Music credit: “NY,” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd  Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. We are celebrating Arts in Education week with a conversation with nationally recognized artist, educator, and arts advocate James Rees. With a career spanning over three decades, James has earned numerous classroom awards, including Utah Art Educator of the Year and National Art Education Secondary Educator of the Year.  Recently retired from classroom teaching, he has been a pivotal figure in building award-winning art programs and he continues his advocacy for arts education on local, state, and national levels. He’s also served as panelist for arts education grants here at the Arts Endowment.  As an artist, James is known for his expressive monotype prints that explore themes of resilience and the unexpected in life. His impactful work as an educator, advocate, and artist, offers valuable insights into the role of art in shaping communities and inspiring young minds. And I’m so pleased to welcome him now. James Rees thank you joining me!

James Rees: Oh, thank you for the opportunity. I'm always happy to support the arts and arts education any way I can to advocate for what we do.

Jo Reed: Well, I really would like to start sort of at the beginning. Can you talk about your own early experiences with art and what inspired you to pursue a career in visual art?

James Rees: Yeah, that's a great question. I actually had very supportive parents. My father was a writer and my mother a dancer, and so I grew up in an environment where they really were supportive of us exploring any creative avenue that we were interested in, whether it be playing the drums or just hanging out in nature or making art. And so early on, I had that support, and I always had a sketchbook with me and always was doodling and drawing and that became just kind of a practice and a way I engaged with the world and maintained my interest in things at school, and outside of school.

Jo Reed: And you ended up getting a fellowship to Brigham Young University in art. How did that come about? 

James Rees: Well, that was interesting because I had a really low SAT score, ACT score, and I probably would not have been accepted other than someone in the art department stumbled upon a show I had as a senior up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and they gave me a full year scholarship having seen my work there and said, "We need this guy to come and be in our department." So it was very lucky for me that I had that ability, because my test taking abilities were not obviously on par.

Jo Reed: And what did that year allow you to do?

James Rees: Oh, I really connected with a really great group of educators. My teachers and professors were dedicated in helping me to understand and navigate my own creative journey and start to develop the skills to be able to have my own voice within the visual arts. And it really was a very transitional time from high school, whereas I had great teachers in high school, but in the college setting, I was able to really get down to work and find like-minded people that would support me in my creative journey.

Jo Reed: You've said that you hadn't planned to teach, and yet you taught high school for 30 plus years, how did this come about?

James Rees: Yeah, that is really interesting. In my graduate studies at the University of Arizona, I was pulled into a program that worked with seniors in local high schools, and they had mentors who were MFA students. And I was really amazed at the level of ability the high school seniors had when they were exposed to really good art practices. So based upon that and other things, I really became passionate about engaging with the high school level.

Jo Reed: Well, you've had such an impactful career as a high school art teacher, department chair in Provo. You've been instrumental in building an award-winning art program in the Provo School District. What key elements do you believe are essential to creating a successful art department in a high school setting?

James Rees: I really think about a good program as student-centered learning, where they're engaged in exploring and having the freedom to choose to become more engaged and invested in their own learning and directed in exploring and developing their own voice. Instead of just, after 2020, I saw a rise of only tutorial kind of type in education where they were learning skill sets. But I thought, and I still think, it's very important that art education isn't just about making art, it's about helping students to see and understand the world around them in different ways and articulate that in their own unique ways through making art. And so I think it's essential that students are exposed to contemporary art and that they can think beyond the conventional and start to question and explore through art making. I think our high school students are especially needing to be able to have something that's reflective of what they're thinking and feeling, what's going on within themselves and around them, and I think the arts are positioned to do that very, very well. And so I think it has to be a program that's really robust, based upon critical thinking. It's not just about art making, it's about making meaning through art.

Jo Reed: Well, you know, failure is often seen as a negative and art is about trying, failing, trying again, failing again, and again. And it's a vital part of the creative process, and toften it's hard for many people to embrace failure, but I think it can be particularly hard for high school students who have been kind of bred not to. How do you help your students embrace failure and learn from it?

James Rees: Well, I've always seen my studio practice bleeding into my classroom in that when I do demonstrations, sometimes they don't work out. And I don't see that as bad, that I fail in front of my students. I try to say, "Well, that didn't work out. Here's what we're trying to do. Let's try something different." And just embracing everyday failure, and let them know that that's okay. Because, you know, the components of good creativity and art making rely on that divergent exploration where things don't always work out, right? The materials or the ideas that they come up with are not always great, but then later on, you have an opportunity to do enough work that you can curate and create some works that are meaningful. So I think I built that into my program. I encourage students to understand failure as a natural part of the creative process and to find out what they could do better by looking at what didn't work before. And so that's something I think it's very important, especially in the educational system where the pass/fail, the grade system doesn't really enforce students taking risks and failing and risk taking is really connected with the creative process, and they have to be willing to make mistakes to be able to make any headway creatively.

Jo Reed: You also find venues for students to display their art. Can you talk about how important it is for students to have their work seen by the public, and kind of the impact it can have on their development as young artists?

James Rees: Oh, I think it's critical. I had the opportunity in my last five years of teaching-- I retired two years ago-- that I ran a gallery in a mall with my students called Art Cetra. We did that for five years, and it was an outlet not only to show their own work, but to also curate the work of other people, professionals and other students from other school districts. And I see that as really important because, you know, it's a creative act, it's not only making art, but the way you arrange art as you go into a museum or a gallery space, there is curatorial practice at play to create something that's meaningful and displayed in a way that people connect with it. I made that an integral part of what I was doing for many years, but the last five, we actually had an outlet to do that permanently. And also, it's great for teachers if they're advocating for the programs, visibility is the greatest advocacy tool they can have-- having their work out in the public and connecting with people and seeing the value on the wall of what they're doing in the classroom.

