AWF Interviewing Alicia Vega and Joanne Vena from Changing Worlds
June, 2021
Changing Worlds uses art to help young people learn, love, and embrace all the parts of their identity and to not internalize the negative things being said and done to them. They also learn to love and embrace people that are different from them. -- Alicia Vega, Executive Director
Can you tell us about the Arts Work Fund-funded Teaching Artists Survive and Thrive project?
Joanne: Its for teaching artists to cultivate themselves as artists. We are testing an idea: if we support teaching artists as they create for their own work as artists, can we deepen our connection to them and see carry over into their teaching practice?
The grant allows us to offer up to $2,500 for teaching artists to work on their development as artists. They could apply for projects that they were already working on, or they can work with a new idea. It was a competitive process. We have nine projects funded through this grant that are wide-ranging. We have a teaching artist illustrating a graphic novel; another is recording an album of traditional batá music and composing original compositions based on batá. One teaching artist is taking mindfulness training to improve their practice, both as an artist and teaching artist. Another project involves two teaching artists who are building a collaborative dance pedagogy for developing movement to tell individual stories. The artists also think it will become a pedagogy they can use in their teaching practices.
The grant allows us to offer up to $2,500 for teaching artists to work on their development as artists. They could apply for projects that they were already working on, or they can work with a new idea. It was a competitive process. We have nine projects funded through this grant that are wide-ranging. We have a teaching artist illustrating a graphic novel; another is recording an album of traditional batá music and composing original compositions based on batá. One teaching artist is taking mindfulness training to improve their practice, both as an artist and teaching artist. Another project involves two teaching artists who are building a collaborative dance pedagogy for developing movement to tell individual stories. The artists also think it will become a pedagogy they can use in their teaching practices.
Alicia: Another component of the project is to document each artist’s process and showcase them on our website. This is another way to show our community the caliber of the teaching artists that are working with our young people.
What was the impetus for the Teaching Artists Thrive and Survive and why it is so critical to Changing Worlds right now?
Alicia: I'll start with a little bit of the history. Coming into Changing Worlds a little bit over four years ago, I saw this hidden gem within Changing Worlds, the teaching artists: their experience, caliber, and their magical ability to connect with young people. It was something that I wanted to make sure that we really emphasized in telling the story of who we are and what we're doing. We began to center the question, 'How can we best support teaching artists and embed them more intentionally in the organization?' I started bringing them to the table more in terms of decision-making.
When the pandemic hit, we knew one of the first categories of folks affected within our realm were the students, of course, but the teaching artists were unable to have work. So we started to think, okay, how do we support the teaching artists and continue to keep ourselves surviving as well. Everything we did during the pandemic centered around supporting our teaching artists as much as we could. Before we talked to anybody else about doing services like video production, we asked ourselves, can we bring our teaching artists in to do that? The first pandemic year, for our benefit, we commissioned three of our teaching artists to do a collaborative piece together. We felt really proud that we were able to commission them to do this amazing piece.
This started a ripple effect in our thinking around how we make sure we continue to support and showcase the teaching artists. We started featuring teaching artists on our website, doing interviews with them and promoting the work they're doing in and outside of Changing Worlds. Then Joanne started having this vision around how we can continue to build on that.
Joanne: That first commission for our gala was a light bulb. I kept thinking, why aren't we doing this more? Why not celebrate the artist in the teaching artist and how their individual practices inform their teaching artist practices? And that's where our project, Survive and Thrive, came from. CPS Teacher Liz Winfield of Juarez High School wanted to pose a question to her students “How did you survive and thrive and persist during this pandemic?” In collaboration with Changing Worlds artists, they had a really beautiful kind of success with her students creating their own personal statements and photographic images. And, with the support of an Illinois Humanities Council grant, we were able to invite two teaching artists in Pilsen to do the same thing that our students do. It made me think - Could we go larger in our thinking about supporting teaching artists?
It seems pretty bold for an arts education organization to invest in the individual artistic practice of their teaching artist corps. Are you worried that it will detract from your core mission of serving students?
