our career and technology continuum, an arts credentialing and art certification.

So that as we build a pathway where students enter high school and they've had a good foundation, and great opportunities in the arts in elementary and middle school.

But as they get to high school, they can then sequence courses that would lead to an arts certification, an arts credentialing.

So, they could then take that to the workplace.

They could take it to college, technical school, but it would also give them the skill sets and the accountability around that, that they've proven that they have that skill set that they then can go on to the next level of work, whether it's post secondary, or whether it is the workplace, we've seen that happen and work well in the other career technical courses, and pathways, and we feel like the one missing place is a pathway for the arts.

<Kim> Our goal is to have a certification in at least one of the four what we consider sort of traditional art forms that being theatre, visual art, music, and dance.

So that is the goal.

That's what we're working towards and doing a lot of research into listening to the arts industry themselves and saying where are those opportunities?

What coursework would be required from the student to be industry ready?

And then we have the bigger challenge we go right back to equity is okay, "So, how "can students in a school district that may not have "an arts industry in their backyard, how will they be "able to earn that same certificate as some "another student in a different school district "that does have an arts industry in that community.

So, those are some real big challenges, but we're super excited about that, because South Carolina does have a lot of thriving artists and arts industry and businesses that rely on artists.

And we see this as a very exciting economic development approach for our students.

>> At the Cyril B. Busbee Creative Arts Academy, students can get an hands on introduction to classes in visual arts, dance, music, and more.

There are teachers involved the arts and other subject areas too.

>> Our school serves about 440 kids.

In grades six through eight.

We have a full comprehensive arts program that includes dance, theater, band, chorus, and orchestra, visual arts, and several other elective courses.

And the great thing about our school is that all of our students are able to participate in any of those courses throughout their three years at our school.

What I really appreciate is that as our students enter into sixth grade, we almost require them to kind of experience all of those arts so that everyone has the opportunity to participate, whether they enjoy the art form or not, they have that opportunity to try it out.

And so as they move into the 7th and 8th grade, it's important for them to kind of almost specialize in an area and an area that really piques their interest.

And they can learn so much more from that.

Our teachers actually do a really good job with integrating the content through the arts.

You know, in our math classes and our science classes, they do a lot of integration with our fine arts teachers.

We have some teachers who integrate on their own, but then we also have some teachers who do collaborate with our fine arts teachers and are able to teach those lessons to our students.

For example, in our sixth grade, they were studying the water cycle and so they teamed up, and the sixth grade science teacher and our dance teacher collaborated together and our students were able to use movement elements of dance to create a water cycle, instead of drawing it, or you know, putting a slide presentation together, they were able to dance and move.

...so through learning the science standards, they're also incorporating those dance standards, as well.

One of the ways that our fine arts have collaborated with other fine arts is our dance.

Students were studying the history of dance and hip hop was one of the areas they were studying.

And so our visual arts teacher and our dance teacher collaborated together to do a whole unit on hip hop, the history of hip hop, and then graffiti.

And so, putting those two art forms together was really cool for the kids.

They enjoyed learning the history of graffiti and the history of hip hop and how they work together.

But it's so important to give the kids the opportunities to see what is out there, to try what is there, because you never know if they're missing out on something they might not have even known about.

We have seen some beautiful dancers come through who have never set foot in a studio before.

And so to see them excel, because of the experience they had in middle school has really been phenomenal to watch.

You could go down any of our hallways on any given day and see some thing arts related going on.

Not every single lesson is an arts integrated lesson.

It's something that, it does take planning and it takes collaboration between the different you know, teachers to pull that off, but if you were to go down our fine arts hallway, you're definitely going to see kids engaged in the arts, whether it is rehearsing or learning something new in that art form.

Our art room always has something you know, wonderful going on, whether it's paintings, or sculpting.

Yesterday, there was an artist in residence there and they were learning how to create pastels.

So, there's always something going on.

There's not a lot of sit and get on our fine arts hallways.

And then of course, it depends on where you are on our content classes.

You'll see some integration between the different contents, some kind of art activity, taking place.

The sounds, the vibrations, all kinds of fun - the arts can go a long way.

It's just a matter of finding the time and being willing to go out and try something new.