Jo Reed: And what about the role of mentorship? How does mentorship work, or did work in your classrooms? How did you connect students with professional artists for internships, for example, or mentorships?

James Rees: Yeah, very important. I had an ongoing series for the 26 of the 30 years that I taught, where every other week we'd have a guest artist from various creative industries come and talk about their work. And from them, many internships developed. One of the internships that we did and a long running partnership we had with the Museum of Art, the Springfield Museum of Art, was that they curated a lot of our exhibits. That helped my students learn the curatorial process, and then they were able to-- my students were able to use that knowledge and start to really understand that space, that creative act as a curator and develop shows for our gallery and other places. We did in a lot of other public spaces. But the mentorship is very important. One of the reasons I had guest artists come in regularly is because I'm not the only one that has a perspective on what the visual arts are and how they play in the world we live in. I wanted them to hear from other people what their perspectives were so they can triangulate from all these experiences and find their own idea of what art might be for them.

Jo Reed: You have had many leadership roles in national arts organizations, including vice president for the National Art Education Association. You were in leadership for Utah itself, President of the Utah Art Education Association. So, you've done advocacy on the national level, on the state level, and also on the local level in Provo. Talk about your passion for advocacy and why you think it's so crucial.

James Rees: I think it's so important. So many times as a classroom teacher, we lament the context, the environment that we're in and that we're frustrated with funding or the lack of support. And that's why I went outside the classroom to try to find greater resources, link up with other organizations to advocate for the arts and arts education and to educate the public on what we're doing, and legislators, and get more funding for arts and cultural things within Utah. And then from that and in many years I've served on the board for the National Art Education Association. I did two stints, once as a secondary division director and then the other time as a vice president. And I think you just have to think outside your classroom to really empower what you do within your classroom, it's not enough to just complain about things, you need to be at the table where decisions are made and you can leverage change that will impact your students in your classroom.

Jo Reed: This might be unfair and you are free to skip, but are there any initiatives that you've been particularly proud of during your time in these leadership roles?

James Rees: You know, I've been happy for a lot of things, but it's now, I think, been 10 years. I was part of the writing team that wrote the Utah Core Art Standards, and I thought that was a really good step forward that really aligned up with the National Core Standards and share many of the same ideals of those different strands of development and the need for a whole holistic view of education, that's not just making, but also critical thinking and responding and connecting and presenting. And I feel very happy about that, because prior to that, the standards were more like a really weak curriculum and they were very formulaic and didn't allow the open-ended student-based study that I think is critical for students to really think as an artist and to develop their skills artistically in the classroom.

Jo Reed: Well, can you just talk briefly about why you think arts education is crucial in today's educational landscape and the benefits that it offers students that they might not find elsewhere?

James Rees: That's a great question. And for many people in their mind that the arts are a side road, right? It's not the main artery of education. But the visual literacy is a big component of the world we live in today, and we are impacted by that visual world, the graphics and art and music and all that really help us to navigate the world we live in today, I don't know how we do without them. And so helping students to develop that ability to navigate and understand how those things impact them is one of the reasons I think it's important. The other reason is really it helps them to really process what they're going through inwardly and outwardly, what is happening in the world around them and also what their emotions are. It's a really great mirror to be self-reflective and understand who they are and what they're going through. 

Jo Reed: Well, one ongoing project you have with Flavia Bastos is “Who is American Today”, that project. Describe this, because I think it speaks to teaching students how to think critically, how to use the arts to  discover themselves.

James Rees: Yeah, that has been an ongoing project that we've done since 2017, and it's been wonderful. We've done it throughout the United States and even beyond. we did a couple in South America, and it really is about examining identity, power, and what it means to be a citizen. And asking students what they think about that, and having them articulate that through a digital story. I really think digital storytelling is a great art form and helps students really articulate what they think. If you're not familiar with digital storytelling, it is an audio narrative from the student's own voice, and then it's supported with visuals, graphics of some kind, or images, and it supports that narrative. And so it really is a great, very effective way for them to represent what they're thinking.  It's an ongoing project, and it's as relevant today as it was in 2017. In fact, I'm going into Cincinnati at the university next month and doing a workshop for teachers. Who's American today? It seems like a really simple question, but when you get down to it, as we look and track what students think, they all are very different in the responses of that question. But we think that art has the power to connect us, to challenge us and help us to have a better sense of who we are and our identity and have an open dialogue in the classroom. 

Jo Reed: I've seen a couple of the films, maybe three or four, and I was stunned by them, and surprised by them, because there wasn't a likely scenario among the ones I saw.

James Rees: No, and I will tell you,  I found in my classroom, perspectives I did not know that my students had, even though I'd worked with some of them for years. Some teachers are concerned that this could be a problem for them to discuss in the classroom. But what we found, as long as the teacher is neutral and allow the students to form their own opinions without any input from the teacher other than the structure of their own stories, it becomes a really rich experience for them to share what they believe, to think about what they believe, and hear other people's perspective. So it's a great opportunity for students to say what they believe about this very timely topic.

Jo Reed: And to use art to do so. 

James Rees: Yes. 

Jo Reed: Can you describe your own artistic practice?

