Director of Education Young Audiences of Louisiana, United States
Abstract Information: This presentation will describe a multi-prong approach that places arts in education stakeholders at the center of the evaluation. We will share how we: 1) engaged stakeholders (e.g., school leaders) in the design of evaluation instruments; 2) used stakeholder voices (e.g., teachers, school leaders, teaching artists) and stories to help inform arts in education program leadership of options to enhance their program; and 3) collaborated with program leadership on an artistic display of telling the evaluation story, that included stakeholder experiences, outcomes and lessons learned. In addition, we will discuss best practices we have identified with regards to engaging stakeholders and/or using stakeholder voices at different points in the evaluation, from design, data collection, reporting, and dissemination. We will also share how engaging stakeholders, and using their voices and stories can increase their investment and buy-in of arts in education programming.
Relevance Statement: Young Audiences of Louisiana (YALA) received multiple arts in education grants from the U.S. Department of Education. While all programs include arts-integrated professional development (PD) with the goal of enhancing teachers’ arts-integration skills and improving student engagement and achievement; their comprehensive arts-integrated school model also provided PD for school leaders, and a “school-embedded” YALA arts-integration coordinator that helped promote arts integration climate at the school.
The proposed presentation focuses on how the evaluators engaged with YALA and other arts in education stakeholders throughout the evaluation process, and how stakeholder voices and stories were key evaluation elements. This presentation is relevant to evaluators wanting to increase engagement with stakeholders throughout the evaluation process and/or learn different approaches to collect, use, and/or dissemination stakeholder voices and stories for different purposes (e.g., program enhancement or program outcomes).
Over the years, the evaluators and YALA developed a strong partnership with the goals of designing and implementing a rigorous mixed-method evaluation, that included surveys, interviews, focus groups and classroom observations. The team continuously updated instruments based on findings from the previous year. Throughout the evaluation, we also realized the importance of listening to other arts in education program stakeholders (e.g., teachers, school leaders, teaching artists) and using their experiences, voices, and stories to inform the evaluation. These key areas included: • Engaging stakeholders in the design of the evaluation instruments. For example, we wanted school leaders to benefit from the information we collected and provided opportunities for them to add questions to the teacher interview protocol. Based on school leader feedback we added questions to capture teachers’ perspectives about how to best utilize teaching artists to develop arts integration skills and ideas for sustaining the program. • Using stakeholder voices and stories to help inform program enhancement and describe perceived program impacts. Through stakeholder interviews, we identified themes and stories about ways the program could be enhanced (e.g., teachers wanting customized arts-integrated lessons) and perceived impacts (e.g., how the program was important to alleviate their stress and promote engagement among students during the pandemic). • Collaborating with program leadership on an artistic display of telling the evaluation story. We created a program summary that included photos of YALA teaching artists, teachers, students, and student artwork, along with bar graphs (of survey data) and quotes from participants that told the evaluation story of how the arts integration program made a difference for many program stakeholders.
This presentation will contribute to the evaluation field in the Arts, by 1) sharing approaches for engaging stakeholders in the evaluation instrument design, 2) Sharing how participants stories were used to identify key areas for program enhancement and perceived impact, and 3) presenting ideas for how to disseminate evaluation stories to program stakeholders and beyond. The presenters will also make recommendations for evaluators who are working with arts in education grantees and arts programs. Although this evaluation focused on arts in education programs, our approach to using stakeholder stories and lessons learned may be applicable to evaluators in other fields.