Alicia: I see this effort as a mission extension and a part of the life cycle that we are in as an organization. Teaching artists’ identities as artists are completely tied to their work with our students in schools and we need to honor that.
Joanne: I think of it as investing in our own, just as we might invest in staff development, building the skills of our team. We're doing the same thing with Thrive and Survive, but we're doing it with the teaching artists. We believe they will bring the skillset and experience gained from their individual projects back into the classroom in one way or another. We are trying to support our teaching artists as whole people, not just the teaching side of their art practice. We are quite fortunate that we are bringing artists in who share our vision and to be able to expand the universe of how we support our teaching artists. We have been cultivating artistic expression in young people for years and now we are also cultivating it in our artists.
What are you learning from early project implementation?
Joanne: We're really at the very early stage; artists just got their checks. We are going to do short interviews with the teaching artists to talk about their process.
Alicia: Another thing that has occurred as we've engaged more teaching artists and having more exchange between teaching artists and board members, is that we saw this sort of immediate spark among board members. They would meet the teaching artists and realize the caliber of the work that they're doing. And we had some board members say, "How do I help them?" We're starting to see an interest in the possibility of board members sponsoring a teaching artist to deliver programs to young people because they're so inspired by what they see the teaching artists' capacity. Maybe donors will like this approach as well.
Joanne Right now, we have about 40 artists that are on our roster. We have about 28 to 30 that work with us every year; the rest function as guest artists. We're about 60% artists of color. We are looking for artists who also bring their cultural heritage forward. This helps young people learn, love, and embrace all the parts of their identity as well as embrace people that are different from them.
How is Survive and Thrive influencing your thinking about the future?
Joanne: We are still a relatively small organization. We only have nine staff members. So this is an opportunity for us to go deeper with a group of committed individuals. How are we supporting and respecting each other? They are our teaching artists because they embrace things that we are also trying to cultivate young people at the same time. We're planning to do some salon-style evenings, listening parties, or viewing parties where we'll compare and contrast what one or two artists are working on in an effort to help cultivate an audience for them.
We are already seeing logical connections coming into play. For example, Erika Valenciana is working on distributing a film about Ecuadorian women survivors of sex trafficking and artist Alva Nelms is illustrating a graphic novel about a woman that has to empower herself because she is being oppressed. We're hoping the teaching artists will start to hear about each other's projects and hoping that we'll also be able to support their work and support audience development for them.
Poster for the film La Mitad del Mundo: Surviving Sex Trafficking in the Middle of the World by Erika Valenciana
Working draft cover of Alva Nelms’ collaboration with Author Chris Ellis
Joanne: I think our next step would be a broader reach to artists who want to work with us and have that opportunity to do projects that they want to cultivate as well. We're not there yet. We don't have the financial means to do that right now. But I think that's why we're at an interesting point in our development as an organization. This offers us dimensionally limitless possibilities.
Alicia: As I think about the pilot this year, I would like it to be something that we do every year. There are so many different directions that we can grow as an organization. Maybe it shifts a little bit into how this directly benefits the youth population.
What would you advise colleagues in the field to do and not do if they are to go about building a program like this?
Joanne: We know that there's so little money for people to continue cultivating their own personal practice as artists. It's just not there. One of the things that I'm very proud of as a small organization is that we can start cultivating our own and then see where maybe a larger workforce development kind of project happens for teaching artists.
I have this really beautiful drawing on my wall, which talks about passion-based outcome-focused delivery. And to me, the three points on the triangle are challenger, creator, and coach.
And I think it's just such a beautiful metaphor for the teaching artists that have worked with us. They don't come into this line of work thinking that they will make a hundred billion dollars. They go into this process because they strongly believe–and, I take this as a personal thing because that's why I decided to do this–is they take it as an opportunity to offer their vision of the world and how art fits into young people who are just at the beginning stages of their personal development. Middle school students are feeling out the world in so many different directions and even more so now. When I think of why teaching artists do it, they don't do it because it will make them famous. They do it because they are committed to that idea of creator, coach, and challenger in the next generation of people.
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