James Rees: Yeah. So my MFA is in printmaking, and I do monotype prints, because I like the uniqueness of each image. You know, printmaking, if you're familiar with it, is in this case, a monotype printer, multiple layers. And it is a process you start with a base and then you work outward and the layers kind of develop layer by layer and present themselves. And you have to respond to what's there before it. You have some degree of idea of what will emerge, but you really have to be responsive to what happens, that conversation between you and the process, is an ongoing process, as it prints layer by layer, the image emerges and you respond and react to it. And I really like that. I think it's a great metaphor for life. We're responding to the unexpected things in our life and that we are making the best of it and trying to shape it into something beautiful.

Jo Reed: Right. Like we think something's going to happen one way, but lo and behold, it's something else. And here we are. 

James Rees: Exactly. Rarely does life turn out like we exactly plan.

Jo Reed: Well, how do you begin a work, James? Is it with an idea, an image, a color? Because I've seen your work and what you do with color, I'm astounded by, it's really beautiful.

James Rees: Oh, thank you. Well, you know, I have a few series, but the series that I'm most known for lately is called “The Weight We Carry”. And I start this monotype process differently where I put a squeegee of ink on and respond to it then with a layer of line work and then separate the figure ground. So I did that intentionally in this series because it's all about responding to those unexpected events of our life. So I thought it would be important to mirror the process of the printing itself to have that same kind of response of, you know, to the unexpected.

Jo Reed: I wonder how throughout the years you balance teaching and artistic practice, and how they influenced or impacted each other.

James Rees: Yeah, I really, I've approached my teaching much like I do in the studio, where it's driven by inquiry, that I go in there with an idea I want to explore in my studio. And I do the same thing each year with my classes. There's a question or two that I think is going to be relevant for students and we explore a process that would be appropriate to express that. And over the years, I've tried to balance those two because they inform each other, even though it is a challenge. I talk about this quite often because the very system that's set up in education to teach teachers to help people become artists, sometimes robs the very teacher themselves from their artistic drive and that creative energy that they lose in through teaching. So I was very conscientious of trying to maintain my studio practices by always having this physical space, a studio space, planning my schedule through the week, just like I would with a class. And a big one I found that teachers tend to do, and it may come from the classroom practice, is sometimes art educators will stop making even before they start making because they analyze before they start to make. And I think I'm very open to making, and then I'll analyze it after, I don't judge what I'm going to do before. And like you've already talked about in the classroom, embracing failure, being vulnerable. And I think these are important traits to have as a teacher to maintain your own studio practice because you have empathy and understanding for your students. You're able to be more innovative and find inspiration that you can, not only for your own work, but can help your students. If my students see that I'm doing work and I have shows and I invited students to my art shows, it shows that I really know what I'm talking about, and I think that's very important, why it matters to maintain your studio practice as an art educator is it makes you authentic. And students are always looking for that authentic voice.

Jo Reed: You served multiple times as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. What made you decide to participate as a panelist?

James Rees: Well, I was invited initially and I'm always trying to strive to be around people that are smarter than me because I learn so much by that interaction, and getting in a room with other people and evaluating programs. And I really wanted to advocate and support good programming, and I think I had, by my own practical experience as an artist and as an art educator, some ideas of programs that really connect with students and help build communities through the arts. And so I wanted to be part of that because money fuels a lot of great things and will help good things to happen in communities and impact people and their lives, and so I wanted to be part of that. And it's been a privilege to work with the National Endowment for the Arts over the years.

Jo Reed: Do you mind walking us through the process of evaluating grant proposals as a panelist?

James Rees: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, initially it's a lot of paperwork, right? You're looking at the application and looking at the budget and everything. And, you know, in a general sense, it looks to me like it's a storytelling event where they are outlining what they're going to do. And I look and see if they can credibly do what they're asking through the funding, through the narrative, by their professional connections they have in the community and seeing if it's feasible what they're asking. And is it worthwhile what they're asking? Is it adding something that's not already in that community? Does it benefit a segment of a community that may be underrepresented? And so going through that initially as an individual and rating it, and then you come together with the other panelists and you have a discussion. And it's always good to have more than one mind looking at things, right? You see different things and then make adjustments. And then we make a recommendation of the ones that seem to rise to the top, the cream of the crop. But I also love that the NEA requires panelists to make comments for those that maybe didn't quite reach the bar, that high bar of being funded, and gives them feedback of how they can apply the next year, and gives them specific things that were maybe lacking. Maybe the budget was an issue. Maybe there was other things they did not consider. I know I've applied for things and then you never hear anything. So you go, "Well, I guess I didn't get it. I'm never going to apply for it again." But I love the National Endowment for the Arts is really supportive of people reapplying and learning through that grant process.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you this. What impact do you think the NEA has on arts education as well as the wider arts community based on your experience, not just as a panelist, but also in the classroom, your work and advocacy on the state and local and national levels?

James Rees: I think the National Endowment for the Arts provides a lot of resources for smaller programming that may not be able to survive without their support. Different programs that may be summer programs or schools that really don't have the funding to really have a full, robust arts program that may fund for after school programming to help the arts to exist within a community. You know, one of the programs we have here in Salt Lake is SpyHop Productions, it's an award winning program, but they've received a lot of funding, and that's an after school program where students learn skills to be able to market professionally.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I actually interviewed one of the producers at SpyHop.

James Rees: It's a great program, yeah.

Jo Reed: Oh, it's a great program. I love it. Yes.

