Critical Examination of Race and Gender in Determinations of Successful Teaching Artists in OST Arts Organizations

• In Event: Out-of-School-Time Youth Arts Programs: What Are the Big Juicy Questions?

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this inquiry is to provide an analysis of the ways power and privilege determine who is considered a successful teaching artist (TA). Our interviews with Black women arts organization leaders are used to better understand the similarities and departures in how OST Arts leaders determine TAs as “successful.” We also examine the racialized and gendered dimensions of those determinations from a group of people with similar identity markers. This work intends to amplify the dynamic relationships between race, gender, culture, and geopolitical location in determinations of successful teaching artists.

Theoretical Perspective
Our analysis centers on life-affirming interactions and experiences. Analyzing ecologies and individuals from a “logic of extraction” (Cannella, Pasque, & Perez, 2015, p.118) maintains data that necessitates communities and young people be classified as “marginalized.” When access to funding is tied to these dehumanizing statuses, it invites funders to seek out marginality instead of the joyful, liberatory, and abundant lives of young people and the adults who support them (Baldridge 2017, 2020). We therefore are disinterested in the use of marginal status as a value, as well as views that see Black and Brown space as under-resourced or lacking. A paradigmatic shift in our understanding of the ways power and privilege impact how people experience life-affirming relations in OST Arts Organizations is needed.

Modes of inquiry
This study is a critical discourse analysis of interview data through the lens of black feminist epistemology and postmodern theories of the human. Data includes memos and thick descriptions (Carspecken, 1996; Cottom, 2019) for audio and video recorded interviews used to describe our understanding of each leaders’ ideology about successful teaching artists and what that means for seeking out and supporting life-affirming successful teaching artists for OST Arts Organizations that serve predominantly Black and Brown young people.

Data sources
We use interview data from Zoom audio and video recordings and their transcripts with four Black women arts leaders.

Results
Individual leaders hold different values, politics, and ethics that may or may not provide a way to see teaching artists as an integral part of an arts program. The different values, politics, and ethics that OST arts leaders hold shape the ways they consider what makes a TA successful. OST arts leaders who are proximal to dominant power and privilege appear furthest away from community, teaching artists, and young people and have more abstract ideas about successful teaching. Those proximal to the community serve as embodied homeplaces for the young people they serve.

Significance
This work helps to better understand how race and gender influence determinations of successful TAs. The values, politics, and ethics each leader holds are knotted to that social positioning. Their ability to see and determine teaching artists as successful relies on a complex understanding of those relational aspects of interactions in OST arts organizations. This work allows us to understand that simply selecting people of the same identity categories are not inherently the best ways to ensure access to successful teaching artists.

Authors

• Jalessa Noel Bryant, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Caleb Probst, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jonathan Tunstall, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Manuel Rueda, University of Wisconsin - Madison