And I think that's probably one of the most difficult things for our teachers these days is finding that time with all of the other pressures of you know the expectations of, you know, what teachers have to do.

It's just finding that time.

But as an administrator, it's important for me to trust the teachers and give them what they need and the support that they need in order to go out and try something, especially when it comes to the arts and if it works, that's fantastic.

If it doesn't, it's okay.

<Laura> Busbee students have the opportunity to learn about behind the scenes roles, like sound and lighting for a theatre performance.

At the Koger Center for the Arts, those roles are very important when preparing for production.

<Steven Borders> I make sure everything works backstage, on the stage everywhere like that, making sure we have the right number of people, make sure all the technical needs are made appropriate, such as the lighting, the sound, making sure it all comes together and on time, and the show happens and next show comes in.

It depends on what show we're doing, I can either be doing the sound, I could be doing a switch for a live stream, or I could be walking around putting out fires.

Technology enhances the arts and arts takes technology and it allows it to reach more people like I mean, like Broadway shows, embracing, you know, the use of microphones, use of lights, use of video projection use of like chain hoists to fly things in and out.

That enhances that production, you know.

Everybody's looking for a way to increase the visual of their show, the production value, the wow factor and so being able to integrate that, that's an art in itself, programming a light, programming the sound, being able to mix that sound, balance that sound.

That's an art form all unto itself.

So, that art form is collaborating with the art form of the musician or the actor, the singer.

All of it all comes together and that's what makes the show.

So, we're all artists, even though I'm on the technical side of the art.

We're all still the arts.

<Chip Wade>I think I have the kind of personality like I don't want to be in the front.

I don't want to be on the stage.

But I can make a lot of things happen.

And I think that's important too.

You don't have to be the star to be a part of the arts or to make the arts happen.

And you need the people who aren't on, in front of the camera or on the stage to make arts happen.

So I'm, like, the guy behind the scenes.

I do a lot of scheduling.

I do a lot of PR.

I do a lot of press releases and mailing those out, and following up with that, I worked directly with the promoters that bring shows in to help promote their shows.

I manage the website.

<Jeannie Weingarth> As the front of house manager, I deal with everything from the stage to the street, which is patrons, ticketing, programs, making sure that everything that happens before performance comes off smoothly.

We have security working here, nurses, full time people.

If you don't notice us, then we've done our job, right?

<Steven> Whether you want to sing, whether you want to play an instrument, whether you want to mix sound, whether you want to do lights, whether you want - there's so many different positions within arts, you don't have to be the star.

<Laura> Earning a degree in the arts does not limit a student to choosing a job working in a theater or concert hall.

The soft skills learned through an arts integrated education have value in many other career paths.

<David Platts> Oftentimes we've asked employers what is it that you're looking for in your employees?

What are those skills that you want an employee to have, beyond maybe the basic information that you need to do that job.

Oftentimes, they're looking for employees that are creative, that can present and make presentations that can stand in front of an audience that speak well, and can also have skills within working groups.

They can communicate effectively with each other.

All of those skills are skills that we actually teach in the arts.

<David Mathis> First of all in arts education, I think is you learn teamwork collaboration, interpersonal skills, is you learn to evaluate your work as you build those skills through the arts.

I think that will help with any career.

Employers are telling us you know they need - We need the skill set for students that can collaborate and work with others, that can think creatively, that can problem solve, that can evaluate their work, and then know, how do I revise that to make it better.

So, I think that fits in any career out there.

But I think also, the arts can lead to work in architecture, landscape design, which is a very popular and much needed career right now.

There's opportunities in the digital world with website design, with graphic artists.

There is an opportunity, I think, through the arts education, to even go into sound technicians, lighting technicians that are so often needed and some of the businesses now.

So, I think there's a wealth of opportunities out there, photography.

There's so many things that the arts could lead to that we typically don't think about.

But I think the most important thing is no matter what career is out there.

A parent shouldn't worry that an arts education they're going to be that star - like you say, that starving artists, on the stage.

It builds the good citizen that can go into any career and be successful.

<Laura> Thanks for joining us.

We'll be back on TV in January.

You can find more education stories from around the state on our website, Carolina classrooms.org.

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