James Rees: I mean, that's the kind of program we were talking about. Somebody who really is insightful, is visionary, and is seeing to a need that's not existing in the community. And they do a great job with that, and provide students with a lot of opportunity to really get the skill set they need to advance with their own creative journey, whatever industry they land in.

Jo Reed: Well, let's take a step back and just think about arts education broadly and about how you see it contributing to the skill sets students need in the 21st century, but also to their own creative paths, as well as empathy.

James Rees: Yeah, I think it's very important, because I think the arts help us to see how another person thinks and feels and see. And it does it so immediately, right? The visual arts, especially, and music, you feel it immediately. And so the arts have that power of boundless opportunity for students to learn, to express. And it also, I think it promotes open-ended thinking and helps students to engage in contemporary topics that are happening around them. I think there's sometimes the impression that the classroom is separate from community, that it's not porous, that the events, the good and the bad things happening outside the walls of a school don't find their way in there. But they do, and so I think helping students have a space and place to express that through the arts, to examine and re-examine who they are and explore that through their own learning creative journey is great.

Jo Reed: And James, I'm curious what advice you might give to emerging artists and educators who are just beginning their careers.

James Rees: You know, I think it's to be yourself. I think there's a quote I love by Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance, that said, "There's a vitality, a life force, a quickening, that is translated through you into action. There's only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it will not exist through any other medium and be lost, the world will not have it." And I think that's true for teachers—

Jo Reed: Wow.

James Rees: Yeah, it's a great quote. I've used it so much, I've memorized it. But I love that because the nice thing about the arts is: you know, I'm going to be in an art show this weekend, I don't have to compete with my peers because I'm doing something different, I'm uniquely trying to express what I see and how I feel. And I think that's true of students with them and their careers becoming artists to learn from others, but to trust their inner gut. And also for teachers, that you have a unique way of teaching and connecting that no one else can, and so you need to trust that your own unique perspective and what you can lend to the profession, and how you can help others progress with their own creative journey. And so that would be the advice I'd give is to be yourself, to trust that inner perspective and vision and voice.

Jo Reed:  Your art work has been so well-received.  What’s next for you with your own work?  

James Rees: You know, I've just been so blessed. I have so many exhibits right now, I have a show going up on the 20th of September in Wisconsin in a museum. Next weekend, I have an art fair that's going up, and I didn't used to do those because I was, I'll be honest, I was a little snobby, but I've learned that interacting with people that buy my art and talking to them, it makes it really rich. So in addition to museum and gallery shows, I like doing the art festivals once or twice a year because I get to really have a lot of in-depth conversations about what the work means to people, how they're responding to it, and having that back and forth conversation. So that's some of the things that I have coming up in the next couple months.

Jo Reed: You have received so many awards for your teaching, your advocacy, including Utah Art Educator of the Year, National Art Education Secondary Educator of the Year, and so on and so on. When you think about this, what are some of your most rewarding moments?

James Rees: You know, I think right now after being in the classroom, my most rewarding moments are when I run into students who are now professionally engaged in their own creative process, whether it's working at a museum as a curator, or if they're working for a non-profit, or making their own art and having an exhibit. I just love that. I just got a letter from someone who's now a teacher. And, you know, being a teenager is a tough time for them to find who they are, and they often make huge mistakes. And some of my most cherished moments are when those students that struggled so much through their high school years, but stayed in the classroom with me and worked through things through their art. And when I run into them later on, they're still happy making art, or doing something in the classroom, many of them become art teachers. I'm just so excited to see that the work that I've done has blessed and benefited others. It's nice to have the awards, but it's even more rewarding to have that feedback from the way that my students are living their lives today.

Jo Reed: I think that is a good place to leave it. James Reese, thank you so much. Thank you for the extraordinary work that you do in many different levels of the art world.

James Rees: Great, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Jo Reed: It really has for me as well. Thank you. 

That was artist, educator and advocate James Rees. You can keep up with him at JamesRees Art.com   If you’re in Appleton Wisconsin, James’ exhibit opens at the Trout Museum on September 20.  We’ll have a link in our show notes.  Many thanks, as ever, to my colleagues here in the Arts Education division and to all the art teachers and advocates out there inspiring young minds.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. If you liked the show, leave us a rating and follow us! For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. 

James Rees: The arts help us to see how another person thinks and feels and see. And it does it so immediately, right? The visual arts, especially, and music, you feel it immediately. And so the arts have that power of boundless opportunity for students to learn, to express, it promotes open-ended thinking and helps students to engage in contemporary topics that are happening around them. I think there's sometimes the impression that the classroom is separate from community, that it's not porous, that the events, the good and the bad things happening outside the walls of a school don't find their way in there. But they do, and so I think helping students have a space and place to express that through the arts, to examine and re-examine who they are and explore that through their own learning creative journey is great.

Music Credit: "NY" composed and performed by Kosta T, from the album Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.

As students across the country head back to school, it's the perfect time to discuss the vital role that arts education plays in their development. And so I welcome Dr. Thalia Goldstein, a distinguished expert in developmental psychology and theater education. Dr. Goldstein is an Associate Professor at George Mason University, where her research focuses on how theater and the arts can enhance children's social and emotional skills, including empathy, emotional regulation, and creativity. She also directs the University’s Play, Learning, Arts, and Youth Lab or the PLAY Lab, and co-directs the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab at Mason’s Arts Research Center. Her recent book, Why Theatre Education Matters, is based on a six-year research project and unpacks the profound impact of theater education on students' overall development. As we gear up for a new academic year, we'll discuss why integrating arts into the school curriculum can help students thrive both in and out of the classroom.

