Sister IAsia Thomas is an equity practitioner, arts administrator, director for Children’s Windows to Africa, and is a multi-disciplinary artist whose creative work is guided by Dr. Asa Hilliard’s precepts on Being an African Teacher and Fu-Kiau’s Kindezi: The Kongo Art of Babysitting. Thomas served as Pittsburgh Public Schools from 2014 – 2024 as project manager for Equity.
Rodney Hopson currently serves as Acting Co-Dean and Professor, School of Education, American University and was former AEA President (2012). When he lived in Pittsburgh, he was on the faculty in the School of Education and as Hillman Distinguished Professor at Duquesne University. With a team of colleagues, he served as Principal Investigator to the Pittsburgh Public Schools Culturally Responsive Arts Education (CRAE) evaluation.
Once upon a time there was a program that required an evaluation. Through the commissioned work, “Cultural Responsiveness, Racial Identity, and Academic Success: A Review of Literature” by Stone Hanley, M., and Noblit, G.W. (2009), the CRAE program was born in Pittsburgh Public Schools in 2009. The foretelling literature review was abundant in articulating the program’s seven core themes related to employing arts of the African Diaspora, partnering with artists, developing leadership qualities within children, and collaboration among arts specialists to name a few. By all efforts and evaluations, CRAE was a success.
The evaluation team’s guiding question: “What was the impact of the CRAE key themes among participating children, teachers, administrators, teaching artists, and parents who played a role in the CRAE Program?”, was intended to lay out core next steps and recommendations toward sustainability and even more integration of arts in schools. One might assume the educational leaders of that time would stand at attention, but has been shown by efforts that tend to weaponize instead of liberate, not enough was done to sustain CRAE.
10 years later reflection continues; and educational philanthropy sustains influence in schools.
Nonetheless, the spartan representations of the hosts of residency spaces (schools) represent those that seem to appreciate community presence and resources most.
As I (S. IAsia) lived it, this work contributed to the district’s arts profile but still begs the question: What are the challenges and of conducting evaluations that center African arts in a system known for anti-Africanness. What makes the contributors to the undertaking vulnerable when evaluations are assumed to be the apparatus to turn the hourglass around as a metaphor?
Lessons Learned
- Recognize the integration of African arts in schools is counternarrative. Considering the repeated onslaught of teaching race and difference in schools and the concomitant fervor about banning books through the legislative attacks, teaching African arts in schools empowers a counternarrative. Justin Laing’s paper, in the book, Culturally Relevant Arts Education for social justice: A way out of no way (Ed. by Hanley, Noblit, Sheppard, and Barone), aptly entitled, “Free your mind” Afrocentric arts education and the counter narrative school” describes strategies emphasizing focus on brilliance, bonding cultural capital among children, ethics of persistence, participation into a larger community of leadership, and a use of symbols, rituals, and protocols.
- The process of liberation in schools requires de-weaponizing evaluation. CRAE didn’t last. It was “unsustained” by a set of conditions bigger than the program and evaluation. Participants advocated for its longevity more than the executive leadership on the inside. The evaluation could not save CRAE. The trifecta of evaluation, research, and assessment in the public educational space let S. IAsia see a factionalized hierarchy because the learning curve was in essence justified, because root cause analysis was on the margins of the institution, so they let go.
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