Dr. Thalia Goldstein, welcome thank you for joining me.

Thalia Goldstein: Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Jo Reed: Can you start by sharing what initially drew you to research in theater education to begin with?

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. So, I, like many young people, did acting classes and theater during elementary school, middle school, and high school growing up. It was really my home. I was just in love with it. When I finished college, I actually double majored in psychology and theater and then moved to New York to try and make my way as a dancer and actor. After a few years, I decided that I was interested in getting a PhD in psychology to try and figure out, from a scientific perspective, what was happening when we engaged in imagination and play and theater and the arts. So, when I went to go get my PhD in developmental psychology, theater education was just the most obvious fit for my interests, my background, and it was really uncharted territory. I was super excited by the possibilities of asking all the different questions I possibly could in theater education and its benefits.

Jo Reed: Well, you explore these questions in many different areas and I want to begin with PLAY Lab at George Mason University which you direct. PLAY lab focuses on play, learning, arts, and youth.  Tell us a little bit more about the mission of PLAY Lab and the types of research projects you do there.

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. PLAY Lab is myself as well as my PhD and my master's students in the program in developmental psychology at George Mason. We are really interested in the arts writ large. Children engage in artistic play in all sorts of ways. They draw, they dance, they make music, they move their bodies, they pretend play and engage in theater. We think there's a whole host of psychological, cognitive, brain, social benefits to engaging in all these different kinds of art forms. The way that we think about it is we try to look at one art form specifically, so one kind of engagement, say the marching arts or dance or musical theater or, in my case, theater and acting and performing. Then we look at one aspect of social emotional development or cognitive development-- so, creativity or empathy and compassion. We look at under what circumstances, for what kinds of kids, with what kinds of lessons do we find associations and hopefully, eventually, causal threads where participation in a particular kind of art form may lead to benefits in a particular kind of psychosocial outcome.

Jo Reed: Tell me about the children who you work with. What's the age range? How long are they with you? Just give me a sense of how you collect this research.

Thalia Goldstein: Sure. So, the wonderful thing about research in psychology of the arts is you can participate in the arts at any age and I think it has different benefits for different kids at different age groups. We've worked with kids down in preschool classrooms, looking at how drama games and improv games for the youngest learners are helping them with their emotional control. We've found in some really well-controlled experiments that participating in eight weeks of drama classes helps you able to deal with distress and negative emotions a little bit better in that preschool age range. All the way up through middle school and high school, looking into how playing video games and engaging in the creative action that's available in some of the more artistic video games may be helping your creative thought processes and creative behaviors. We really look across the wide range of ages. I think of myself as being very question driven and curiosity driven. So, I try not to get too singularly focused on any age group, but rather try to think about "Well, what's the age group where this art form may have the strongest benefits?"

Jo Reed: Or different aspects of the same art form, for example.

Thalia Goldstein: That's exactly right because, of course, making visual art and learning how to draw when you're five and six years old is likely to have very different outcomes than when you're taking an intensive painting class when you're in high school. We try to account for that as well. My specialty is really theater and the kinds of drama games and sociodramatic play that kids are engaging in when they're four, five, six years old has a throughline to improv games when you're in middle school, but it's a lot more complex as you start to get older.

Jo Reed: You're also involved in the George Mason University Arts Research Center, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of its Research Labs program and that focuses on arts engagement, child development, and education. Can you tell us about the specific projects you're currently leading within this center? 

Thalia Goldstein: Yes. The Mason Arts Research Center has been such a great home for a wide variety of arts-based research over the last six years. I'm very lucky to have two co-directors at Mason, Dr. Adam Winsler and Dr. Kimberly Sheridan, and each of us have our own specialties within the world of arts education and child development. We do a wide range of projects there. We have projects that are more qualitative in nature, really looking at children's lived experience in visual arts classrooms, for example, and looking at how teachers may promote student autonomy and self-directed learning within those arts classrooms through rich descriptive analyses. We also have a large-scale data set that comes from Miami-Dade County, which followed kids from pre-K all the way through high school and looked at all of their different academic classes, all of their different academic outcomes, as well as their enrollment in arts classes through middle school and high school. Then we also have the work that I've been doing over the last few years, which is all about trying to pull apart what we call the mechanisms or the parts of theater education that might be causally related to different kinds of theater outcomes because that's really what I'm interested in is what is happening within the theater classroom that may be specifically leading to the kinds of outcomes that teachers have been seeing and talking about for a really long time. So, we have these big keystone projects that are multi-year projects. Without the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, we wouldn't be able to keep going on for several years because these are complex questions that take a long time to answer. Then we also have a public-facing website and we hold meetings every few years to get the group of researchers in the United States and around the world that are interested in questions in arts education, generally, together to be in one place and talk about it.

Jo Reed: Well, you've also conducted a six-year long study on 21st century skill development through theater education and that resulted in your book, "Why Theater Education Matters." So, let's talk about that. What are some of the key skills that theater education does help develop in students?

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah. I was really excited about conducting this study because I wanted to go back to the classrooms to look at theater education as it was happening in the real world, on the ground, what teachers were actually teaching. I read, obviously, a lot of theory and there's a lot of discussion about how theater could be taught or should be taught, but I wanted to get back to how it was actually happening in classrooms with real kids. So, what I looked for was a set of psychological skills and abilities called the habits of mind. 

Jo Reed: Can you define habits of mind—what do you mean by that term

Thalia Goldstein: So, habits of mind are a way of approaching problems and solving tasks that are put before you as a student in the classroom and the concept of habits of mind has been around in education in general for about 30 years at this point and it's been previously applied to a number of different specific domains, including in the visual arts in a series of books called "Studio Thinking," but then also for mathematics, for science, and even for legal theory and legal thought. So, that was the approach that I took to these theater classrooms, which is "What are the habits of mind that are being taught in these classes?" What I found was across a nationally representative set of five different school districts, the same habits of mind are coming up over and over again for these students, what the teachers are asking the students to do. So, one of these is body awareness and control. So, in an acting class and for theater, the body is really the instrument of the actor, right? In the same way the violin is an instrument in a music class or the paintbrush might be considered the instrument in a painting class, for actors, to be able to control and understand what your body is doing, why it's doing it, and how you can best present your story or your emotion to an audience so it can be read by an audience. So, there were many, many different kinds of exercises within theater classrooms that were meant to present students with an opportunity to engage their body awareness and their body control in order to then solve those problems or answer those exercises. 

Jo Reed: I was going to say, in fact, so many theater classes actually start with body exercises.

Thalia Goldstein: Yes. This was the thing that I was really, actually a little surprised about. Even though I've taken many acting classes over the course of my life and development, I was surprised by just how much physical engagement the students were being asked to do over the course of a warm up. So, a lot of these warm-up exercises that teachers presented to students wouldn't have been out of place in a physical education class or in a dance class. They're doing sit-ups and push-ups. They're doing yoga and mindfulness. They're jogging around the room, really getting their bodies engaged and ready to go for the work of putting character and story and emotion on top. That was just fascinating because a lot of education, a lot of traditional education is sitting still, being mindfully focused on a task, but bodily disengaged almost because you have to concentrate. But acting class is the opposite. It really asks students to bring the body into the room and to engage with their physicality and the way in which they're engaging with other people or engaging with their own sense of self as they're in that room together. I just thought that was so cool because it's connected to a bunch of psychological skills that are so important, like emotion regulation.

Jo Reed: When I think of theater too, it's probably one of the most collaborative art forms. You have to constantly be working with others, both on the stage and behind the stage.

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely. That was another one of the acting habits of mind that we saw over and over again in the theater classrooms. We saw teachers constantly asking students to work together to solve a problem or to collaboratively come up with a way to solve an improvisation prompt or to work with a large group in order to do a fun exercise like keep a balloon in the air for a hundred bounces without moving their feet. It was really fun, actually, because the students had to both actively move the balloon around and communicate while they were moving the balloon around. So, teaching that skill of collaborative communication through giving the group of students a collaborative goal is one of the ways that the teachers really get students to understand and practice their collaborative skills. Of course, collaboration is one of the critical 21st century skills for student education and learning that'll last them no matter what career or what activities they engage in the long term. Teachers were also really often presenting students with the chance and with the opportunity to integrate really thinking deeply about their classmates and thinking deeply about the characters that they had to play. That was another habit of mind that we saw quite often called consider others. This is where students had to think about "Well, what is my character thinking or feeling? What do they want? Then what are the other people on stage, my other fellow classmates, what are they thinking and feeling and what do they want?" Because you have to have that understanding of the other person to then be able to collaborate with them. It was sort of all of a piece as the teachers presented these different exercises to the students.

Jo Reed: I would also think-- maybe this is a subset-- but theater demands being present at the moment. You can't be thinking about "Okay, this is what I'm making for dinner later."

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. There's a theater theory called the 80-20 rule, which is you need to be 80% in the moment at all times, and then 20% aware of whether what you're doing is working or not. You have to be sort of 20% aware that it's going well or not going well while you're 80% in the moment. That requires a lot of concentration. You can't be thinking about what you make for dinner. You can't be thinking about whether or not you finished your homework for the next class because then you're not closely paying attention to the people around you. This sort of ability to keep in mind your goal while actively engaging in the behaviors, again, that's something that the teachers really asked the students to integrate and use as they were engaged in their theater exercises.

Jo Reed: Now, one of the key things in your book is that theater education helps develop these skills and they transfer to other contexts. Can you talk about that a little bit and provide examples of how these skills benefit students in non-theater settings?

Thalia Goldstein: Sure. Yeah. This is one of the big questions whenever we talk about the psychology of arts education. There's sort of a long history of talking about transfer, right? Because I want to make sure we always give weight to theater and theater education as being important in its own right and being part of a holistic and worthwhile education for all students. I also think that there are opportunities that theater education provides that really can't be found in other classrooms and in other kinds of subjects. Transfer takes two forms. One is called near transfer and that's when you're learning a skill in the theater classroom that is easily applied outside of the theater classroom. For example, learning how to say a speech out loud within the theater classroom probably makes it a little bit easier to then learn how to give a presentation no matter what topic it is that you're presenting on, right? Because you're learning how to enunciate, you're learning how to read with fluency, you're learning how to pronounce words. That seems like a pretty clean near transfer example. But then there's also these examples of what we think of as far transfer and that's when the skills that you're learning within a theater classroom transfer to experiences and opportunities outside of that theater classroom that are maybe not so much a one-to-one correspondence and this is where I think the large amount of practice within the safe space of the theater classroom that the students are getting can really sort of bolster their ability to use these skills outside of the theater classroom. So, if we take another habit of mind-- so, one of the habits of mind that we saw over and over again was reflect and think metacognitively and that means that the students are being taught to take a step back from their own work and take a step back from the work of their classmates and give helpful critique both to themselves and to their colleagues about whether what they're doing is working for the audience, whether it's working for the character, why did they make the choices they could make, what additional choices could they have made in the moment and this ability to take a step back from your work is really key to learning. You have to engage in a sort of self-evaluation. "Do I quite understand that yet? Do I need to maybe study a little bit more? Would it be helpful for me to have a conversation with a partner in order to figure out how to best move forward?" So, this is one of the examples of something that they're being taught and given the opportunity to use within the classroom that I would hypothesize we would see gains in outside of the classroom, but we haven't actually done that research yet. So, that's my next step. That's the work we're doing now is looking at whether these habits of mind that are being taught in the classroom are actually transferring to outside.

Jo Reed: And what about building emotional skills in the students that transfer outside? 

Thalia Goldstein: Yes, absolutely. So, emotional skills are really the key to performance, right? You have to be able to understand the emotions of the character. You have to be able to regulate your own emotions to then portray that character and then you have to be able to understand the sort of physical and vocal messages you are giving as a performer in order to know whether or not it's working for the audience. And all of these are very clearly emotional skills that we see in everyday life, right? The ability to know what you're feeling, know whether or not you want to or need to change or regulate your emotions, and then also know what it is that the people around you are feeling and how to engage with them based on what it is that they're feeling. So, these are the skills of knowing what somebody else is thinking or feeling, empathy, feeling what somebody else is feeling, and then of course, compassion and sympathy, right? Feeling bad or sorry for somebody else and then trying to help them out. There's actually some really interesting evidence from both my lab group and other lab groups that being involved in theater classes is associated with higher levels of empathy and higher levels of understanding other people's emotions. But we haven't been really clear to this point as to why that might be happening or under what circumstances we might be able to promote that kind of learning. So I think the acting habits of mind that come into play are body awareness and control, because of course, knowing what you're feeling is all about tapping into your body and your mind and understanding what it is that you're thinking and feeling in any particular moment, and then also paying close attention to other people and considering others and thinking about why they might be experiencing or thinking or feeling in any particular moment the things that they're portraying on stage. So, theater is really a social and emotional art form, right? Drama deals with heavy emotions and big situations and boring plays without emotions aren't any fun to watch. 

Jo Reed: Or be in.

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah. It's really a training ground for looking at the extremes of emotion and looking at the different kinds of things that come up in different situations and I really think the safety of the theater space allows students to maybe try on some uncomfortable emotions that they might not be able to try on in real life and see how they might react to it within the safety of the theater classroom.

Jo Reed: I would think improvisation also plays a significant role, not just in fostering creativity, but also fostering flexibility.

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. We saw about 20% of the class time across all of the different school districts is being spent in improvisation and what I call generation exercises, where the students have to create material in the moment. They don't have a script, they might have a specific prompt, but nothing sort of is known ahead of time. So, they have to go ahead and create things while they're in that moment and that really is the brainstorming part of the creative process and when you're brainstorming, there's lots of research out there on the creative process that says you don't want to limit yourself, right? You don't want to throw away an idea just because you think it might not be the best idea yet. You want to take all the ideas you can possibly have in the moment and then sort of sift and sort through them after you've gone through that brainstorming process. So, the improvisation moments in those classrooms, students are encouraged to trust themselves, right? To be playful, to try things out and if something doesn't work, try something new and if something doesn't work, try something new and this really applies to every kind of creative process across different fields, where you have to just keep brainstorming, trying new things, testing them out, and keep going until something really clicks. If you throw away your very first idea and refuse to try anything new, you're not going to make very much creative process. So, the theater space really invites that sort of trial and error pretty much on every different kind of activity that the students could be presented with.

Jo Reed: And that would also have a great impact on a student's confidence.

Thalia Goldstein: That would be my hypothesis as well and again, there's a lovely study that an undergraduate student and I did together a few years ago, where we did find gains in self-confidence as a result of being involved in improvisational theater classes for 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds. We only found those gains in the students that had started with lower levels of self-confidence. So, there's still more to unpack there. But I think that the key is in acting classes and in improvisational exercises, students are told to just trust themselves and trust the people around them and just try something new. They're asked to be playful and to do things that might be silly or absurd, and they're celebrated for that and that's where the playfulness and the creative outputs can come from.

Jo Reed: Now, did you find any differences between how theater education impacts students in specialized art schools compared to those in a general education setting?

Thalia Goldstein: It's such a great question and the thing that was super surprising to me was I didn't. I was expecting to. So, we went to five different school districts, two of which were conservatory styles. So, one of whom was a public magnet school and then we also went to a private theater conservatory. In both of these schools, students were doing upwards of 5, 10, 15 hours of theater per week and we were also in school districts where students were taking theater classes as part of their general education curriculum. So, they were maybe getting a few hours of theater every week and it might be the only theater class they ever took, and they didn't have to audition to get in. And it was actually quite surprising to me that what I found was students were being taught and given the opportunity to use the same acting habits of mind regardless of whether they were in these conservatory audition programs or whether they were in the public sort of open to all programs. 

Jo Reed: I find it so interesting that was no difference.

Thalia Goldstein: There was a difference in the content and a difference in the depth. So, perhaps in the conservatory schools, students were being given slightly more challenging, more mature material, longer scripts, more complex improvisational exercises because they had the previous experience that allowed them to go into more depth in those cases and in the public schools, often the students were just getting their first taste of improv or their first chance to deal with a Shakespearean script. But the psychological habits of mind, the social and emotional skills at play were equivalent across the different classrooms and that was really exciting and surprising to us.

Jo Reed: I'd like you to speak a little bit, sort of connect the dots between the pretend play that you observed and researched with the younger children and the more established arts education classes that happen within schools.

Thalia Goldstein: It's such a great question. In fact, it's one of the questions that I want to spend more time researching in the future is: How does that throughline work?”  I think there are a lot of similarities. Obviously, the sense of play, this sense of containment, which is "When I'm in the play, everything is accessible to me and mistakes can't really be made and I'm allowed to try things out without real world consequences." That's true whether you have a group of preschoolers pretending to be firemen or chefs or whether you have a group of high schoolers putting on a play and working through a scene for the first time. I think the big difference is that children's pretend play when they're very young is: number one, self-driven. So, rarely are children told "You are going to play chef today," or "You are going to play doctor today," and very young children's pretend play is highly reflective of the culture that they're in. So, children who are growing up in a culture in which you go to the dentist will pretend play dentist and pretend play getting in the chair and looking in each other's mouths, and children who are growing up in cultures where there is spear fishing will pretend to go spear fishing and they'll get a long stick and they'll look for the fish and they'll throw the stick into the ground to try and catch that fish. So, in pretend play, the children are inventing their own games and coming up with their own topics in order to try and figure out the world and the culture that they're being invited into and that they're growing up into. We do the same thing for teenagers, just with a lot more structure. They're given the structure of the warm-up. They're given the structure of improv games in order to practice different ways of trying on emotions or actions or scenarios or different concepts and then we give teens scripts to start to enact and often, hopefully, we then let them create their own work and devise their own work to explore the issues that are important to them. So, the scaffolding is a little bit different between what we expect from our very young people and what we expect from our more sort of established scholars in high school and middle school and college. But the sense of sort of freedom and trying things out and trying to figure out the world around maybe has a bit of a through line from when you're three until you're professional.

Jo Reed: And have you found that theater education can positively influence academic performance in other subjects? And if you have, or if you see research going in that direction, have you thought about what mechanisms do you think are at play?

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah, it's a really important question. As I mentioned before, I want to make sure that theater is seen for its own sake always, that it's important to engage with storytelling and narrative and character because that's one of the ways in which we understand our world and it's one of the ways in which we understand each other and understand people who are not immediately like us. There has been a long history of interest in whether being involved in theater classes can positively affect math scores, reading scores, SATs more generally. I'll say from my experience, the research is actually really not there for most academic domains. So being involved in theater is not necessarily going to make you any better at science or math or history. There is a way to use theater to make those subjects really interesting. There's a whole field of drama-based pedagogy in which you can use dramatic techniques and integrate theater into, say, your history and social science curriculum and there's some interesting findings that that may help students' retention over time and their motivation to engage in those subjects. But the only place we have clear causal evidence is in vocabulary scores. So, students who are involved in theater classrooms and who are randomly assigned to do theater in elementary school have higher reading scores than students who aren't and that makes a lot of sense, right? Theater and drama are verbal art forms. You have to use words in order to tell a narrative. You have to learn about narrative causality and narrative comprehension and those are the skills that are usually tested in academic fields such as English language arts and on standardized tests of reading. But outside of those more specific academic domains, teachers have been speaking for many years about the importance of social and emotional skills because it gets you to want to come to school and it gets you to want to collaborate with your classmates and I think that's where theater really shines is in teaching kids how to collaborate with each other and have that sort of social and emotional learning that then makes the school day holistically work a lot smoother.

Jo Reed: And looking ahead, you mentioned some of them, but talk a little more fulsomely about some of the future directions or projects you want to pursue at this intersection.

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah. I'm really excited about the possibilities going forward because I think now that we have these findings about what is really happening on the ground in these theater classrooms, we can begin to look more specifically for, number one, the psychological skills and abilities that students are showing definitive statistical change on as a result of being in a theater classroom, but also which kinds of activities sort of activate which kinds of habits of mind in the classroom that can then be used for specific kinds of goals. So, right now, we are starting a study where we're going to follow a group of elementary school kids over the course of a year and look at whether and how their different habits of mind change as a result of taking their very first theater classes. So, these are students who haven't necessarily chosen to go into a theater class, but their school is offering them a theater class for the first time. So, we're going to be able to track that very first year of theater engagement from kindergartners all the way up to sixth graders. And we're also going to be talking to these students about what they are getting out of the classes, how they're feeling about them both before and after they finish each class, but then also what comes to the front of mind when they're first talking about their acting classes. Are they thinking about collaboration? Are they thinking about emotion regulation? Are they thinking about a sense of containment and a safe space within the classroom? Because I think getting the perspectives both of what the teachers are trying to do and what the students are actually picking up is going to help us develop interventions and have a deeper understanding of theater education. And then I'm also doing the same thing with college students. So, we're getting the very young ones and the students who are in college now taking their first acting classes because it's required as part of a core curriculum, looking at what they're picking up when they're not planning on going into theater professionally.

Jo Reed: And we all look forward to seeing that research. Professor Thalia Goldstein, thank you so much. Thank you for giving me your time.

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. This was such a fun conversation and thanks so much for your really insightful questions. I appreciate it so much.

Jo Reed: Not at all. Thank you for all the wonderful work that you do. I truly appreciate it.

That was Doctor Thalia Goldstein. She is associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University, where her work focuses on how theater and the arts can enhance children's social and emotional skills. Her recent book, based on a six year long study, is called Why Theatre Education Matters. We’ll have a link in our show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, Produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts—leave us that all-important rating because it does help other people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening